Located in Oaksterdam, California, DeAngelo’s Harborside Health Center (HHC) provides mega-pounds and dozens of strains of tasty, cannabinoid-tested medical marijuana to hundreds of patients per day.
His medical marijuana dispensary has nearly 83,000 registered medical marijuana patients; some reports say he sold upwards of $22 million worth of medical marijuana last year.
DeAngelo’s discovery by Discovery is no surprise: he’s long been one of the most creative and successful medical cannabis and hemp activists. As a co-founder of reform group Americans for Safe Access (ASA) and an outspoken advocate for medical marijuana, DeAngelo lately pioneered a new type of medical marijuana dispensary.
Ever since he founded HHC in 2006, DeAngelo has gone beyond the pharmacy model that most medical marijuana dispensaries use. Many medical marijuana dispensaries are just bare rooms with a bud-tender, a few jars of medical marijuana, some medibles, and not much else.
DeAngelo changed all that by creating a beautiful holistic health center, education center and community meet-up place at Harborside. With acupuncture, yoga, organic foods, low-income subsidies, counseling and other services, DeAngelo was an early pioneer of the holistic medical marijuana dispensary movement.
Discovery didn’t discover DeAngelo first. Media-wise, he’s probably the best-known medical marijuana dispensary owner. He’s already been covered by news organizations around the world, as well as North American media powerhouses such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, and Fortune Magazine.
Of course, it isn’t so much that marijuana is a great medicine that has attracted the attention of Discovery Channel or any of these other media reporters. It’s the money. It’s also the “sexy” nature of a wildly successful “business model” confronted with conflict. That’s why they call it Weed Wars.
Insider word is that Weed Wars takes us in through the back door of the medical marijuana dispensary business to show us what it’s like to source, sort, test, grade, and provide medical marijuana.
Many Big Buds readers already know all about that. In fact, one of our readers who grows the finest connoisseur medical marijuana using Sensi Grow and Connoisseur base nutrients, along with Advanced Nutrients supplements that boost medical marijuana taste, aroma, yield and THC percentages, regularly supplies medical marijuana to HHC.
“Steve is a class act,” the grower reports. “He is all about the patients, making sure the meds are clean, strong, affordable, safe. He holds growers accountable. One time I brought a couple of kilos of fine Kush meds to him but he had it tested like he does everything before he sells it and they came back and said it had a tiny infestation of gray mold. So he wouldn’t pay me a penny for it. I was financially hurt by that, but I respect that. The man cares about peoples’ health more than profits.”
Discovery Channel hired Snoop Dogg to do the theme song for Weed Wars. Looking forward to it, Snoop, and glad that a major network is paying attention to medical marijuana, Steve DeAngelo and Harborside Health Center.
