Cannabis Chronicle December 2021.

Cannabis Chronicle CANNABIS CULTURE & NEWS FOR THE BAY AREA & CENTRAL COAST • DECEMBER 2021

SEEDS OF A

MOVEMENT How Santa Cruz’s legendary Flying Skunk became the building block for thousands of strains grown today BY RICHARD STOCKTON P6

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t’s been a year of ups and downs in the world of cannabis— just like everywhere else. In this issue, we look back at 2021 and examine how issues like security and testing affect both the industry and the consumer. And to end the year on a high note, pun intended, our cover story is the totally true tale of how some Santa Cruz County seeds started a worldwide weed movement. Happy New Year!

STEVE PALOPOLI | EDITOR

CONTENTS

OH SAY CAN YOU SEED P6 The legend of Santa Cruz County’s Flying Skunk seeds

CODE GREEN P10 Cannabis businesses face targeted crimes, sky-high security costs

NEWS OF THE WEED P12 How cannabis took over the world in 2021

TEST PATTERNS P16 Why cannabis drug testing doesn’t work

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Skunk City In the ’70s, seeds from Santa Cruz County became the basis for a worldwide weed movement. Here’s what happened when I found some of them

BY RICHARD STOCKTON FLYING HOME The front and back of a packet from Flying Skunk, the first cannabis seed company in the country, which was based in Santa Cruz County in the late ’70s.

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woman walks towards me on Seabright Avenue in Santa Cruz. She is fastidiously buttoned up and well-heeled, carries a tiny dog, and is clearly from out of town. She stops me, and asks “Do you live here?”

I say, “Yes, I do, ma’am. How may I help you?”

“Well, I love Santa Cruz. But I do not understand why everywhere I go in this town I smell skunks. I do not see them, but I smell skunks everywhere here.”

I nod, “They’re shy. They like to stay in the backyard.”

It’s fun to razz the occasional out-oftowner, but we all know what they’re really smelling. The pungent Skunk strain of cannabis is the legendary genetic building block of thousands

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of strains produced today. What most people—even locals—don’t know is that it was first developed and grown in Santa Cruz County 50 years ago.

I tend to miss the most obvious connections. In the late ’70s, long before I heard of Santa Cruz being the epicenter of the Skunk cannabis growing world, I briefly served as a singer and guitar player for a country-rock band called the Skunk Band. We opened for Larry Hosford.

When I asked the Skunk Band’s leader where they got the band name, he handed me a joint. I still didn’t get it.

I was all-in on being a hippie, but was stupidly naïve. While I was too innocent and dense to appreciate the band’s name, I did appreciate how I played my guitar on their pungent weed—it gave me an uncanny ability to focus on detail. I could

look at the fretboard of my guitar and see all the notes as if it was the keyboard of a piano. Transposing a complex guitar part to a different key was effortless. Man, did their weed smell. My stint with the Skunk Band faded from memory, and I forgot about them and their weed for 40 years.

Then I met Wayne.

The Man with the Seeds In 2018, I moved to Watsonville when I found a farm in the vineyards that let me set my Airstream trailer up as a Santa Cruz County crash pad. That’s when I became friends with Wayne, who would not stop rattling on about his frozen weed seeds. At first, it all sounded like stoner babble, but little by little, his ramblings

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that is a felony moves to Watsonville and calls himself Watson. Sure, why not?) His former associate Phil Noland tells me Watson used a tiny greenhouse 10 feet by 20 feet in the ’70s to combine Columbian seeds (sativa) with Afghani, Pakistani and Indian seeds to bring down the enormous height of his pure sativa plant and mitigate the odor to make it more grower-friendly. He also wanted to reduce the long maturation period of the pure Colombian strain. Look at the front of the Flying Skunk seed package from 1978 and notice the thin blue font that says, “Extra Early.”

