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Steve Ackerman interview, part 1Linda Meyer: Okay. This is Linda Meyer, and today is June 28th, 2019. And I am talking with Steve Ackerman at his place of business on Mountain Avenue in Fort Collins, Colorado. All right, looks like the levels are working. So, I'll just start asking you some questions. All right, so could you talk a little bit about the community where you grew up as a child and your young adulthood, and some memories of your parents, grandparents, other relatives?
Steve Ackerman: Let's see, I was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1954. Moved out to the northern suburbs of Detroit, I believe when I was in fifth grade. My father instilled --even though he would never describe himself as an entrepreneur-- he instilled the idea of entrepreneurship in his children, and I had an older brother, a younger brother, an older sister, and a younger sister.
Linda Meyer: So, you were right in the middle?
Steve Ackerman: The way that he'd done that was he owned a riding lawn mower, it was a tractor that had a mower on it. And he offered to let the boys use the lawn mower to mow other people's lawns, and give him a small amount of rent and pay for the gas. We liked to have our own little money that…
Linda Meyer: And it was a riding mower; it sounds like maybe there were some big lawns that you were mowing out there?
Steve Ackerman: Oh yeah, no, in our neighborhood there was rarely anything that was under two acres. Linda Meyer: Wow.
Steve Ackerman: Of land, the houses, it was out in the north suburbs. My brother had a paper route, I never had a paper route. I caddied at the country club -- Bloomfield Hills Country Club -- for a few summers. And in the winters we could use the tractor to plow people's driveways. I was just always, I was interested in having an income and that was a way that I could do it when I was a kid.
After graduating high school in 1972, I moved to Fort Collins to attend Colorado State University, and lived in Green Hall. One of my roommates, immediately in Green Hall we became friends. I dropped out of school after the first year. They were on the quarter system back then, so I finished a whole year and a quarter. And then did not return for the, I guess it was the spring quarter? Maybe. Might've been the winter. I don't know, I don't remember. After Christmas break I did not come back to school. Began running short on money. And I was living in a chicken coop, and I had a long cord into the main house with a telephone.
I put an ad in the Coloradoan saying that I would do cleanup, repair or remodel. The phone rang once, and it was this guy that wanted me to clean out an old building down here in old town. This was over on Linden Street before the Old Town Square was built. This would've been in 1974. He had owned this place as the... He opened it up probably when your dad was over at CSU, he'd opened it up as a 3.2 bar, serving 3.2 beer, and it was called the Green Onion.
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Linda Meyer: The Green Onion. Yeah.Steve Ackerman: And he sold it to some guys that opened it up as the City Dump. And then they went out of business, and he sold it again to somebody that reopened it as the Green Onion, and they went out of business, and he was back in there trying to sell it to the next guys. And the Health Department said that the place would not change hands, or would not open up until the upstairs of the building had been cleaned out of about somewhere around eight to ten inches of pigeon droppings.
Linda Meyer: Oh no.
Steve Ackerman: And old stoves, and refrigerators, and mattresses, and things. So, I was hired to do that. Linda Meyer: And you were living in a chicken coop, so was this a friend that had a house that had a
chicken coop? Or how did you manage to find yourself--?
Steve Ackerman: I had lived in the main house until I didn't have enough money to pay rent in the main house, and the people that were left in the main house rented my room, but allowed me to go out and live in the chicken coop. I think I paid them something, $25 a month or something like that.
In any case, it took about six weeks to clean out the upstairs of the building and fumigate it, by the time I had gotten done with the job he'd talked me into signing my name on the lease and buying the business from him. And I bought the business by going to a group of my friends that were still going to Colorado State. And they'd all borrowed money from their parents, very small amount, and we got enough money to give this guy a down payment, which is all he really wanted, because he knew he was going to get it back.
Linda Meyer: He thought you were going to default. Steve Ackerman: Yeah.
Linda Meyer: How much was he asking for a down payment? Steve Ackerman: I think we gave him $10,000.
Linda Meyer: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Which was a fair amount in the early 70s.
Steve Ackerman: Yeah, that was. And there were four of us. It might have been less, I just really don't remember. But I know that we went out and spent a lot of money on a stereo because you had to have music. And the guy told me that he'd operated the place during College Days, and that the whole street out in front of the place turned into a party. And he said all you got to do is hire a band and get some kegs of beer in your coolers, and you got a business. I knew nothing about it. But I wasn't doing anything else, I didn't know what my next thing was going to be after I cleaned out the upstairs of the building. The building now houses the Little Bird Bakery, was our front door, and the Bondi Beach Bar was where the stage was. And I was 19 years old.
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Steve Ackerman: So, I guess the theme is that I was an early entrepreneur adaptor. I figured out how todo things with the bare minimum of investment. Which I'm not sure if those opportunities even exist anymore. I'm sure somebody-- you have to start with something, but I usually started with next to nothing.
