Discover a world of exceptional cannabis products with Crystal Nugs, your trusted destination for premium strains, edibles, and more in Sacramento. As a leading cannabis dispensary and delivery service, we bring the finest products directly to your doorstep, ensuring a convenient and personalized experience. At Crystal Nugs, we take pride in serving the Sacramento community. Whether you're looking for high-quality cannabis flower, edibles, or wellness products, we cater to the diverse preferences of Sacramento residents. Explore a diverse selection of top-tier cannabis strains sourced from reputable growers. Indulge in delectable edibles crafted with precision to elevate your cannabis experience. Discover wellness-focused products, including CBD options for those seeking alternative remedies. CRYSTAL NUGS DISPENSARY AND DELIVERY 2300 J STREET SACRAMENTO, CA 95816 PHONE: (916) 701-9777 | HOURS 9AM-9PM DAILY | C10-0001403-LIC
The CORE program is meant to remove barriers of entry into the cannabis industry for people in communities disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Sacramento’s first Black woman-owned storefront cannabis dispensary just opened, due in large part to the city’s Cannabis Opportunity Reinvestment and Equity (CORE) program.
Crystal Nugs is the fourth storefront dispensary to open as a member of the CORE program. CEO Maisha Bahati said Crystal Nugs, which started as a delivery service, would have never been able to expand to a physical store in midtown without the city’s help.
I wouldn’t have this opportunity if the CORE program did not exist,” Bahati said. “I’ve received loans and grants close to $200,000. I received waivers on our business operating permit. I’ve received technical assistance and just support.”
The CORE program is meant to remove barriers of entry into the cannabis industry for people in communities disproportionately impacted by the War on Drugs. This includes Black and brown communities who were disparately arrested for cannabis-related offenses or lived in neighborhoods that were over-policed for drugs.
“It’s really difficult to get into the cannabis industry,” Bahati said. “The costs to get in are huge, and so you need assistance and that’s what the CORE program essentially does. It provides you with the assistance that will help you further your career in cannabis.”
The CORE program was created in 2018. In 2020, the Sacramento City Council approved 10 new storefront dispensary permits, increasing the number of storefront permits allowed in the city from 30 to 40. Crystal Nugs is the fourth business out of the 10 that received permits to open a storefront.
Davina Smith, the program manager for the City of Sacramento’s Office of Cannabis Management, said the CORE program helps with everything from education to advertising, to networking opportunities – and, of course, funding.
“It’s sort of an organic, living program,” Smith said. “It’s pretty expensive and time-consuming to break into and actually operate a regulated cannabis business, and so, the idea is to break down those barriers, try to reduce costs.”
Smith said the six other businesses are on track to open storefront dispensaries, but they must open by April 1, 2024.
Crystal Nugs is planning to open a cannabis dispensary at 2300 J St. in Sacramento in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Cannabis-delivery company Crystal Nugs is planting roots in Midtown with plans to open a storefront dispensary in a vacant building at the corner of J and 23rd streets.
Crystal Nugs CEO Maisha Bahati said once operational, it will be the largest cannabis dispensary in Sacramento.
The building at 2300 J St. was previously occupied by J’s Beauty Supply. The two-story location is 7,800 square feet and has its own parking garage with 18 spaces, Bahati said.
“We have owned a tattoo shop on J Street for 12 years right across the street and have always admired the building but never imagined opening a dispensary there,”she said. “It sits on the corner and there is a lot of foot traffic in the area. Parking was also a big deal for us, so it’s just a great location. I think we’ll fit in well with the neighborhood.”
Bahati envisions the lobby occupying downstairs, with the dispensary and showroom upstairs. She said the amount of space will allow the opportunity for innovation in terms of how brands are showcased.
Crystal Nugs is one of 10 local cannabis companies that received dispensary permits from the city through its Cannabis Opportunity Reinvestment and Equity (CORE) Program, which was created to assist those facing barriers to starting cannabis businesses due to the historical disparate enforcement of cannabis crimes.
The planned dispensary will put an emphasis on women-owned and minority-owned brands, Bahati said, especially those local to the region.
“I just want people to be able to come to this staple location in Sacramento and know that you’ll find local, equity-owned, women-owned brands, and top brands in the market,” she said.
The planned dispensary is organizing an open house this weekend to allow Midtown residents to learn more about the vision for Crystal Nugs and meet the team. Approximately 2,900 invites were sent out, Bahati said, and the goal is to let residents ask questions and show that the dispensary is committed to the neighborhood and transparency.
Architectural plans are in the process of being finished for the location, which Bahati is leasing. Once those are completed, Crystal Nugs will apply for a conditional use permit through the city to operate a dispensary on the premises.
