One Dispensary's journey in el monte's budding marijuana market

EL MONTE, Calif. — Cannabis. Marijuana. Weed. Smoke. Ganja. Herb. Whatever one chooses to call it, there is no doubt that marijuana has, and continues to be one of the more controversial issues in American society. Nowhere has this battle been more center-stage than in the state that many consider to be the Marijuana Mecca, California.

While many people may view the laid-back atmosphere of the Golden State to mean that everybody is supportive of cannabis, this is not the case. Even though Californians voted to legalize recreational marijuana usage in 2016, many more campaigns are still playing out in individual cities deciding whether to allow pot shops to open within their borders. Recently, a battle over allowing marijuana companies to do business came to a close in the city of El Monte.

California made waves in the 1990s when it became the first U.S. state to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes. This meant that anyone suffering from ailments as mild as back pain, all the way up to something as severe as cancer could be evaluated by a doctor to see if they qualified for a medical marijuana card that allowed them to purchase and consume cannabis from licensed dispensaries.

The Compassionate Care Act of 1997 which legalized medical marijuana only received 56% support from voters. And in 2010 when Californians were faced with their first opportunity to allow recreational sales through Proposition 19, the initiative failed with 53% of the population voting no.

It was not until 2016 when Proposition 64 was introduced that California would become the fifth state to legalize recreational marijuana with almost 60% of the population agreeing to pass it. While many people may have viewed this as a victory at the time, the passage of this initiative would be just the first step in the long journey of normalizing marijuana on the same level as, say, alcohol.

While El Monte voters did support Prop 64 and its mission of legalizing cannabis, allowing the industry to take a foothold in the community was still up for debate. In September of 2017, the El Monte City Council unanimously approved Ordinance No. 1216 which allowed for the cultivation of marijuana and sale of medicinal cannabis while barring its commercial sale. 

A Brief History of Cannabis in California

Even the move to permit cultivation within El Monte stoked the fires of a resistance that was building in El Monte and neighboring communities against the marijuana industry.

In November of 2018, El Monte’s City Council received its first application under the new ordinance to issue a permit for a medical-only cannabis project. This project, which ended up being approved, was on Temple Boulevard, a dividing street between El Monte and Temple City. 

This move piqued the concern of residents from neighboring cities who felt as though the El Monte City Council was acting in bad faith through their zoning laws that only allowed cannabis businesses to open on the outskirts of the city. 

Fenglan Liu, 53, is an attorney originally from China but currently residing in Temple City. She recalls this day in November very vividly.

“It was November 27^th, just a day after Thanksgiving,” she said. “I was having my dinner; I heard this news on social media, and I was so shocked. I stopped eating and I ran to city hall.”

Ms. Liu’s biggest concern was the proximity that marijuana businesses have to some schools and large residential areas.

Ms. Liu was not alone, as many more residents of El Monte and its neighboring cities felt that they needed to fight back against this perceived invasion of cannabis businesses, especially those in the Asian community. In El Monte, Asian people make up about 31% of the city’s population.

“We [Asians] are very conservative people, we don’t want the kids thinking about getting marijuana,” she said. “Internationally, a lot of countries still think of it as a drug.”

It is not surprising then that Ms. Liu opposed the opening of El Monte’s first recreational dispensary in November of 2021.

Catalyst Cannabis Co. is a chain of Southern California dispensaries that started in Long Beach and has since begun to expand to more cities across the region. 

Elliot Lewis, 44, is Catalyst’s CEO and founder. He has been through the process of bringing dispensaries to new cities before, so this type of conflict is not new to him.

“I always say, 70% of the people are for it, but you don’t get a lot of loud people who are for it,” he said. He continued, “You go to a city council meeting and I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, here come the NIMBYs,’ which is the not in my backyard people.”

Despite the pushback that Lewis receives from various residents, he maintains that opening a Catalyst dispensary is one of the best decisions for a community. 

“We would never go into a city, ever, and not do community outreach, or not uplift the community. And we do it for its own good, but I’m also very self-aware. It’s good to de-stigmatize cannabis,” he said. “It’s good to ingratiate yourself into the community.”

At his El Monte location, this came in the form of a toy drive, food drive and expungement clinic to remove marijuana offenses from peoples’ records.

Mr. Lewis also described some of the other ways he believes the cannabis community can help to further remove the stigma from marijuana in a brief podcast interview:

El Monte, like many other cities that have adopted legislation to allow marijuana businesses to operate, includes provisions in its laws that put money earned in taxes from cannabis sales to be put towards community projects like after-school programs, park development and public safety.

Ms. Liu is not convinced that these financial benefits for the city cannot be obtained through other forms of commercial investment.

“If you want tax money, you can get it,” she said. “El Monte doesn’t have any nice restaurants; El Monte doesn’t have a Costco. El Monte doesn’t have those kinds of nice businesses. Why don’t you put those things in your city?”