Linda Meyer: Yes.
Steve Ackerman: Anyways, so when I turned... Actually when school got out, my partners who were all CSU students, advised me that they were going to go home for the summer. And I could have the bar. Because it just wasn't a really good business proposition. But I didn't have anything else going on, so I ran the bar with one remaining partner.
Linda Meyer: Now was it called the Green Onion? Steve Ackerman: It was called, no we called it Dirty Sam’s.
Linda Meyer: Dirty Sam’s. Did you know anyone named Sam or was that just-
Steve Ackerman: Well, that was the other part of the story is that the college roommate who was my remaining partner and actually was the instigating one, that came in early, first day that I met him when I came to CSU, I just started calling the guy Sam even though his name was Jay. And he started calling me Sam, so when we were trying to think of what to name the place we decided to call it Sam's. And then we decided to make it more interesting by calling it Dirty Sam's. I think there was some place down in Denver that was called Dirty somebody's, I can't remember whether it was Dirty Harry's or… Anyway, so then this partner left the business probably a year later. And when I turned 21, I decided that I was going to get a regular liquor license so that we could stay open past midnight and until two o’clock. Because normally in those days, we closed at midnight, and everybody would leave our place, and go to the other bars downtown and spend the rest of their money.
Linda Meyer: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Because yours was just 3.2 beer?
Steve Ackerman: Uh-huh (affirmative) I had to close at midnight. We had live entertainment. And we booked bands in there like, I think the first nationally known act that we had in there was a guy named JJ Kale. And we had people like Asleep At The Wheel and David Bromberg and Taj Mahal, and the L.A. Express, just a long list of over a period of 10 years I operated that.
And through that I wound up having the opportunity to own half of the building, which I did. And eventually, the other half was owned by Gene Mitchell who's a local attorney and developer. And Gene convinced me that I should take my half of the building and invest that value in the development of Old Town Square. So, I operated until 1984, and they started the construction of Old Town Square in ‘85, and we closed up in sometime in’ 84.
So, it was a good ten years. And I was, I think I was 29 when I stopped, and I figured it was a third of my life I'd spent in owning a bar.
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Steve Ackerman: Sam's Old Town Ballroom is what I renamed it after we got the liquor license, I wentthrough remodeling. I actually bought an antique, back bar fixture from a local antique dealer here in town. And I still own that bar. The bar is next door in my marijuana dispensary.
Linda Meyer: And so, you sold the Old Town Ballroom?
Steve Ackerman: I didn't sell it. What I did was I traded my lease for a half ownership, and then I traded my half ownership in the building for a percentage ownership in the Old Town Square. And after the square was constructed, development was complete, they found it hard to get tenants in there that could pay the amount of rent that was necessary to cover the expense of the mortgage of the loans against it. So, the partnership went bankrupt. Old Town Square is still there, but the original owners lost all of their investments, including myself.
Linda Meyer: And that was late ‘80s? Steve Ackerman: It would have been ‘85, ‘86.
Linda Meyer: There was kind of an economic downturn at that point, wasn't there?
Steve Ackerman: Right. But it also, it really was just a little bit of a reach. So, the person that owns it now, has owned it since then. He bought it 10 cents on the dollar from the insurers that had loaned the money, and they wrote it off.
Anyway, 1987, in February of ‘87, I went out and actually from Sam's Old Town Ballroom, after we closed, I continued to use my connections that I had in the music business, and booked national touring acts to play at the Lincoln Center, and at other large clubs here in Fort Collins. In February of 1987, I had a show booked at the Lincoln Center with the Count Basie Orchestra. And I had booked the hall, booked the band, I had the posters going up, the tickets were on sale, the advertising was all in place. And that basically meant my job was kind of done for a few days.
So, I rewarded myself with a trip up to Steamboat to go skiing, and about halfway up Poudre Canyon, not even, I slid off the road. It was in a snow storm. I slid off the road, and broke my back. So, that pretty much put an end to my ski season in 1987.
Linda Meyer: Were you in the hospital for very long?
Steve Ackerman: I was in the hospital… When I came into the hospital at about, I think the accident happened maybe ten o'clock at night, or nine o'clock at night. And I didn't get to the hospital until early in the morning, the next day, because the roads were so bad. And when I was wheeled into the emergency room, they put me in a CAT scan machine, and there was a state patrolman who was behind me. He's trying to write me a citation, he’s questioning how fast I was going, and how much I'd had to drink. Neither of which were… I was going 15 miles an hour, and I hadn't had anything to drink.