After a police stakeout and bust of his Watsonville seed operation in 1982, Watson sneaked back onto the crime scene and stole back his seeds from the cops, making off with 250,000 seeds that ultimately changed cannabis history. He took his seeds to Amsterdam to share them with Nevil Schoenmakers of the Seed Bank of Holland, which started the development of Skunk-based sativa brands that proliferate worldwide today.

At that point, David Watson became known as Sam the Skunkman.

The Lost Strain about his seeds and some character he called “Sam the Skunkman” began to form a larger tale. I started researching the story of Sam the Skunkman, who turned out to be a legendary figure in the cannabis world. And Wayne’s story turned out to be true. It went like this: In 1978, Wayne bought 100 seeds of Flying Skunk from Sacred Seeds. He paid $1 a seed from a guy named David Watson, who developed the cannabis seed strain in Watsonville and later became known as Sam the Skunkman.

But life happened, and Wayne could not grow out the seeds. He read on the back of the seed package that they would keep much longer if they were frozen— and that’s what Wayne did. He froze all one hundred seeds. Like Bilbo Baggins’ obsession with the Ring, Wayne never could stop talking about his frozen seeds.

My All-Encompassing Disclaimer In researching this story of the first Skunk strain and Sacred Seeds, I spoke with three Santa Cruz seed producers from the ’70s about Skunk—and I got three different stories. As this was an outlaw subculture at the time, there was pretty much zero documentation, so I

can’t say for sure if everything they told me is true. All I know for certain is that these guys can smoke me under the table.

I have no idea if the controversial Sam the Skunkman is a genetics genius, a marketing genius, a benevolent scientist, or a fast-talking opportunist. Maybe he is all of those. His story has become legend, and while we may each believe different portions of it, I take the legend itself as a piece of folklore for our times. Whether you accept Sam the Skunkman’s story as Johnny Appleweed or not, he did create the first cannabis seed company in the country, called Sacred Seeds. The seeds he sold in 1978 were called Flying Skunk, a strain that became the building block for thousands of strains we grow today.

He did escape the clutches of the law and steal back his seeds. And we also know that the first strain of Skunk was lost.

Wayne knows a lot about his seeds, “The intense odor of this first strain led many to call it Roadkill Skunk. During his breeding program at the Amsterdam Seed Bank, Nevil lost the Skunk male,” he says.

“They had to replace that male with a male from another strain.”

That is one part of the story that is universally agreed upon—while developing and crossbreeding many different strains, Nevil Schoenmakers somehow lost the original Skunk male flower. He had to replace that male with male flowers from a different strain. The first pure Skunk is lost. Gone. Extinct.

Unless some crazy hippie had a stroke of cryogenic genius, the first Skunk is no more. That amazing weed I smoked with the Skunk Band 43 years ago is gone like smoke in the wind, and it would be preposterous to think that some nutso stoner froze the original Skunk seeds. But Santa Cruz is where preposterous happens.

Wayne is our nutso.

Roots of Skunk

Why Skunk Matters

The legend goes that before he took his seeds to Amsterdam in 1982 and became Sam the Skunkman, our hero called himself David Watson. (Hmm, a pothead dodging the law to grow a plant

What is this strain called Skunk? It is very high in Sativa, which makes you creative, focused, inspired, and happy.

Skunk is not like the heavy Indica-based dispensary herb that is so popular 8

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the plants upside down in a shed. And finally, it was time.

A Long, Slow Toke My first inhale did not do all that much.

I inhaled again. I felt pleasant enough, but I also wondered if this weed works.

Was the legend of the first Skunk strain bullshit? I hit it a third time, deep. Then I looked at my guitar fretboard and could see all the notes like I was looking at a piano keyboard. I thought of the Jimi Hendrix chord (E7 #9), and a way to play it above the twelfth fret appeared in relief on the fretboard. In euphoria, I played with intense focus. Would Aldous Huxley say that I had opened the “doors of perception?”

Happy Weed

TIME TRAVELER One of the plants that sprouted from the original, frozen Flying Skunks seeds from 1978.

