Venture capitalist Steve Berg figured he had an unassailable business model. Berg’s San Francisco firm, the ArcView Group, was pledging to find “angel investors” for startups offering products and services for California’s $1.5 billion medical marijuana industry. But last week, U.S. prosecutors in California announced criminal prosecutions against targeted marijuana dispensaries and threatened landlords with property seizures, Peter Hecht reports in the Sacramento Bee. Suddenly, the state’s burgeoning medical marijuana sector is dealing with fear and introspection. Industry advocates are calling for increased state regulation, thinking that could weed out bad actors in the trade [...]
For Southern Humboldt resident Kristin Nevedal, an avid gardener and a trained herbalist, marijuana is just another plant. ”It doesn’t make sense to me that there’s not access to it, and it doesn’t make sense that you can’t grow it in your backyard,” she said, adding that any herbal plant can be abused if taken improperly. The key is education, Nevedal told Donna Tam of the Eureka Times-Standard. As the medical marijuana industry grows and evolves, residents like Nevedal are bringing their beliefs and craft to the forefront through trade groups such as the Humboldt [...]
Feb 252011
The Wal-Mart of weed is coming to Sacramento. At least that’s the moniker embraced by weGrow, a cavernous hydroponics store enthusiastically marketing itself as a retail outlet for people cultivating marijuana for personal medicinal use. The 10,000-square-foot weGrow store, which opens Saturday at 1537 Fulton Ave., is the first national franchise for a company that bills itself as a supply and training destination for legal pot growers. The enterprise, started in Oakland last year as a warehouse store called iGrow, doesn’t sell any marijuana, Peter Hecht reports in the Sacramento Bee. Yet the gardening emporium [...]
Is a modern-day Gold Rush taking place that centers on loosening marijuana restrictions and the rise of indoor, hydroponic pot grows? Or has the bottom fallen out of the market in Auburn and other California communities? Auburn has four storefronts selling all the equipment needed to grow everything from tomatoes to marijuana – three that have popped up in the past two years, Gus Thomson reports in the Auburn Journal. But with Prop. 19 going down to defeat in November and more growers with plenty of pot looking at more competition to supply medicinal marijuana [...]
In 2008, then-state Assemblyman Mark Leno got a bill passed in both houses of the California Legislature to prohibit employees from firing workers simply because they were medical marijuana patients. A little more than two years after the bill was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leno, now a Democratic state senator from San Francisco, has introduced similar legislation. Leno’s Senate Bill 129 would prohibit employers from discriminating against workers with medical marijuana recommendations in hiring or firing decisions or in their rights to participate in the workplace, Peter Hecht reports in his “Weed Wars” blog. [...]
SOQUEL — How strange is the emerging world of medical-marijuana entrepreneurship? Consider Clay Butler, who may soon be marketing a food product that he’s never tasted, and that he would never buy. The product is called Canna Cola, and it’s a soft drink that contains THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, aimed at medical marijuana dispensaries. “I don’t do drugs,” said the Soquel-based commercial artist. “Never have. I never drank, never smoked. I’m a clean-living guy. I’ve had two beers in my whole life, and I remember them both too. No marijuana, I’ve never smoked [...]
WASHINGTON – The cannabis industry has flexed its muscles in 15 states, including California, where it’s legal to smoke marijuana for medical purposes. Now the industry is ready to go to work in Washington, Rob Hotakainen reports in the Sacramento Bee from McClatchy Newspapers’ Washington bureau. A new trade group, called the National Cannabis Industry Association, aims to bring together sellers, growers and manufacturers and to promote pot on Capitol Hill. “Our intent is to be the go-to organization in Washington for this industry,” said Aaron Smith, the group’s executive director. For the past five [...]
This week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been on a tear, but it’s nothing compared to the recent highs achieved by an obscure stock known as General Cannabis (ticker symbol: CANA). Since word leaked out in September that the company was acquiring the popular Yelp-for-pot site WeedMaps.com, the value of its shares has skyrocketed 300 percent. Last week General Cannabis officially finalized the purchase, Josh Harkinson reports in Mother Jones, making WeedMaps the latest and most brazen marijuana business to go public. Founded in 2008 by a University of California computer science graduate, Justin [...]
Nov 132010
OAKLAND — Californians may have rejected legalizing recreational marijuana, but voters across the state are more than ready to reap revenue from the state’s largest cash crop. On Election Day, all 10 cities with local measures on their ballots approved new or higher taxes on marijuana sales that put the need for cash above the stigma of a federally banned drug. The same was true in Colorado, where medical marijuana was approved in 2000, the AP’s Marcus Wohlsen reports in a story picked up by the Sacramento Bee. Nine municipalities approved higher sales taxes on [...]
A statewide radio advertising blitz paid for by the California Chamber of Commerce’s Business PAC features a commercial depicting a stoned California workforce. The spot calling for a “no” vote on the Proposition 19 marijuana initiative is bound to get your attention. But it merits a closer look – and some chilling out on its more colorful claims. Here is the text of the CalChamber commercial, as reported by “Weed Wars” blogger Peter Hecht, followed by some of Hecht’s observations: Imagine coming out of surgery and the nurse caring for you was high – or [...]
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