And then I got a chance to talk to the neurosurgeon who came over, and he had his hand over his mouth, and I said, "So what's the story?" And he said, "You're going to be in the hospital for the next six weeks”—or excuse me, "For the next three months, and in a wheelchair for the rest of your life." Immediately. And I went, "Oh." That didn't sound right, because-
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Linda Meyer: Pretty blunt.Steve Ackerman: I was a skier. And I was just on my way to go skiing. But anyway, I was also promoting a show while I was in the hospital, and three days out of intensive care, and into the neurological rehab floor. The nurses came into my room and said, "We can't take any more of your phone calls." They said, "We've got 30 messages here, and we've got to do something." And I said, "Well, I'm promoting a concert." And they looked at me like, "Somebody tell him he's not promoting a concert. This is way more serious."
Linda Meyer: This was before they had phones in your rooms?
Steve Ackerman: No, there was a phone in the room, but I wasn't always able to answer it. I was out for testing, and x-rays, and rehab things. So, I had a friend come in to visit me, and he said, "Anything I can do for you?" I said, "Yeah, go down to the store, and buy me a phone answering machine." And we unplugged the phone, and plugged in the phone answering machine. And I began getting all my messages, and I continued to work on promoting the show at the Lincoln Center. And two days... And everybody told me I wasn't going to that show.
Two days before the show, my neurosurgeon came in, and he said, "Well Steve, congratulations. I'm going to sign you off on going to your show. And you'll go over there with a nurse, and she's going to accompany you." So, I went to my show, and when I came back the next morning, he said, "I'm going to send you down to Denver for an MRI." Which was a new thing back then. And that was going to be in another week or so, it'd be six weeks into my stay. And I said, "Okay, well, when I go down to Denver, I'm not coming back." He said, "Yeah, you are." And I said, "No, that's going to be it for me. And I'll be an outpatient.”
And so, six weeks later, I'd beat his three month hospital stay by half. While I was in the hospital, I get a phone call from a friend of mine who I had met when I owned Sam's Old Town Ballroom. And he said, we had parallel businesses. He had a music store that he used to sell the local musicians, their strings and instruments and things and lessons, and I was the place where they perform. And we were very good friends. We had a symbiotic relationship in that respect. And he had moved out to California, and started a 2,500 capacity nightclub in an old art deco movie theater. And through a chain of events, had become-- was working for a large concert promoter in California. And he called me anyway and said, "Don't worry Steve, I have a job for you this
summer-- or next summer." And I said, "what's that? And he said, "We're going to open up the Fiddler's Green Amphitheater down in Denver." And he said, "I wanted you to do all the promotion." So, basically I came out of the hospital with a job opportunity. Linda Meyer: That's great.
Steve Ackerman: So, not to make this long story, too long or- Linda Meyer: This is fine.
Steve Ackerman: Okay. Anyway, after I did that for a couple of years- Linda Meyer: So, you did you move to Denver to do that?
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Steve Ackerman: I stayed in a hotel down in the Tech Center. I stayed at the new Hyatt Regency at theTech Center, which was built in ‘87, I believe, maybe ‘86, ‘87. Brand new. [A woman comes to the front door.] It's probably a customer. Hello.
Speaker 3: Hey.
Steve Ackerman: Hey.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I'm at the right place? Steve Ackerman: Right next door.
Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you.
Steve Ackerman: So anyway, I did that for two years, and then I had a friend who was a quadriplegic in Fort Collins in a wheelchair. And he convinced me that I should go out to California to something called the Abilities Expo, which was a trade show for consumers of people that had disabilities of all kinds, and it was adaptive equipment, everything from wheelchairs to what would eventually become my next thing, which was hand cycling. While I was in the convention hall out there in LA, there was a guy riding around on a contraption that you pedaled with your arms, had one wheel in front, two wheels behind in a recumbent position. And he had a sign up that said he was going to ride from California to New York City in 26 days.
Linda Meyer: Wow.
Steve Ackerman: In one of these things. And he asked me if I wanted to try it. And I looked down at it, I was wearing a pair of khaki pants and I saw it had a greasy chain. I didn't feel like getting down there and getting on that bike, but it didn't escape my mind. And when I was -- about two weeks later, when I was back here in Fort Collins, I was invited out to dinner by a friend, and then he had some other friends that were in town from Wisconsin who were here to do a bike ride called Ride The Rockies, the Denver Post Ride The Rockies. This would have been 1990.
And it just sounded -- their description of what they had just completed, riding seventy or eighty or a hundred miles every day to a different mountain town, and camping, and having big group meals. Just sounded like a lot of fun. And I felt sorry for myself that I wasn't able to do it. Then I thought about this guy that I had seen at this show out in California. I figured out how to get in touch with him, and I called him, and asked him if he'd done his bike ride. I was asking in kind of a rhetorical way, because I figured he didn't make it.
