Living as I do down the road from Point Roberts, Wash., I’ve wondered if or ever it will see a retail marijuana outlet there, now that the state has legalized its sale.

Hanging colon-like from the body of Metro Vancouver, Point Bob has for generations offered more straitlaced Canadians a taste of sins we eventually embraced: drinking on Sundays, Triple-XXX movie theatres, pull tabs, Milk Duds. We crossed the line, so to speak, to cross a line.

Its pleasures are more innocent now, like taking delivery of cut-rate car tires at the Point’s post office box outlets, but even that still offers a vaguely illicit thrill.

As yet, a marijuana retail outlet for Point Bob has not been announced. Washington state is still in the process of selecting sites and awarding franchises, and they likely won’t be known until spring. Stores could open as early as next June.

Under the rules set out for distribution of outlets, however, which are determined by 2010 census data, Point Roberts is an unlikely candidate. Bellingham would get six outlets, Ferndale and Lynden would each get one and seven more would be distributed through Whatcom County.

Jim Donaldson, a reporter with The Bellingham Herald who has written on legalization, said he doubted if Point Roberts had enough population to be awarded an outlet. But if it did, I said, I would guess it would be busy with Canadian customers, and he agreed.

But that is all it is, a guess. Exactly how Washington state’s legalization of pot will play out is a big unknown, and that includes the government and citizens of Washington state themselves.

In the space of a year, they have had to erect a system for pot sales that in North America has no precedence. They are finding that legalization is more easily said than done, however popular the decision to do so might be.

Some of the state’s more conservative jurisdictions have balked. Lynden city council OK’d a six-month moratorium on legalized sales, as have Pullman County and the city of Pullman. Walla Walla County opted for one year.

Earlier this month, Pierce County council passed an ordinance prohibiting licensed marijuana businesses from operating until the U.S. Congress removes marijuana from the list of federally controlled substances. It did so despite Pierce County residents voting 54 per cent in favour of the initiative legalizing pot. The ordinance will likely be challenged in court. Yakima council is also considering a prohibition.

Other unknowns abound. In an article in this month’s The New Yorker, writer Patrick Radden Keefe found that state officials responsible for setting up the system really didn’t know what to expect.

Pricing, they felt, was problematic: Too low, and it might cause product “diversion” to buyers in non-legalized states (or to Canada), which might then attract the ire of both federal governments. Too high a price could help drive the sale of pot back to the black market.

Nor did state officials expect that legalization would necessarily end the black market. One consultant asked to help set up the system, Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at UCLA, told Seattle city council that the state would have to have stricter policing of black market sales, at least in the initial stages, to make it clear to illegal sellers that they would not be tolerated.