As well all know by now, the great state of California went legal for adult consumption of cannabis January 1st 2018. That doesn’t mean that every part of California was ready all at once. Today, San Francisco went legally, officially.
Per Leafly
Beginning at 8 a.m. today, six of the city’s roughly three dozen storefront marijuana dispensaries began taking customers without requiring medical-marijuana paperwork.
They are: The Apothecarium, Grassroots, The Green Cross, Harvest on Geary, Medithrive, and ReLeaf Herbal Cooperative.
Green Cross and Grassroots both opened at 8 a.m., with Apothecarium and Medithrive opening after 9 a.m.
Thirty-one of the city’s 46 existing medical marijuana storefronts and delivery services sought licenses from the state to start sales today.
After reviewing security plans, good neighbor policies, and proposals to employ locals and people of color, the city’s Office of Cannabis recommended seven dispensaries to receive approval, and the vital state license, from the California Bureau of Cannabis Control.
And just as it did last weekend, the BCC issued licenses well into the evening on Friday, in some cases giving business owners a scant 12 to 14 hours’ notice that their customer base was about to expand exponentially.
The seventh dispensary, Shambhala Healing Center, apparently needed more paperwork from its landlord—who was away on vacation and couldn’t be reached, a disappointed owner Al Shawa told me.
For the lucky six, the emails from the BCC set off a furious scramble to open early, arrange staffing and invite a few politicians to a hastily-planned ceremony—and then make history.
Marijuana has been sold openly in this city since at least the 1970s, when Dennis Peron ran a major weed-dealing operation out of a Castro District restaurant. The first medical marijuana dispensaries in America were here, and now, five days after commercial sales began across the bay in Berkeley and Oakland (where lawmakers were just quicker to the punch), the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry has arrived.
“I would compare it to when the city tries to get the Olympics come in,” said Misha Breyburg, Medithrive’s founder. “It’s one of those moments where you feel like laughing and crying at the same time.”
Medithrive has had a tougher road than most: It was one of the dispensaries to shut down during an Obama-era crackdown in 2011-2012. One-third of San Francisco’s legal pot clubs went away. Medithrive went delivery-only, and reopened only after Congress removed funding from the Justice Department to go after medical marijuana. (Shambhala, too, survived the crackdown, and was one of the few dispensaries to challenge the local U.S. attorney in court.)
Leafly will giving you live updates from around the city through the day. Follow them for updates