In November 2016 I and my friend Lee went on a tour of about 10 cannabis shops in Seattle. Cannabis is legal in Washington state. Lee and I have both done regular activism toward legalization of cannabis for years, with us participating since 2001 when I moved to Seattle and him participating for years before then. We were not key players in the activism, but we have long been people to participate in the organization of events, attend community meetings, and commit to regular hours during campaigns managed by the bigger groups. In 2010 I created the Wikipedia articles for Washington Initiative 692 and Washington Initiative 1068, which were cannabis-related voter initiatives. I did all sorts of campaigning for 1068 that year, and at the same time, started to interact online with wiki user:Another Believer who established and still manages WikiProject Cannabis. All of that was a positive experience for me as political activism, and as wiki participation, and as cannabis-related activity. Beyond that we volunteered with Hempfest most years between 2002-2011. I have been interested to follow what I can about how legalization is changing Seattle, but as I moved from Seattle to NYC in April 2012 and the legalization finally happened in November 2012, I have not been able to participate in the transition as I would have done had I been in Seattle. It was kind of a strange situation anyway – Vivian McPeak from Hempfest had opposed Washington Initiative 502, which was the law which passed to eventually legalize. I looked to him for mentorship in what I did in cannabis activism, and after some conversations with him in which he advised me to avoid campaigning for 502, I had mixed feelings about how much energy I should put into the effort for that round. 502 passed and now there are cannabis shops everywhere. Viv is still around doing other things.
The Seattle cannabis shops all sell the same branded products from the same suppliers for about the same prices. The law is that retailers and cannabis producers have to be separate entities with separate owners, so the way the business has progressed is that all the retailers buy product from the same pool of wholesalers. Different businesses differentiate themselves with branding, but most of them do so haphazardly and without much of a marketing plan. Lots of retailers have opened and already gone out of business. There might have been multiple shops in one neighborhood, all selling the same products at the same prices, but then one shop gets all the business and others get none. Much of the management is haphazard. Although some shops are investments by financiers who treat the storefronts like any retain operation, some other shops either have ties to activists or are presenting themselves to be tied to cannabis culture.
I saw three trends in staffing practices. One way to staff a shop is to have retail staff who dress in business casual and act like neutral customer service staff. The shops which do this present themselves in the way that the Liquor Control Board used to manage the liquor stores in Seattle, which was clean, organized, and efficient for getting in and getting out. Another way to manage the store is to hire people who are friendly with contemporary Seattle style, and to offer a shopping experience that includes a distinct local cultural experience. These shops have artistic interior design and marketing and are trendy with good-looking fashionable younger people as staff. Seattle had grunge culture in the 90s, then its own counterculture flavors including what is shown in the regional television show Portlandia. While people with extra tattoos, piercings, dyed hair, and alternative clothing might face discrimination in some cities, even conservative businesses might hire such people as front-facing staff in Seattle, and any such people with good social skills are especially being sought by some cannabis shops. Seattle has a greater percentage of this demographic than, for example, NYC. I have had 10 body piercings personally, and because I was younger in Seattle culture when I got them I never realized that I was conforming to local fashion. Since moving to NYC I realized that it was not part of culture here for so many people to have piercings. Now, in most places, the peak of piercings as personal fashion has passed, but in Seattle, piercings are still culturally more important than in many other places. Apparently in cannabis sales they are a job qualification. The third trend in stores is to be a boys club. In these kinds of cannabis shops the place is generally wrecked, somehow the store smells more like body odor than cannabis, and the prices are discounted as compared to other places. The staff themselves are more likely to be stoned and there is overlap with other interests more likely to attract straight males. Customer service is less planned as a retail offering, which makes for a more welcoming environment for a certain type of bro to come in and get what they need without the obligation of navigating the minimal sort of social interaction which is typical in retail sales.
I am happy that cannabis is available in this way in Seattle. I do wish that somehow the cannabis industry sector could have been designed to be more community oriented and less of a revenue stream to be captured by business, but I am not sure how that could have happened to the present and I am glad that availability increased in 2012. There was a quick shift in Seattle after legalization. The last legalization push happened without support from the hippie community, who had pushed all previous serious legalization efforts and a perpetual and doomed effort to advocate for legalization without doing anything in particular except hippie activities. The legalization happened kind of unexpectedly with Rick Steves being the face of that campaign as a long-time community hero and established cannabis activist. Since the legalization, a surprising business shift is that whereas many head shops pre-legalization were hippie-themed, and whereas hippies have been publicly known as providers of marijuana since the 1960s, suddenly after legalization the marijuana shops distanced themselves from hippie culture and adopted new cultural identities. The cultural disconnect and break from tradition surprised me.
In ~2000 when I was ~20 I moved to Seattle. Within 1-2 days of arriving I went to Capitol Hill, the gay district. I went to what was then the reservoir and what is now Cal Anderson Park and got super stoned with a cute boy in a dress. The police came up to us, and being Seattle police who encourage cannabis use instead of Texas police of my home state who treat it as a serious crime, they told us to stay cool and they gave us leftovers of their lunch. We were both very hungry and shared the meal, and I was happy that I did not need to scavenge the food from the garbage. It makes me kind of worried to think back about how vulnerable I was, and how if I had been somewhere else, the police might have hassled or arrested me. I worry also about how easy it is for other people of that age who were in my situation to go as boldly as I did into all kinds of situations which were more dangerous than I would enter in my current safer lifestyle. I am not sure that I can think clearly about what I thought back then, but as I recall, I did not have complete awareness that using cannabis in public could lead to problems with police, or that in places other than Seattle’s gay district it might be dangerous for obviously queer boys to be hanging out somewhere, or that some people do not go out anticipating that they will eat someone else’s leftovers that day. What I remember most about that early experience was that the cops were nice to give food when I was hungry. I had no consciousness that kids smoking pot in public are visible and doing something perhaps illegal, or that sometimes gay kids get hassled. At that time in my life cannabis was part of the social scene and culture and I am grateful for the adventures it helped me find. I would want the good experiences that cannabis offers available to anyone else who would benefit from them.
I am not sure why Seattle’s relationship to cannabis never really seemed to enter the national conversation, but even before legalization, cannabis was openly sold in storefronts and festivals without restriction in Seattle when almost anywhere else in America the practice would have been treated as a felony. There is less documentation about this, but looking back, it seems crazy to me that there was a social agreement in Seattle that cannabis would be openly advertised for distribution in all kinds of storefronts and public places, whereas in other places in America I can imagine cops shooting people or putting them in jail forever for doing the same thing. In some ways American culture is homogeneous throughout the country, but in other ways, there are some places doing their own things and hardly anyone but the local people know about it or can understand.