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with young folks. My son turned me on to cannabis that looked like brown glass, a dab of concentrate. We used a blowtorch to smoke it out of a quartz bowl, at which point I renamed it Flat On My Back on the Floor Weed because that’s how I ended up. Sativa will not make you pass out on the floor. Sativa may make you dance on the floor. It may make you paint the floor. It may make you think you are the floor, but it will not knock you out.

I’ve got absolutely nothing against the idea of passing out, and if you want to do that, delve deep into Indica. It’ll make your body feel good. But if you are trying to brainstorm what you could say to your wife about last weekend, Skunk is your junk.

Time Release In February of 2020, Wayne gave me 40 of his seeds. We didn’t know if they would sprout. I felt like Frodo putting on the Ring for the first time as I lay the seeds

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between damp paper towels on a plate.

Were these seeds too old to germinate? I found myself looking at them throughout the day, keeping the towels damp. On the third day, one cracked open, and a tiny white sprout appeared.

Over the next two weeks, 38 of the 40 seeds sprouted at an incredible germination rate. I put the sprouts in potting soil, and in May, I replanted them in the ground. They grew so tall I had to cut their tops off four times.

The leaves were narrow and dark green, but the thing was the smell. My Airstream is one hundred feet from the hoop house, and inside my trailer, it smelled like I lived with a skunk. If anyone in the neighborhood wondered if I grow pot, they know now.

We were going for seed production, so Wayne shook the male flowers all over the female flowers when flowers formed. (And this at the height of the #metoo movement!) I kept trimming the tops. In mid-November, we hung

Wayne loves his seeds so much he has a vision for them, “I found something heritage that people love. So how do I share it?” he wondered.

Wayne’s vision is that everyone who wants to feel great could start by germinating 12 seeds, discarding the males and growing the six plants that California allows. Nice vision. Wayne thinks of himself as a holy man.

Wayne is a holy man; he has a colostomy bag piped into his gut.

He and I sit on his porch smoking the flowers grown from his time capsule Skunk seeds, and I ask him how it makes him feel.

“It’s the most creative weed I’ve ever used,” he says. “You start laughing, talking; it puts you in a good mood. It’s more fun; it’s happy weed. In high doses, it gets psychedelic.”

Wayne’s mission is to figure out how to legally distribute these seeds to anyone who wants to grow sativa cannabis. “It’s the kind of weed you can smoke in the daytime,” he tells me.

The way I have encountered this psychoactive strain repeatedly over the years makes me think there is something beyond coincidence here.

In the end, the story of the Skunk strain is a circle that coheres—a circle of legend, of genetics, of a place that believes in its own magic, and of our desire to open Huxley’s “doors of perception.”

If you want to learn more about these seeds and the Santa Cruz Mountain Seed Company, please contact Richard@PlanetCruzComedy.com.

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ON GUARD Security cameras are a common sight at dispensaries, which are often targeted for crime and must employ expensive security measures.

Pot Locks A look at the state of security in the cannabis industry BY DAN MITCHELL

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iven all the recent burglaries and robberies of cannabis businesses up and down California, especially in the Bay Area, it might seem hard to believe, but the industry's security situation has actually improved in some ways over the past couple of years.

James Vierra, CEO of Kingdom Protective Services, runs the Mantecabased Cannabis Security Group. He says that in the year or two after California legalized cannabis, a lot of his business came from offering cash-transfer services—bringing money to the bank and keeping it secure.

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"Now, I won't even take that business," he says. "If some company hasn’t gotten its thing together and started accepting bank cards, I know they’re not really serious."

It’s not easy for cannabis companies to set themselves up to accept electronic payments, but most of the bigger operations have now managed to do so. The reason it's hard is that weed is still illegal under federal law. The biggest banks, and many smaller ones, are too fearful of liability to offer services to cannabis companies. If hauling sacks of cash to the bank were still common, the situation would likely be even worse than it is.

