Weed Land. Peter Hecht
a seven-thousand-square-foot warehouse outside of downtown, between the Interstate 880 freeway and Oakland’s industrialized waterfront. He constructed windows and a natural-light waiting room in the drab-olive building, added ferns and broadleaf plants, and stationed trained, patient-friendly attendants along expansive dispensary counters between a pastel blue backdrop and the glistening glass cases offering vast, exquisite selections of cannabis.
In addition to more than five dozen designer marijuana strains, Harborside offered medicinal elixirs, creams, lotions, and baked edibles—chewy chocolate cannabis creations topped with hash frostings. Harborside, marketing its dispensary as a nonprofit wellness center, also had a naturopathic primary care doctor, an acupuncturist, a chiropractor, and life coaches offering sessions in yoga, stress management, and “universal life force energy.” By 2010, Harborside had amassed a clientele of more than fifty thousand registered medical marijuana patients. It greeted more than eight hundred medical marijuana consumers a day, annually handling more than $20 million in pot transactions and paying more than $2.3 million in state sales taxes and city dispensary fees. By 2012, having opened a second dispensary in San Jose, Harborside would attract more than a hundred thousand people to sign up as members, receive patient services, and purchase its herbal medicine.
In 2008, Harborside partnered with an Oakland laboratory, Steep Hill Lab, for what it called California’s first product-safety protocol for marijuana. Steep Hill tested cannabis samples to weed out batches tainted by molds or pesticides. Lab tests for potency also enabled Harborside to label its cannabis with results for tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive substance in marijuana. Harborside’s popular Mango OG, one of its highest-potency strains, packed a medicinal mindful ranging from 14 percent THC to 22 percent. Its OG Kush products ranged from a moderate 8 percent THC to a mighty 24 percent. And DeAngelo’s medical-marijuana patient cultivators also grew an OG Kush/True Blueberry hybrid cannabis strain that bred out the THC in favor of another cannabis constituent—cannabidiol, or CBD. The CBD strains offered analgesic, less euphoric properties, stirring a niche market for pot that promised relief without getting you stoned. With the panache of a pharmaceutical rep, DeAngelo hit the road to national cannabis conferences. He touted “wellness, not intoxication” as he helped bring medical marijuana to the masses.
DeAngelo, who graduated summa cum laude in American studies from the University of Maryland and enrolled for a time in law school, had started out as an old-school advocate for marijuana. Many years before emerging as the new-generation medicinal cannabis executive, he had joined the movement as a Youth International Party devotee who, in the 1970s, chained himself to the White House fence in Fourth of July smoke-ins demanding marijuana liberation. He went on to operate a Washington, D.C., hangout—called the Beat Club—in a three-story townhouse that included a music and dance club, an Ethiopian restaurant, and a rooftop garden where pot smoking was encouraged. He later rented a ten-bedroom party house—dubbed “the nuthouse”—that became a party haven for pot activists and cannabis-savoring intellectuals. One day, DeAngelo welcomed a happily wild-eyed man named Jack Herer, a San Fernando Valley head-shop owner who hyped legal pot on Los Angeles’ Venice Beach boardwalk and pushed grassroots marijuana initiatives in California. Herer waved a tattered copy of his book—The Emperor Wears No Clothes—which would become a manifesto for the marijuana movement. It extolled America’s long history of using cannabis plants to produce hemp fabrics, plastics, foods, and fuel while alleging a conspiracy by the likes of William Randolph Hearst and DuPont Chemical behind hemp and marijuana prohibition that effectively began with passage of the onerous Marijuana Stamp Act in 1937. The two men sat down and sparked up a joint. DeAngelo read the material. He turned to Herer. “This changes everything,” he said. “They have to make it legal.”
