Assembling a hydro hut, buying a gun safe, cleaning up after neighborhood dogs—the ABC’s of opening a pot franchise
by Joshua Green
Under a microscope, it’s easy to tell really good marijuana from schwag. Look for trichomes. On the best pot, they cluster, thick and crystalline, indicators of potency. If you’re training to become a professional pot dealer, as I was last fall, it’s important to be able to pick out the good stuff. Your livelihood will depend on it. Fortunately, I had expert instruction, along with strains of varying quality to examine for my pedagogical benefit. Ranked from best to worst, they were Blueberry, Grand Daddy Purple, and Mango. Appraising them was, truth be told, slightly nerve-racking, since the assignment was sprung as a sort of pop quiz. It was part of an advanced seminar on growing and selling marijuana in which I had enrolled at the Los Angeles campus of Oaksterdam University, a new trade school founded in Oakland and devoted to the booming business of growing and dispensing medical marijuana. Or, as we liked to call it around campus, “cannabusiness.”
In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 215, a referendum legalizing medical marijuana. Although federal law prohibits the cultivation, sale, or use of cannabis, a series of subsequent state laws and court decisions cleared the way for what has become a thriving industry. Recent studies say that Californians grow more than 20 million pot plants. Their bounty, valued at as much as $14 billion, is distributed to the state’s 200,000 physician-certified users through hundreds of dispensaries, which advertise through billboards, flyers, and even bikini-clad barkers on Venice Beach. Given California’s well-publicized budget crunch, it’s worth noting that legal pot sales generate $100 million in state tax revenue a year. As Don Duncan, the proprietor of dispensaries in Berkeley and Hollywood and an Oaksterdam professor, put it, “Marijuana has evolved from a countercultural experience to an over-the-counter experience.”
A veteran pot activist named Richard Lee founded Oaksterdam in 2007 to serve this new and lucrative trade and add a veneer of respectability to an industry operating in a legal gray area. (The feds have adopted a mostly hands-off policy, though they occasionally swoop
