Stoned In Seattle? A Christmas Crash Course in Legalized Weed
Run by Ben Reagan and Jeremy Kaufman, both in their early 30s and both of whom had finance jobs they hated before diving into the industry, the CPC operates mainly out of a 6,000 square-foot facility in the city’s Georgetown neighborhood, with around 20 employees. As for Kaufman, who showed me around the offices last week, I have never met more of a true believer, in any cause or in any context. Which makes sense. After a horrific snowboarding accident a decade ago led him through a horrific bout with chronic pain and prescribed opiates, Kaufman eventually turned to weed for his treatment, and never looked back. In 2011, Seattle Weekly dubbed him “Budtender of the Year.”
“I thought, if I’m gonna get off of these pain pills, I have to understand exactly what I’m doing,” he explained. “I don’t want to just be eating a brownie I made at my house with a bunch of butter and stuff that I don’t know where it came from. There’s so many things that can go wrong. […] This is not an industry that’s always perpetuated by the highest common denominator. If all you can do is drive from place to place, put 3 grams in a bag, and take money for it, you can make a living. But there’s a definite microcosm of real professionals showing up who are passionate, and it turns, out they’re all sick, too.”
The office, of course, had the requisite Bob Marley posters and candy dispensers, but was also neatly decorated with stacks of literature, and shelves full of elaborate tinctures, gluten-free chocolate medibles, and even topical, non-psychoative balms and bath salts (“I created those for my 94-year-old grandmother,” said Kaufman), all labeled with specific strains, dosages, and targeted symptoms. This is not your average dispensary. The tinctures (discreet, ingestible oils extracted from the plant that can be put into both edibles and pills) are really the CPC’s bread and butter, and are based on what any seasoned pothead can already tell you, which is that different strains can serve different purposes.