DeAngelo joined Herer on a national hemp tour. He produced two records—Hempilation 1 and Hempilation 2—that compiled procannabis songs by performers such as Dr. Dre, the Black Crows, and Cypress Hill to promote hemp and legal marijuana. From 1990 to 2000, he ran an import company, Ecolution, that sold products—from blue jeans to cosmetics—manufactured from hemp legally grown overseas. In 1998, DeAngelo supported the campaign for Initiative 59, a Washington, D.C., measure that won overwhelming voter support to legalize medical marijuana in the nation’s capital. Congress barred the district from implementing the results under an amendment by Congressman Bob Barr to a 1999 appropriations bill. Betrayed in the nation’s capital, DeAngelo answered the cannabis call of California.
He founded Harborside with Dave Wedding Dress, a San Francisco Bay Area peace activist who legally changed his name to match the flowing white gowns he wore at antinuclear protests. The man known around Harborside as “Dress” served as the dispensary’s “holistic care director.” And while Harborside cast itself in corporate clothes as an HMO for cannabis, DeAngelo and Dress instilled an activist creed. Harborside rewarded patients who volunteered for marijuana advocacy work with free samples of weed—up to a gram a week. Its medical marijuana consumers wrote letters of support to “prisoners of war”—inmates incarcerated for pot. DeAngelo also saw himself as a leader in bringing regulations and legitimacy to medical marijuana dispensaries that had long braved raids and were still seen as a nuisance by many California cities and counties. In that cause, he found a natural partner in Richard Lee.
The pair worked together on an Oakland ballot measure that promised the city new revenues through America’s first local tax on marijuana. In June 2009, with the hearty backing of medical marijuana outlets and cannabis advocates, Oakland voters overwhelmingly approved Measure F to allow the city to collect a special 1.8 percent tax on gross receipts of the city’s four pot clubs. The sudden prospect of new tax revenues inspired Oakland officials to explore an expanding marijuana economy. The long-struggling city came to see itself as the progressive center for California cannabis commercialization. Over the next year, Oakland welcomed a cavernous hydroponics store that reveled in media attention as the Walmart for marijuana cultivation supplies. The city council later set in motion controversial plans to license four commercial warehouses—vast urban factory farms that could produce pot for a thriving California medical market and, potentially, for future legalization of marijuana beyond medical use.
Richard Lee, in particular, saw the passage of Measure F as a “reverse tax revolt” and a springboard for historic acceptance of marijuana. He advanced a new political mantra—“No taxation without legalization.” He began organizing, and bankrolling, a statewide ballot measure to legalize pot for any Californian twenty-one or older who wanted to smoke marijuana.
DeAngelo may have had his epiphany over a shared joint with Jack Herer that legalization was near. But he steadfastly told Lee that this wasn’t the time.
Outside of pot-friendly Oakland, many cities and counties in California still banned medical marijuana dispensaries, and newly opening pot stores were making residents and officials uncomfortable in places that allowed them. DeAngelo contended that the medical marijuana industry needed to establish professional standards and broader public support. He argued that 2010—a nonpresidential election year—wouldn’t attract young voters who could turn the tide on marijuana legalization. DeAngelo thought legalizing pot purely as an adult recreational pleasure was too much of a political leap.
Lee was stunned as California leaders for the national Marijuana Policy Project and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws also told him to stand down. Dale Gieringer, NORML’s state director, argued that a legalization initiative could make efforts to pass pro-marijuana legislation even more difficult at the capitol in Sacramento. Gieringer, an activist-sage with a PhD from Stanford, put it to Lee in blunt terms. “If you lose,” he told the president of Oaksterdam University, “you’re a loser.”
The movement naysayers only made Lee more determined. He also thought too many people entering the medical marijuana trade had such a good thing going they simply didn’t want to change. He sensed that not everyone coming to buy marijuana had a serious medical need. “Let’s just do this,” he thought, “instead of having people pretend to be sick.” Lee’s cannabis college and medical marijuana enterprises had made him rich but also uncomfortable. He wondered how much he alone deserved his earnings. And he thought if he didn’t empty his bank accounts, it was only a matter of time before the Internal Revenue Service would