One of the city’s first medical marijuana dispensaries, literally in view of the Capitol

dome, is scheduled to open in just a few weeks, and its operators believe it should

be a model for the nation. The owners and designers of the facility, Capital City

Care, will tell you that if it looks and feels like a cross between a doctor’s office

and a spa, it was intentional. This, however, is a doctor’s office and spa with redundant

and high security—and marijuana. They will also tell you, many times over, that what

they do and how they do it is all about the patient.

On Monday morning, as an untimely spring snow turned to slush on the bright blue building’s

front and back steps,

David A. Guard and

Scott Morgan of CCC, and architects

David Shove Brown and

David Tracz of Studio 3877, met with

The Washingtonian to give a full tour of the dispensary and to talk about the details of the business

they are about to open. Only once did they pull a door shut and say a particular room

was off limits, due to Department of Health regulations. But the DC government, the

process of getting the legal grow centers and dispensaries open, and the strict requirements

involved prompted a careful language that threads through everything the men have

to say.

In all, Capital City involves “about a dozen” people, according to Guard, some of

them investor partners and some of them employees. Guard and Morgan are the visible

members of the team, and even they aren’t sure how much they want to deal with the

media. They are purposefully vague about certain particulars. Again, it’s about the

patients—and Guard, who is the general manager, has firsthand experience. He teared

up as he mentions a friend who had terminal brain cancer and whose doctors recommended

medical marijuana, which Guard says eased the remainder of his life as much as possible.

Through our hourlong chat, Guard, Morgan, Brown, and Tracz were forthcoming as they

gave an early look inside a world that patients and the public have been curious about

for the past several years, as legal medical marijuana made its way from a controversial

proposal to a law and then to implementation. They showed off the conjoined townhouses

on North Capitol Street, which Brown and Tracz have transformed with exposed brick,

clean walls, and surfaces made of bamboo for its warm hues. Brown says their goal

was to go against preconceived notions of what a dispensary would look like—“You know,

seedy and back alley,” he says. “The idea is it’s a warm environment and all about

the patient.”

It is a contemporary and soothing environment, though one can’t help but notice ceiling

cameras, fingerprint-activated biometric locks, motion detectors, alarm notices, and

an interior security desk adjacent to the locked door that separates the reception

area from the area where actual sales will be conducted. All security is hard-wired

to the Metropolitan Police Department. The selling room is supplied with at least

three scales. There’s also a paraphernalia boutique featuring the same clean, bright

design. There are potted plants around, but not those kinds of plants.

Read on for what Guard and Morgan had to say about the facility.

How did you and your partners get involved in this business?

David Guard: It’s an issue I’ve cared deeply about for years. I was actually in grad school for

a masters in public policy at American University when DC passed the law. A professor

of mine encouraged me to get involved, and I did. I collected signatures, worked the

polls. It was 1998. So I’ve been through the 15-year stretch.

When are you actually opening?

Guard: We should be open mid-April, as long as everything goes just fine. We’ve had all our

inspections, we’ve jumped through every hoop that there is except for that one final

walk-through with the DOH, folks from the DDOE [District Department of the Environment],

and the MPD and DCRA [Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs]. They will then

give us our final registration certificate and our ID badges. Every employee, every

owner, every director has an ID badge. After we’re registered you can only be in here

if you have a badge or are a patient or caregiver, and even then you will have a health-issue

ID. They [the city] are trying to be extremely careful in implementing this.

Do you see that as a positive? Because you don’t want to be shut down right after

you open?



Guard: Right. You look at what’s going on in other states, and they are a bit tentative

at times, and what [DC] wanted to do was avoid any of that, avoid drawing the ire

of the DEA or the federal government in any way. Go step by step very carefully, show

everybody this is really about the patients, have only a few conditions and diseases

for which people can receive medical marijuana, and stretch it out. This went through

four rule-making sessions. Everybody’s on board with it, but at the same time everybody

wants to be really careful.

So you are happy with the way the city has handled it?

Guard: Yeah, I really am. Because they’ve been so careful to introduce doctors to this, slowly

as well, and they are now learning about the program very carefully. They are going

to do their patients a great service by being careful and thinking through the process.

Scott Morgan: Keep in mind also that participation in the program by doctors is going to be decided

on a case-by-case basis, when patients come to their own doctor and say, “I want to

be part of the program.” As long as you have a qualifying condition, and it’s a doctor

who is licensed in DC, that doctor can write a recommendation. They don’t have to

interact with the Department of Health. Any doctor who is licensed and seeing a patient

on an ongoing basis can do it.

