DENVER — Neal Pepper didn’t spend New Year’s Eve partying, clubbing or counting down the minutes until 2014. He and two friends spent it on the road, driving 12 hours nonstop from his home in Arkansas to Colorado’s capital. They pulled into town around dawn on Jan. 1 in spitting gray snow. Rather than head to a hotel for some much needed rest, they drove to an industrial office park near the airport to join some 50 others lined up in the gloom to wait.

The line that formed that morning, outside a marijuana outlet called the Medicine Man, looked, from afar at least, like those that precede an iPhone release. But the people in the crowd were far more subdued, even though they were making history. They were here to do something that no one ever had: legally buy marijuana from a state-licensed retail store, one of the first to open anywhere in the world, in full view of the police.

Though Colorado voters legalized marijuana in 2012 with the passage of Amendment 64, the system through which this federally banned substance may be taxed, packaged and sold to anyone 21 or older is new, as of Jan. 1. The day marked the final milestone for the state’s creation of a legal pot industry: the ability to walk into any of the (now) 51 licensed marijuana retail outlets in the state and buy up to an ounce of Bubba Kush as easily as if it were a six-pack of Fat Tire at a liquor store. Stores are opening every week, and by summer there will be more than 100.

“I just felt like I was coming out of the closet,” Pepper told me around 10 a.m., after winding through the DMV-like line to make his purchase. He was a little bleary from his all-night road trip. And he had no idea what sort of marijuana he’d just bought. Smokers in Arkansas — where marijuana is still very much illegal and where the quarter ounce of pot in his hand could result in a year in jail and a $2,500 fine for a first offender — usually can’t afford to be picky about such things as which strain they’re buying.

“I just asked the guy to suggest something,” he said. “I don’t even know what I’ve got.”