There’s a joke about an old-time town promoter. Hoping to attract lot-buyers, he told prospective residents that “This town is so healthy that we didn’t even need a cemetery until the first doctor starved to death for lack of business.”
That came to mind last week when I read that Vail’s town council had voted 6-1 to ban medical marijuana dispensaries in town.
Vail’s stated municipal mission is to “provide the citizens of Vail and our guests superior services, outstanding environmental stewardship and an abundance of recreational, cultural and educational opportunities.”
Medical marijuana should fit in there, but the local newspaper explained that dispensaries would taint “the world-class image town leaders have worked so hard to create,” so the council had decided such “businesses have no place in a destination ski-resort town.”
Mayor Dick Cleveland said that “We’ve spent how many millions promoting this town?” Having legal dispensaries “kind of flies in the face of the tone we’ve tried to set in this community.”
My first thought about Vail’s “tone” was that the place has long been a white-bread Valhalla; of course it wouldn’t want anything funky. You want some mountain- town ambiance, you go to places that were mountain towns before they were world-class destination resorts — e.g., Aspen, Breckenridge, Telluride. For a sanitized playground, you go to Vail or Winter Park, which also banned dispensaries.
This concern about Vail’s image goes beyond marijuana, though. In theory anyway, legal cannabis in Colorado is medicine imbibed by sick people. Publicly admitting that people get sick, or even die, likely goes against the image Vail wants to present.
That was my conjecture, so I called my friend and colleague Allen Best, an authority on all things Vail. Although he now lives in Arvada, he dwelt in and near Vail for many years as he edited newspapers in Eagle County, and he still visits Vail frequently.
I asked if Vail had a regular pharmacy where sick people could get medication. I recalled one such shop in a mountain town, Nederland, with a prominent “Drug Dealer” sign. He mentioned the immense “DRUGS” message that covered one side of a building in Kremmling.
“I know the City Market in Vail has a pharmacy inside,” he said, “And there may be a stand-alone pharmacy somewhere in town. But if there is, it’s not prominent.”
“So the town tries to give the impression that no one ever gets sick there,” I said.
Allen cautioned me not to go that far, pointing out that Vail has a world-class facility for treating knee injuries, so the town does concede that people can get hurt.
To move past sickness, Vail has no mortuary. This led a friend in Leadville to observe that the funeral home in the Cloud City does a fair amount of Vail business, and Leadville could thus market itself as “The place where Vail residents go when they die.”
As for burial, Allen said there is no cemetery in Vail. “When I covered the town government, it was a frequent controversy at council meetings. Somebody would come forward with a proposal for a graveyard — one had an award-winning design — and the town always turned it down on the grounds that it didn’t fit the Vail image. The closest cemetery is in Minturn.”
So while Boulder may have the reputation of “24 square miles surrounded by reality,” Vail strives to go beyond that, to be perceived as the place where no one ever dies, or even gets sick. It’s the “medical,” not the “marijuana,” that really bothers image-conscious Vail.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
