Randy Hill
WHEN WE FIRST reached out to the social equity stakeholder in Panorama City’s Erb & Arbor dispensary, the first thing Hill said was that he wanted his attorney, Joseph Adeife, as well as his co-owners, Sev Toroussian and Mauro Lara, to be involved. This wasn’t because he feared legal action but because he felt their efforts — particularly Adeife’s — were key in landing him his license.
“I definitely wouldn’t have been able to do this without them, that’s for damn sure. They’ve helped me so much,” Hill said. “And Joseph was even doing it pro bono.”
Only after he was convinced that the rest of the team’s contributions had been duly noted did Hill seem comfortable talking about his own backstory, which began in late 2016 (or early 2017, he’s not exactly sure) when a friend persuaded him to leave his job helping third-graders at the afterschool program L.A.’s Best to try his hand at cannabis cultivation. “At first, I wasn’t really interested — I really loved working with kids,” he said. But his friend’s persistence won out and, before he knew it, Hill was working at the L.A.-based grower THC Design.
“My first job was helping manage one of the warehouses — two little flower rooms,” he said. “It was small but it was a good start for me because it pushed me to get to know everything . ... And I found out I had a green thumb, so I ended up loving it.”
His cultivation connections eventually put him in the same orbit as Lara and Toroussian, and the threesome’s effort to open a dispensary began. That joint journey would continue for nearly three years and culminated in the dispensary’s opening in December 2021. While Hill is happy to let his partners handle the day-to-day business, he says he’ll tend to weigh in on things that key into his cultivation background, such as trendy strains to stock. “Double Stuffed Oreoz is one of those,” Hill said. “And Rainbow Runtz is another.” (The former is described as having a sweet and creamy aroma with chocolate undertones, the latter as earthy with notes of berry and pine.)
Eventually, Hill wants to pursue his passion for the plant — on the cultivation side — beyond the Golden State. “I’d like to be a multistate operator,” he said. “One of my old bosses moved to Colorado and Oklahoma, so maybe one of those states.” (Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational weed, is seen as a more stable market, while medicalonly Oklahoma has fewer regulations, a lower bar to entry and a strategic appeal if cannabis ever becomes legal coast to coast.) But for now, Hill is focused on nurturing a 4-monthold seedling of sorts.
“You want to keep your cultivation facility diseasefree,” he said, likening the dispensary to a grow facility. “That means no viruses, no insects, no powdery mildew. You have to focus on plant health; the healthier the plant the better the product.”