Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
California starts recreational pot sales, clients jam stores
SACRAMENTO » From a pot shop in Santa Cruz that hung a banner proclaiming “Prohibition is Over!” to one in San Diego handing out T-shirts showing the first moon landing and declaring a “giant leap for mankind,” the Golden State turned a shade greener with its first sales of recreational marijuana.
Ceremonial ribbon cuttings marked the occasion Monday as the nation’s biggest producer of illicit marijuana moved from the shadows toward a regulated market. Freebies and food greeted those who waited in long lines to get their hands on weed with names like “Oh Geezus” and “Banana Breath.”
“I’m scared, I’m excited, I’m relieved,” exclaimed Kimberly Cargile, director of a Sacramento shop that has sold medical pot since 2009.
Cargile’s shop, A Therapeutic Alternative, opened at 9 a.m. with the celebratory cutting of a red ribbon — a symbolic gesture that could be seen as a nod to those who cut through red tape in time to open the doors to a new era.
First-day sales were brisk in shops lucky enough to score one of the roughly 100 state licenses issued so far. But would-be customers in some of the state’s largest cities encountered reefer sadness.
Riverside and Fresno outlawed sales and Los Angeles and San Francisco did not act soon enough to authorize shops to get state licenses by New Year’s Day.
California’s state and local governments still have a lot of work ahead to get the massive industry running that is projected to bring in $1 billion annually in tax revenue within several years.
Charles Boldwyn, chief compliance officer of ShowGrow in Santa Ana, which opened to retail customers Monday, said he is concerned that a delay in local and state approvals could create shortages of products for consumers.
“We’re looking at ... hundreds of licensed cultivators and manufacturers coming out of an environment where we literally had thousands of people who were cultivating and manufacturing,” Boldwyn said. “So the red tape is a bit of a bottleneck in the supply chain.”
Bureau of Cannabis Control regulators worked through the holiday to try to process 1,400 pending license applications for retail sales, distribution, testing facilities and other businesses, bureau spokesman Alex Traverso said.
A flood of applications for shops in Los Angeles and San Francisco is expected after being approved locally. Because Los Angeles is the biggest market in the state, some of those shops will be licensed by the state more quickly than others already in line, Traverso said.
The status of Los Angeles shops highlights broad confusion over the new law.
Los Angeles officials said they will not begin accepting license applications until Wednesday and it might take weeks before any licenses are issued. That has led to widespread concern that long-established businesses would have to shut down in the interim.
Attorneys advising a group of city dispensaries have concluded those businesses can 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 was not immediately clear how many of those shops, if any, opened.
“My patients are scared, my employees are scared,” said Kiloh, who owns a dispensary in the city’s San Fernando Valley area.
With sales starting around California, the most populous U.S. state joined a growing list of others, and the nation’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 banned what it called “loco-weed” in 1913, though it has eased criminal penalties for use of the drug since the 1970s and was the first state to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes in 1996.
California voters in 2016 made it legal for adults 21 and older to grow, possess and use limited quantities of marijuana, but it was not legal to sell it for recreational purposes until Monday.
The signs that California was tripping toward legal pot sales were evident well before the stroke of midnight.
California highways flashed signs before New Year’s Eve that said “Drive high, Get a DUI,” reflecting law enforcement concerns about stoned drivers.