Debbie Goldsberry - Magnolia Wellness
We could not do what we are doing if we were not located in Oakland, California where the city government is incredibly supportive of medical marijuana. They get this issue inside and out. They want to lead the development of the medical marijuana industry right here from Oakland
Can you give us a brief overview of your background and how you came to be involved in one of the most influential medical cannabis dispensaries in California and the United States?
First of all, when I first heard about medical marijuana I wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not. I had been a recreational marijuana user, and then my best friend got breast cancer. When she was dying, she used medical marijuana at the recommendation of her doctor. They already had her on such heavy morphine, you couldn’t even imagine the drugs they had her on. But when she used marijuana, what she told me was that not only did it lessen her pain and anxiety, because there is a great fear at the end of life for a lot of people – it’s a very fearful time, but it made her feel like she was connected to her soul again, which was incredibly important to her as a part of that transition. I knew it was medicine right then. I never looked back. I got into the medical marijuana movement to help provide that experience to other people. And also realized that we need to protect patients from the fear of arrest and the fear of not being able to get their medicine. People who are strong enough need to be a buffer for people who need that kind of help. So, I got into the dispensary industry to provide a physical location for people to be able to come. Where they could just feel better, and also a place where they could get their medicine and have a support network that would help them know their rights and understand the laws and know what form of medicine was going to best help with their condition.
You were one of the founders of the historic Berkeley Patients Group (BPG). How did you go from BPG in Berkeley to Magnolia Wellness in Oakland?
Before we had BPG, we had a place called The Berkeley Cannabis Consumer’s Union because the voters of Berkeley made cannabis legal back in 1979 for adults but they never implemented the law because when citizens make a law through these citizen’s initiatives, we don’t just make a law and walk away, we have to implement it. Because of the legal environment they were not able to implement that law. When we came to Berkeley in about 1992 to 1993, Dr. Tod Mikuriya[1] said why don’t we work on implementing this law. Eventually, we opened an adult Cannabis Café, just like in Amsterdam. The police would come and we would be like, “We’re just implementing the law Officer!” At that place, it was a community center which is where we built on our philosophy, but it was also a political action. Everybody who walked in the door, we would sit them down and look them in the eye and say, “You know this is about politics, right? You know this isn’t quite legal? You know the police are going to arrive.” And then we would explain to them their rights: here’s how you interact with the police to be most safe; here are the magic words – ‘I choose to remain silent and I want to see my lawyer. No I do not consent to this search.’ Politicizing people is just as important as getting them their medicine because we are in a fight for our lives and people are going to jail and prison for life for marijuana still. We had to let people know that this isn’t all fun and games, this is a political movement. Combining politics, music, fun, marijuana, kindness, political action – it was a winning combo. When we eventually did get shut down by the police we opened up a Medical Marijuana Dispensary – Berkeley Patients Group. Eventually, I left Berkeley Patients Group after about 10 years for a lot of the normal reasons. If you sit at the same desk, and do the same thing for 10 years your creativity stalls. You are not able to think of things anymore. I just felt that my creativity was not working the way I wanted it to work so I had to get out of that desk and do something different. I personally decided that my path was supporting small business people because at that time, this is now 6 years ago, we were all afraid of Big Business coming in and taking over the medical cannabis industry. If we did not give our own people a leg up by helping them with some knowledge about how to run their business – how to incorporate, how to do their finances, how to manage consignment accounts – just the basic nuts and bolts of business, that it was possible our mission would get overlooked and people would come into the movement from outside that only wanted profit (which is what we are seeing to some degree but we are also seeing places like Magnolia Wellness which has become the new standard for medical marijuana dispensaries). People don’t necessarily identify with the old big business methodology. People are looking for medical marijuana to continue on a non-profit path or at least a community-giving path. These are still healing centers where people can come out of the cold and find an ear that will listen to them and find people that care and a medicine that actually helps. At Magnolia, we employ a nurse part-time. She is on the floor Monday through Thursday. If you need an ear, you come to Magnolia because we are here for the community and we have a health professional ready to serve. Magnolia exists to create funding for progressive issues, which has never been more important that I know in my past than right now, creating centers for progressive free-thinking politics. We are here to make money and invest it into causes that are getting trampled on by what is happening at our Federal level right now. It is pretty fun and exciting.
There is another piece to this that is equally important right now - Magnolia is pretty much a woman-centered organization when it comes to the people who actually run the dispensary. Could you speak to the feminist aspect of how this is consciously set-up?
