Joint Venture: Too legit to quit?

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In the midst of all of it, the amendment’s intent can get lost in the shuffle, says attorney Brian Vicente of the nonprofit patient advocacy group, Sensible Colorado. The whole idea was to ensure access to marijuana for people who need it.

People like Jason Lauve, confined to a wheelchair after his back was broken when a snowboarder slammed into him. He registered with the state and was growing his own medication in his home when a neighbor turned him in. Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy charged him with possession of more cannabis than was medically necessary, but the jury disagreed. Lauve rolled out of the courthouse with his 34 ounces of medical marijuana in a box on his lap.

Lauve wants to make sure that lawmakers hear his voice – and those of others who rely on Amendment 20 and cannabis to make life bearable.

“The market is going to drive all those who don’t care out of the business. Because the quality won’t be there. And the quality has to be there for the patient. The cost has to be there for the patient, and the safety,” Lauve says.

“Dispensaries or storefronts are often the best way to access medical marijuana in a safe and dignified manner,” Vicente says. “Some of those business interests and patients are trying to legitimize and regulate and control it. On the other side are law enforcement and the attorney general who are trying to destroy those new businesses and really weaken the state’s law.

“It’s a bit of a pickle,” he says, in what is perhaps the understatement of the year.

It’s also a business model turned on its head, one where the customers come first – literally. Under the law, patients can appoint a caregiver to supply them with their medicine, and caregivers are allowed to grow six plants per patient. Dispensary owners typically start by getting their own patient cards, then seek out friends and family who might qualify. Five patients equals 30 plants, et voila! A business is born.

On the same day that grower Dana May was giving his seminar under the auspices of the American Cannabis College (“Growing since 1968”) in a hotel off Interstate 70, California-based Greenway University was hosting a sold-out, two-day seminar at the Westin Tabor in downtown Denver. Attendees were mostly middle-aged, mostly professional people looking to make a career change – a far cry from the stereotypic stoner growing plants in his closet.

“Compliance is our driving force,” says Greenway CEO Gus Escamilla, whose organization advocates quality control from seed to sale so that consumers know exactly what they’re buying. He supports regulation as a way to both legitimize and validate the industry.

“I applaud legislators who are actually taking a stance and establishing ordinances and rules to play by. The industry is desperately in need of that,” Escamilla says, noting that more than 600 new patients register with the state every day. “That’s phenomenal growth. (Lawmakers) are staying one step ahead and trying to tax and regulate. That’s a good thing.”

It’s an evolving business that has created more business for everyone from the real estate agents who track down storefronts for dispensaries and warehouses for growers to the security specialists who try to make those buildings tough to crack. And there are the spinoffs – education seminars like those of May or Greenway, labs that test for quality, people who sell hydroponics equipment or make the world’s best vaporizers or bongs.

“Job-creating, tax-paying, space-renting, employee-hiring – this is a positive thing,” says Corry, whose own marijuana-related legal business is booming, too. He has formed the Colorado Wellness Association, a kind of cannabis-centric Better Business Bureau “committed to creating a fair and ethical regulatory framework for the State’s wellness and medical cannabis community.”
Like Escamilla, Corry was pleased when Colorado Attorney General John Suthers – no friend to the medical marijuana business – said the state can collect sales tax on cannabis and that dispensaries must get retail-sales licenses from the state to do business.

“With taxation comes legitimacy,” Corry says.

Corry would like it to include a password-protected cannabis “commodities market” to bring together wholesale growers and dispensaries. More supply would lower prices, which can be $400 an ounce, definitely more than it might cost on the street. But patients – most of them middle-aged, 90 percent using cannabis for severe pain – pay the premium to buy it safely.

“It’s not a bunch of hippies getting stoned – these people are sick,” says grower May, who suffers from a nerve ailment that causes intense pain. “Many of them are on disability, but what choice do they have? It doesn’t matter how much it costs. It helps.”

All the commotion over cannabis begs the question: In an economy struggling to pull itself out of the toilet, can governments afford to ignore the tax revenue bonanza sprouting up before their eyes?

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