Will the doctors who write medical marijuana prescriptions be primarily oncologists

and pain-management specialists?



Guard: Primary-care physicians, particularly the HIV/AIDS community. Ophthalmologists, infectious

disease. People taking protease inhibitors. There’s a variety of conditions.

Have you had doctors come in to tour the facility?

Guard: No. It’s really patient driven. We’ve had [patients] who are what we call pre-registered,

people who have approached us over the past few months, and I can tell you as we get

closer to the start date it has just been increasing. Last week I got a knock at the

back door from two different gentlemen, and they didn’t even come together. One had

leukemia and the other has glaucoma. As I was speaking with them, a knock at the front

door happened, and it was an AIDS/HIV patient. Three within five minutes.

What will be the hours and days of operation?

Guard: We’re going to be open from 10 to 7 every day. But initially it might be scattered.

We’ll see what the patients need.

Morgan: We’re starting with a small staff. We want to see how things unfold, just the process

of getting patients signed up, getting the doctor recommendation forms. It might be

initially that there are only five patients who received IDs in the first active week

of the program. We might do things by appointment, or if we see everyone is interested

in coming in at the same time, we might do those hours. But eventually, every day.

Do you only service DC residents, or are Maryland and Virginia included? What about

tourists or travelers?



Guard: Only DC residents. There are five states that have reciprocity [for out-of-state patients],

but DC is not one of them.

What grow house will you use? Only one or all of them?

Guard: We’re fortunate enough to be vertically integrated. We’re the only organization in

DC allowed to have a cultivation center and a dispensary. Our cultivation center is

on Channing Street, and it is ready to go. We have one more inspection to go.

There’s one cultivator that’s actually growing right now. That’s why we’re talking

mid-April, because that’s when they say they’ll have product.*

When will you start growing on Channing Street? And how long before you’ll have usable

product?



Guard: Probably within hours of when we receive registration. By the Department of Health’s

rules, the plants have to be in the ground 60 days.

Do you mean literally “in the ground,” as in there is a farm?

Morgan: No. It’s a soil-less mixture. The growing is done indoors. It’s technically not dirt.

[laughs] We’re not growing on the Mall.

Guard: The techniques are so sophisticated today. Remember, we’re growing pharmaceutical-grade

[marijuana]. Essentially what that means is it is very, very high end. It’s free of

any kinds of pests or molds. The profile for each of the plants is very specific,

and we want to have the highest quality. The different ailments patients suffer from

require different ratios of cannabinoids.

Morgan: Certain strains tend to be more helpful to different patients. What we can tell people

is, “This particular strain is popular with people who have your condition.” What

we’ll be offering is a good cross-section of some of the most helpful strains. Our

staff will be more familiar with the healing properties of these strains than a doctor

would. We will be able to [inform] this strain might be better for anxiety, this one

better for pain relief, this one better for nighttime, this one for daytime.

Have you tried the products?

Guard: We can’t do that. Only a licensed patient can receive the medicine. There’s enough

general knowledge out there that we don’t need to sample the product.

Will you have a doctor on the premises?

Morgan: No. We’re prohibited by the regulations. When patients arrive, they will have already

gotten their recommendation. We haven’t met the doctor. The way that works is the

patient goes to the doctor and says they are interested in this, and if the doctor

agrees, and certifies the patient has one of the conditions that is covered, they

fill out the paperwork and the patient takes that over to the Department of Health,

where they are issued an ID card—and that is their key to the dispensary. We don’t

see the patient until that point.

Can they get in the door without a card?

Morgan: No. When they get to the front door they will be met by a guard. We’re using former

police as the guards. After that they will be buzzed in and come to the reception

desk, where they will get put in a queue. They can sit in the reception area, and

the sales staff will be notified they are here.

Where are the other dispensaries?

Morgan: Eastern Market and Takoma Park. They are going to be opening up soon, as well. In

the near future there will only be these three. There were four approved, but we’re

not sure of the status of the fourth location.

Do you expect this to be a success? Do you expect smooth sailing?

Guard: I do. I really do. There is that fear, the federal issue, but we’re so driven by what

the patients really need that we’re willing to take that risk. We’re unsure how risky

it really is, ultimately, but I think because DOH is so careful and the City Council

was so careful, the slow implementation, the small plant count right now, and the

limited number of patients who can receive it, this is really a model for the nation.

The federal government, I believe, should put their stamp of approval on it. This

is how medical marijuana should be done, and we’re going to show that it can be done.

*This post has been updated from a previous version.

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