But it’s still pretty bad. On the weekend before Thanksgiving, at least 25 cannabis companies in Oakland— including dispensaries, distributors, and manufacturers—were hit by coordinated series of burglaries. The losses are estimated at $5 million. In 2019, during the protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, an even larger coordinated assault was mounted against cannabis companies from Seattle to San Diego, with more than 40 establishments hit. Oakland and Berkeley were the hardest hit.

What a lot of people don't know, according to Amber Senter, is that in between those two massive crimes, one-off burglaries were, and continue to be, common. “We get hit all the time,” said Senter, who runs the incubator EquityWorks in Oakland and is a cofounder of Supernova Women, which represents women of color in Oakland’s cannabis industry. By “we,” she means all the cannabis companies in Oakland.

But she also means EquityWorks itself, which was hit in the most recent major incident. EquityWorks supports small cannabis companies owned by people participating in Oakland’s social-equity program, which helps people hurt by the decades-long “war on drugs,” a leg-up in the industry, specifically people of color and those who had been incarcerated for pot crimes. Thieves don't discriminate, unless you call “purposely targeting pot businesses” discrimination.

The Bay Area’s weed industry certainly calls it that. Senter and several other pot businesspeople in Oakland have asked the city to suspend or eliminate its cannabis tax and for the police to be more responsive to the industry.

Oakland is widely considered to be America's cannabis capital. Many people are worried it will lose that mantle as cannabis companies flee for friendlier locales.

In the meantime, cannabis companies can do a lot more to protect themselves, Vierra says. The challenge is the expense.

“The rule of thumb,” Vierra says, is that companies should expect to pay “between a half million and a million dollars a year” for adequate security: solid doors, cameras, lighting, guards.

Too often, startups believe they can get away with going light on security.

"They present detailed security plans to the local government [when applying for a cannabis license],” says Vierra. “But 90 percent of the time, they don't do what they promised to do.”

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The Year in Cannabis A look at how the world of weed changed in 2021 BY JONAH RASKIN

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t’s time for an end-of-the-year look back at the weird world of weed in 2021:

Cannabis Goes Global About violence in the marijuana universe, the less said, the better. I understand. Violence isn’t a pretty picture; potheads don’t want to hear that their drug of choice is linked to violent crime, and PR folks in the industry don’t want to hear it, either. But it’s definitely around. To be perfectly clear, marijuana doesn’t make users violent. Reefer madness is a figment of the imagination.

But money madness is real.

There’s actual violence in South America, where the corrupt, authoritarian government of Colombian President Ivan Duque recently lifted the ban on the export of weed. Colombians can’t smoke it legally, but Duque wants folks in other countries to consume it. “Colombia can play a big role in the international market,” he said recently.

“Latin American cannabis exports could be worth $6 billion.” Leave it to a dictator to break the longstanding international rules that have prohibited the import

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and export of drugs from continent to continent. Colombian weed is already in Canada; before long, it will be in California. Meanwhile, Canadian weed is now going to Mexico.

Sanho Tree, who works at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington D.C., told me on the phone that while the worst of the violence is over in Colombia, there’s still fighting and that “it will be difficult for Duque’s government to regulate the cannabis trade.” Protests that took place earlier this year led to the death of 19 people and more than 800 injured. The popular Colombian singer, J. Balvin, known as the “Prince of Reggaeton,” said not long ago, “There is now a civil war in Colombia, and there are no words to describe what is going on.” He added, “We would like to see that through love, tolerance and talking, we could arrive at something, right? Because hatred generates more hatred.”

grown marijuana for decades. He is still growing, but now MM is in the midst of a mini-civil war. On one side of his land, there are meth addicts, aka tweakers, who trash the neighborhood—I’ve seen their filthy house and land. They let their dogs run wild in MM’s marijuana garden and wreak general havoc.

On the other side of his parcel, guys in a cartel have heard that MM is gay.

