By Nate Gartrell
In case the literal clouds of smoke that billowed up from San Francisco’s Hippy Hill last April 20th weren’t enough to tip you off, marijuana is now legal in California. And while some cities and counties have resisted the change, many others (especially around the Bay Area) are doing just the opposite, clearing the way for existing medical pot dispensaries to start selling to the recreational 21-and-up crowd.
Vallejo is certainly in the latter category; in February, the Vallejo City Council passed an ordinance that opened the city’s 11 dispensaries up to recreational sales. But if you thought that the emergence of recreational marijuana, however, was going to kill the black market, think again. Added taxes that came with the new legalization laws have led to grumblings among legal pot sellers about a decline in foot traffic since the New Year, and they think off-the-grid dealers are picking up that demand. Despite the challenges the industry faces, marijuana grow sites, dispensaries, and delivery services are popping up all over the state, and that shows no signs of stopping. At the same time, cannabis products that do not induce a “high,” like CBD oil, are gaining more acceptance among mainstream doctors and catching the eye of the country’s top medical researchers.
If there was anything surprising about California legalizing marijuana, it was that other states—Colorado, Washington, and Oregon—beat us to the punch. When voters turned down Prop. 19, the 2010 legal marijuana initiative, it ended a streak of California pioneering new liberal marijuana laws. In 1977, comedian Steve Martin joked to a crowd of San Franciscans that he wouldn’t want to be caught smoking marijuana out there, because “you might get a ticket for that.” Martin got laughs, but he wasn’t wrong; the year before, a state law came into effect that made possessing less than an ounce punishable by no more than a $100 fine. Twenty years later, California enacted the country’s first medical marijuana laws, which quickly became the butt of jokes around the nation and late night talk show hosts theorized what crazy medical maladies pot heads from the Golden State would concoct to get their weed cards. As it turned out, it didn’t take much; saying you suffer from chronic headaches sufficed just fine.
For a perspective from within the marijuana industry, we spoke with Maurice Solis, one of the operators of a Vallejo cannabis club called ReLeaf Alternative Healing, who told us that he entered the business with the same type of cynicism about the medical marijuana laws: that they were being abused by the overwhelming majority of “patients.” He reluctantly entered the cannabis industry after leaving a career he enjoyed, car sales, and he said at first his cynicism was confirmed right off the bat.
“The first dispensary I worked in was in San Jose in a part of town that was not good, not even a little bit,” Maurice recalls. “But as I started getting rare patients that did have a medical need, I would work with them and begin tracking their symptoms, figuring out what worked and what didn’t, and I started to get real joy out of that.”
As Maurice began to study up on medical cannabis, the dispensary began to change its product line, and his thinking began to transform as well. “As my business partner and I learned more about the medical benefits, different types of people started to see us and it totally changed our clientele,” Maurice said. “It made me a believer in the fact that cannabis can be a medicine and we wanted to expand on that.”
ReLeaf, Maurice and his co-founder, Ayn Nguyen, have the motto that “we wanted to be more medicinally-based and do as much research on it so we could help patients.” This includes partnering with neuroscientists for a research project through Stanford University, which has studied the benefits of dronabinol and other cannabis products to patients with epilepsy and autism.
“Our main focus is happiness,” Maurice said. “We are almost like the local corner store; we know our customers, we know our patients, we know when they’re going through tough times in their lives and when they’re going through great times. We’re very social and our main goal is to see them happy.”
With legalization of marijuana for adults 21 and up, the market for recreational cannabis has been something analogous to wine tasting. There is an endless amount of indica and sativa strains, each with different densities, textures, and smells. Search across the Bay Area’s numerous dispensaries, and you’ll also find a wide range of cannabis oils and waxes, vaporizing pens, THC-laced snacks and candies, pills, pre-rolled cigarettes, joints, and even palm tree leaf cigars, not to mention a hard-to-find, semi-legal, pre-rolled marijuana cigar line named after one of Vallejo’s most famous rappers. There are even marijuana syrups that one can pour into a soda, juice, or drink straight up.
Nowadays, since co-founding ReLeaf, Maurice gives public talks on his transition and the future of medical and recreational marijuana, and he’s gotten involved in the community in ways that would have seemed unthinkable in the “Reefer Madness” era. ReLeaf has joined up with the Vallejo Chamber of Commerce and participates in community events, also making a point of opening its walls for local artists to hang their work.
“I don’t blame people for having those stigmas associated with cannabis,” Maurice said. “I came into the industry with a bias; and I know if I came into it like that, then other people are going to also. My job is to shed a better light on it and be a better example.”
“One of the most common things I hear is that it’s going to attract teenagers to start using marijuana, but statistics show there is no correlation between legalization and teen use,” he continued.
Another of the biggest misconceptions Maurice has heard, he said, is that marijuana dispensary owners are “all millionaires.” However, he said that is far from the case. “I would probably be making more if I stayed in the car industry,” he said. “But I don’t get that type of joy from helping people; it’s not the same when you’re selling a car compared to when someone comes in really sick and in tears, and for the next months you see them when they are coming in happy and relatively free.”
The City of Vallejo was unquestionably resistant to medical marijuana a few years ago, but Maurice said that times have changed over at City Hall, and with the passing of several ordinances that paved the way for cultivation and distribution within city limits, that seems to hold true. Of course, on a national level, there are growing concerns throughout the “weed legal” states that the US Justice Department might begin to pursue criminal prosecutions against growers and dispensary owners. In the Bay Area, the top prosecutor in the federal district that oversees the East Bay and San Francisco resigned shortly after the DOJ announced it was expanding the breadth of marijuana cases it would pursue. In California’s eastern federal district, where Vallejo sits, the top US Attorney is McGregor Scott, who led the 2006 prosecution of two dispensary owners in the Modesto area who were granted clemency under President Barack Obama. And while Californians have a lackadaisical attitude about marijuana, the federal penalties remain stiff. “It’s always something that you have in the back of your mind,” Maurice said, but he thinks cities throughout California would “go to bat” for dispensaries, which bring in lots of tax revenue.
“There are tons of things you can do with the plant itself,” Maurice said, citing the litany of known uses for the hemp plant, which doesn’t yield usable amounts of THC. “This is why we feel that the federal government has a big fight on their hands if they push against it.”
While marijuana does bring in tax revenue, the New Year also brought new pot taxes, which has opened the door for the black market to undercut legal marijuana businesses. There is also a well-documented surplus of marijuana statewide; weed grows like, well, a weed, and the state is producing more marijuana than Californians can smoke. As a result, dispensaries are pickier about what marijuana products they buy from distributors, and illicit growers are more tempted to transport their product across state lines. “A lot of folks who weren’t able to get a state license, they were sitting on millions of dollars worth of inventory,” Maurice said. “They’re not just going to leave it on the shelf.”
ReLeaf is open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily. It is located at 1 Benicia Road in Vallejo, with plans to expand into Monterey and Dixon. For additional information and for the daily menu, visit weedmaps.com/dispensaries/releaf-alternative-healing or releafalternative.org. Reach them at (707) 980-7868 or email them at releaf4life@gmail.com.
Nate Gartrell grew up in Benicia, studied journalism in college, and has written for a handful of media outlets since age 15. He aspires to visit all 30 Major League Baseball stadiums and to hit the trifecta at the horse track.
