January 12, 2010 — Entrepreneur John Lee thinks the pot business is ready for its own Amazon.com.

The numbers back him up. Marijuana is California’s biggest cash crop, generating sales estimated at $14 billion a year. Thanks to the state’s increasingly liberal medical marijuana laws, more of that money than ever before is being spent legally.

Which leaves sellers with new challenges: Taxes. Invoices. Supply chain management. Regulatory compliance.

Enter PlainView Systems, a four-month-old Sonoma startup that aims to bring sophisticated business management tools to an industry that has only recently begun operating like one. “It’s a business where everyone is very, very paranoid,” Lee says.

PlainView’s “compassionate care marketplace” is a business-to-business exchange for licensed providers of medical marijuana and their patients. Participants can band together to form growing collectives — a legal requirement for those that want to sell pot — and cut deals with other members to buy and sell their inventory. The system also helps users sellers keep their records in order, generating invoices, sales reports and tax paperwork.

Evan, who asked that his last name not be used, is one of the site’s early clients. Now 23, he’s been growing cannabis and supplying it to a dispensary since he was 18 — when it became legal for him to do so, he is very careful to say. He uses PlainView to invoice his buyers and order seeds and fertilizer for his crop.

“I’m just a small-time grower,” Evan says. “Anytime I have extra, I can sell it to [a dispensary] for $2,000 to $4,000.”

Actually, even the word “selling” is a legal no-no with the dispensary that Evan works with. “They’re ‘reimbursing you for your time,’ that’s how they like you to say it,” he says.

That semantic footsie is a sign of how California is approaching its controversial crawl toward de facto pot legalization: By burying it in red tape. Local municipalities have drawn up a thicket of regulations specifying how, and how much, cannabis each individual merchant can grow, transport and sell. For Lee, that blizzard of bureaucracy is a business opportunity. It means sellers will need help keeping their paperwork straight.

“Just in the state of California alone, according to my calculations, medical cannabis is a $200 million market,” Lee estimates. “As that market grows, we want to have a small but significant part of.”

But the formerly underground industry isn’t exactly scrambling to shape up and fly straight. Four California dispensaries didn’t return calls and e-mails seeking comment on PlainView Systems’ business model.

“A lot of them are still on the edge of the law and may not want the publicity,” theorizes Andy Cookston, who owns Cannabis Medical, a clinic in Denver that grows and dispenses its own marijuana on the premises and dispense it.

Cookston says that he appreciates Lee’s “idealism.” If PlanView Systems does ultimately help growers and dispensaries operate within the law, “I’m all for that,” he says. “His business makes great sense.”

Lee never expected to work in the drug trade. A lifelong IT professional, he held an executive position at media software maker Real Networks before losing his job to a layoff in February. Soon after, Lee’s brother saw a news story on CNBC about California’s growing medical cannabis industry and called up to suggest it as a career option. “And I thought, ‘OK, I’ll go take a look,’” Lee says.

He didn’t want to start a dispensary and knew cannabis farming wasn’t in his future. But his quarter-century of experience in technology seemed like a useful fit for the fast-growing cannabis field.

Fourteen states have legalized some form of medical marijuana, and new signs of acceptance turn up almost daily. The American Medical Association recently softened its stance on the drug, recommending that some federal controls on it be relaxed, and the Obama administration reversed a Bush era policy and said it would stop federally prosecuting medical marijuana users and suppliers who comply with their state laws. Every step creates more potential clients for PlainView.

Lee still gets the jokes from friends — “So, you’re a pot dealer now?”

“Not exactly,” he responds. “I don’t touch any of the material. I’m not part of the transaction.”

But if all goes as planned, he intends to be part of a multi-million dollar solution. By Geoff Williams. Source.

January 10, 2010 – Mount Pleasant junior Brandon McQueen is hoping to teach people how to cook with marijuana.

The goal is among many he has as part of his recently formed Compassion Club.

Since Michigan residents voted to legalize medical marijuana in November 2008, the law has left some qualified patients scratching their heads. The biggest problem: the enacted law does not specify how to obtain the substance.

To alleviate the problem, McQueen started the Mount Pleasant Compassion Club — one of several cropping up across the state, namely facilitated by the Michigan Medical Marijuana Association.

“I’ve always just had a passion for reforming marijuana laws and I’ve always been very political,” McQueen said. “I told myself that I was going to throw myself into things and start this club.”

McQueen said since its inception, about 100 people came to meetings of the local Compassion Club — 20 being regulars. The group’s first meeting of the year is at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 21 at Biggby Coffee, 210 S. Mission St.

McQueen calls the club “a place for caregivers, patients and anybody who’s interested about medicinal marijuana to come together, meet, learn and network to find the information they’re looking for.”

Currently, he is working toward earning a 501c3 tax status for the MTPLCC and compiling a list of doctors willing to issue recommendations for qualified patients.

“The law provides patients protection in the use, acquisition and cultivation of marijuana, but there’s no legal means as to how they obtain it,” said Celeste Clarkson, compliance section manager with the state Bureau of Health Professions.

No issues
Dave Sabuda, Mount Pleasant Police Department public information officer, said there have been no issues surrounding the use of medical marijuana within jurisdiction.

“We went over the laws and how it would affect us, and we depend on our prosecutor to talk to us on how to deal with questionable things, and we haven’t had any problems with it at all,” Sabuda said.

Like any other statute, however, Sabuda knows there could be room for abuse since the law is in its early stages.

“Anytime we have new laws, there’s always going to be questions raised … and as time goes on, there’s a period of oversight or interpretation issues,” Sabuda said.

Clarkson said there have been primitive discussions in Lansing about implementing government-run marijuana warehouses or a dispensary that registered patients may obtain their medical marijuana from in order to avoid complications with law enforcement.

Whether Michigan could garner any revenue from selling medical marijuana via tax revenues is among the issues being discussed, she said.

Since the Michigan Medical Marijuana Program began approving patient applications in early April 2008, 12,723 applications were received and 6,920 of them were approved. About 71 applications are received on average each day. Source.