He said, "Oh yeah." I said, "Really? How long did it take?" He said, "I did it in 23 days." I said, "Wow." I said, "How'd you do that?" He goes, "I had a couple of 150 mile days riding long distances every day." I just said, "Okay, well I'm going to have to get one of these bikes because I want to do Ride The Rockies." He told me where to get it. I ordered it, and about -- God, it wasn't until October or November it showed up. I went right away, assembled it and immediately went out and rode it up the dams at
Horsetooth. And a friend of mine who was riding with me said, "If you can ride up this Hill..." (which they call Maniac Hill) he said, "You can do Ride The Rockies."
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I just rode up that, and rode home. And the next spring I found myself training to do Ride The Rockies. ‘91 I was the first person ever to do Ride the Rockies by arm. In ’92 I was the second person to do it by arm. And ‘93, I pulled together, I think actually this, the guy that had showed me the bike in the first place, I invited him to come out and do Ride The Rockies. ‘94 there was a larger group of hand cyclists that I had organized. And when I got home from that, there was a letter in my mailbox from a nonprofitorganization from North Carolina that was announcing that they were going to put on a ride around the world in 13 stages. And that I was being invited to pick two or three stages that I'd like to be on, and then they would assign me to one.
After looking at over a couple of times, I contacted them and said, I wanted to do all 13 stages. And they said, "Okay, well we have a small group of people that are going to do this whole thing." And they checked me out and decided that I could be one of them. So, I found myself in March of 1995, starting out March 17th of 1995, starting out in
Atlanta, Georgia on my hand cycle, on the beginning of a ride that took me up the East coast, to Boston, and then a flight to Shannon Ireland, and then across Ireland, and England, and France to Paris.
Then up north through Belgium, and Netherlands to Hamburg, Germany, and then down south through Berlin and Dresden into Czech Republic into Austria, back into the Czech Republic into Poland, through Belarus, Russia, northern tip of Kazakhstan, a bunch of Siberian Russia, and down south through Mongolia, and the Gobi desert to Beijing. And then we flew to LA, and rode to Washington DC. And I finished-- that bike ride was over in time just before Thanksgiving of 1995. It had all been filmed, and a documentary was made that ran on CBS on Thanksgiving Day, narrated by Charles Kuralt.
Linda Meyer: What was the name of the documentary?
Steve Ackerman: Well, it was called, “AXA World Rides - The Possible Dream,” but you can find it a YouTube by Googling “We All Ride The Same Road.”
Linda Meyer: Great.
Steve Ackerman: Anyway, I came back from that, I was now an established person on hand cycling, and actually during that period of time, from the time I got my first one, to the time I rode around the world, I had gotten involved with the people that made the bikes, and told them that if they'd make the bikes, I'd go out and sell them. And so, I got myself in a place where I was selling the hand cycles for this small company, and was really instrumental in making it a popular sport.
Then I'm going to fast forward. And I did that for quite a while. I was the representative for this company. In 2009 my son came to me, and said that medical marijuana was legal and that we could grow marijuana, medical marijuana.
Linda Meyer: How old was your son at this point? Steve Ackerman: I don't know, he was-
Linda Meyer: Teenager, or?
Steve Ackerman: No. He was a young adult, in his definitely in his mid-twenties, or how long has it been? Probably early twenties. And so, we got our medical marijuana cards from the state that
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allowed us to grow six plants a piece. And then we got other people to let us grow for them. And we, this was before there was any licensing for the growing of marijuana, or selling of it, but this was allowed under the medical marijuana being voted legal in the constitution in the 2000 election.So, this was nine years later. And I think what really opened up the doors was the assistant attorney general, federal attorney general Cole, I believe his name was, and I can't remember his first name, but he issued the, what is known now as The Cole Memo, which stated that the federal government was not going to use any resources in prosecuting the federal laws in states with state legalized marijuana for medical use. And was not going to, as long as people were following the rules. As long as they were following the regulations. And the regulations were, continued to get more, they just kept building the regulatory model as it was required. But particularly after The Cole Memo came out, is when people like myself decided that this was a safe thing to do without, even though we're in violation of federal law, the attorney general announced that he wasn't going to prosecute anybody for it.
So, we grew out doors, and then we found that we needed to, when the weather got cold, we found a warehouse on the north end of Fort Collins, and set up a grow
operation under lights in there. And in January of 2010, I purchased this building that we are in now, and set up half of it as a medical marijuana dispensary. So, we had a grow operation, and a dispensary operation, and there was still no licensing. At this point, the city of Fort Collins came to the conclusion that they needed to start licensing these places, and controlling it before it got away, and make regulations. And they had decided that they were going to-- the city council decided that they were going to draw the line, that the only people that were going to get licensed were the people that were already in business.
And I believe there were 20 or 21 places that were in business that were issued. I don't know how many of them were issued city licenses. And shortly thereafter, the state announced that they were going to start licensing. I think it was by the end of June, we had to, it might've been July, but it was June or July of that year of 2010. We had to gather all of the information, paperwork that was required by the state to apply for a license. I went down to Denver to, actually I think it was in Aurora, there was a dog track, Mile-High Kennel Club is where the department of revenue had set up their operation for licensing.
