News » Want to Open a Dispensary in D.C.? You’ll Need $200,000





NORML points to an article in the Washington City Paper that explains what it takes to get a medical cannabis center in D.C. through the legal loopholes, red tape, and the still-murky process the nation’s capital has for medical marijuana.

A rabbi and his wife want to open a dispensary and are spending their life savings to do it. Literally. The pot will be expensive, especially since D.C. doesn’t currently allow cultivation (even at home for licensed patients), so it will have to come from somewhere else – which involves a lot of red tape and probably isn’t legal either, since the federal government doesn’t recognize medical cannabis – especially when it goes across state lines.

Annual fees for the licensure of a dispensary (over and above normal business licensing requirements) are $10,000 per year. Plus an additional application “processing fee” of $5,000. (It must be great having a monopoly on processing applications. Wow.)

Then you have to register each of your corporate partners at $200 a pop. Every person on staff who has access to marijuana (which in a dispensary is probably all of them) requires another $75 (per person, remember) for registration and twice that ($150) for the facility’s manager(s).

Then every time you transport the medicine from its growing/processing location to the store itself, you’ll have to pay a $25 transport permit fee.

Another $33 is required to register the “certificate of occupancy” for the business.

So the rabbi’s business, with say 3 employees and him and his wife acting as managers and corporate partners, just racked up $15,958. That’s sixteen grand and you don’t even have a building or any product yet. It’s doubtful that they can get by with fewer than three employees since laws require that the dispensary have at least two staff on the premises at all times during business hours.

The paper continued the rundown, calculating rent, payroll, and so forth and came up with a figure of $200,000 just to get your business up and running for the first year.

That doesn’t account for the legal fees and loss of inventory and property damage that will come when the feds raid you – which they will eventually, if trends continue to hold out.

[source Washington City Paper]

[via NORML]

Tags: medical, Washington D.C.