Medical marijuana vending machines are an actual thing

Published Nov 20 2012, 04:20 PM by Carly Carioli

Kudos to the usually-staid headline writers at Mass HIGH Tech (huh-huh) for pulling off the following headline: "Pot-dispensing machine maker explains stock highs." HIGHS, get it? You see what they did there?

The story under the headline doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense, since it turns out the stock in question is internally held and fluctuates wildly -- and it's latest jump was your fault, Massachusetts voters, for legalizing medical weed.

But more to the point: wait, there are pot vending machines?

It gets better: turns out the vending-machine part is the least impressive part of the apparatus. According to MHT, the California-based company Medbox has designed "a drug dispensing system that uses hardware, software and biometric scans to verify a medical marijuana patient’s identity has using both the person’s ID card and a biometric fingerprint scan."

You'd think California kids with weed cards would be paranoid about the whole fingerprinting thing, but apparently not: according to the manufacturer, the weed version of a gumball machine is in high demand. (You see what we did there? You do, don't you.)