Sure. Magnolia was founded by a man, Dave Spradlin. Dave knew the best way to run the business was to surround himself by powerful women. I don’t know if he did it intentionally or what, but his executive team has always been women. Dave has always stood aside and let people run the place with compassion and intelligence. A couple of years ago I told Dave, I like your place and I would like to run it one day. He told me, that’s a good idea but everyone here works their way to the top so you’ve got to start at the bottom and work your way to the top. At that time, I was 12 years into the dispensary industry after having already run a multi-million-dollar business but I really liked the passion of that: the idea of working my way to the top again. And so I did. I came in as part of the marketing team. It took me almost 2 years to work my way to the top. But I did become the Executive Director here. And I hired a woman named Amber Senter[1], who comes from a marketing background and me and Amber have been running this place. She started out as the Marketing Director and now she is the Chief Operations Officer here at Magnolia. The place is infused with the best talent, of all types of people, not just one type of person. We are in Oakland, California which is one of the most diverse places on earth. And our staff matches the diversity of our city – all kinds of ages and types of people and we are really proud of that.
That segues nicely into our next question about Oakland and the role it plays in what you are doing. Maybe you can talk to us a little bit about the equity laws?
We could not do what we are doing if we were not located in Oakland, California where the city government is incredibly supportive of medical marijuana. They get this issue inside and out. They want to lead the development of the medical marijuana industry right here from Oakland. And they always have which is great. A lot of city governments ban or shut down. They stop innovation. They are afraid. But in Oakland, we’ve always embraced it. It is in large part thanks to our City Council and the Mayor. We’ve changed Mayors quite a few times but the mayors have always been very supportive of the industry. It is really sort of boots-on-the-ground; in order for the cannabis industry to succeed you have got to be able to get a business, a building, a license, and then have a regulatory system in the city that supports operations by the books. We need to be inspected by our fire department. We have to have our planning department in here. We need to pay our taxes just like everybody else. The City of Oakland has taken our tax money and infused it into the city to help make Oakland, a city which lost most of its manufacturing jobs long ago, and where there has been so much poverty that the city has turned to medical marijuana as a way that we can lift the city out of poverty. They are creating permits. Right now, it is really a kind of a wrestle because we want to bring new cannabis businesses to Oakland but we would like Oaklanders to start those businesses. We do not want people from out-of-town coming and buying up the real estate because they have more money than our local Oaklanders who have been suffering in poverty all this time. The city is really wrestling with how to make these new manufacturing permits and create new dispensaries – how to do this without outsiders coming in and taking away the permits from our own Oakland residents. We see a lot of confusion at the city/government level right now. A lot of proposals going back and forth. They passed a law that did not work, so they did not implement it. And now they are trying to pass a law that works so that we can keep Oaklanders in the cannabis industry, and Oakland people can own the cannabis businesses that are going to be opening up. I think it is going to be pretty amazing. It is going to be a challenge, but I think that what is going to happen is once we pass our laws, other municipalities are going to pass similar laws and make sure that medical marijuana and the marijuana industry is equitable.
I know one of the things that the City of Oakland was looking at was this idea of having some kind of system based on equity. There was one that was a little controversial that wanted to limit the number of dispensaries based on neighborhood the owner came from. What is the latest in creating the equity platform for Oakland that allows everything to move forward?
People of color in Oakland have been targeted by the War on Drugs, exponentially more so than any other persons. We still see 300 people of color arrested every year in Oakland for marijuana. It is just an outrage. How do we stop that? How do we identify that the War on Drugs has always been a war on people, and particularly people of color? And what do we do to repair that historic harm? It is very tricky. The way the City of Oakland decided to do it, or the first thing that they tried is looking at the arrest statistics in the City of Oakland. They identified the six neighborhoods in Oakland that were the most heavily impacted by marijuana arrests. Those were six very low-income neighborhoods, most centered in East Oakland. There were so many people that weren’t in those neighborhoods that were also equally effected that is why the law did not go forward. We have to come up with a way that more people can get equitable permits because what happens is these permits are competitive. In order to compete to get one, you have to have a location, you have to have money, you have to be able to prove your concept. And that is hard. Especially if you are competing against people who have more money and more proof that they can put their concept together because they have founded other businesses or they come from big business, they went to Wharton and got a business degree. People in Oakland didn’t do that. People in Oakland suffered through poverty and are trying to rise up and lift themselves out. They have just as good ideas and the ability to run businesses as outsiders, so how do we make sure these opportunities are available to people all over Oakland and not just those six neighborhoods? Interestingly, what we found out was one of those ‘high crime neighborhoods’ is downtown Oakland which happens to be where our wealthiest people are moving. They are building these big condo projects. The idea of doing equity neighborhood-by-neighborhood did not pan out. And now we are looking for a different solution.
You talked a little about the community outreach that your dispensary does, what is the long-term 5-year vision for the dispensary? What can the dispensary be for the community over time?