They’ve posted homophobic signs at the front of his property, but he’s not going to tangle with them. MM also has trouble with the middlemen who buy thousands of pounds of weed at a time from growers like him and bring it to dispensaries and the black market. “They don’t want to see my weed before they buy it,” he complained. “They don’t want to taste it, smell it or smoke it. All they want to know is whether it was grown indoors or outdoors, in a greenhouse or direct sun.

It’s crazy.”

Trouble in Mendo

Ironic Pot Summit

The fellow I call MM (for “Marijuana Man”) knows about hatred. Like J. Balvin, he’d like to see love and tolerance, especially in his neck of the woods in Mendocino County where he has

I caught up with MM at the biggest cannabis event of 2021, held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. The event’s purpose was to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the

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What’s Legal?

SUMMIT BY THE BAY Legendary outlaw grower Joe Munson at the biggest cannabis event of the year, which commemorated the passing of Prop. 215.

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1996 passage of Prop. 215, the Compassionate Care Act, which ushered in the era of medical marijuana.

The meeting took place inside the General’s Residence, usually rented for marriages and big bashes. Fort Mason is federal property. Since marijuana is illegal in the eyes of the White House and the Department of Justice, the words ``cannabis,” “marijuana,” “weed” and “grass” couldn’t be posted outside the building. The irony of a marijuana event on federal land was obvious to most people who attended. Some smoked weed, albeit discreetly. Buds also changed hands. I scored big.

Everyone in the world of weed attended the anniversary event. To name a few: Ross Mirkarimi, the former SF Sheriff; George Zimmer of the Men’s Warehouse, who funneled tons of money into the campaign for Prop. 215; and Valerie Corral, the founder of the Wo/ Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (now WAMM Phytotherapies, located in the Almar Building in Santa Cruz).

Years ago, Corral was hammered by the feds. She’s a survivor who has provided compassionate palliative care for the sick and the dying. One longtime Santa Cruz cannabis maven says of Valerie, “She’s on the side of the angels.”

The Fort Mason cannabis fete was like a great big high school reunion, except that the participants had graduated from high school long ago. No one under 30 sat in the audience or stood at the podium and spouted a stream of words.

Not surprisingly, Ross Mirkarimi told

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the crowd, “Millennials spend billions on marijuana, but they have no clue about Prop. 215.” History is toast for many folks in every generation, though the speakers who talked about weed history were fascinating. We have come a long way, baby. Twenty-five years ago, a cannabis event never would have happened at Fort Mason. The cops would have raided it, as they raided Dennis Peron’s Cannabis Buyers Club in San Francisco in 1996, taking Dennis to jail.

Valerie Corral knows that story by heart. When it was her turn to speak at the confab, she smiled brightly and said, “History is a movable feast. Some people have been unacknowledged.” She added, “Support goodness and take care of those with the greatest need.” Good advice.

Unacknowledged people include MM and hundreds if not thousands of marijuana growers and dealers who were, for the most part, not recognized at Fort Mason. No one said what ought to have been told: that without growers, dealers and dope smokers, 215 would never have been approved by California voters. Nor would we have recreational cannabis today, which voters approved in 2016, which now seems like ancient history. If a cannabis Rip Van Winkle were to wake up now, after having been asleep for the past two-and-a-half decades, they might not recognize the array of cannabis products, the sheer number of dispensaries, the fact that the black market is alive and well, and that Colombian exports its weed.

I’ve been awake all these years, and I’m still shocked by the rapidly changing marijuana scene. What amazes me as much as anything else is that cannabis companies send me beautifully wrapped samples by special messenger. A delivery man shows up at my front door and hands me a big box with all kinds of goodies— from joints to gummies and more. Is the delivery legit? It’s hard to tell what’s legal and what’s not. Still, the whole cannabis juggernaut slouches towards what? The end of Prohibition? Randal John Meyer, a lawyer, a lobbyist and the executive director at the Global Alliance for Cannabis Commerce (GACC), a trade organization based in D.C., tells me that legalization is around the corner and that the marijuana marketplace will soon stretch around the world. He also tells me that “California is the largest cannabis market in the U.S., that California weed is the best bar none and that West Coast consumers tend to be better informed about cannabis than consumers elsewhere.” Meyer ought to know. He’s smoked weed from nearly every part of the globe. In Amsterdam, he tells me, California weed is the most expensive.

