[420 Girl]

On Friday the 13th NORML announced the opening, in Portland, of the first medical marijuana coffee shop in America. Since then this unforgivable error has been picked up by CBS 3, Examiner.com, Canada Free Press, Daily Finance, Money Times, Visit Bulgaria, The New York Times, Passport Magazine, Reuters, The Huffington Post, The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times Online, and The AtlanticWire, to name just a few.

The Portland Cannabis Cafe is most definitely not the first medical marijuana coffee shop in America.

The mother ship was the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club which opened in 1995 at 1444 Market Street in San Francisco. But even that was not the first. Its predecessor was a smaller operation, also ran by Dennis Peron, at Church and Market in San Francisco. About 1995 Fred Seike and Scott Imler opened a medical marijuana club in Santa Cruz and in 1997 Steve McWilliams and Barbara McKenzie opened a medical marijuana club in San Diego that was in operation at least 4 years.

As of this writing the New York Times has changed the title of their article and added the following note:

This post was corrected after its initial publication to make clear that the statement in other reports, that this cafe was the nation’s first to allow marijuana use, was incorrect.

Unlike NORML's club, The San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club did not charge a membership fee or a use fee or require anyone to be a member of anything, except (of course) the club. Membership was free to anyone with a valid recommendation from a doctor, and cards were issued to members. You had to have a card to get in.

Patients purchased cannabis on two floors at a counter. One floor was for sativa, the other for indica. Both floors had lounge areas of various types, and there was entertainment space as well. Medicating on the premises was not just allowed but encouraged. There were 5 floors in all, with intake and the offices of Proposition 215 on the ground floor, the backroom and club office on the 2nd floor, indica on the 3rd floor, and sativa on the 4th floor.

It should be noted that on November 3rd, KDRV TV in Oregon reported the Portland Cannabis Cafe was the second medical marijuana club in that city - that another club had opened a month previous.

http://www.420magazine.com/forums/in...p-america.html