In West, 24 shops OK'd to sell 'pot'

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

SEATTLE -- Washington state issued its first retail marijuana licenses Monday with an early morning email alerting "pot" shop proprietors that they'll finally be able to open for business.

"We're pretty stoked," said John Evich, an investor in Bellingham's Top Shelf Cannabis, in a 2:30 a.m. interview. "We haven't had any sleep in a long time, but we're excited for the next step."

Randy Simmons, the state Liquor Control Board's project manager for legal marijuana, said Sunday night that the first two dozen stores were being notified early to give them an extra few hours to get cannabis on their shelves before they are allowed to open their doors at 8 a.m. today.

"Dear Licensee," read the electronic missive that landed in chiropractor Tim Thompson's email box at 1:17 a.m. "Effective immediately, your account on the Washington State Liquor Control Board's Marijuana Traceability System is active on the LIVE system."

Thompson and his business partner plan to open the doors of Altitude, their eastern Washington retail establishment, at 8 a.m. today.

The state licensed 14 stores in western Washington and 10 in eastern Washington.

Spokane has three stores. Vancouver, Tacoma and Bellingham each have two. Seattle and the other cities on the list have one each.

The pattern came down to chance and circumstance, said Mikhail Carpenter, a spokesman for the Liquor Control Board, which wrote the regulations and administers the system. With multiple inspections and requirements to meet, "a lot of people weren't ready," Carpenter said.

Many would-be operators were slowed by financing troubles, inspection questions or other issues, Carpenter said.

The issuance of the retail licenses marked a major step that's been 20 months in the making. Residents in Washington and Colorado voted in November 2012 to legalize marijuana for adults over 21 and to create state-licensed systems for growing, selling and taxing the drug.

Sales began in Colorado on Jan. 1.

Colorado created its first recreational marijuana shops from the medical marijuana dispensaries that were already in business, which meant that many of the first wave of operators were already in the marijuana trade.

Washington, by contrast, started from scratch, throwing open the application process and giving medical marijuana dispensary operators no edge in the competition for licenses.

It remained unclear how many of the shops being licensed in Washington planned to open today. Officials eventually expect to have more than 300 recreational marijuana shops across the state.

At Cannabis City, which will be the first and, for now, only recreational marijuana shop in Seattle, owner James Lathrop worked into the night Sunday placing no-parking signs in front of his building, hoisting a grand-opening banner and hanging artwork before he turned his attention to his email -- and the official notification that he was a licensed marijuana dealer.

"I've had a long day. It really hasn't sunk in yet," he said early Monday.

He planned to hold off on opening his store until noon today.

"Know your audience: We're talking stoners here," he said. "It'd be mean to say they need to get up at 5 a.m. to get in line."

With the emailed notifications in hand, the shops immediately worked to place their orders with some of the state's first licensed growers. As soon as the orders were received, via state-approved software for tracking the bar-coded marijuana, the growers could place the product in a required 24-hour "quarantine" before shipping it early this morning.

The final days before sales have been frenetic for growers and retailers. Lathrop and his team hired an events company to provide crowd control, arranged for a food truck and free water for those who might spend hours waiting outside, and rented a portable toilet to keep his customers from burdening nearby businesses with requests to use the restrooms.

At Nine Point Growth Industries, a marijuana grower in Bremerton, owner Gregory Stewart said he and his director celebrated after they worked through some glitches in the marijuana-tracking software early Monday and officially learned they'd be able to transport their marijuana 24 hours later, at 2:22 a.m. today.

"It's the middle of the night and we're standing here doing high-fives and our version of a happy dance," he said. "It's huge for us."

Marijuana prices were expected to reach $25 a gram or higher on the first day of sales -- twice what people pay in the state's unregulated medical marijuana dispensaries. That was largely because of the short supply of legally produced marijuana in the state. Although more than 2,600 people applied to become licensed growers, fewer than 100 have been approved -- and only about a dozen were ready to harvest by early this month.

Marijuana growers got their licenses only in March, not enough time to produce a big crop. Retired schoolteacher and shopowner John Larson expects to have perhaps 2 pounds, which he expects could be gone in hours, and no edible products at all, since no state-licensed marijuana food producers are up and running.

Some retailers said they planned to ration supplies in the early days, allowing customers to buy only a small fraction of the ounce that the law allows for adults over 21.

Evich, however, said his shop in Bellingham wanted to thank the state's residents for voting for the law by offering one cannabis strain at $10 a gram to the first 50 or 100 customers. The other strains would be priced between $12 and $25 a gram, he said.

The store will be open at 8 a.m. today, he said, but work remained: trimming the bathroom door, cleaning the floors, wiping dust off the walls and, of course, stocking the shelves.

In Seattle, among those who planned to buy some of the first marijuana at Cannabis City was Alison Holcomb, the lawyer who drafted Washington's law. She said it was a good opportunity to remind people of the big-picture arguments for ending nearly a century of prohibition and displacing the black market, including keeping nonviolent, adult marijuana users out of jail; redirecting profits away from criminal groups; and ending racial disparities in who gets busted.

"No one thought legalization could happen in our lifetime," she said. "I think this is going to be a little overwhelming for me."

While many of the new business operators are brimming with optimism about the new market, others say the road ahead might be harder than people want to believe. Protesters in Prosser, for example, have been regularly picketing Thompson's chiropractor office, carrying signs with slogans like "God Judges Sin."

"They camp out in front of my office every day," Thompson said.

Information for this article was contributed by Gene Johnson of The Associated Press and by Maria L. La Ganga of the Los Angeles Times.

A Section on 07/08/2014