A Native American tribe has become Las Vegas’ most unlikely cannabis powerhouse

Benny Tso stands on the curb of a concrete sidewalk looking up at a snow-covered mountaintop, about eight km in the distance.

Tso, who served as the chairman of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe for over a decade before stepping down in 2018, recalls the story of his ancestors making the journey each year from near where he now stands to the mountainous area to escape the desert heat.

When temperatures cooled in the area now known as Las Vegas, Tso says, the Paiute tribe would migrate down Snow Mountain toward a natural spring located in the northeast part of what’s now part of a major metropolitan city.

“That’s our creation story and that’s where we come from,” Tso says. “When the Creator made us, he made us as ants. When the world was flooded, the ants went up to the mountain. “Those who climbed the pine trees and didn’t get drowned by the water transformed into who we are today.”

Thousands of years later, the Paiutes’ ancient migratory route is spotted with housing subdivisions and roads. But where Tso stands on this cool winter afternoon, the tribe is preparing to preserve its economic future with its latest cash crop: cannabis.

Learning from failing

After opening the record 15,800-sq. ft. NuWu Cannabis Marketplace on tribal land near downtown Las Vegas in October 2017, this past January the Paiutes celebrated the grand opening of a second, smaller dispensary—Nuwu North—near the tribe’s golf resort by the mountain. The two dispensaries will combine to welcome as many as an estimated 4,000 daily customers via the storefront and a 24-hour, drive-thru window located on the backside of both facilities.

The Las Vegas Paiute Tribe owns Nuwu Cannabis Marketplace, just one mile north of downtown Las Vegas. The tribe opened a second, smaller dispensary in northwest Las Vegas earlier this year.

Separate cultivation and production facilities, slated to open later this year next to NuWu North, will allow the tribe to employ as many as 200 people to manage its cannabis empire.

The Paiutes’ road to cannabis riches hasn’t been completely smooth. In 2016, the tribe partnered with New Mexico-based Ultra Health Cannabis to build a 2,500-sq. ft. medical cannabis dispensary and cultivation facility near Snow Mountain—where NuWu North now stands. The Paiutes saw the first deal fall through less than a month after breaking ground.

It took that well-publicized failure and a special compact with the Nevada governor’s office in the next year’s state legislature to make their cannabis dreams a reality.

Chris Spotted Eagle, the tribe’s new chairman, worked alongside Tso and the office of then Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval to pass Senate Bill 375 in 2017. The landmark law opened the door for legal negotiations on the use and sale of cannabis on tribal lands. It further allowed the Nevada governor’s office to bypass federal laws that limit commerce talks between tribes and Congress, meaning the tribe no longer needed to partner with a third-party cannabis dispensary company to open its own facility.

The Paiutes had plans to do it bigger than the 45 dispensaries already located across the Las Vegas Valley. A simple, European-inspired, waiting room-free design with massive, nine-metre-high windows made NuWu easy to quickly build. It’s a little more than a kilometre from where an estimated 18 million tourists visit downtown Las Vegas each year.

Beating the odds

“In true Las Vegas style, we went all-in,” Spotted Eagle says, smiling.

As successful as NuWu has been for the Paiutes, Spotted Eagle points to the effect tribal cannabis has also had on Nevada’s industry as a whole. The tribe carries more than 900 different cannabis products from the lion’s share of the state’s almost 200 combined cultivation and production facilities. The Paiutes have written seven-figure cheques for some of their product purchases, the chairman reports.

Several cultivators and producers, which bled money fighting for only 50,000 state-registered cardholders during Nevada’s two years as a medical cannabis-only state in 2015 and 2016, are now thriving thanks, in part, to giant purchases from the state’s largest cannabis dispensary.

Scaling new heights

The success of the Paiutes first cannabis marketplace has brought the tribe international publicity. An advertising partnership with the Las Vegas Lights—a soccer team that plays in the United Soccer League—garnered articles from ESPN and Sports Illustrated for being the first such deal between a U.S. professional sports franchise and a legal cannabis company. Last fall, a segment on Jimmy Kimmel Live broadcast live footage from NuWu’s drive-thru as Kimmel interviewed a dispensary employee serving customers. In December, the marketplace sold a 24-g, gold leaf-wrapped cannabis cigar to a Los Angeles man for a record price of US$11,000.

Wearing tribal necklace with a NuWu North medallion at its center, Tso says he hopes the Paiutes’ ancestors—the ants as well as generations of humans that came before today’s leaders—would be proud.

Thanks to Nuwu’s success, Tso and Spotted Eagle welcome eager Native American leaders from around the U.S. and Canada on a weekly basis to show them the in-and-outs of operating cannabis. As U.S. states have different laws on cannabis and restrictions on tribe’s ability to grow and sell the plant, he notes there’s no “one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter formula,” even for U.S.-based tribes, until the plant becomes federally legal.

In the meantime, the two are happy to educate their tribal brethren while ensuring the Las Vegas Paiutes are an economic driver in Nevada for decades to come. “The growth is inevitable,” Tso says. “We’re going to set the bar and bring the industry with us.”