Trevor Hughes

USA TODAY

SEATTLE – The first thing I noticed was that the pot stores here don't smell right – and that they can be awfully hard to find.

In Washington state, I visited several of the state's legal recreational marijuana stores as part of USA TODAY'S continuing coverage of the nation's fast-growing cannabis industry. I'm based in Denver, in the only other state that permits recreational sales, and my trip to Washington was intended to help me better understand the two states' approaches.

If you didn't know marijuana was legal in Washington state, you'd be hard-pressed to guess. Only 60 pot-shop licenses have been granted statewide. When I was there, only one store served all of Seattle, and it was basically out of stock. A second has since opened up.

In Denver, more than two dozen marijuana stores serve downtown, and Colorado has licensed more than 230 retail stores. If I need to interview buyers or sellers, there are three stores within a one block of my downtown Denver apartment.

While the states have created similar regulatory structures – tracking of plants, mandatory testing, background checks for those working in the industry – the differences are noticeable. Starting with that smell.

At Seattle's Cannabis City, all marijuana comes prepackaged from the producer. Washington's rules make it much harder for retailers to talk up the products they're selling because they can't just open up a jar and let customers sniff their pot.

In Colorado, retailers are allowed to grow the pot they sell, which means many of the stores have large grow operations behind the counter. At Denver's 3-D Cannabis Center, for instance, customers can watch workers tend to dozens of plants growing under lights.

That means Washington's pot shops smell a lot more like a liquor store, while Colorado's tend to smell much like a brewery: A heavy marijuana funk tends to hang in the air. And yes, you can often smell Colorado marijuana grow operations while driving around Denver. In Seattle, the only times I smelled pot on the street was when homeless men and women lit pipes while huddled together out of the rain.

Huge numbers of tourists are visiting stores in both states, drawn by the novelty of buying legal pot. Time and time again, I've seen empty-nesters tentatively walk in, confessing they used marijuana a bit in college and put it away when the kids came. But with the kids grown, a surprising number of couples come in to explore.

Once people figure out what I do for a living. I end up discussing youth drug use with school counselors, talk about mold and pesticides with store owners, debate federal drug-trafficking laws with federal agents, and explain to my parents and my boss that no, I still haven't tried it. (I also cover murders, and I haven't tried that, either.)

In Seattle, I interviewed a lot of people whose comments never made it into my stories. USA TODAY has strict rules that require, with few exceptions, quoting people by name, and lots of people I talked to were nervous that a family member or employer might read their comments.

That comes with the territory when you cover a substance that's not exactly legal. Marijuana remains illegal in the eyes of the federal government, and lots of people are unwilling to admit they use it.

In Colorado, though, people are getting much more comfortable talking about using pot, now that it's been 10 months since recreational sales began and the federal government hasn't shown much interest.

In Washington, there's still that "pinch me; is this real?" sentiment on display. That is, if you can find any pot for sale.

Hughes is a Denver-based correspondent for USA TODAY.