Photo by Matt Cohen.

Hundreds lined the block of 18th Street NW, wrapping all the way down to Champlain Street and stretching nearly as far as Kalorama Street. It was, quite literally, a massive open-air drug market. And completely legal.

Yesterday, the D.C. Cannabis Campaign hosted the first of two legal “seed shares”—where growers could trade seeds and others could legally obtain them for free— at Adams Morgan’s Libertine bar and people lined up en masse. But by the time of the event’s official kick-off time, 5:30 p.m., the line was already as long as an extended Phish jam.

In fact, many people who weren’t there to get in line at least an hour before it all started wondered if it was even worth waiting. “We were just discussing that,” Mat Shelton, a recent D.C. transplant from Tennessee said. “It’s pretty cool, there’s definitely nothing like this in Tennessee,” he said (marijuana, of course, isn’t legal in Tennessee).

Chris and Tia (they requested not to have their last names printed) were standing eagerly in line to get their seeds. “It’s about damn time,” Chris said. As D.C. natives, the idea of obtaining and smoking weed in their homes without the threat of police busting them is liberating, they said. “It’s just kind of wild…we’re all lined up for weed,” Tia added.

Yesterday’s seed exchange was something of a dream come true for some legalization advocates who’ve been working for years to get to this point. Adam Eidinger, chairman of the D.C. Cannabis Campaign, is one of the central figures in getting Initiative 71—the marijuana legalization voter initiative—on last November’s general election ballot. Sporting a shirt depicting a map of every precinct in D.C. that voted to legalize weed (all but one did), he played the role of emcee yesterday, pumping tunes on a PA and greeting everyone in line.

Paul Zukerberg, a D.C. lawyer who specializes in marijuana-related cases and also one of the early advocates for legalization, was as equally thrilled as Eidinger.

“It’s wonderful that now, in the District of Columbia, we can grow marijuana legally and we don’t have to turn the criminal organizations in the underground market,” he said. “It’s a huge step forward.”

But marijuana policy in the District doesn’t stop here. Zukerberg says there’s a long way to go in that the District needs to keep fighting to establish a taxation and regulation system. Congress is currently blocking D.C. from establishing any sort of system like that because they can.

“The first East Coast state to tax and regulate is going to experience an economic bonanza,” Zukerburg says. “There’s a race for that now … taxation and regulation can bring a huge amount of tax revenue and create a lot of jobs. Right night, job creation in the D.C. area is pretty much stagnate. If we can be an early adopter, we can get the benefit of it.”

The Cannabis Campaign will hold another seed exchange tomorrow afternoon.