And the day that I went down there, I think that there was only one weekend maybe that people were even allowed to go down there and apply. And there was a line of hundreds of people, first come first serve, with beer cases, bankers boxes full of all the required stuff. They wanted to see everything. They wanted to see leases, bank
statements, credit card statements, just basically they wanted to know everything about you financially to try to avoid allowing anyone in the business that they didn't want to be in the business.
Linda Meyer: Where were you in the line?
Steve Ackerman: Way back. I think I waited for five or six hours before I got in there. Finally, I got in there, and I dropped my two boxes of paperwork down, and I handed them a check for
$10,000, and they wrote me a little receipt on a Walmart receipt pad for $10,000, and said, "We'll be in touch." And that's all I heard, for everything. Which I unfortunately, I don't know if I have that anywhere now; that'd be a probably a good thing for the
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archives. We just came back, and business as usual. In the November of 2010, that same year, we saw a special election in Loveland and in Windsor, which are neighboring communities, to ban medical marijuana dispensaries from their communities, and they were successful in the November election.And at that point I realized that there was probably going to be the same thing
happening here in Fort Collins. And so, I formed an organization, and I can't remember if we ever decided what our name was, but it was something to the effect of the Northern Colorado Cannabis Coalition, or Business Owners Association. I just really can't
remember what we called it. Really I convinced about half of the dispensary owners that we needed to, in the old phrase, hang together or hang separately. And that indeed we were going to be facing an election at some point. I just knew it. And that we needed to clean up our act.
We had a committee from our organization that went around to each dispensary. And they made recommendations to them of what they could do to become more
acceptable in the community. Take down the marijuana leaves from outside of the buildings. Don't have the person standing out there with a sign in front. One guy had a van that was wrapped, to be a sign out in front of his place on South College. Just a lot of things. Bad signs that just had not the right wording on them.
Linda Meyer: Negative connotations?
Steve Ackerman: Yeah. Just stuff that would not be, I mean, I'm a member of this community. I've lived here since 1972, and I know what would make people not happy, and what would make people happy is if we were innocuous, and that's just not how everybody played it. I could see that we were going to fight an uphill battle. And certainly in this March, I think of 2011, a petition drive was started. Actually something I wanted to tell you, before that, just before the petition drive we started, there's an organization here in Fort Collins, or was, called Team Fort Collins, which is a youth drug prevention, or resistance organization.
They had shown a real opposition to the dispensaries. We had approached the board of directors of this nonprofit to meet with them, because they had a program, the Team Fort Collins had a program called the Responsible Alcohol Retailers association, RAR. We thought that it would be a smart idea for them to have a responsible marijuana retailers association. We went to the board, and they listened to us, but basically cut us short and said, "Well, we just can't work with you."
Within a week that's when the petition drive was started, and it was started by-- the signers were Justin Smith, the sheriff of Larimer County, Larry Abrahamson, an assistant district attorney in his office, Jean Troxell who is our current mayor's wife, and Wade was on the council at that time. And Ray Martinez, who was a former Fort Collins policeman, and a former mayor of Fort Collins, was up until this most recent election serving as a Councilman from district two. They were successful in getting the number of signatures they needed to get it on the ballot.
And the 2011 election, which was a school board election, there're not very well attended, unless somebody has a kid in school, and certainly not by the people that are interested that were our voters. I spent the last six months of 2011, opened up a campaign office over on Linden Street where we worked getting yard signs out, and door knocking campaigns, and everything we could do to get people to vote. We had
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phone bank over there, we were unsuccessful by, I think we lost by 2% of the votes. I think that was 50 to 48 or 52 to 48, I don't know, I can't remember that. But it was enough of a margin to lose.Basically the result of the election was that we were commanded to close, cease and desist our businesses, on or before February 14th of 2012, which is 90 days after the election. We continued to operate until February 14th, closed down. I had to refinance my house so, that I could pay the mortgages on the buildings that I owned with relation to the business, and to put food on the table. I actually went into the hospital, and had a surgery that required about four weeks of being locked in a rehab facility where my wheelchair was locked up in the bathroom, and I was not to be out of bed at all for four weeks.
During that period of time, Kirk Scramstad, who is a current employee of mine, and had worked on both campaigns, right now, excuse me, not both campaigns. On the one campaign, called me, and said, "Steve, we've got to get this back on the ballot." And I was like, "Ah." But I knew we did. And so, I couldn't even get out of bed. I said, "Okay, you start organizing the petition drive, and I will fund it".
