Amoeba Music Plans to Sell Cannabis Next to Berkeley Location

Six eager applicants proposed their collective plans to the Berkeley City Council Thursday. The council recommended three applicants—iCANN Health Center, Berkeley Innovative Health and Berkeley Compassionate Care Center. Amoeba Records Co-Founder, David Prinz, wants to open the Berkeley Compassionate Care Center next to their famed Amoeba Records Berkeley location on Telegraph Avenue.

Don Duncan is the California Director of Americans for Safe Access. “Berkeley is a city on a hill for medical cannabis, and . . . I think it’s important if you have a place here where it can exist, it should,” Duncan told the Daily Californian.

Berkeley is currently home to three legal collectives. Measure T, which was implemented in 2010, opened up the door for a fourth collective.

Prinz originally hoped to open the collective inside the Berkeley location. “That street could really frickin’ use this,” Prinz said late last year. “The whole neighborhood would like the street to be more civilized . . . Amoeba has some really good friends who really grow some beautiful strains,” he hinted. Prinz said he would install high-end cameras to prevent crime. “This part of Telegraph Avenue has been problematic for the neighborhood for decades in terms of loitering, vagrancy, low-level crime harassment and street dealing,” he told the commission January 28, 2016. “A dispensary at this location can greatly help this situation with the increased security presence it would provide.”

The new plan would open the collective on the same block as Amoeba and Prinz called the location the “epicenter of the counterculture of the East Bay.” Amoeba Music opened in 1990, and has served as a staple cultural landmark.

Elizabeth Greene, secretary for the Medical Cannabis Association, said that the City Council will come to a final decision by March.