An 81-year-old has become the first person to legally buy marijuana in Alaska's largest city.
Anna Ercoli pulled into Arctic Herbery's small parking lot three hours before the store was to open and become the first legal retail marijuana store in Anchorage.
Owner Bryant Thorp gave her a red-stamped ticket indicating she would be the first in line and told her she didn't have to wait around for hours in the cold weather and could come back closer to the noon opening.
"I need this medication for me because it works better than taking anti-pain or sleeping pills, and not really solving anything," said Ercoli, a native of Italy who has lived in Anchorage for 45 years.
Just before noon, she was escorted into the cramped retail location in an industrial and residential area of midtown Anchorage.
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A clerk helped her pick out a 2.5 gram vial of Afghan Kush flour to mix with an ointment to provide pain relief.
She paid $US52.50 ($A71.33) after being told she could only buy one vial on this trip, and then scurried out the store trying to avoid a crush of reporters.
"This is really the only thing that when I put it on my skin, I can go to sleep and I can sleep because I have no pain," she said before boarding a shuttle bus to get back to her car.
Thorp has arranged to sell three different strains of marijuana from Black Rapids LLC, a cultivation facility located in North Pole.
"One of them is some of the best that AK has seen at 22 per cent THC," Thorp wrote in a text to The Associated Press earlier this week.
Alaskans in November 2014 approved the recreational use of marijuana for those 21 and older.
