At the suggestion of Alex of Weedweek i read this and in turn i suggest you do..
Shawn Richard stood in a surging Haight-Ashbury crowd one morning in December 2019, golden scissors in his hands. If anyone deserved to cut the ribbon on what should have been San Francisco’s marquee cannabis store, it was the “king of legal weed.”
Richard has said he started dealing drugs at 13 and later landed in prison. He kept selling after he came home, stopping only when his little brother was slain at age 20 on Easter Sunday of 1995. Tragedy inspired Richard to remake himself into a nonviolence advocate. And now, at the sunny end of this long arc, he was the city’s model marijuana-industry success story.
“It’s been a long time coming,” he said. And it had. California voters legalized recreational cannabis in 2016. The first sales were Jan. 1, 2018. But it took San Francisco policymakers until nearly 2020 to figure out how to sideline the corporate types seizing the market in other places and center people like Richard instead.
Now here he was, the first permit holder in the city’s “social equity program,” which reserved cannabis business licenses for people “unfairly burdened by the War on Drugs.” This meant Richard and his store, Berner’s on Haight, would also be an experiment: to see if legalization could atone for decades of racist law enforcement excesses and empower small businesses, some owned by members of the city’s dwindling Black populace.
Richard was fully committed. As the only weed retailer allowed on the main drag of the Haight-Ashbury thanks to strict zoning laws, he’d resisted temptation to sell out, telling Wired he rejected cash offers from “big dogs” to use his permit. Not good enough; he was the big dog. And as a founder of the San Francisco Equity Group, he would lead the way for other applicants. “I hope every other person of color can look at this and see it can really happen,” he told the Chronicle at the time.
It didn’t hurt that Richard had power behind him. He and then-Mayor London Breed, both of whom grew up in Western Addition public housing, had known each other most of their lives. One of Richard’s business partners, Conor Johnston, was a combative former Breed chief of staff and “periodic adviser” to the mayor who had pivoted to cannabis. Another partner, Johnny Delaplane, was part of a group that won a permit in 2017 to run a medical dispensary on Bryant Street called Project Cannabis.
That this well-connected dream team had snagged the first “equity” permit — and that two of the three frontmen were white — prompted grumbles. Competitors saw the “city family” doing itself favors again. But Richard also had the best marketing: Standing with him on opening day, in a black alligator jacket, was the draw for the crowd: Berner, a San Francisco native born Gilbert Milam Jr., the co-founder and public face of Cookies, perhaps the best-known marijuana brand in America.
Under a licensing deal inked the month before, Richard’s store would be the first recreational cannabis outlet in San Francisco to use the brand’s coveted intellectual property, tapping Berner’s Instagram-powered marketing machine while selling its iconic strains like Gary Payton, Sunset Sherbet and Powerzzzup. The potential was obvious — for everyone. Two Cookies stores in Los Angeles, styled in urban chic with gleaming white floors and the brand’s light-blue hue on the walls, were already ringing up close to $1 million in sales a month. As a sweetener, Cookies floated the team a $760,000 loan for startup costs.
About the only hiccup was the name. The city worried that a store called “Cookies” would be too appealing to children. Naming the store after Berner instead was the compromise. Any fears that the buying public would be confused disappeared the night before the grand opening, when a mob of Cookies fanatics pitched camp on the sidewalk.
Amid the good vibes, there was little to indicate what was to come: That the store would go belly-up in a little more than four years. That the great expectations of the equity program and legal cannabis would crumble along with it. And that, despite the failure, Richard and his partners would still be poised to pocket millions — with Cookies footing the bill.
When Richard snipped the ribbon, the queue of customers snaked down Haight Street, up Cole and almost all the way to Waller. “The sky was the limit,” Parker Berling, Cookies’ president, had said during negotiations for the licensing deal. And on that morning, who would have doubted him?
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