By DCist Contributor Keith Mathias
The smell of excitement—and maybe, uh, a little something extra—was palpable in the Holiday Inn at Capitol Hill on Saturday. Playing host to the ComfyTree Cannabis Academy, Grow School and Job Fair, marijuana aficionados and entrepreneurs alike gathered to celebrate and educate themselves about joining the District of Columbia’s so called Green Rush.
Starting off the day’s conference talks with a panel on getting into the green rush, District Growers owner and operator Corey Barnette, along with Metropolitan Wellness Center General Manager Vanessa West, discussed the in’s and outs of what to expect when attempting to start up a cannabis-based business.
“Owning a cultivation operation is an adventure every day,” Barnette said, highlighting both the practical and financial challenges associated with getting a business started. “Some people expect to just drop some seeds and let Jesus do the rest.”
With many conference attendees interested in a cultivation career, West addressed the issues surrounding hiring help. “You’re hiring a personality,” she stressed, “someone who is comfortable talking to people all day every day.” For her, the ability to work with people is more important than coming into the industry with technical know-how.
But one of Barnette’s biggest challenges with District Growers is finding the kinds of people that they want. “One of the things we learned…is that most people who have been growing a while have a lot of bad habits,” he said. “We’re interested in developing novices. Willing is more important to us than knowledgable.”
On an even more practical level, both Barnette and West spoke to the importance of developing good relationships with law enforcement officials. Barnette recognized that one of his most important activities early on was to build “good relationships and good rapport with law enforcement.” He went on to suggest that “anyone interested in joining the industry do the same.” Likewise, West emphasized the importance of “trying to develop a rapport, because it’s a good rapport.”
The day’s second session continued the trend of dealing with law enforcement, as Scotty Levy of Levy and Levy CPA discussed the various issues that canna-businesses encounter when dealing with the IRS, particularly IRC Section 280E. With cannabis still illegal on a Federal level, the IRS is using 280E as a method for attacking all state-legal marijuana businesses.
Levy provided an overview of the different methods for filing a tax return on cannabis-related income, discussing the pros and cons of the various returns. However, “the IRS is targeting the industry as a whole,” Levy said. “So it doesn’t really matter what your tax return looks like.”
Perhaps the most close-to-the-heart session of the day came in the form of a panel discussion between Dr. Malik Burnett, Policy Manager for the Drug Policy Alliance, Robert Capecchi, Deputy Director of State Policies Marijuana Policy Project, and Nikolas Schiller, Director of Communications at D.C. Cannabis Campaign, where the relationship between Congress and cannabis was the topic of conversation.
Schiller repeatedly pointed out the fact that “D.C. is not a state, and this means that we have to deal with 535 members of Congress, that we didn’t elect, that get to do whatever they want to us.” Capecchi built upon this point, noting the Federal government’s tendency to “lag behind the states with regard to rapid moving social initiatives,” and in a wonderful rhetorical ploy comparing cannabis and alcohol, emphasized the difficulty of “unwinding marijuana prohibition.”
“It’s no secret that the people want to tax and regulate this,” Dr. Burnett said, “and that elected officials are well-poised to take this ball across the finish line.” However, he also noted that “Congress does not fight this in a public space,” choosing instead to hide its opposition to marijuana legalization in a rider attached to the House Appropriations Committee’s spending bill, and again failing to publicly oppose legalization by passing a resolution of opposition within 30 days, and have instead focused on preventing a system for taxing the sale of marijuana.
Fortunately, this lack of action has resulted in the current legal status of cannabis in the District; however, Schiller notes that legalization is not yet complete, as sales are still not allowed. “Decriminalization was a stepping stone, just like the current ballot initiative,” he said. ”In D.C., everything is in baby steps.”
Capecchi pointed out that the current status of marijuana in the District would likely change little in the lives of residents. “No one is going to see much change day-to-day affairs, other than people aren’t going to get arrested anymore,” he said.
However, Dr. Burnett pointed out that the legal status of marijuana in the nation’s capital would likely garner a “tremendous amount of international attention.”
After all, what does it say to the rest of the world if the capital of a country that classifies marijuana as a Schedule I Drug with no potential for medical use has legalized its use for both medical and recreational purposes?
Running concurrently with these sessions was a cannabis-related job fair, with representatives from companies across the country offering everything from networking opportunities for a canna-career to merchants selling clothing and smoking devices.
Much of the information provided by the various vendors focused on the different aspects of setting up a grow operation. The Grow School, a Denver based company, offers a course called Grow-101, which teaches recreational cannabis users to legally, safely, and successfully grow their own high quality, organic cannabis at home, while The AV Team provides resources for securing and monitoring your grow operation.
With the second day of the conference focusing on workshops covering everything from proper grow equipment selection to soil mixing and cannabis reproduction using cloning, the ComfyTree Cannabis Academy, Grow School, and Job Fair has set a fairly high bar for marijuana-related conventions in the District.
Now the apparent next step in the Green Rush is the rush to figure out how to make some legal green out of all this legal green.
