A Novel Idea For a L.A. Coffee House Welcomes Cannabis Smokers
As the marijuana industry grows, the indirect business opportunities that don’t involve selling pot at all, also grow. Cannabis is becoming a lifestyle for many people as the taboo label is removed and where there is a lifestyle shift, there is money to be made.
Doug Dracup and I are standing in front of a glass cabinet in his new gallery on South La Brea Avenue. We are looking at what appear to be handblown glass fruit — a big pineapple, strawberries, a bunch of grapes — but which are actually pipes.
Really, really expensive pipes. For smoking cannabis concentrates such as hash or shatter or wax or budder or rosin, many of which did not exist until recently.
The fruit set, made by renowned Humboldt County glass artist Scott Rosinski, is not for sale, Dracup said, but if it were, it would probably cost six figures.
My jaw dropped a little, but I should not have been surprised. There is so much about the cannabis world that is unexpected, and costly. The paraphernalia of my youth — Zig Zag rolling papers, alligator roach clips, shoebox lids for separating leaf from seeds — are laughably quaint now.
Today, the range of products is astonishing, goosed along by the death of marijuana prohibition and the influx of cash into an industry where visions of dollar signs have replaced fear of prosecution.
Dracup, 31, owns Hitman Glass, which makes high-end glass pipes. Last month, he opened Hitman Coffee here in a cavernous space that used to be a rug store. For members only, it is part bong gallery, part coffee shop and part co-work space. Memberships cost about $400 a month, or $4,000 a year, roughly in line with rents at other co-work spaces around town.
Display cases are filled with even more pipes-that-look-nothing-like-pipes.
Also, and possibly most enticing, Hitman has a smoking patio in back where members can bring their own joints, blunts, pipes and rigs and smoke themselves happy. Dracup and his staff are willing to teach curious neophytes about concentrates, which can be up to four times stronger than top-shelf cannabis flowers, and how to consume them.
No cannabis will be sold on the premises; in fact, no businesses in the state can legally sell recreational cannabis until 2018, and even then they will need state and local licenses.
Dracup moved to Los Angeles from Boston in 2011. Several months before, his best friend and business partner, Erik Weissman, 31, was murdered in Waltham, Mass., with two other young men. Before his death, Weissman had not been able to move west with Dracup because he was facing a court case related to an arrest for marijuana possession and intent to distribute.
Authorities believe that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who would become one of the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, may have been involved. A friend of his in Orlando, Fla., had implicated himself and Tsarnaev in the killings. In the midst of writing a confession, the friend tried to assault an F.B.I. agent and was shot to death.
(Had the Waltham triple murder been solved, some have speculated, the Boston Marathon bombings may never have happened.)
Steve
Steve is an affordable multifamily housing professional that is also the co-founder of Whiskey Congress. Steve has written for national publications such as The National Marijuana News and other outlets as a guest blogger on topics covering sports, politics, and cannabis. Steve loves whiskey, cigars, and uses powerlifting as an outlet to deal with the fact that no one listens to his brilliant ideas.