Before long, I was back in my wheelchair, and we had opened up a petition office, over where my dispensary is next door. At any given time, we had 20 people out passing petitions inside the city limits, and every day we counted all the signatures we had, and we compared them against voter rolls to see which ones of them were actually valid, because you could collect 10,000 signatures, but (which we did) but many of them, because somebody didn't live in the address where they were registered now, they wrote a different address down, or lived outside the city limits, were not eligible voters to vote in the election, and were not eligible to sign the petition.
But anyway, so very exhaustive process, validating signatures every day. And we finally got to a place where we were ready to turn in 10,000 signatures, and it was required that we have 4,200 valid.
Linda Meyer: So, you had more than double?
Steve Ackerman: And they said they stopped counting them after they had a hundred cushion. Anyway, we got on the ballot, and luckily the reason why we decided to go ahead and do this just one year after the special election, and why I felt like we could be successful was that it was a presidential election year in which the electorate is much larger. And there was also-- 2012 election was also the election where adult use of marijuana was being voted on to change the constitution to allow for that to legalize it.
Linda Meyer: For the state constitution? Steve Ackerman: For the state constitution. Linda Meyer: So, Amendment 64? Steve Ackerman: Right.
Linda Meyer: What did your ballot proposal basically say? Was it aimed at re-instituting being able to practice in Fort Collins?
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Steve Ackerman: It was really, the gist of it was to overturn the ban that had been put in place. But it was a new ordinance that was required to do that, and the ordinance re-instituted medical marijuana dispensaries, the licensing of them, and it also had a formula for how many of them there would be, based on how many registered patients there were in Larimer County. So, the wording was that there would be one dispensary allowed for each 500 registered medical marijuana patients in Larimer County. Or the number of licensees that were in business on February 14th of 2011 when—or, of 2012, that were able to reestablish themselves in any location that met the zoning requirements of the city of Fort Collins.Linda Meyer: And so, you were petitioning for medical marijuana to be legalized again within Fort Collins?
Steve Ackerman: Re-instituted. Linda Meyer: Re-instituted.
Steve Ackerman: Because there wasn't any adult use marijuana yet.
Linda Meyer: Right. And Amendment 64 was for recreational use, or like you said, adult use marijuana.
Steve Ackerman: Correct. Yes. And it was voted in, in that same election.
Linda Meyer: Did you contribute anything at all to the Amendment 64 movement or?
Steve Ackerman: We piggybacked with them. We shared yard signs. We... I'm trying to think what, I think our yard sign said “regulation works.” Which is the opposite of prohibition doesn't work. Linda Meyer: Right. And your initiative number was? Trying to think...
Steve Ackerman: I don't know. It was 300 or- Linda Meyer: 300, yeah.
Steve Ackerman: We had one that got us out, and one that got us in. But the election night, we were, I was there with Kirk over to Avogadro's number after the polls had closed, and we were sitting there and just didn't really know what to expect. And I said, "Kirk, look, we won." And he's like, "No." I said, "Look." And we had won by 10%, so we had 60% of the voters, to their 40% or whatever.
Linda Meyer: Now, did you enlist some lawyers to help you write the proposal language?
Steve Ackerman: I had a lawyer out of Loveland that helped. He's no longer with us, Mark Schaefer. It was just like a necessary thing we had to do.
Linda Meyer: You had to have some advice on-
Steve Ackerman: We had to have an ordinance to have a petition. Because it's a petition to get this ordinance on the ballot. So, the ordinance is written, and it is part of the petition that you have, I think in your archive.
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Linda Meyer: Yeah. We have a copy of it. So, you got reinstated.Steve Ackerman: Got reinstated. The city really dragged their feet on licensing us. I don't, I think that the election went off in November, and I don't think that a license was issued until July. So, we were out of business for 18 months anyway.
Linda Meyer: And you couldn't go back in business unless they issued you the license? Steve Ackerman: No.
Linda Meyer: And now Amendment 64 had now made adult use recreational marijuana possible. So, at that point, were you thinking about going into both options, or were you going to stick with the medical?
Steve Ackerman: Well, it wasn't available. As a matter of fact, the city of Fort Collins City Council, and pretty much immediately after that election, voted to have a moratorium on any retail adult use marijuana, or recreational. And I think they voted for a four month
moratorium. And I think that that was after the first of the year in 2013, yeah. Well, election was in 2012, so, after January 1st, 2013, they voted that they weren't going to be doing that anytime soon. And so, next phase of my program was to meet with the people that I felt would listen to me on the city council.
And we eventually got ourselves to a place where we thought we had a possibility of getting four out of the seven. I knew we had three. I knew that we had three that were against us. And Jerry Horvath was on the fence. He wasn't telling anybody what he was going to do. And that night at the city council meeting when they were going to vote to let the moratorium pass, or re-institute it, or extend it, Jerry got up and they went through the council members, and Jerry said, "Well, I'm going to vote for this." And the Gino Campana looked at him and said, "You can't do that. You haven't even heard the testimony of the city staff, the chief of police, and that."
