Josh Weitz

Photo Credit: Joe Budd

“It’s a redemption story, for sure.”

The story all starts with me being born July 30, 1982. I was born here in San Francisco at a SF Children's Hospital on California Street. I was raised in the Mission.

My best friend, who I’ve known since childhood but is a little bit older than me, he had a bunch friends that were from New York and out of state, because of college. And then I started to grow a little bit of weed.

I would grow a little, he would sell it, I was cool. Then he hired me to help him do his thing, packing up weed and buying from people. That's how I started to understand the way the business went, how shipping went.

He taught me the whole business, and then eventually, he took his stuff and left. Then he gave me most of his routes and I just expanded it from there.

For me, I wanted to stay in the cannabis business because I was tracking the growth of the medical cannabis industry. I have three uncles with colon cancer, who have been struggling with colon cancer for the past 20 years, and they swore by the effectiveness of medical marijuana, how it saved their lives. Thank god they're in remission now or it's been managed.

I felt this is a business that, even though at the time it was kind of illegal in California, and was super illegal every place else, that it's still a righteous business. I felt like, "Hey, I got to stay on this track and position myself for when it really cracks open legally." My goal was to expand the business my friend gave me and save money to be able to get into a medical dispensary, and then an adult use dispensary. I could see it happening somewhere down the line.

I knew it was going to take a lot of money to do it. Obviously, there was nobody to borrow that money from; there was no bank to borrow that money from, so I knew I was going to have to do it myself. My exit strategy was to exit into the legal weed business.

I had a bunch of really good years, but unfortunately, I did end up getting arrested in Texas in 2014. I was driving about 150 pounds of marijuana from California to New York City. I was about to move on to my own exit strategy because we were going to have a referendum on legal marijuana. I’m ready. I'm thinking, I’m going to get a medical cannabis dispensary, and I'll be perfectly positioned to jump into the moment we're at right now.

I was onboarding a friend of mine, because this whole business is built on trust. He's Puerto Rican and Black. I never really thought about how that riding next to a person that's African-American is like the opposite of the lottery. The lottery you don't want to win. You're 10 times more likely to go to jail if you're a black man in a car.

Unfortunately, in Texas, it was just an automatic, big red target painted on us. They pulled us over. I thought that this was going to be one of the last runs. I could see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. That was very devastating.

I ended up fighting the case because it was my first offense ever. I had a totally clean record. Even my co-defendant, he had never gotten caught for anything either. That worked in our favor because then we were able to bail out much easier, or even get bail.

I kept going and kept going, and by December 2015 I had gotten arrested again. This time on the lower east side of New York City for having a couple of pounds of weed on me, because I was trying to re-up. I was trying to get back to where I was. I lost 150 pounds of weed. That was all my money.

They left me at Rikers Island for about a year. A lot of being in jail is not knowing what is going to happen to you when you get out. That's really the torturous part.

It had a tremendous impact on my family, mainly because most of them had no idea what I was doing or up to. My sister, who I love very much, found out what I'd been up to for the past six years, from a phone call. We barely talked at the time because I just wanted to keep things separate.

I called her from jail; she was super supportive. I told her what I was trying to do. I had an exit strategy. I had a corporation set up in the state of California ready, the cooperative to deliver marijuana. I had a brand called Mirage Medicinal that I had registered as a DBA in San Francisco.

I had a website that I had already built out. I had everything, even the cannabis. It was all in a room. "Hey, if you want, I can give you the keys to this operation. You could do it." She said yes to that, on a phone call from jail. It was crazy. That's family for you.

Simultaneously, while I was in jail, my sister had formed a women of color advocacy group called Supernova Women. At that point, in 2016, it was apparent that marijuana was going to become adult use. She knew that there was going to have to be some kind of framework legally, on a policy level, that allowed former felons to enter the legal business once marijuana became legal.

She made it her personal mission to make sure that people of color were able to access that, even though they might have been incarcerated formally for selling cannabis.

It was dire, because in Colorado and Washington, maybe Oregon too, if you were a felon, you were shut out of the marijuana business. You had zero access. It was a very real possibility that that was going to happen here in California, the biggest state in the country.

That means you’re shut out of all opportunity, completely black marked. You're on a cycle to jail, back out on the street and back to jail, for the rest of your life essentially, while other people take advantage of this huge, green rush opportunity.

My sister quickly started to mobilize. In San Francisco specifically, she got in touch with the Human Rights Commission, which is a governmental policy body here in San Francisco and started working with them very closely on collecting data to back up why people of color should be allowed back into the cannabis industry, the reasons that communities of color were targeted during the war on drugs.

Through that policy group, she was able to make contact with the city supervisors, especially Malia Cohen's office, who spearheaded the equity on cannabis policy. We were able to create a very broad equity program, which is made to give access to people of color that were formerly incarcerated for marijuana, a preferred pathway to be able to engage investors and create your own businesses.

That's huge, and that's where we're at right now. We're on the cusp; we're on the very precipice.

I'm a beneficiary, and I was an advocate. I went and spoke to all these supervisors with a bunch of other folks who were just like me, in the same situation. We helped write the policy in order to make it broad enough that a majority of San Francisco from 1973 to 2016 who were arrested like me get to be a part of the business that almost destroyed them.

I came back from Rikers Island late 2016. It took me about four or five months to really just shake off the jail and feel comfortable. You get a lot of anxiety. But now, I have an opportunity to start a multi-million dollar company. Investors, if they want to get in the next two years, they have to come through an individual who has a record like mine.

It’s a redemption story, for sure.