A new state law opens the door for Amsterdam-style cannabis cafes. Why hasn’t one opened in the Bay Area?

OAKLAND — In North Oakland, there is a community that meets every third Friday of the month called the T’Oakland Senior Canna Club, where food and drinks and cannabis are donated and served pot-luck style.

Live music, soft-tissue massages and dabs — weed concentrates — are available for those who care to imbibe. Seniors, and anyone else who wants to see what the buzz is about, meet in the 420-friendly lounge of the minority-owned, equity-minded dispensary Root’d in the 510 and blaze freely – smoking openly in the cannabis club’s 5,000-square-foot entertainment-focused event space.

“People need other spaces,” T’Oakland Senior Canna Club founder Melodye Montgomery said in an interview. “There’s no place for people to go to for community.”

Montgomery, a 68-year-old Alameda resident, said she remembers having to hide smoking cannabis in alleyways or basements for fear of the police. Born in the mid-1950s, she saw the War on Drugs upfront in her 20s and the racially prejudiced prosecution of Bay Area residents.

“It happened to Black people in mass quantities,” Montgomery said of drug-related arrests and imprisonment.

Under a new state law, AB 1775, which took effect Jan. 1, the T’Oakland Senior Canna Club — which has grown from 20 attendees to 200 since it began in April of last year — could meet in a full-blown cannabis cafe. That would allow Root’d to sell attendees some food and drinks under certain restrictions, such as no open-flame cooking or fryers. But it would require additional permits, and the owners have said they are still figuring out how to convert it.

Some of the newly legal, Amsterdam-style cafes — where patrons can smoke cannabis while they enjoy snacks and non-alcoholic drinks — have already popped up in California, such as West Hollywood’s The Woods, which serves fresh espresso and tea drinks and offers rentable private smoking rooms. The new law requires cannabis cafes to be attached to a dispensary.

But no cannabis cafes have opened in the Bay Area  — which Assemblyman Matt Haney, who authored AB 1775, finds surprising.

“It’s a huge opportunity for the Bay Area,” Haney, whose 17th District includes the eastern side of San Francisco, told Bay Area News Group. “We are the undisputed capital of cannabis culture worldwide. And this is the future. People want to be able to consume cannabis with friends. They should be able to do it while having a sandwich and tea.”

Hany emphasized that cities have a lot of discretion in regulating cannabis cafes.

“The bill doesn’t automatically allow anybody to do anything. It simply gives the authority to cities that allow lounges that sell food or drinks, where previously that was entirely banned statewide,” he said. “This doesn’t allow a coffee shop to sell cannabis. It allows retailers who can operate lounges to also sell food and drinks, or hold events, if authorized by a city.”

Montgomery said she believes the new law is a good idea, but that it still “needs work,” noting how in many cities throughout the state, some people are still unable to safely or legally smoke cannabis in their own homes due to restrictions imposed by red tape and city regulations.

She compared smoking a joint with friends to the social equivalent of grabbing a beer at a bar, and argued “restrictions make it so difficult to do things like other industries.”

“You should be able to go to a dispensary and have those same kinds of services,” Montgomery said. “As long as it’s federally illegal, we’re still going to have those restrictions.”

Throughout the Bay Area, onsite consumption spaces began rolling out recently with the opening of lounges in Oakland at Root’d In The 510, NUG, Harborside and Urbana, and in San Francisco at Barbary Coast, Mission Cannabis Club and Moe Greens. In Emeryville, Ohana Cannabis has a THC-infused drink tasting bar. But smoking inside there isn’t allowed — yet.

Other major cities in the area which allow cannabis dispensaries, such as San Jose, Redwood City, Alameda and Berkeley, currently don’t allow on-site consumption.

Oakland Cannabis Regulatory Commission Vice Chair Chaz Walker told this news organization in an interview that he believes cannabis cafes could “help Oakland become the number one cannabis tourism business in the world.”

“I think this is going to be a huge boost to the quality of life in Oakland, and it think it’s going to be a boost to the cannabis community,” Walker said. “The social environment is a huge part of the experience, and it’s a lot better than being home alone and consuming.”

He added that a current stipulation under the new law requiring the new cafe-style lounges to be attached to a dispensary is “great for a start.” But he also said he envisions that people could be able to smoke at other establishments apart from a dispensary-linked lounge.

“Personally, I think there’s one step further that we can go with cannabis cafes,” Walker said.

Root’d co-founders Rickey McCullough and Daniel Chung opened their dispensary in 2018, knowing they would eventually ramp up into an onsite-consumption lounge as law changed in the future. They are planning even more growth now that AB 1775 passed.

“We’re going to expand for sure to take advantage of the new legislation that passed,” Chung said in an interview. “We’re very excited for what the future holds. These are infancy stages. We’re walking and we’re about to run.”

The two are plotting on evolving with the times, after late last year opening their 5,000 square-foot event space with a stage, couches, chairs, tables and more.

“With the cafe aspect blending in around us, we definitely plan on opening up a tiki bar,” McCullough said. “It does open it up to another stream of revenue to the store as well. And also just to bring more exposure to cannabis as a whole.”

Wayne Justmann, the first man in California to receive a medical marijuana card in June of 2000, also attended the T’Oakland senior session, where he sat among a wooden, circular table of senior marijuana enthusiasts and helped hand out free joints. As one of the early trailblazers for medical marijuana use, he said he backs the benefits of using weed to help with his own symptoms of HIV/AIDS.

He also voiced his support for the new law allowing cannabis cafes.

“I think it’s a wonderful way for us to enjoy cannabis and enjoy ourselves,” Justmann said, with a vaporizer loaded with cannabis oil in his hand. “This is a blast. Cannabis is a blast.”

Oakland city spokesperson Jean Walsh said that of the city’s 12 dispensaries, four are now permitted under the new law to convert their onsite consumption lounges into cannabis cafes. But they must do so by following county regulations related to food preparation and the city’s “entertainment venue permit criteria and noise ordinance.”

There is no separate permit process to open a weed cafe, she said, and no limit to the number of cafes allowed to operate in Oakland.

“Our office is at the beginning stages of understanding the impact of AB 1775 and will work with the City Administrator and our Council Members to ensure safe and equitable implementation of cannabis cafes in Oakland,” Walsh said.