Jerry said, "I don't see anything in tonight's agenda that says we're even having a presentation from anybody on the city staff. So, I don't appreciate that. And that is my vote. You can go ahead with your presentation, but..." We knew we had four at that moment. We were ecstatic. I think it took us quite a while to get licensed for the retail too, maybe it was, it may have been 2014 before we got licenses for that.
Linda Meyer: So, you were back operating as a medical marijuana dispensary for about six months, or longer?
Steve Ackerman: Or at least. Probably more.
Linda Meyer: And then you were able to get licensed?
Steve Ackerman: When we were, in just, to give you an idea of the difference. I remember on January 1st of 2013, when it became legal for dispensaries to open was on January 1st. And of course Fort Collins was not allowed. We had our medical marijuana business open, and all we did all day long was answer the phone, and tell people that we couldn't sell marijuana to them. Very frustrating. But it gave us the idea that we want to be able to sell marijuana and all these people that want it.
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And typically a day in the medical marijuana dispensary, we would serve 35 to 50 patients. And the day that we opened up as a retail dispensary, business went up tenfold, and has not stopped.Linda Meyer: So, there was a great demand for the product? Steve Ackerman: It's a very popular item.
Linda Meyer: Maybe you can talk a little about the differences. You sell, in the same shop you sell two different types of materials, and sometimes there's some overlap, but maybe you can- Steve Ackerman: Well, really what the... We still have medical marijuana. The city requires us to have
medical marijuana licenses, and to co-locate them with-- if we want to have retail, you can't have retail. The only people that were able to get retail licenses were people that already have medical marijuana licenses.
Linda Meyer: Is that still the case?
Steve Ackerman: Yes. And they had to be co-located. Actually, you could be medical, and not retail, but you couldn't be retail and not medical. And medical marijuana laws say that a person has to be 18 years old in order to purchase. And retail marijuana laws say that a person has to be 21. If they are located in the same premises, then the 21 applies to everybody. That was the city's idea to keep people from under 21 from being able to purchase marijuana legally.
So, we grow the same-- we have a grow facility on the north end of town here, and we grow the same strains, plants, in the same facilities using the same methods. It's the exact same product, but it has to be a medical marijuana plant from the time that it's just a baby, and it gets put in soil for the first time, has to be designated as a medical marijuana plant, and can never be a retail plant, and vice versa. So, plants are tagged the day that they go into pots.
Linda Meyer: And that's for the regulation purposes, so they can make sure you've got the right number?
Steve Ackerman: This is magical. This is retail. Even though they are the same.
Linda Meyer: Because you are only allowed a certain number of medical plants per patient? Steve Ackerman: Yes, but that's changed also. I believe that changes on July 1st. There are no longer
requirements for patients, and basically just a tier level. Linda Meyer: Was that the reason that you had to tag it as medical?
Steve Ackerman: No. We have to tag it because it's taxed differently. Medical marijuana does not have the additional sales tax that retail marijuana was imposed on it. So, a person buying medical marijuana from us will pay regular city, county, and state sales tax. Person buying retail, or adult use, or recreational marijuana, will pay a 15% sales tax (state sales tax), plus the city sales tax, plus the county sales tax. So, the medical patient will pay about a little less than 8% sales tax on their purchase, and the retail customer will pay close to 20% sales tax.
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Linda Meyer: But that's going to change now? No. Okay. So, the taxes are still going to be the same,you just don't have to tag the plants?
Steve Ackerman: No, we tag the plants, because they are taxed differently. Linda Meyer: Okay.
Steve Ackerman: You can't take a medical plant, and decide that you're going to sell it on the retail side. Linda Meyer: Okay. The thing that has changed is that you don't have to have a set number of plants
per patient?
Steve Ackerman: Or, yeah. You don't have to have any patients to grow medical marijuana. Before you had to have one-- you could grow 12, or six plants for each medical marijuana patient that you had signed up with you. You also were required to grow 70% of what is sold, which is not a requirement on the retail side. So, they've just, they call it sunset that. And now there is no 70, 30 requirement, and there is no requirement of number of patients in order to grow, but you do have to-- and there's also a formula in there, and I can't tell you exactly what it is, because I don't know the exact number, but they also don't want a huge increase in inventory, because it becomes harder to control. So they don't want-- if someone has a tier one, they have to justify moving to the tier two somehow. And that probably might have something to do with patients. I don't know. Linda Meyer: Perhaps the paperwork has gotten a little less complex, because you don't have to have
patients registered for certain things?
Steve Ackerman: Yeah. We stopped registering patients anyway for a long time ago because we had enough.
Linda Meyer: And so, they're basically the same products that are sold on either side, tax differently, and you have to have a card to buy on the medical side. Okay. So, you opened back up this medical, and then maybe six months later, or back into retail, or starting to be a retail…?
