California’s retail pot touted as a milestone
Sales for recreational use now legal
OAKLAND, Calif. — Retail cannabis shops in California opened their doors Monday for the first time, inaugurating what proponents say will become the world’s largest market for legalized recreational marijuana.
A transaction that remains illegal in many parts of the country seemed almost banal Monday for the customers at a dispensary in Oakland who picked out their marijuana, showed their driver’s licenses and walked into the brisk morning air with their drugs in paper bags.
“This is a whole new world opening up,” said Diana Gladden, 48, who bought marijuana for herself and her aging parents. “My mother, a very strict Southern Baptist, now thinks it’s OK because it’s legal.”
One customer left with more than $1,000 worth of cannabis in a grocery bag.
Khalil Moutawakkil, chief executive officer of the KindPeoples Collective in Santa Cruz, said the legalization of marijuana for recreational use is a change that has been
too long in coming.
“This is essentially going to eliminate prohibition on the plant of the last 400 years and return the plant back to the people,” he said.
Medical marijuana has been legal in California for more than two decades, but the arrival of full legalization in the state is a milestone for the nation’s fast-growing cannabis industry. Pot is now sold legally down the entire length of the West Coast, plus Alaska.
A slow and halting rollout of California’s new cannabis regulations limited the number of shops offering the drug Monday. Such shops are open in just a handful of cities across the state, including Berkeley, Oakland, San Jose and San Diego. But more municipalities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, are expected to issue licenses soon.
Alex Traverso, a spokesman for California’s Bureau of Cannabis Control, said about 100 dispensaries in the state were licensed to sell recreational cannabis Monday.
Jeff Deakin, 66, his wife, Mary, and their dog waited in the cold all night to be first in a line of 100 people when Harborside dispensary, a longtime medical pot shop in Oakland, opened at 6 a.m. and for early customers offered 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,” Jeff Deakin said. “This is kind of a big deal for everybody.”
“Happy New Year!” Steve DeAngelo, executive director of the dispensary, shouted through a bullhorn. “We’ve been looking forward to this day for a long time.”
In Orange County, shops in Santa Ana over the weekend received the green light to open, and a steady flow of people showed up at ShowGrow.
Ellen St. Peter, 61, shopped with her son, Bryce St. Peter, 23. Both are medical marijuana users. She said she smoked pot for years — at times taking great risks to get it — but stopped once she started having kids.
“In high school, my guy friends would fantasize about shops we could go into and just buy weed,” she said. “I couldn’t have dreamed of this place.”
Will Senn’s Urbn Leaf in San Diego had previously specialized in cannabis for medicinal purposes. When Senn opened his doors on New Year’s Day, he had an additional 15 workers he’d hired to accommodate what he expected to be a crush of new customers.
“This is what a lot of activists in the industry have been working for since the 1990s when Dennis Peron opened his first marijuana shop for AIDS patients in San Francisco,” Senn said. “It’s a monumental moment, and we are ecstatic to be a part of it.”
But because medicinal marijuana has been widely available in the state for so long, the enthusiasm for the recreational drug in some cities was relatively muted. Outside a dispensary in Berkeley, only a handful of customers waited in line before sales began.
The state banned what it called “loco-weed” in 1913, though it has eased criminal penalties for use of the drug since the 1970s and in 1996 was the first state to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. 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.
California is the sixth state to introduce the sale of recreational marijuana, after Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Nevada. Massachusetts is expected to begin sales later this year. Maine residents can grow and possess recreational marijuana, but proposals to regulate retail sales have run into opposition from Gov. Paul LePage.
State law still prohibits smoking in public, although smoking bans are already commonplace in California cities.
Legalization may further raise tensions between the state and federal drug enforcement officials led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration considers marijuana a Schedule 1 drug, the same category as heroin.
California has also not yet adopted a standard measure for marijuana impairment, an issue highlighted on Christmas Eve when a California highway patrolman died after a man who police said was driving under the influence of both alcohol and marijuana rammed into the back of the officer’s vehicle.
But police are already warning drivers. California highways flashed signs before New Year’s Eve that said, “Drive high, Get a DUI.”
Unlike the other states that have legalized marijuana, California has a vast industry producing the drug, much of which is illegally sold across state lines. By one estimate, California produces seven times more marijuana than it consumes.
Legalization in California will test whether that vast black market of growers, many of whom have been reluctant to join the legal market, will come out of the shadows.
Travis Lund, 34, said that while working the graveyard shift, he’d been looking forward to buying weed legally for the first time since he began smoking pot as a teen.
“I’m just stoked that it’s finally legal,” he said after purchasing an eighth of an ounce of “Mount Zion” and another type of loose-leaf marijuana at Northstar Holistic Collective in Sacramento, where the fragrance of pot was strong. “I’m going to go home and get high — and enjoy it.”
Lund previously purchased marijuana on the black market through friends and said that may continue, given the high costs of legal pot, which is heavily taxed. But he said he would indulge in retail pot occasionally because of controls being phased in to ensure a higher-quality product.
But Jonathan Duenas, a college student and one of the cannabis customers in Oakland on Monday, said he probably would stick with the black market.
“I have a friend who grows it,” he said. “I can get it much cheaper.”
Information for this article was contributed by Thomas Fuller of The New York Times; by Patrick McGreevy of the Los Angeles Times; and by Brian Melley, Terence Chea, Kathleen Ronayne, Krysta Fauria, Christopher Weber and Michael R. Blood of The Associated Press.