Meanwhile, Sacramento collects tax dollars, cops raid, arrest and confiscate crops. At the same time, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) predicts the imminent legalization of weed in the U.S. But don’t hold your breath, folks—unless you’ve just taken a hit from a joint.

I get stoned at least once a day, usually at bedtime. Pot often helps me relax and get a good night’s sleep. At the right time, the right place, and in the correct dose, it’s good medicine. This season, I grew weed in San Francisco for the first time. In May, a commercial grower in Santa Cruz gave me two plants, which I tossed in the back seat of my car. I must have worn a sheepish grin on my face because the grower said, “Don’t worry.

It's legal.” I drove up Highway 1, arrived home safely, stuck the plants in the ground, gave them water and nutrients, and harvested them in September. There was hardly any sun all summer in San Francisco, so the buds were pathetic.

But the weed got me stoned. Thanks, marijuana. If you wanna grow, folks, grow in the sun. And don’t worry, a backyard garden is legal.

Jonah Raskin is the author of the novel ‘Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.’

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Failed Tests A new state bill may finally ban cannabis testing—long known to be useless and damaging—in the workplace

BY DAN MITCHELL

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s the CEO of the weed-delivery service Ganja Goddess, Zach Pitts is particularly exposed to the potential bad outcomes of people being high on the job. He employs between 40 and 50 people who drive all over California. If one of them were in an accident and it was discovered that the driver had cannabis in their system, it could result in the company facing major liability. Conceivably, it could put him out of business. The fact that his company sells weed would likely open him up to even more criticism, particularly from politicians and activists who oppose legalization.

Other than carefully hiring and managing his drivers, though, there's not much he can do to prevent such an eventuality.

"Obviously, none of our drivers should be high while they're working," says Pitts, whose company is based in Los Angeles and has a major facility in Oakland. "But there's no consistent, reliable way to test for the active use of cannabis."

Not that he would do so, even if he could. "I have to trust them and their

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judgment," he says. Given the essential uselessness of cannabis testing, that’s all any employer really can do. The employers that do conduct testing aren't actually finding out anything about their employees beyond knowing whether they have or have not used cannabis in recent weeks (or even months, depending on the method of testing). A positive test given to a person who used cannabis weeks earlier might yield the same positive result as a test given to a person who is actively stoned.

That hasn't stopped American industry from signing on with cannabis testing in wholesale fashion over the past few decades, either with pre-employment screening or with spot checks of existing workers.

Weed is entirely legal for adults in 18 states plus Washington, D.C., and decriminalized in 13 more. Counting states with medical marijuana programs, pot is legal in one form or another now across most of the country. So, the notion of testing employees for cannabis use is increasingly seen as archaic.

Companies are starting to review the

practice. Amazon made a big splash in June when it announced it would stop pre-employment screening for all workers and declared that it favors the legalization of pot at the federal level.

"Given where state laws are moving across the U.S., we've changed course," Amazon retail executive Dave Clark said at the time.

This isn't necessarily due to companies feeling compelled to do the right thing.

Employers are finding it harder to attract workers, especially companies like Amazon that employ many low-skilled and semi-skilled people. They are looking for ways to draw more people into their application pools.

Oakland is now considering an ordinance that would end the practice of testing city employees for cannabis use.

It might seem ludicrous that Oakland, widely considered the pot capital of the U.S., is still testing employees, but it's far from uncommon.

The measure might be rendered unnecessary if a bill under consideration in the state legislature were to be signed into law. Assembly Bill 18

»

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BAD CUP Assembly Bill 1256 would ban the use of cannabis testing for most jobs in California.

16 « 1256, sponsored by Assemblyman

Bill Quirk, D-Hayward, would ban testing employees for cannabis use. There are some exceptions, such as jobs with a federal mandate to test for THC. Most often, those are jobs regulated by the federal Department of Transportation.

Amazon similarly said it would continue testing people in those positions.

If you think the whole notion of testing employees for pot use is ludicrous, Oakland City Council Member Rebecca Kaplan, who sponsored the proposed city ordinance, agrees with you. "Cannabis is legal. There is no valid reason we should be testing people for it," she said.

Of course, alcohol is legal, too, but we test for that all the time, particularly cops on the roadside, and few people think that's wrong. The big difference is that if a breathalyzer detects alcohol above a certain limit, that's a good indication that the person blowing into it is impaired. Alcohol burns off fairly quickly after it's consumed. That's simply not the case with pot, which lingers in the body long after it's ingested, and long after the high has worn off.

And yet, cops routinely test drivers for cannabis use. People have spent years

18

People have spent years in jail for “driving under the influence” of cannabis, despite no solid evidence that they were under the influence of anything while they were driving. in jail for "driving under the influence," despite no solid evidence that they were under the influence of anything while they were driving.

Brian, who lives in the Midwest and asked that his last name and home state be withheld, was the editor of a smalltown newspaper eight years ago when he was pulled over for speeding. He submitted a saliva test. "I was slightly nervous about it, but pretty sure it would come back negative," since it had been a few weeks since he'd ingested any cannabis, he says. No such luck. He was

charged with DUI and lost his job and his marriage through a series of resulting events. His former newspaper ran a story about his arrest. He avoided jail time but had to pay a hefty fine. He now lives in a tiny apartment and works nights in a telemarketing call center. The drug test "ruined my life," he says.

Stories like Brian's are why the American Civil Liberties Union has declared that testing drivers for cannabis use are "probably unconstitutional."

Chloe White, policy director of the ACLU's Vermont chapter, wrote in 2018 that "unlike breathalyzers, [cannabis tests] say nothing about actual impairment at the time of testing."

As laws and corporate policies change to adapt to the new reality, many employers are left to their own sense of fairness. For Pitts of Ganja Goddess, treating employees with respect doesn't include forcing them to hand over their urine, hair, blood or saliva.

"It's just really condescending to drug-test people," he says. "If there's a problem with an employee, you can address it without being invasive."

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Our guide to finding your cannabis in Santa Cruz County and Santa Clara County SANTA CRUZ COUNTY 3 BROS 1100B Fair Ave., Santa Cruz, 831-345-0281, 3brossantacruz.com Hours: 9am–9pm every day.

THE APOTHECARIUM 1850 41st Ave., Capitola, 831-325-0691, apothecarium.com Hours: 9am-9pm every day.

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CANNACRUZ 115 Limekiln St., Santa Cruz, 831-420-3227; 1156 Abbott St., Salinas, 831-202-0172, cannacruz.com Hours: 8:30am–8pm every day.

CENTRAL COAST WELLNESS CENTER 7932 Highway 9, Ben Lomond, 831-704-7340, centralcoastwellnesscenter.org Hours: 11am-8pm Monday-Saturday, 11am-6pm Sunday.

CHAI CANNABIS CO. 3088 Winkle Ave., Santa Cruz, 831-475-5506, chaicannabis.com Hours: 10am-9pm every day.

CREEKSIDE WELLNESS 12603 Hwy. 9, Boulder Creek, 831-338-3840, creeksidewellness.co Hours: 10am-7pm Monday-Saturday, 12pm-6pm Sunday.

7887 Soquel Dr., Aptos, 831-431-6347, scva.us Hours: 10am-8pm every day.

CURBSTONE EXCHANGE 6535 Hwy. 9, Felton, 831-704-7151, curbstoneexchange.org Hours: 10am-8pm every day.

HERBAL CRUZ 1051 41st Ave., Santa Cruz, 831-462-9999, herbalcruzsantacruz.com Hours: 8am-8pm every day.