Steve Ackerman: I think we opened up in July of the following year. Linda Meyer: So, it's like 18 months, or something?
Steve Ackerman: It was a good long way. I don't think it was less... We opened up in, reopened in 2013 as medical, and I don't think we opened up retail until the summer of ‘14.
Linda Meyer: And is it still the case that there are no retail-only medical marijuana shops? You still have to be combined with-
Steve Ackerman: You have to-- inside the city limits of Fort Collins, you have to maintain a medical-- Linda Meyer: A medical, okay. So, outside the city limits they may be different?
Steve Ackerman: They could. But I don't know that either of the two places that service Fort Collins that are outside the city limits are retail only, I don't believe… I believe they both maintain
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medical too. But they may have separate entrances, which allows them to sell to people that are under 21. Between 18 and 21. Matter of fact, I'm going to guess that they do. Linda Meyer: Okay. So you can be in the same building if you have a different entrance, and theydon't mix?
Steve Ackerman: But not in Fort Collins. Linda Meyer: But not in the city?
Steve Ackerman: Only outside the city limits. Linda Meyer: So, different rules for the county--
Steve Ackerman: There's only two in the county. And they're both right outside Fort Collins.
Linda Meyer: And you mentioned before working with some of the other marijuana retailers in some initiatives to kind of improve the image before the election. What other kinds of things have you done with other retailers in Fort Collins?
Steve Ackerman: Really need to do more.
Linda Meyer: Everybody's pretty busy doing their own things.
Steve Ackerman: Everybody's pretty busy doing their own thing. But I think that it would really benefit everybody to have an organization. Even if it's initially three or four of the licensees meeting once a month, with an invitation for everybody to join. I think it's important to have some clout I guess.
Linda Meyer: Now-
Steve Ackerman: Be all on the same page.
Linda Meyer: And you also have, I think in the past you've mentioned to me some efforts that you have been involved in to work more with the youth of Fort Collins.
Steve Ackerman: I am-- at least, I think I might've told you--this an interesting turn of events. After going to Team Fort Collins, and being rejected in my appeal to have them start a responsible marijuana retailers association, I guess what it would be. After we overturned the ban, I was approached by the new board at Team Fort Collins, which was changing its name to Team Wellness and Prevention, saying that indeed they did want to institute a
responsible marijuana organization.
And what they've done is folded it in with the Responsible Alcohol Retailers. And so, it's still called the R-A-R, RAR, which now stands for the Responsible Association of
Retailers. I'm on the board of that organization. And as a matter of fact, a little over maybe two years ago, I was elected the president of the board of that organization. Linda Meyer: A little over two years ago, you said?
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Linda Meyer: [Do you want me to take a look…]Steve Ackerman: That's all right. That's just people thinking that it's the dispensary.
Linda Meyer: Okay. So, as president of the board, what kinds of things have you led the board to do in Fort Collins in the last couple of years?
Steve Ackerman: Basically we-- the organization has programs that are in place to educate youth, to empower youth, to try to teach them to be responsible citizens, and to understand what the pitfalls are of getting involved with substances.
Linda Meyer: Okay. And so what do the programs look like? Is it an afterschool thing? Is it a-- Steve Ackerman: One of the programs works with the courts, and works with kids that have gotten in
trouble. There is another one that works with parents and children in the schools, and the high schools, and junior highs. There's one that teaches yoga, as an alternate to that. So that's--
Linda Meyer: Yeah. So, quite a variety. Would you say that you work with all of the schools in the district?
Steve Ackerman: No. Only the ones that want to work with us.
Linda Meyer: A few that are interested. I remember my daughter and son, when they were in elementary school, there was a program called D.A.R.E. And that didn't seem to be a very effective program. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the differences.
Steve Ackerman: Well, the D.A.R.E. program was-- basically encouraged kids to turn in their parents, and that didn't work really well for some people. And really told kids to, "Do as I say, and not as I do," which doesn't work either.
Linda Meyer: Wasn't the, "Just say no" part of that?
Steve Ackerman: Just say no, I think, well, that was Nancy Reagan who said, "Just say no." D.A.R.E. was, this is your brain, this is your brain on drugs program.
Linda Meyer: Okay. Yeah. The advertisement. Whereas the program that you work with-- looks like the fan is going to come back on.
Steve Ackerman: Yeah.
Linda Meyer: The program that you work with- Steve Ackerman: You want me to turn it off again?
Linda Meyer: Yeah. I guess we could pause for at least a minute? Steve Ackerman: I just have to turn up the heat. Yeah, go ahead. Linda Meyer: Okay.
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Steve Ackerman: I need to turn up the heat. It must've got to 75 in here, we're not going to want it to geta lot more-
Linda Meyer: No, we don't want to do that. Okay.
