MEN’S JOURNAL
By Joe Warner
On a warm late-summer afternoon, Don Stevens steps out of the Cannabis Corner in North Bonneville, in southernmost Washington state. With a scruffy beard, wire-frame glasses, and receding gray hair that curls down to his collar, he looks like a hippie high school teacher, the kind who’d frequent a marijuana shop. It helps that he’s wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with heavenly buds, a local cannabis producer.
But Stevens is more than a pot aficionado; he’s also the city’s highest elected official. Just check out his license plate: mjmayor.
That Stevens is known as the Marijuana Mayor isn’t the only funny thing happening in this town of 1,005. Inside the Cannabis Corner’s otherwise unremarkable bright-green facility is a one-of-a-kind experiment. The shop, which opened its doors in 2015, is run by the city, making it the only government-operated cannabis store in the country. By September 2016, it had generated $2.2 million in revenue, and once the Cannabis Corner covers its start-up costs, proceeds will go to updating the local playground, bankrolling law enforcement, and other municipal expenditures. Not bad for a town that was nearly bankrupt in 2013.
Outside sleepy North Bonneville, this endeavor could have far-reaching implications for the five states — California, Nevada, Arizona, Massachusetts and Maine — voting on legalizing recreational marijuana this election. Currently every recreational marijuana market in the country is based around privately owned stores. Because the Cannabis Corner is a government entity, not only is it exempt from federal taxes, but all the proceeds go back to the town, keeping cannabis — and its profits — in the hands of the people. “In states that legalize, there’s no reason other towns can’t do the same thing,” says Pat Oglesby, a North Carolina marijuana-policy expert and former chief tax counsel for the U.S. Senate Finance Committee.
“It’s the greatest idea nobody is talking about,” says 59-year-old Stevens as he walks through the dispensary, passing cases packed with marijuana baggies and shelves displaying multicolor bongs and hand-carved walking sticks that double as weed pipes.
Stevens was elected mayor in 2009, though the longtime marijuana enthusiast hadn’t planned to get into politics. In 2005, the former IT director moved with his wife from Hood River, Oregon, to North Bonneville for a sales job at a local fruit-bar company and for the mountain bike trails and snowboard runs in the Columbia River Gorge. But while North Bonneville boasts a striking mountain backdrop — “This is where God stopped creating,” locals like to say — it also resembles a town dropped in the middle of nowhere. Set far back from the highway, it has none of the retailers, breweries, or other revenue-generating businesses that have helped revitalize nearby towns like Stevenson and Cascade Locks. For years North Bonneville officials sold off city land to stay solvent, but after the 2008 housing crash, there was little of it left. North Bonneville teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.
An unlikely solution came after marijuana was legalized in Washington in 2012. Council member Charles Pace, an economist who’d helped tribal governments navigate federal regulations, proposed the idea: Why not operate a marijuana store, with profits going to the city’s coffers? If it became a problem — say, fueling increased use among youths or contributing to auto accidents — the city could pull the plug. “The thought was, ‘If it’s going to be here, it’s going to be on our terms,' " says city administrator Steve Hasson. So the council voted to create the North Bonneville Public Development Authority and provided a $15,000 loan to get the store off the ground. Loans cobbled together by local citizens provided another $250,000.