Despite success, some stigma remains in recreational pot business 1 year after licenses issued

LANGLEY, Wash. -- "Just let me tell you how fun this is,” 73-year-old Maureen Cooke said of her foray into the recreational pot business.

“People will come in who are in my age group, or 20 years younger. They’ll walk in and they’ll say, ‘Oh my gosh! I have waited 30 years for this to happen!’”

Cooke’s pot shop, Whidbey Island Cannabis Co., was one of 24 awarded a license to sell recreation pot on July 7, 2014 – the first day such licenses were issued in Washington state. The store, which she co-owns with a partner, is located just a few miles from her other business – a popular restaurant in Langley called Mo’s Pub & Eatery.

Regulars at Mo’s didn’t seem the least bit surprised when Cooke told them about her plans to open up a recreation pot shop.

“I think there was a misconceived notion of what a pot shop owner should look like, or be, or do,” said a friend of Cooke’s. “She is a fabulous capitalist. There was a market for it on the island – you all know who you are.”

Cooke said she knew very little about marijuana when she decided to apply for a license. She smoked it a few times in the 1980s, but said “all it did was make my knees very weak and all I did was laugh and giggle.”

“This was a business opportunity,” she said.

Like many of the first people to open stores in Washington, Cooke struggled with the constantly changing rules and regulations. Many shops dealt with an insufficient supply of product and pushback from local jurisdictions who didn’t want the shops around.

“Implementing legal marijuana was not without some bumps along the way. No one had ever done this before,” said Brian Smith, communications director for the Washington State Liquor Control Board.

Smith said Washington had the responsibility to create a “tightly regulated and controlled marijuana market” to appease concerns from the federal government.

“If Washington or Colorado screwed it up by being too lax,” he said, “the concern was that the federal government would intervene and stop the entire movement from moving forward.”

A year after the first stores were allowed to open, Smith said Washington has “exceeded economic forecasts significantly.”

Since July 2014, $257,248,808 has been spent on recreational pot statewide. An average of $1,496,632 in product is now sold each day.

To date, recreational weed has brought in $64,312,202 in excise taxes and the state has collected $17,050,778 in combined sales tax, business and occupation tax, and miscellaneous penalties and fees.

“Taking it all in to consideration one year later, I think you’d have to say the state was successful in meeting its public safety objectives while regulating an industry that is growing and serving consumers,” Smith said.

Back on Whidbey Island, Carly Houghton, who was brought in to manage Cooke’s store at the very beginning, said the shop has slowly been accepted by the community.

“For me, personally, the thing that was challenging was kind of that stigma that got attached to us,” she said. “You kind of get a little bit of resistant from people, because they just don’t understand. But, at this point, it’s kind of like those struggles at the beginning with people don’t really matter now.”

She said the store’s clientele doesn’t fit the “stoner” stereotype that some people may have.

“Honestly, our average age group is about 40 to 60 and it’s people who work at banks and office buildings,” she said. “You would never guess they smoke weed, because they don’t fit that stereotype.”

Still, some stigma remains in the world of legal pot.

More than a dozen customers who walked into the store on a recent afternoon declined to be interviewed, or to even have their faces shown on camera. Cooke said many of her customers have employers who aren’t cool with them smoking weed.

Houghton said some people were hesitant to come into the store at first and “would park on the side and look around really quick to see if anyone was watching them.”

Cooke said it could take nationwide legalization of marijuana for the stigma to go away entirely, but she hopes to help by opening more recreational pot stores if the opportunity arises.

“Never in my wildest dreams,” she said of whether she thought she’d be in the legal pot business at the age of 73. “I mean, I thought they should have legalized pot 20 years ago, 30 years ago. But here it is now and lucky for me I can be involved in it.”