Tablet

My latest up at Tablet is a profile of Ean Seeb, who is (amazingly) both a marijuana dispensary owner and a machar in the Denver Jewish community. Read here:

Seeb is a third-generation Jewish Denver native. Ean, his first name, comes from his grandmother’s name, Estelle. Like many others, his last name bears the hallmark of unintentional immigrant reinvention.

“The story is when my great-grandfather got off the boat, he didn’t speak English,” Seeb told me. “He was a tailor. They asked him his name, he told them what he did, which was ‘zip,’ so his immigration records show Zipp. Just over time Zipp became Seeb.”

Like his great-grandfather’s, Seeb’s name, at least in Denver, is synonymous with his work.
Denver Relief emphasizes social action and community service in part out of a genuine sense of mission and perhaps also to distinguish itself from other dispensaries. The Green Team aids in clean-up following Denver’s massive marijuana festival held each year on April 20, the highest of holidays for habitués of the marijuana community. One Saturday a month from April to September, the dispensary offers bicycle and wheelchair repair, selling the parts at cost and providing free labor. Inside the dispensary itself, there is a canned-food drive, which benefits the food pantry at the Jewish Family Service and needy patients. And in a move that perhaps best encapsulates how pervasive marijuana culture is in Colorado, on Veterans Day Denver Relief offered a 10 percent discount to vets. (Some took the dispensary up on the offer.)

“In order to be treated like any other industry, we have to act like any other industry,” Seeb said. “We just want to run our business and not have all of these crazy legal hurdles and not have all these problems with taxes and banking. By following a model that says ‘Look, we’re doing something that any other business would do,’ hopefully we’ll get rid of some of that stigma.”