A business in Berkeley, California is thriving in this weak economy, hiring mostly African-Americans and helping to lower the unemployment rate in minority communities.
Could this be a model emulated nationwide? Obama’s always talking about “shovel-ready” jobs — but has he considered bong-ready jobs? :
In the 21 months since it opened, the 40 Acres Medical Marijuana Growers Collective has seen its membership jump to more than 7,000 people, making it one of the fastest growing and largest cannabis businesses in Berkeley.
From a set of rooms located above the Albatross pub on San Pablo Avenue, 40 Acres has become more than just a place where people can obtain and consume medical cannabis. Started by African-Americans, run by African-Americans, 40 Acres aims to bring diversity to the medical cannabis movement and use the rapidly growing industry as a way to open up opportunities for the poor and disenfranchised.
The leaders of the collective actively reach out to marginalized youth and encourage them to enter the group’s training program, where they can learn the nuts and bolts of bud tending, cultivation, patient intake methods, and how to assess product.
“There is a population of kids, high school dropouts, who are coming to us to learn,” said Toya Groves, a director and one of the four co-founders of the group. “This is a way the unemployable become employable.”
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40 Acres actively recruits members online and at hemp fairs, has 21 employees, sells bongs and other retail goods, and advertises its services online and in newspapers.
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Some people in the cannabis community think the city is taking a hands-off approach because officials want to encourage diversity in the industry. While the patients in the city’s three dispensaries are all races, the leadership is primarily white.
“They don’t know what to do,” said one dispensary member. “The people who run 40 Acres made a big stink [during meetings to talk about the ballot measures for November 2010] about how there wasn’t enough diversity in the medical cannabis community. They are hyping up that they are African-American owned and run and none of the other three dispensaries are.”
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In the meantime, 40 Acres is trying to operate a safe space for people who benefit from medical cannabis. The African-American community, traumatized by poverty, discrimination, and violence, has been self-medicating with marijuana for generations, long before it was called medical cannabis, she said. People were forced to smoke pot in secret, and 40 Acres is trying to show people both how cannabis is a medicine that can help anxiety, depression, and post traumatic disorder from violence, and that it can be prescribed by a doctor, said Groves.
When Groves, Smith and the other co-founders started 40 Acres in December 2009, they found that many African-Americans did not know they could get a prescription for cannabis. To jump start the collective, Groves and Smith paid for 200 people to go to the doctor to see if they qualified for medical cannabis, she said.
One of the goals of 40 Acres is to change the equation, from where African Americans were consuming cannabis in secret, or dealing it on the street, to out into the open, said Groves. That’s why 40 Acres reaches out into the community and takes people are unemployed and trains them as cannabis entrepreneurs, she said.
Seriously, marijuana is now one of the few burgeoning industries in California. Even weekly newspapers like the SFWeekly and the East Bay Express are now primarily kept afloat by advertisements for pot clinics. Downtown Oakland’s revival, many say, is in large part due to the success of Oaksterdam, a marijuana-themed university. (No, I’m not kidding.)
Maybe now is the time for California and other “medical” marijuana states to just throw in the towel and make the final transition to an all-drug-dealing economy. And consider the benefits to the African-American community, as described in the article above. If the government simply licensed street-corner drug dealers, the official minority unemployment rate would plummet!
Somebody should call Sheila Jackson Lee — we’ve found that elusive African-American jobs program she was looking for.
This incredible fluff piece is everything about social logrolling, and nothing whatever about supply, demand, income, expenses – least of all profits and losses.
Is it some sort of taxpayer-funded scam that pays its ‘cadre’ and signs up volunteers to poster the neighborhood? What does it pay its ’21 employees’? How many acres of weed are grown to supply its 7,000 members, and where are those acres?
How much did it pay those 200 folks to go to the doctors?
And do tell us what makes its ‘cannabis entrepreneurs’ different than the swarms of them that have supplied Berkeley since the 1950s.
“Cannabis entrepreneurs”, eh? I’m certain that that title plays elicits tremendous respect and admiration from county/city prosecutors, judges and juries in jurisdictions beyond Berkeley.
Oversensitive: PJM does a lot of satire and this piece is sarcastically fluffy.
The facts about the 7,000-member African-American pot club are completely true and real.
My advocacy for an “all-drug-dealing” economy, however, are satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift.
Unfortunately, many people — including some quoted in the article — are completely serious about having an “all-drug-dealing” economy. That’s how crazy this whole situation is.
Loss of the sense of humor is one symptom of cannabis dependency. One of the centers damaged by THC is for critical thinking, logic…that kind of stuff. That’s why they show everybody laughing their (stoned?) heads off at the “Cannabis University” you linked to.
Great coverage, Z! Now I’ll have to drive even more defensively on my way out of Oakland International on my business trip. I wonder if California removed THC from their DWI criteria?
As for your comment on drug dealing economy: Having lived there 18 years, I estimated about 1/3 of inhabitants were on something, legal or otherwise. So it actually makes a lot of sense that the next step would be a drug-dealing economy.
So what you’re saying is, businesses are leaving California in droves not only because of high taxes and onerous regulations, but because they have to go somewhere else to find employees who aren’t perpetually stoned.
I’m from Colorado – similar situation – and I’ve got to say, full legalization would feel a lot less skeezy. Also, I don’t think legal marijuana would be nearly as hip as wink-wink illegal marijuana.
40 Acres, huh? But no Mule, right? I guess with medical marijuana you don’t need a mule any longer.
I have to wonder if diamond mine searches are done on the pot sorters before they leave for the day.
This bud is good,
This bud….well, I’ll just take this one home….
Think of all jobs to be created if California legalized prostitution, too.
Heck, there was a “sex workers’ advocacy group” in Atlanta called “Hooking Is Real Employment” (HIRE).