Washington’s medical marijuana law doesn’t specifically allow dispensaries, reports Dominic Holden at The Stranger, but the shops are already proliferating in some areas, existing in a legal gray area that is yet to be sorted out.

Existing dispensaries — concentrated in the Seattle and Tacoma areas — often avoid drawing attention by inconspicuously setting up shop in industrial areas and office buildings (although I’ve personally been to more than one storefront dispensary in King County). If Kohl-Welles’s bill passes, though, the state Department of health would permit the shops to operate statewide as nonprofit corporations, likely resulting in more open advertising and more visibility.