- Alexander Bencore
Errant Fingers Pointed at Orange County
The traffic is called the Orange Crush, the county line is called the Orange Curtain, and apparently the California's 3rd largest county of 3.2 million residents is also a CANNABIS DESERT, according to Chris Casaccchia @ MJ Biz Daily.
Yes, I’m talking about Orange County. And it’s really got a lot of groovy stuff. But no ganja, maybe?
If you had a post card collection of classically “California stuff”, a lot of those cards would be Orange County.
It’s home of beaches, Disneyland, professional sports teams, and a whole lotta Republican fundraisers coming soon…
But even though the majority (25 of 34 cities) voted in favor of Prop 64 in 2016, it still has only 117 cannabis businesses. "By contrast, LA, San Francisco, Alameda and Humboldt counties have thousands."
The writer tries to pin it on Orange County’s massive red blob of Republicans, but come on now, Republicans smoke weed.
It tries to pin it on NIMBY-ism, Not In My Back Yard with those stoners and freaks! - - and fair enough, there’s plenty of Reefer Madness to go around.
THE DATA:
Santa Ana has 67 cannabis businesses
Costa Mesa has issued 36 licenses but none are permitted yet
Anaheim – 0
Irvine – 0, although Weedmaps and Gold Flora live there
Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach, Newport Beach – 0…
THE DEEP DIVE:
This article is a bit goofy, though and ignores a few basic facts. It’s a bit of a nothing muffin, I hate to admit remembering Herman Munster when he wanted to become a pop singer.
First, if you happen to live in Orange County, chances are fair that you commute to a job in Downtown LA. It’s a little farther to go, but you might even work in San Diego. Cannabis is legal in both, so you just shop for weed in your lunch hour.
Also, the biggest dispensary in the whole state – Planet 13 – is located in Santa Ana, smack in the middle of Orange County. And you might be thinking “Well that’s such a long drive….” But everything is a long drive in Orange County. It’s a county, not a city.
Also, if you just go to Yelp, you can find pages and pages of delivery companies.
It’s not the same as going to a shop and learning what’s good from a cool and trained budtender, but it’s like buying clothes from Amazon… when the package arrives you just go with it.
THE LOOP BACK
So I don’t know, Orange Country is big but it’s actually typical of the scandal of California’s cannabis industry – that municipalities were allowed to opt-out of legal cannabis businesses and almost 70% of the state did… which fuels the illicit market, which fuels massive police budgets for massive raids, which fuels the absolutely horrible state of our industry.
We got 99 Problems, but Orange County ain't one...