San Francisco — KEVIN Reed launched his medical marijuana business two years ago, armed with big dreams and an Excel spreadsheet.
Happy customers at his Green Cross cannabis club were greeted by "bud tenders" and glass jars brimming with high-quality weed at red-tag prices. They hailed the slender, gentle Southerner as a ganja good Samaritan. Though Reed set out to run it like a Walgreens, his tiny storefront shop ended up buzzing with jazzy \o7joie de vivre\f7. Turnover was Starbucks-style: On a good day, $30,000 in business would walk through the black, steel-gated front door.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday December 30, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 39 words Type of Material: Correction
Medical marijuana shop: A story in Section A on Wednesday about the travails of a San Francisco medical marijuana dispensary listed Riverside County among jurisdictions allowing the dispensaries. The county Board of Supervisors voted in October to ban dispensaries.
Today, the 32-year-old cannabis capitalist is looking for a job, his business undone by its own success and unexpected opposition in one of America's most proudly tolerant places. Critics in nearby Victorian homes called Reed a neighborhood nuisance. Although four of five San Francisco voters support medical marijuana, the realities of dispensing the contentious medicine have proved far more controversial.
It has been 10 years since California approved Proposition 215 -- the Compassionate Use Act -- becoming the first state to define marijuana as a medicine. The 389-word act aimed to ensure seriously ill Californians the right to use marijuana. But it said nothing about how they might get the drug -- and left ample regulatory ambiguity.
Today, about 200,000 Californians have a doctor's permission to use cannabis, which they can obtain through more than 250 dispensaries, delivery services and patient collectives -- 120 of them in Los Angeles County alone. Medical marijuana, activists say, has become a $1-billion business.
There's been plenty of blowback. Local governments have been grappling with how to regulate storefront sales, still prohibited under federal law despite California's tolerance.
Though two dozen cities and seven counties -- including Los Angeles, Riverside and Santa Barbara -- have approved regulations allowing dispensaries, more than 90 others have passed moratoriums on new suppliers or banned them outright. Earlier this month, a Superior Court judge rejected a challenge to the medical marijuana law by Merced, San Bernardino and San Diego counties.
FEW in the medical marijuana business have seen as steep a commercial rise and fall as Reed.
He got into the marijuana business by accident -- literally.
