An adult in San Francisco wanting a preroll or THC-infused brownie has over 80 permitted vendors to browse on their phones.
Per the City’s Office of Cannabis, there are 40 storefronts and 40 delivery-only options for avid stoners, medical patients, and novices to peruse, each with their own distinct menu curations, decor, and general vibe. Though online resources like Leafly provide customers some guidance on what genetically is in their $10 preroll, by and large people still rely on the expertise of their “budtenders.”
The term budtender is a quite real and non-ironic term for the public-facing dispensary employee, who often juggle job responsibilities between a retail clerk, prescribing pharmacist, and sommelier. But they are paid little — and trained less. Even 15 years after Senate Bill 420 laid out the creation of medical marijuana dispensaries in California (and the subsequent need for informed, patient-facing workers), budtenders are still largely considered expendable. They have some of the industry’s highest turnover rates, with speculation from Forbes that the position is a “dead end” with little opportunity for advancement.
“This is really medicine for me.”
Little has changed for budtender workflow over the pandemic; many of them lost their jobs due to downsizing and transitions to delivery or pick-up only, and many still lack foundational training on the plant and its byproducts they’re selling. Oakland equity license holder and former budtender Javier Armas is ready to change that, with a book and a class.
“Budtenders are the key industrial link between brand and patient,” he says, hinting that they rarely get credit for it. “Budtenders are just so neglected, exploited, overworked. Nobody cares about them; nobody cared about me. So, I want to help and give them training and intellectual focus. I don’t see anybody doing it.”
He’s not wrong.
A 2016 article published in Substance Abuse details a survey of budtenders in California, namely from the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, with just over half of participants had received formal training. There were numerous differences between “trained” and “untrained” budtenders, from demographics to job longevity to communication style with customers.
“The legacy I would like to leave is to create a completely new framework for budtenders that is organic, that unites science, social science, ecology, politics, nature, and civilization in a unified framework that budtenders could hand to other budtenders,” Armas says. “It’s a very powerful combination where theory, the material world, and practice come together. We’re living in a renaissance right now.”
We’re also living through a pandemic, with a lot of time we can devote to personal projects.
Even before the Bay Area went into some of the country’s strictest lockdowns, Armas was self-publishing articles contextualizing the power dynamics of cannabis communities around the world. He’d post them to his LinkedIn, and as the pandemic dragged on into the fall of 2020, he surveyed his output. Out of 35 essays, he selected the 22 with the best engagement, polished them, and made them into the book now known as “Budtender Education Volume 1.”
Cindy De La Vega is the first Latina equity owner of a dispensary and CEO of Stiiizy’s Union Square location.
Armas had known cannabis was a vehicle for creativity, change, and upward mobility since he was 14 years old, prepping dime bags to sell to Berkeley High students. He was an avid reader, freestyler, and so-called revolutionary likening his adolescent self to a “weed-smoking Che Guevara.” By the time he was ready to transfer and get his history degree from UCSC, the Bay Area’s first generation of dispensaries were opening as a result of Senate Bill 420, and a friend of his was able to get a permit for a cheeky little spot in Hayward.
Armas would come up for the summers and help out and started budtending full-time once he graduated in 2007. Since then, over 35 states and territories have legalized cannabis in some form and erected dispensaries from which patients and/or recreational users can seek products and advice. There are now codified procedures, tracking systems, and the entire point of sales systems built to suit weed sales, and Armas has risen to CEO of his own equity business; he says the approaches to problems for budtenders haven’t really changed.
Across the San Francisco Bay, another regional cannapreneur was also making waves.
Cindy De La Vega knew firsthand what education and empowerment at the community level could do in changing a person’s life. Vega is the first Latina equity owner of a dispensary and CEO of Stiiizy’s Union Square location. As a San Francisco native who spent over a decade working with United Playaz, a non-profit organization that provides vulnerable city youth with workshops, after-school programs, and mentorships to build leadership skills, strengthen community, and further their education, cannabis was in her wheelhouse.
De La Vega began working at Stiiizy’s Mission location as a receptionist in 2018, and in less than three years, opened Stiiizy’s Union Square store on October 9 as its part-owner and CEO. As a former resident of the Sunnydale housing projects, the same principles of equity and education she instilled with kids apply to her employees at Stiiizy.
“I want people to know that when you purchase from my location, it’s not just purchasing for a company,” De La Vega told Cannabis Dispensary magazine in November. “We’re putting back into the community, and we’re doing this for equity, really… we need more support; we need to know that there is a better way out.”
Armas met De La Vega a couple of years ago in the brainstorming phase of BALCA, the Bay Area Latino Cannabis Alliance — a volunteer organization founded to elevate Latinx operators in the cannabis industry through their five pillars of “education, professional development, civil rights, business ownership, and cultural expression” — for which Armas is a founder and leader. When Armas published “Budtender Education,” he made the rounds to sell the book in dispensaries, including his friend Cindy’s store. Stiiizy and other clubs like Harborside in Oakland sell the book to the public, but it was a cannabis newcomer that encouraged De La Vega and Armas to provide a more hands-on resource.
Ariana McCray came to the Bay Area last year from her native Virginia, expecting to continue her work mentoring youth, freelancing, and maybe go to grad school at some point. She arrived in Oakland on March 18, 2020, after a full day spent in the Atlanta airport, to a kind Uber driver who offered her a joint.
She wasn’t going to leave; it was clear to her, a spiritual person, that something had beckoned her to California.
Her Airbnb host eventually became her landlord and had started growing cannabis in her backyard after attending Oakland’s Oaksterdam University, where adults can learn cannabis cultivation and business skills. As she began looking for work, she met Success Centers’ Angela White, who connected her with De La Vega and Shryne Group, which owns Stiiizy.
“Cindy is my mentor,” says McCray, “I remember telling Cindy, ‘let’s get him to teach the class and the book; we need the class.’ And she was like, ‘let’s figure out how to make it happen.’ And before I knew it, it was a thing.”
The class is somewhat of a dissection of the book, which covers topics like indigenous agricultural practices, a breakdown of cannabis license types, an homage to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and European philosophy. They’re more than halfway through a 12-week course that meets on Wednesday at 1 p.m. via Zoom, and just wrapped up the section on Egyptian cannabis history. Yes, there will be a final, and diploma. Armas hopes the example will permeate other businesses, and bring an equity-informed perspective to employees across the Bay, and the country as so many states pass legislation.
McCray’s home state of Virginia will legalize recreational cannabis on July 1, but retail sales are still years away. She’s been siphoning her education and acumen back to family in Virginia, where they own property perfect for a pot farm and postponing grad school. She’s the first to tell you cannabis, and this class has changed her life.
“This is really medicine for me. If you got to use my life as a testimony, that’s what I’m here to be. There’s a lot of work to be done. It’s a lot of stuff to learn. And I’m always open to learning.”
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There’s a lot more to learn, to be sure. While Volume 1 surveys cannabis’ origins in relation to the current industry’s looming issues, Armas plans for his next book to be a “people’s history” with a diverse cast of activists and icons. Education behind the proverbial bar is contagious; an informed workforce equips their clientele with the best products for them, from brands they can trust.