Bahati said if all goes according to plan, they expect to have doors open to the public in the fourth quarter of 2022.
By Jake Abbott – Staff Writer, Sacramento Business Journal
There’s a new kind of celebration attached to the Thanksgiving holiday week, and it is centered around cannabis consumption.
Green Wednesday is the marijuana industry’s big sales day, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Some Sacramento dispensaries are seeing a lot of green from the aptly named day.
Several people crowded around the counter at NUG Sacramento, waiting for their weed. The high demand at the downtown Sacramento dispensary is a result of Green Wednesday.
“It’s been busy all day, actually. It’s our marijuana industries, our Black Friday, per say,” NUG Sacramento general manager Jonathyn Newsom said.
Newsom said the Thanksgiving-adjacent sales day has been all the buzz for a couple years now. Compared to a normal day, it is bringing double the amount of cannabis customers into his shop.
“I want to say maybe this is the second year that I’ve seen it in effect. This year, more or less, being in full effect,” Newsom said.
With the menu full of discounted pot products, NUG “budtenders” were barely able to catch their breath Wednesday.
“It has been pretty crazy, nonstop,” Budtender Eric Comacho said.
Comacho says customers have been telling him and fellow budtenders why they are buying cannabis ahead of Thanksgiving. Many have said that they plan to treat the holiday madness with marijuana.
“A lot of people are coming just because they know they’re going home to visit their families, so that’s definitely the number one reason I’ve been hearing,” Comacho said.
From flowers to vapes to edibles, NUG said all of its products flew off the shelves Wednesday. But they are not the only dispensary in Sacramento that saw that happen.
A Therapeutic Alternative, another joint in town, saw about 50% more pot patrons on Green Wednesday this year.
“We had some doorbuster sales in the morning that were gone within an hour of opening,” A Therapeutic Alternative Director of Education Hezekiah Allen said.
Allen said for A Therapeutic Alternative, Green Wednesday is more than just items on a menu. It is a sign that the “cloud of smoke” around the cannabis industry is lifting.
“It’s been a long journey to get to legalization, to get to normalization, and to have this sort of attention and to have the sort of tradition focused on the holiday is really encouraging and empowering,” Allen said.
NUG agrees.
“It’s showing how far cannabis is coming and how it’s being normalized,” Newsom said.
Newsom says it is a step in the right direction – and a way to save green, on green, for Thanksgiving.
Some dispensaries tell KCRA 3 their deals will continue through Black Friday and even Cyber Monday.
SACRAMENTO COUNTY (CBS13) — Two-dozen municipalities across California coming together to try to put an end to pot deliveries. Eleven local cities from Solano to Stanislaus counties have joined the lawsuit.
The state policy says marijuana companies can drive around and make home deliveries anywhere in the state, but leaders from 24 cities now want local control over who can deliver and where. Some marijuana companies say regulating deliveries will put the brakes on their businesses for good.
Maisha Bahati is co-owner of a new marijuana business: “Crystal Nugs.” The company only does delivery.
“We fought to get here. It took us two and a half years to get here,” Bahati said.
The Bureau of Cannabis Control developed delivery regulation over a two-year period.
“Everything is regulated to a ‘T.’ Everything is tested multiple times,” Bahati said.
She says the state also requires her to put her product on lockdown, literally. Every delivery has to be under lock and key in the back of her delivery car. She worries if the lawsuit passes, delivery businesses like hers won’t survive.
“That would certainly limit the radius that we could deliver. That could kill a new cannabis business overnight,” Bahati said.
She also worries about her clients who don’t drive and would somehow have to get to a dispensary.
“More so it hurts the consumers who rely on cannabis products. There are a lot of elderly that call us every week,” she said.
Two of the cities in the lawsuit are Ceres and Dixon. We spoke to city managers from both towns who call state-run delivery a “fatal flaw” for cannabis control.
“That’s not really the real local control we were looking for, and promised, with prop 64,” said Dixon City Manager Jim Lindley.
Ceres has two dispensaries, Dixon has one. Those businesses have local permits, but also relationships with leaders and law enforcement. These city managers say delivery drivers do not.
“With a delivery, we have no idea who is doing the delivery. How is that person vetted? Who is the actual person doing the delivery? We’re not opposed to the delivery service at all. We just think the delivery service needs to be regulated like the rest of the industry,” said Toby Wells, Ceres City Manager.
The lawsuit was served to the Bureau of Cannabis Control on Tuesday. Leaders with the state-run organization said the public voted clearly for statewide delivery in 2016. Unless a Judge halts these services while the case is pending, drivers can continue to deliver.
More than seven months after marijuana became legal in California for adults over 21, advocates have a lot to be thankful for and yet still much to be desired.
