The 32-year-old Reed had once managed a Hollywood Video store; when he opened the Green Cross, he wanted to create a dispensary that was as stylish and customer-friendly as any retail environment. A neon green cross hung over the original location’s front door. The interior featured deep- red walls and plasma TV screens. Young, attractive women known as “budtenders” served the customers. Located next to an Irish pub, the venue opened without much notice in the fall of 2004. Eventually, its wide selection and competitive prices made it increasingly popular, and at its peak it was serving as many as 300 people a day.
Neighbors in the affluent, largely residential neighborhood began complaining about parking problems and marijuana odors. When a rash of burglaries occurred during the spring of 2005, residents blamed them on the Green Cross’s clientele, many of whom were, in the words of one angry email sent to Reed, “male, under 30, non-white” and characterized by a “skater punk/home boy/gang-banger aesthetic.”
Police never actually tied the burglaries to the Green Cross, and at a community meeting in June 2005 the local police captain reported that crime rates in the neighborhood had actually declined since the enterprise opened. In addition, Reed had made repeated attempts to placate his critics. He banned smoking in the dispensary and invested $50,000 in a security camera system and other building upgrades. He hired security guards to make sure his customers weren’t double parking or loitering in the neighborhood.
Some neighborhood residents continued to press city officials to take action against his business, however, and in September 2005 the San Francisco Board of Appeals offered Reed a compromise of sorts. It wouldn’t revoke his permit, but he would have to find a new location for his dispensary within six months.
Unfortunately, the new restrictions imposed by San Francisco’s Medical Cannabis Act made that virtually impossible—there are so many new conditions regarding potential locations that the great majority of the city has become off-limits to dispensaries. And even in those rare areas where they are permitted, you still have to find a willing landlord. The six months Reed had to find a new location for his business came and went, and in March 2006, the Green Cross shut its doors. A few months later, however, a landlord with a family member who used medical marijuana contacted Reed and offered to rent him space in a building on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf neighborhood.
Fisherman’s Wharf is the city’s major tourist area, home to cable cars, seafood restaurants, and gift shops. Much of the neighborhood is so schlocky that the addition of a Hooters was considered a classy upgrade. The landlord was offering Reed the ground-floor space in a three-story building that also housed a bed-and-breakfast inn. The street on which it is located is several blocks away from the heart of the wharf; it’s across the street from a Holiday Inn and a tiny triangular park known as Joseph Conrad Square. Reed wasn’t crazy about the location, but since he believed it met all the requirements of San Francisco’s new regulations regarding cannabis dispensaries, he signed a lease and began the process of obtaining a permit.
In May 2006, in an effort to introduce himself to the neighborhood, Reed put together a six-page pamphlet about his plans for the Green Cross and mailed it to local residents and merchants. Unfortunately, his talk of “zero-tolerance for illegal parking” and a “state-of-the-art security and surveillance system that includes more than a dozen infrared, high-definition cameras…that are recording activity around the dispensary 24 hours a day” only incited alarm.
As part of the permit process, a public hearing about the Green Cross was scheduled to take place in the Planning Commission’s chambers in July 2006. On the day of the hearing, dozens of neighborhood merchants and residents showed up at City Hall, all decorated with red stickers on their chests that featured slogans like “Character counts” and “Daddy, what’s that smell?”
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