Rayford Brown
THE GREEN PARADISE
A DOZEN YEARS ago — long before recreational cannabis was legal in the Golden State — military veteran Brown decided to sell cannabis to make ends meet. That decision landed him behind bars for three years of a five-year sentence. “I got started because of the recession,” Brown said. “And they caught me with 38 baggies in my bag.”
He calls it a hard lesson but a good one too. “Because I probably would have never been to college [otherwise],” he said. “It really occupied my mind — made me think about another avenue. I look at things differently now compared to before I went in.”
He would go on to earn two associate’s degrees from Santa Monica College (one in solar technology and the other in the field of environmental sciences) and graduated in 2017. It was around that time, while he was working to get a solar business going, that his brother introduced him to Brandon Brinson and Evelyn Scott-Brinson, a married couple who had been struggling to get a dispensary project of their own off the ground. The three eventually would become business partners in the Green Paradise dispensary in Mid-Wilshire.
“When this [opportunity] first came along, I was like, ‘Are you serious? Are you really trying to help us?’ ” Brown said. “The more I talked to them, and the more I learned [about the program], the more I realized it’s giving me — all of us — an opportunity to have a second chance in life and to actually do something to impact the community.”
Brown and his business partners point out that they came extremely close to not having the opportunity at all. Of the initial 200 applications the city agreed to process, ScottBrinson says they received license No. 200 — the very last one.
Their 1,600-square-foot space on a busy stretch of La Brea Avenue officially opened Jan. 1. While Brinson and Scott-Brinson run day-to-day operations, Brown meets with them weekly to discuss sales, product mix and business strategy.
When he’s not focusing on the dispensary business, Brown works on solar projects “as kind of a hobby right now.” He hopes the income from his stake in the dispensary eventually will help him turn that hobby into a fullfledged business.
Asked if being the majority owner of a cannabis dispensary feels like compensation for his past run-in with the law, Brown shook his head slowly. “No, man. I saw some stuff in there. I can never get those years back,” he said. “But it’s like I said to a friend of mine, I get a chance to right a wrong, [to] turn a negative into a positive.”