‘Flower to the People’ comes to golden state
California cannabis shops ring in new year with first the legal sales of recreational pot
Customers lined up early on Monday to purchase recreational marijuana legally for the first time in California, as the new year brought broad legalization two decades after the state was the first to allow pot for medical use.
Jeff Deakin, 66, his wife, Mary, and their dog waited all night and were first in a line of 100 people when Harborside dispensary, a longtime medical pot shop in Oakland, opened at 6 a.m. and offered early customers joints for a penny and free T-shirts that read “Flower to the People — Cannabis for All.”
“It’s been so long since others and myself could walk into a place where you could feel safe and secure and be able to get something that was good without having to go to the back alley,” Deakin said. “This is kind of a big deal for everybody.”
America’s most populous state joins a growing list of other states, and the country’s capital, where so-called recreational marijuana is permitted even though the federal government continues to classify pot as a controlled substance, like heroin and LSD.
California voters in 2016 made it legal for adults 21 and older to grow, possess and use limited quantities of marijuana, but it wasn’t legal to sell it for recreational purposes until Monday.
When sales of recreational cannabis become legal in British Columbia on July 1, buyers will have to be at least 19 — consistent with B.C.’s minimum age for alcohol and tobacco and with the age of majority in the province.
Like other provinces (July 1 will be the legalization day across Canada), B.C. will have a government-run wholesale distribution model. The B.C. Liquor Distribution Branch will be the wholesale distributor of non-medical cannabis in B.C.
The province has said that it anticipates establishing a retail model that includes both public and private retail opportunities.
Meanwhile, finding a retail outlet to buy non-medical pot in California won’t be easy — at least initially.
Only about 90 businesses received state licences to open New Year’s Day. They are concentrated in San Diego, Santa Cruz, the San Francisco Bay Area and the Palm Springs area.
Los Angeles and San Francisco are among the many cities where recreational pot will not be available right away because local regulations were not approved in time to start issuing city licences needed to get state permits.
Fresno, Bakersfield and Riverside are among the communities that have adopted laws forbidding recreational marijuana sales.
Just after midnight, some raised joints instead of champagne glasses.
Johnny Hernandez, a tattoo artist from Modesto, celebrated by smoking “Happy New Year blunts” with his cousins.
“This is something we’ve all been waiting for,” he said.
Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin and state Sen. Nancy Skinner were on hand for a ribbon-cutting ceremony as his city began selling marijuana legally. Customers began lining up before dawn Monday outside Berkeley Patients Group, one of the oldest dispensaries in the nation.
Los Angeles officials announced late last month that the city will not begin accepting licence applications until Wednesday, and it might take weeks before any licences are issued. That led to widespread concern that long-established businesses would have to shut down during the interim.
However, lawyers advising a group of city dispensaries have concluded that those businesses can continue to legally sell medicinal marijuana as “collectives,” until they obtain local and state licenses under the new system, said Jerred Kiloh of the United Cannabis Business Association, an industry group.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many of those shops, if any, were open on New Year’s Day.
“We are trying to continue to provide patient access,” said Kiloh, who owns a dispensary in the city’s San Fernando Valley area.
The status of the Los Angeles shops highlights broad confusion over the new law.
State regulators have said shops must have local and state licences to open for business in the new year. But the city’s top pot regulator, Cat Packer, told reporters last month that medicinal sales can continue to consumers with a doctor’s recommendation until new licences are issued.
The state banned “loco-weed” in 1913, according to a history by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, the pot advocacy group known as NORML. The first attempt to undo that by voter initiative in 1972 failed, but three years later, felony possession of less than an ounce was downgraded to a misdemeanour.
In 1996, over the objections of law enforcement, U.S. president Bill Clinton’s drug czar and three former presidents, California voters approved marijuana for medicinal purposes. Twenty years later, voters approved legal recreational use and gave the state a year to write regulations for a legal market that would open in 2018.
Today, 29 states have adopted medical-marijuana laws. In 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize recreational marijuana. Since then, five more states have passed recreational-marijuana laws.