"The message is: Come to Colorado, smoke the marijuana. Then people bring some home."

On the Great Plains east of the Rockies, a three-hour drive from Denver’s profusion of pot shops — 340 medical and recreational at last count — Colorado’s bold social experiment is confounding parents who have to explain to their children why this alluring but troubling substance is legal just down the road, a state line — and a cultural divide — away.

The same policy decisions that liberated pot smokers in Colorado are filling tiny rural jails in Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming. “Every time we stop somebody, that’s taking up my deputy’s time with your Colorado pot,” Overman said. “We have to pay overtime, pay the prosecutor, pay to incarcerate them, pay for their defense if they’re indigent. Colorado’s taxing it, but everybody else is paying the price.”

When the wind is right, Sedgwick’s entire downtown — all one block of it — reeks of weed, a sign that fresh tax revenue is growing in the rear of the trailer that houses Mike Kollarits’s weed shop, Sedgwick Alternative Relief.