A Newport Beach couple have opened what they describe as a marijuana school, and city officials say it’s legal as long as they don’t distribute pot there.
Chadd and Alysha McKeen don’t care that passersby can see the six
3-foot-tall marijuana plants growing inside their new storefront.
“I want to tell people to stop being afraid of it,” Chadd McKeen, co-founder of Otherside Farms, told the Daily Pilot. “We want to bring it
out into the open.”
The McKeens also put in new tile and ripped
the bars off the windows at the center, which sits between a
dog-grooming business and a therapeutic spa. It’s all part of an effort
to make the place appear open and inviting.
The shop at 2424
Newport Blvd. in Costa Mesa bills itself as a “medical marijuana information center.”
It offers classes on everything from how to grow marijuana for
medicinal purposes to how to make pot brownies. The six plants growing
underneath special lights in one foil-padded room of the shop are
strictly for teaching purposes, the couple said.
–Brianna Bailey and Mona Shadia