Gay-Owned SF Pot Dispensary Fights License Appeal

A large South of Market medical marijuana dispensary is a step closer to opening a second location following the San Francisco Planning Commission's unanimous approval August 5 allowing the nonprofit to renovate and expand a storefront at 473 Haight Street.

The San Francisco Patient and Resource Center, or SPARC, is a swank dispensary located at 1265 Mission Street. It opened a pop-up dispensary, Farm Direct, in the Lower Haight in late June but it closed after just 10 days as neighbors appealed the dispensary's license approval. The Board of Appeals asked SPARC to close the pop-up until it could hear the appeal on its license, now scheduled for October 19.

The neighbors complained that the dispensary had used a loophole to open and had not gotten neighborhood support for its move. SPARC and its supporters, including the Lower Haight Merchants and Neighborhood Association, or LOHMaNA, said they had followed the letter of the law and had repeatedly reached out to the community.

SPARC, a nonprofit collective co-founded by Erich Pearson, who is a member of the city's cannabis legalization task force and a founding board member of the National Cannabis Industry Association, has garnered a lot of attention in the competitive San Francisco dispensary business after the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Architects awarded SPARC a prize for interior architecture, commending on "the strong social commentary and apothecary-like feel of this beautiful project."

Pearson, a gay man who has been cultivating marijuana in northern California since he moved here 18 years ago, has also gotten a lot of press. A profile in 7x7 magazine's annual "Hot 20 List," described him as "a modern farmer" who is "tall, dark, and handsome."

But the pop-up opening in Lower Haight brought SPARC a lot of negative press, after neighbors' protests drew headlines on local blogs.

In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter , Pearson said he knew community opposition was a possibility when they opened the doors of Farm Direct.

"If you're in the dispensary business in San Francisco, you know that the planning and permitting process is complicated," Pearson said. "The process for dispensaries is arduous, overly complicated, and lengthy. An appeal was always possible. We knew that going in."

The SPARC team chose the Haight Street location for expansion because it was an "underserved community," Pearson said. The nearest dispensary was the Apothecarium, a mile away at 2095 Market Street in the Castro, he said.

The concept, said Pearson, was a "smaller and simpler" dispensary about one-fourth the size of the 2,200 square foot dispensary in SOMA.

Because SPARC grows most of the cannabis it sells - a so-called seed-to-sale business - the company is able to keep prices low because it cuts out the profits that normally go to the middleman, Pearson said.

"By growing ourselves," he said, "we also know what goes into our plants, in terms of nutrients, and what does not, in terms of pesticides."

Long History in Community

SPARC has a long history of donating to the community, Pearson said. For the past 10 years, SPARC has been donating flowers and edibles to patients at Maitri hospice as well as other patients who apply through the dispensary directly, he explained.

But some Lower Haight neighbors are opposed to a medical marijuana dispensary moving into the neighborhood, complaints that were voiced at an August 8 meeting of LOHMaNA, held at Black Sands Brewery on Haight Street, whose owner, Robert Patterson, is vice president of the neighborhood group.

Sama Ahmed, a neuroscientist at UCSF, said SPARC's plan to open a dispensary would have a "major negative impact" on the neighborhood, pointing out that 16 of the 18 businesses on the 400 block of Haight Street are also opposed.

"I'm not opposed to medical marijuana," said Ahmed, "I'm opposed to people from outside the neighborhood coming in without adequate discussion. I'd feel much better about it if someone from the neighborhood" was operating it.

Matt Osborne, owner of Glass Key Photo, 442 Haight, accused SPARC of "sneaking into" the neighborhood by qualifying for the previous tenant's exemption from city rules prohibiting dispensaries within 600 feet of a school. The John Muir School is a few blocks away, he said.

"How are you helping the children?" he asked SPARC representatives at the meeting. "What benefit are you to the school?"

Azam Khan, who owns Love Haight Computers at 473 Haight Street, threatened to move his business to SOMA if the dispensary reopens. "I'm pro-marijuana," he said, "but if most of the people on my block didn't want me to move in that should be the end of the story."

But Joel Freston, SPARC's community liaison, pointed out that there are many indications that the new dispensary does, in fact, have community support.

Currently, said Freston, SPARC has over 3,200 active members who live in the surrounding 94117 ZIP code. Some 150 of those people have written letters of support, he said. And at each of three prior community meetings, the majority of speakers were in favor of the project, he said.

Freston explained that SPARC had signed a memorandum of understanding with the neighborhood association earlier this year after it was determined that SPARC was legally grandfathered in regarding zoning and that there was existing public support for SPARC based on testimony at two public meetings.

The MOU contains guidelines, including provisions to ensure onsite security, hours of operation, and other stipulations regarding prohibition of onsite smoking and membership denial of customers who resold or redistributed medical marijuana.

According to Freston, the neighborhood association "challenged SPARC to demonstrate what we were going to commit to the community."

"We think we have exceeded their expectations and we are giving them the opportunity to hold us accountable" to our promises, he said.

"Whether its Farm Direct or SPARC brands, our organization continues to lead the way in lowering the price of cannabis in the Bay Area. In most cases when comparing apples to apples, SPARC's Farm Direct line of cannabis is half the cost of other dispensaries," Freston told the B.A.R. in an email.

More than half a dozen speakers, many who live in the neighborhood and some who are medical marijuana patients, said that they believe that having a dispensary in the neighborhood would actually improve safety, help neighborhood businesses by adding to the foot traffic, and be convenient to neighborhood residents who would have a dispensary within walking distance.

Brett Martinez, who has lived in the Lower Haight for 10 years, said his mother, who is suffering from multiple sclerosis, and his aunt, who has fibromyalgia, use medical marijuana every day.

"Let's have a happy ending" to the dispute about the dispensary coming into the neighborhood, he said. "Let's come together."