In Sonoma County and all across California, cannabis companies that don’t have permits from Sacramento have received cease and desist orders over the past six months. Those companies have had a choice: fill out the forms, submit them to the authorities and pay the fees, or face loss of property and fines.
According to Lori Ajax, the chief at the Bureau of Cannabis Control (BCC), 22 percent of the California cannabis companies that received cease and desist orders have complied with demands and registered for licenses.
That leaves 78 percent of companies without them. Some have been raided, their operations shut down. More raids are scheduled.
In June, Governor Brown beefed up the enforcement teams with additional funding.
Why the crackdown? The State of California wants the tax revenue. As long as cannabis operators don’t have licenses and continue to operate on the black market, Sacramento and local governments are out a big chunk of change.
It’s the beginning of the end for thousands of growers, and the real beginning of the new, legal cannabis industry.
Four local business partners who have all the necessary permits are ready to open a manufacturing center in Sebastopol, which is the most cannabis-friendly city in Sonoma County, along with Santa Rosa.
The four partners are Craig Litwin, Mitcho Thompson, Johnny Nolen and Angie Harrison, who is the CEO at the 421 group, which calls itself a “full service cannabis consultancy.” Indeed, 421 provides help to clients already in the cannabis business or about to start in the business.
Litwin served on the Sebastopol City Council for eight years, and as the mayor for two terms, from 2000 to 2008. Along with Linda Kelley, he wrote the dispensary ordinance for Sebastopol.
Litwin and his partners in the legal cannabis industry have survived while others in the illegal industry have fallen by the wayside, or not yet succeeded, for half a dozen reasons. They’ve been patient and persistent, they know how to navigate tangled rules and regulations and they know how to talk to people who sit behind desks, make up rules and then enforce them.
Litwin, Thompson, Nolen and Harrison also get along with one another. Finally, they’re at the right place and at the right time.
“We live in a very regulated state,” Litwin said. “It requires a very strong stomach to get involved and then stick with it.”
Their new company, which is called Phytomagic, will make concentrates, tinctures and topicals, some of them with herbs like lavender that will be locally grown.
Phytomagic will work with small, local growers who adhere to organic and biodynamic farming practices.
Thompson has a long history as an herbalist. He has served as the vice president of the Sonoma County Herb Association and he was one of the founders of Peace in Medicine, the Sebastopol dispensary.
“Our company will be able to help a lot of people who have so far been excluded from the new legal market,” Thompson said.
Phytomagic will hire locals to create a full line of cannabis products. The company won’t grow marijuana.
Sebastopol is ideally situated for the manufacture of tinctures and topicals; the city doesn’t tax the manufacturing of cannabis, plus there are nearby organic pot farms and a small army of growers and herbalists like Thompson who have years of experience behind them.
In California, Sebastopol is an exception — 70 percent of the state has no dispensaries and no access to safe cannabis products.
“I think it will take another decade to open other jurisdictions to retail opportunities,” Litwin said. “Meanwhile we have a great opportunity to forge ahead in Sebastopol.”
Jonah Raskin, a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, is the author of Marijuanaland, Dispatches from an American War, published in French as well as English, and shares story credit for the feature length pot film Homegrown.
