Week in Weed
Lines are a bummer. Photoillustration Wikimedia Commons/Jacqui Langeland
Left Behind By Thadeus Greenson thad@northcoastjournal.com
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little more than five weeks have passed since recreational marijuana became legal in California and local dispensaries remain bustling. “We’ve been a lot busier than we expected,” says Ray Markland, company manager for Eureka’s EcoCann dispensary. “We expected a 20 to 30 percent bump in business but it’s been 200 to 300 percent.” Mariellen Jurkovich, owner of the Humboldt Patient Resource Center in Arcata, agrees things have been “super busy” since the dispensary opened recreational sales last month. And that’s brought a variety of changes. “It’s been a different atmosphere,” Jurkovich says, adding that lines have swollen with first-time customers who bring a litany of questions about various products, from flowers to edibles to concentrates. Markland says he’s already seen a fair number of repeat customers, intoning that there’s more to this legal green rush than novelty alone. While the transition to legal recreational cannabis sales is exciting, it hasn’t been a boon for everyone.
16 NORTH COAST JOURNAL • Thursday, Feb. 8, 2018 • northcoastjournal.com
“I think medical patients feel somewhat left behind,” Markland says. Medical marijuana patients, who have enjoyed a fairly stable marketplace for more than a decade, have indeed seen their medical supply chain upended overnight as the state put medical and recreational cannabis under a single regulatory umbrella. For medical patients, that means they’re now waiting in longer lines to buy more expensive products that they now also have to pay taxes on. While the regulations do allow patients with a state-issued medical identification card to avoid some taxes, Markland says most patients don’t want to go to the Department of Health and Human Services to have their name put in a statewide database. (The cards cost $100 and, Jurkovich says, MediCal patients get a $50 discount.) Most patients, Markland says, have even bristled at new regulations requiring customers to offer up their identification so dispensaries can make sure they don’t purchase more than the single ounce a day that the law allows. In addition to the taxes — which run almost 25 percent locally and as high as