Ms. Liu instead believes that much of the push to permit the sale of marijuana was due to donations made by those in the cannabis industry to members of the city council who do not care about the well-being of their city. 

Mr. Lewis believes that the city council has made a fair and competitive process to obtain a permit in El Monte that only six dispensaries will qualify for.

An initiative must be proposed by the dispensary in conjunction with a registered voter in the jurisdiction, in this case, El Monte. At that point, the initiative must garner enough signatures and be presented to the city council where they will either adopt it or allow it to be voted on in a public election.

However, the inner workings and behind-the-scenes of collecting signatures can oftentimes lead to new conflicts.

At the same time Catalyst was working to get signatures to open a location, Ms. Liu was organizing counter-protests and collecting signatures for a petition to cease the issuance of permits to marijuana businesses.

Enter Damian Martin, co-founder of Catalyst who also acts as their attorney and is dubbed the “Keyser Söze of Cannabis” by Mr. Lewis. Before joining Mr. Lewis at Catalyst, Mr. Martin cut his teeth working as an operations analyst in banking and a performance analyst in the D.C. court system.

Mr. Martin was responsible for writing the initiative and helped during the signature-gathering phase.

Ms. Liu and Mr. Martin’s paths crossed more than once during the process, but one time stood out to Ms. Liu the most.

Ms. Liu recalled a day when she was collecting signatures and Mr. Martin began to follow her in his car and tried to persuade people against signing her petition. 

“I was driving to a location to organize people and he chased me,” she said. “He didn’t only chase me, he chased our other volunteers every day too,” she continued, “He didn’t act like an attorney, he acted like a gangster.”

Mr. Martin has a somewhat different account of this encounter. He believes that this was all a part of swinging voters to his side of the issue.

In an email, Mr. Martin wrote, “Democracy inherently involves competing for voters and votes. I specifically sought to counter their efforts by communicating with the same voters that Fenglan Liu and her colleagues were communicating with.  In other words, I wasn’t following Fenglan Liu, but, rather, I was following the voters.”

He later said he believes much of Ms. Liu’s recollection to be “revisionist history” and that he recalls their interactions after this event being rather pleasant, even stating that the two had coffee together. 

Unfortunately for Fenglan Liu (or fortunately for Damian Martin), Catalyst’s El Monte location was able to open its doors on November 5^th, 2021, becoming the first recreational dispensary in the city.

During Catalyst’s opening, Mr. Lewis noted that several members of the El Monte City Council along with the former mayor, Andre Quintero, were in attendance and appeared to view the opening as a victory for the city.

Mr. Lewis and Mr. Martin have a philosophy at Catalyst they refer to as the “weed for the people” movement. They both believe it to be responsible for much of the brand’s positive reception.

According to Martin, this includes, “making cannabis reasonably accessible to the People and operating a successful cannabis business in the State of California.”

Mr. Lewis also emphasized that aside from making weed affordable and accessible, it is about providing a positive experience for the consumer and the community.

He said of the balance between growing as a company while also maintaining this mantra, “There’s this whole battle, you want to be as big and bad as you can, but you also don’t want to lose touch with your mission statement.”

Dennis Garcia, 34, is one of the managers at the El Monte location who started working there shortly after its opening. He believes Mr. Lewis is following through on his promise to remain true to this goal.

He said of Mr. Lewis as a CEO, “He listens to his employees and his management team; other dispensaries don’t listen to their employees for input.” He continued, “When I first got to meet him, I saw that he was about the industry he wasn’t just here to try to collect a few extra bucks. He actually cares about the weed industry.”

Many Catalyst customers were also happy that they did not have to traverse long distances or pay expensive delivery costs to buy their weed.

Elizabeth Teschler, 35, is from Glendora, a neighboring city. “It’s the only dispensary near me. The delivery services charge an arm and a leg, and I was sick of that. So, coming here and actually being able to talk to someone in person is kind of nice,” she said.

As part of Mr. Lewis’ attempts to maintain a loyal consumer base, he offers multitudes of discounts to customers to account for the wide variety of people who shop at his stores.

Michael Morán, 23, from Covina said, “I work for a union job, and they offer union discounts here. When I found out they were opening a location here, I told everyone at my job, this is the place we all gotta go to now and I think we all come here now.”

They also offer similar discounts to members of the military and disabled customers.

Despite the pushback that Catalyst faced before its opening, Mr. Lewis and his team were able to deliver El Monte its first recreational dispensary with little to no complications.

Since its opening, the opposition has quelled and those who were against its opening have accepted it and learned to live with it. 

Even Ms. Liu acknowledged that the only difference she has noticed in the community is the odor of marijuana wafting through the air more often.

A culture shift on the scale of removing the taboo associated with marijuana will take time and there is no way around that. However, when those in the cannabis business seek to win over the trust of their communities and customers by giving back, this process can certainly be sped up and Elliot Lewis and Catalyst Cannabis are at the frontlines of that effort.