IGrow: Walmart of weed opens in Oakland Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writer Thursday, January 28, 2010 Call it the Walmart of weed. In a 15,000-square-foot warehouse just down the road from the Oakland Airport, an entrepreneur is opening a one-stop shop for medicinal mar1juana cultivation that's believed to be the largest in the state. Don't know the first thing about growing pot? The folks at iGrow have a doctor on site to get you a cannabis card and sell you all the necessary equipment for indoor, hydroponic cultivation - from pumps, nutrients and tubing to lights and fans. Don't know how to set it up? For a fee, on-site technicians will show you how to build it in your home and even maintain it weekly. "A lot of people don't know much about growing pot," said Dhar Mann, 25, the owner, who stood in front of an array of Ikea-like displays, showing different rooms of cannabis cultivation systems. "Since there are no full-service resources like us, they take risks, like electrical fires." This is hardly a fringe business. When iGrow opens today, at least three City Council members will attend. So will most of the leaders of the cannabis industry in Oakland, a city long at the vanguard of medicinal mar1juana. Today's opening also comes on a key day for proponents of a statewide ballot measure to allow recreational mar1juana. They plan to turn in about twice as many signatures as needed to qualify the measure for the November ballot. The supporters of that measure are being led by Richard Lee, owner of Oaksterdam University, an Oakland-based business that trains people for work in the cannabis industry. The medicinal mar1juana world is still unsettled. Cities from Los Angeles to Berkeley are grappling with how to permit and regulate medical mar1juana dispensaries. Oakland, where voters last summer agreed to have the city to tax and regulate "cannabis businesses," has allowed only four licensed dispensaries. Though iGrow provides all the supplies and know-how for cannabis cultivation, they don't sell the seedlings - only dispensaries can. And even some of the vendors tread a delicate line. Gabriel Goodhart, the owner of Easy Feed Systems based in West Oakland, was setting up one of the system displays at iGrow on Wednesday. His company has an explicit policy of not setting up any system where mar1juana is visible when they show up - or even mentioning the word "mar1juana." "Liability is shifting," said Goodhart, a libertarian who is a registered Republican. "A small business like ours can't take the risk." But, he believes, the issue is a moral one. "It's not fair to medical patients to put them in a gray area where they have to be involved in criminal activity to stay healthy," he said. "That's like not having health insurance." The cost of creating your own cultivation system or relying solely on a dispensary is vast. At a dispensary, a patient might spend $120 a week for a quarter-ounce of mar1juana. However, it might cost $1,000 to set up an eight-plant system, said Zeta Ceti, one of iGrow's "indoor growing technicians." But in the course of a year, they might only use half of their harvest and be able to sell the remaining 3 pounds for $12,000 to a dispensary. E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/01/28/BA4T1BOGCV.DTL Heres a cnn video. http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2010/01/29/simon.ca.superstore.of.weed.cnn&hpt=P1
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/muA5EBmpDhA&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/muA5EBmpDhA&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>
where've you been? i've been smoking, come to my part of the town, just about everyone i know smokes.
Interesting, naturally one must wonder a few things. A) is there a limit to the amount you can grow per year for your medical use? B) Is there an inspection of your cultivation system every year? Depending on the answers to these questions, I can already imagine an enterprise / racket where card holders are paid to serve as a front to obtain all the requiste of starting your own little mar1juana factory. Imagine being able to produce legally without any hassle then exporting it out of state for large chunk of cash? Yeah the last part is criminal felony but still it's better than any distribution model available out there today. I'd be willing to finance such an operation, do we any have entrepreneurs from Cali here on CF?
Not sure about cali, but it's limited to 6 plants in colorado. No local inspections that I've heard of. Just the occasional itchy DEA jackass kicking in your backdoor under some false pretense. But that's usually on the bigger places. They busted in a testing lab in Denver last week, confiscated all their of samples and still refuse to release any information on why they did it. The paradigm I've seen is...you become a caregiver for multiple people. That allows you to grow 6 plants for each person. Cultivate..Sell...Profit. There's tons of money to be made legally, no reason to get dirty with it
Not from Cali but have family there. Anyways, this is something I've always wanted to do. All legally too. Maybe we can be business partners? Email me if serious. It's a big market with lots of money to be made.
I saw some news item of a guy using one floor of his home to grow and he said he was making $250,000 a year offloading it to dispensaries. Unbelievable.
So let me get this right. This is legal through the state, but very illegal under the Federal gov....right? Man this Cali-weed stuff is so confusing.
That's the current law regarding medical mar1juana but under the Obama Admin. pursuing medical mar1juana cases isn't a priority.
Just so confusing. So everyone involved is still under risk of being prosecuted by the federal gov. Thats seems more risky than than state and local agents. If only Texas would....
I think Oakland has a tax on medical mar1juana now. I wonder if they're making good money from it yet.