THE HOOK OUTLET 4170 Gross Road, Suite 5, Capitola, 831-3224665, hookoutlet.com Hours: 11am-8pm, Thursday through Saturday.

KINDPEOPLES 3600 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz, 831-471-8562; 533 Ocean St., Santa Cruz, 831-515-4144, kindpeoples.com Hours: 8am-9pm every day.

REDWOOD COAST DISPENSARY 10090 Highway 9, Ben Lomond, 831-336-8795, iheartjane.com/stores/417/ redwood-coast-collective Hours: 10am-8pm every day.

REEFSIDE DISPENSARY 1104 Ocean St, Santa Cruz, 831-515-7363, reefside.co Hours: 8am-9pm every day.

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Spotlight on Dispensaries « SANTA CRUZ COUNTY SANTA CRUZ NATURALS 9077 Soquel Drive, Aptos, 831-688-7266; 19 San Juan Road, Royal Oaks, 831-722-2018, santacruzcannabis.com Hours: 8am-7:45pm every day, delivery available 11am-7pm.

SURF CITY ORIGINAL 2649 41st Ave., Soquel, 831-325-7299, surfcityoriginal.com Hours: 10am-8pm every day.

THERAPEUTIC HEALTHCARE COLLECTIVE 5011 Soquel Drive, Soquel, 831-713-5641, thcsoquel.com Hours: 9am-9pm Monday-Saturday, 10am-8pm Sunday.

TREEHOUSE 3561 Soquel Drive, Soquel, 831-471-8289, ourtreehouse.io Hours: 10am-8pm every day.

SANTA CLARA COUNTY AIRFIELD SUPPLY COMPANY 1190 Coleman Ave., San Jose, 408-320-0230, airfieldsupplyco.com Hours: 9am-9pm every day; delivery 7:30am-9pm every day.

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CA COLLECTIVE

HERB’S COLLECTIVE

210 Phelan Ave., San Jose, 408-809-4301, ca-collective.com Hours: 9am-9pm every day.

543 Parrott St., San Jose, 408-297-0543, herbscollective.com Hours: Noon-6pm every day.

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1695 S 7th St., San Jose, 888-688-0303, caliva.com Hours: 9am-9pm Monday-Saturday, 11am-6pm Sunday.

1859 Little Orchard St., San Jose; 408-385-9600, luxmjco.com Hours: 10am-8pm every day.

CANNA CULTURE COLLECTIVE 3591 Charter Park Drive, San Jose, 408-2647877, cannaculturecollective.com Hours: 9am-9pm every day.

DELI BY CALIVA 92 Pullman Way, San Jose, 888-688-0303, delibycaliva.com Hours: 9am-9pm daily.

ELEMENTAL WELLNESS 985 Timothy Drive, San Jose, 408-433-3344, elementalwellnesscenter.com Hours: 9am-9pm every day.

MEDMEN SAN JOSE – CENTRAL 1075 N. 10th St., San Jose, 408-298-8837, medmen.com Hours: 9am-9pm every day.

NATURAL HERB PAIN RELIEF 2121 S. 10th St., San Jose, 408-456-0420, naturalherbpainrelief.org Hours: Wednesday-Friday 11am-7pm, Saturday-Tuesday 11am-6pm.

PURPLE LOTUS 752 Commercial St., San Jose, 408-283-9333, plpsanjose.com Hours: 9am-9pm every day.

HARBORSIDE

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1365 N. 10th St., San Jose, 888-994-2776, shopharborside.com/san-jose Hours: 10am-8pm every day.

1014 Timothy Drive, San Jose, 408-849-3706, facebook.com/Theraleaf Relief Hours: 9am-9pm every day.

HAZE DISPENSARY

WHITE FIRE

1761 Smith Ave., San Jose, 408-266-HAZE (4293), haze420.com Hours: 9am- 9pm every day.

111 Old Tully Road, San Jose, 408-564-4512, whitefireexperience.com Hours: 9am-9pm every day.

For more information about these dispensaries, check out our complete guide at cannabischronicle.net.

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