Having thus obtained the proper frame of mind, I went back down to meet a man named Mike Metoyer, who, as I’d been told, would serve throughout the weekend as my cannabis spirit guide. I found Mr. Metoyer in the lobby, waiting for me in a My 420 T-shirt with its buds-beneath-the-mountains corporate logo. He introduced himself and handed me a swag bag. This, I saw, contained a smaller vaporizer for use outside my room, a recent copy of Dope Magazine and — because of Denver’s potent homegrown — a bottle of lavender oil designed to bring me down if I suffered a panicky high.

Like almost everyone I met in the local pot trade, Mr. Metoyer, who is 22 and grew up in a Pentecostal church, had come to marijuana only recently. A few years ago, he told me as we made our way into a ballroom, he’d been working as a docent at a silver mine in the mountains when J.J. Walker, founder of My 420, went on one of his trips. Mr. Walker was apparently impressed and offered Mr. Metoyer a job. “I didn’t believe at first that ‘pot tour guide’ was, you know, an actual position,” he said. “But as you can see, it obviously is.”

Waiting for us in the ballroom was our sommelier, Michael Pyatt, the director of training at Native Roots — “the Gucci of dispensaries,” Mr. Metoyer whispered as we sat down at a table. Mr. Pyatt is a tall, thin man of 27, formerly employed in sales at Best Buy. His knowledge of the product, accumulated over years of personal research, was exhaustive and, within a few minutes, he had filled our table with little plastic canisters of weed.

“You a smoker?” Mr. Pyatt asked. I told him not so much. And so, in an almost oenological language, he started to describe for me the qualities of the Native Roots proprietary brands: Harlequin, for instance (“a mix of three sativas”) and Sour Kush (“musky, sweet, cerebral with a nice tight nug structure”).

As Mr. Pyatt peered into his goody bag for another strain to show, I turned to Mr. Metoyer and asked what kinds of people usually sign up for his tours. “I get everyone,” he told me, “men, women, young, old, but 60 percent of my clients are from Texas.” (“It’s a weed-repressed society,” Mr. Pyatt said.) Then Mr. Metoyer added: “Most of our customers are blown away the first time they start smoking on the party bus. They’re like, ‘Wait a sec, you’re sure this is legal?’ When I tell them it is, then they’re like, ‘Whoa, dude, I’ve been waiting my whole life for this!’”