Harborside pioneers medicine—without a head change
By Paul Rogers
“It’s not just about getting high—it’s about medicine.”
So says Steve DeAngelo, the founder of Harborside Health Center, which he claims is “the world’s largest legal retailer of cannabis.” But DeAngelo could be speaking for progressive dispensary owners and medical marijuana growers and advocates everywhere. And he’s truly putting his back—and wallet—into the development of laboratory-tested cannabis strains that are specifically bred for maximum medicinal value (even when this is at the expense of the plants’ psychoactive properties).
Understanding DeAngelo’s mission requires a little science (much of which is familiar to many CULTURE readers). It’s all about cannabidiol—better known as CBD. CBD is a compound in cannabis that has medicinal effects but does not produce a “high.” In fact, CBD actually counters some of the effects of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in cannabis. DeAngelo has devoted much of his energy (and money) to having CBD-rich strains of marijuana identified, tested and bred—and then making these available through Harborside, a nonprofit, community service medical collective which he opened in 2006. Harborside now has 72,000 patients and locations in Oakland and San Jose.
When DeAngelo first set out to identify existing CBD-rich cannabis strains, he couldn’t find a laboratory in the Bay Area to take on the project. A cannabis reform activist for nearly four decades, DeAngelo, in 2007 was involved in the creation of Steep Hill Labs, which was to become the world’s first commercial cannabis testing service.
Harborside distributed cuttings of the CBD-rich strains they identified to their most trusted growers. At any one time, Harborside now has at least one or two such strains (such as “Harlequin” and “True Blueberry”) available. CBD-rich buyers roughly breakdown into three categories of patients, DeAngelo says: What he terms “cannabis naïve patients” (those with no previous experience with marijuana, who want its medicinal benefits without any psychoactive side-effects); gravely ill people whose symptoms have proven responsive to CBD-rich medicine; and older patients who’ve had positive experience with cannabis decades ago and have returned to it for medical reasons.
“It’s very difficult for people to point at Harborside when we’re selling CBD-rich medicine and say all we’re interested in doing is getting people high,” says DeAngelo. “Because it’s very clear that we have devoted a great deal of our institutional energy and resources to developing a type of cannabis which gets people less high!”
harborsidehealthcenter.com.