We are in the process of expanding by an extra 5,000 sq. ft. We are going to open a community center, a restaurant, a vape lounge, and hopefully a spot where people can just get off the street and just smoke marijuana. Unfortunately, smoking marijuana is not allowed in businesses in Oakland right now. You can vaporize if you get the right permit, which we have secured. I think we are the only place in Oakland that has secured the vaporizing permit so far. The anti-tobacco law in Oakland says no smoking of any kind. Marijuana is unfortunately covered under that. We have to change that law and get marijuana allowed inside. The idea is to build a place where people can come. People need a place to gather to be together. In a marijuana dispensary, it is not just one kind of person: it is every kind of person coming in here. There is something so special and unique about a gathering place where every kind of person can come. It is very equalizing. For one thing, we are creating this gathering place where people can come and be together and they can be equal. They can be treated equally and be given equal access. The other thing is that we are making a funnel that people have to pass through so we can give them info. Come in the door so we can give you info about whatever the cause is we want people to know about. You know it is the holiday season and we are very concerned about people during this particular holiday season because of how depressing it is frankly with poverty, joblessness, with people not being able to feed their families, get gifts for their families. We are doing a lot of work around suicide prevention. We are making sure to be here for people to listen, to actively listen. We find people who need help and guide them to help. We have a nurse on staff who is there for people so that is our goal right now. Different times of year our goal changes. Trying to educate people before the election was a big goal here. We wanted to get the word out about Prop 64[1] and the importance of passing that law so we could get people out of jail. We spent a lot of our time educating people about the truth around Prop 64 because the Proposition was targeted by fake news. There was a lot of false information being purposefully put out on the airways, so bad. That was our focus before the election to get reliable info out. Before that focused on a big campaign, and we still do, to work with the marijuana lifers. There are about 100 people who have been locked up for life. We work with a group called Marijuana Lifers Project[2] from out of Southern California. A woman Sheri Sicard founded the group and we want to support people who are non-violent marijuana offenders. Sheri has sorted through the prisoners and has, loosely I guess you could call it, adopted about 100 prisoners. We work directly with Sheri to provide funds, to write letters, to do cards for people on their birthdays and the holidays, to pay particular attention to people whose clemency has been denied, who are maybe losing hope, to spread the money around to prisoners who need it. Some prisoners are kind of famous and getting more funds. And then also to help with the clemency efforts to write letters, to get the word out, to let people know when a push is on for clemency so maybe we can get some of these people freed. Two people have gotten free already from our project. It is really thrilling.
You talked a little about the community outreach that your dispensary does, what is the long-term 5-year vision for the dispensary? What can the dispensary be for the community over time?
The town Of course, Charity Navigator[1] is an incredibly important tool for anybody looking to where they are going to give their non-profit funding, even in the marijuana industry at least for the big ones – The Marijuana Policy Project, Americans For Safe Access, The Drug Policy Foundation. You will find them on there rated “good” so that you know that they are doing good work and they use your money right. As far as the marijuana movement goes what we do here is two things. We are looking to give to local non-profits that are supporting people locally to marijuana non-profits so we donate a lot of our funding to Super Nova Women of Color[2], a local non-profit that is supporting equitable access to marijuana permits and ownership for people of color and teaching people the skills that they need to gain ownership. And then the other thing that we do is we support a couple of big national organizations when they are campaigning for special campaigns. But I think even more important for us is giving back to our local community. We ourselves are a marijuana non-profit, and we want to give to the community to make a better Oakland. We are giving funds to Oakland’s only women’s shelter[3], which has 9 beds and is the only woman’s shelter in the City of Oakland. We are funding scholarships for high school graduates that are going to go to college as the mayor started a scholarship fund so we are supporting that. We have a local non-profit group here in our neighborhood called One Fam[4] that is trying to build up the neighborhood, do job training, make a community center for our neighborhood so we are supporting them. It is incredibly important that marijuana organizations work within the community on the issues that matter to their home.
Thank you so much for your time today. It's been great talking to you.
References
[1] California Proposition 64, the California Marijuana Legalization Initiative, was on the November 8, 2016, ballot in California as an initiated state statute. Supporters referred to the initiative as the Adult Use of Marijuana Act. It was approved. For more details see:
http://www.canorml.org/news/what_will_be_legal_and_what_wont_after_Prop_64[2] Marijuana Lifer Project. For more information go to: http://www.marijuanaliferproject.org or on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/liferproject/?pnref=lhc
[1] http://www.charitynavigator.org
[2] https://supernovawomen.wordpress.com
[3] http://www.asafeplacedvs.org
Originally published in Weed World World 127
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