Cities up and down the coast where Proposition 64 in 2016 passed by some of the ballot measure’s highest margins have banned dispensaries.
They have prevented individuals from growing cannabis in their backyards.
And now, with the state’s California Bureau of Cannabis Control poised to adopt new rules permanently governing the adult use of marijuana, cities are lining up in opposition to a provision that would force them to allow delivery services. A 60-day public comment period on the rules ends Aug 26.
“We always wanted to preserve local control,” said Dustin Moore, a Manhattan Beach resident who served as the deputy campaign manager for the Yes on 64 campaign.
Local control was baked into the proposition, he said, giving cities the ability to prohibit if they wished how many dispensaries operated in their city, if any at all.
“Even in the eyes of what’s being interpreted now around delivery services, I would still argue it allows for local control,” Moore said. “What they (cities) don’t have the ability to do is prevent someone from driving on public roads and deliver to a private residence.”
Although many cities passed laws prohibiting delivery services, law enforcement officials have said there is virtually nothing they can do to enforce such restrictions. The issue of delivery services is essential to the original Compassionate Use Act of 1996, which said patients must be allowed safe and legal access to medicinal marijuana, Moore said.
A proposed initiative aims to overturn Pomona’s ban on commercial marijuana use.
A review of Weedmaps.com, a website dedicated to connecting patients to dispensaries, delivery services and doctors, show numerous services that deliver throughout the South Bay – where every city bans the business practice.
Many of those delivery services are not charging taxes or operating under any business license at all, putting them in a sort of gray market, observers say. Some dispensaries, located in unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, out of the jurisdiction of cities with prohibitions, may also be operating under quasi-legal circumstances.
What cities also can’t control is the ability for an individual to grow up to six plants in the privacy of their own home. The proposition also decriminalized marijuana offenses and expunged past convictions depending on the amount involved.
Among Los Angeles-area beach cities, Long Beach is the only municipality that permits dispensaries through a voter-approved medical-marijuana initiative in 2016, which allows up to 32 licenses. The City Council approved last month rules that set up fees and licensing requirements for medical-marijuana dispensaries that also want to operate as adult-use ones; those fees run between $7,000 and $8,500, but they have yet to take effect.
Ivan Jimenez, a Long Beach resident who grows cannabis for his own business in Northern California, told the council at the time of the rulemaking process that he’d like to open up in his home city but he finds the fees too high.
“I would love to come here and invest money in the same industry,” Jimenez said during public comment. But “I believe the city of Long Beach is taking advantage of the taxing and taking advantage of the fees.”
Devil in details
Since January, when the adult-use law went into effect, dispensaries across the state have been adapting to new emergency regulations put in place to bridge the gap before permanent rules could be established.
Those emergency rules required by July 1 that all products, medicinal and recreational, be tested and labelled. The new rules also barred giveaways and allowed governments to impose taxes, some as high as 35 percent in combined local, county and state taxes.
Moore believes what bans and excessive taxes and fees are doing is “throwing gas on the illicit market.”
In Los Angeles County, where 59.5 percent of voters approved Prop 64, only 20 percent of municipalities allow some kind of operating license to sell pot. That’s not to say, however, that every supporter wants a dispensary around the corner from their house, Moore said.
“When you voted for Prop 64 what did you actually vote for. Were you voting for cannabis to be sold in your neighborhood or for cannabis to be made legal and end the war on drugs.”
Jonatan Cvetko, who heads the non-profit Emerald Angels that works toward responsible cannabis regulation, said rules such as one that requires child-resistant bags were a good thing. Like other advocates, Cvetko fears that the legal market is not given an opportunity to succeed.
“If the majority of the bans stay in place there will be no access for residents to find clean and safe products,” Cvetko said. “It’s not that the black market will come back, it’s that it hasn’t gone away. The goal was to allow existing operators to transition, so without any pathways for operators they have no choice but to stay in the illicit market.”
In Redondo Beach, the council was unified against the state’s rulemaking allowing delivery services even in cities with laws prohibiting them. The council directed staff to draft a letter to that effect. Similar letters were recently addressed to the state agency by the League of California Cities
While it opposed one important aspect of the rules, the Redondo Beach City Council also instructed the city manager to form a Cannabis Steering Committee. Mayor Bill Brand said that doesn’t mean the city is giving the green light to dispensaries.
“This is brand new legislative territory, so I’m looking forward to the recommendations from the city manager’s task force and more importantly, what the residents feel is appropriate for Redondo Beach,” Brand wrote in a statement. “No decisions will be made before a full vetting of all the issues.”
For more information on the cannabis industry in California and to comment on the proposed rules visit Cannabis.ca.gov.
