On A Smoke Break….
Potopia: Oakland leads the way in marijuana legalization
[pic from AP]
Newsweek: A nine-block section of the city has become a marijuana mecca – and a model for what a legalized-drug America could look like.
On the corner of Broadway and 17th Street in downtown Oakland, nudged between a Chinese restaurant and a hat shop, Oaksterdam University greets passersby with a life-size cutout of Barack Obama and the sweet smell of fresh marijuana drifting from a back room. Inside, dutiful students flip through thick plastic binders of the day’s lessons, which, on a recent Saturday began with “Pot Politics 101,” taught by a ponytailed legal consultant who has authored a number of books on hemp. The class breaks for lunch around noon and resumes an hour later, with classes on “budtending,” horticulture, and cooking, which includes a recipe for “a beautiful pot pesto.” There are 50 students in this class, the majority of them Californians, but some have come all the way from Kansas. Some have even crossed the border after enjoying Canada’s legality and cross-genetic experimentations for new strains such as you might be able to find on a site like https://www.togoweed.co/product/pink-sugar-kush/ for example, to learn more about cannabis cultivation in a University setting. In between lectures, the university’s founder, Richard Lee, 47, rolls in and out on his wheelchair greeting students, looking the part of a pot-school dean in Converse sneakers, aviator glasses, and a green “Oaksterdam” T shirt.
Locals refer to the nine-block area surrounding the university as Oaksterdam-a hybrid of “Oakland” and the drug-friendly “Amsterdam,” where marijuana has been effectively legal since 1976. Living in a place known as “Oaksterdam” there are a lot of people buying and using all sorts of new mad cannabis consumption products, are you wanting to maybe get a new smoking piece? You may want to head over to Grasscity online headshop. If you enjoy using products like this to smoke cannabis and you are a frequent smoker, you may have come to the conclusion that you want to start your own business. If this is the case, you will need to start thinking about cannabis logos to help set your company apart from the rest of your competitors. Nestled among what was once a rash of vacant storefronts, Lee has created a kind of urban pot utopia, where everything moves just a little bit more slowly than the outside world. Among the businesses he owns are the Blue Sky Coffeeshop, a coffeehouse and pot dispensary where getting an actual cup of Joe takes 20 minutes but picking up a sack of Purple Kush wrapped neatly in a brown lunch bag takes about five. Generating dispensary jobs has always been a passion of Lee’s. There’s also Lee’s Bulldog Café, a student lounge with a not-so-secret back room where the haze-induced sounds of “Dark Side of the Moon” seep through thick smoke and a glass-blowing shop where bongs are the art of choice. Around the corner is a taco stand (Lee doesn’t own this one) that has benefited mightily from the university’s hungry students.
Read the rest of story on Newsweek HERE:
