The Rabbi of Pot Rabbi Jeffrey Kahn wants to be D.C.'s first legal medical-marijuana dealer. But first he has to navigate city regulators, well-financed competitors, and suspicious neighbors.

Conceptualizing your very own marijuana store is one thing. The logistics of actually setting it up is quite another. The regulations proposed by Mayor Adrian Fenty ’s office last week—which would impose strict limits on location, staffing, and inventory—call into question the very feasibility of maintaining such a facility.

For one thing, the system seems designed to exclude anyone with much prior experience in marijuana salesmanship. Even a misdemeanor citation for possession is grounds for disqualification from working in the newly legalized industry.

That’s not a problem for the Kahns. But they’re more confused by the pesky question of where their merchandise is supposed to come from. One key question: Whether dispensaries will have to grow their own. “We’re waiting to see if the District is going to be making provisions even for how the cannabis is going to get here in the first place,” the rabbi says. “You can’t plant tomatoes and say ‘Abracadabra’ and it comes up marijuana.”

If it comes to self-cultivation, Stephanie Kahn says, they’ll probably hire someone who knows what they’re doing. “When we first got married, my husband said, ‘I hope you do better with your patients than you do with all of our plants,’ because they did not live,” she says.

And the possibility of having to rely on the Kahns’ conspicuously non-green thumbs is only one of the cultivation challenges buried in the regulatory language. The rules currently limit legal grow operations to possessing only 95 plants at a time. The cap is intended to help protect cultivators from facing stiff federal penalties. But by limiting supply, it’s also likely to mean high consumer prices.

“Every cultivation center will have its product sold before it even hits the shelf,” says Amsterdam. “That’s going to be troubling when you run out and you’ve got to wait three weeks for product. You’re just sitting there, twiddling your thumbs, paying taxes. But you don’t have anything to sell.” He says that in New Mexico, a similar rule has led to shortages. (The proposed rules already prohibit one piece of Amsterdam’s ideal business model: Cultivation centers—the spots where he could display growing plants—would have to be closed to the public.)

“A 95-plant garden is not going to be very feasible from an economic point of view,” DeAngelo says. “The cost of that medicine is going to be extremely high.” He notes that 62 cents of every dollar earned at his Oakland dispensary goes to pay for the product itself—and that’s in a state with a vast cultivation system.

Even if there is enough of the basic stuff to go around, adequate variety is another potential snafu. “No one kind of cannabis works best for all patients,” says DeAngelo. “Patients, universally, find different strains that work best for them and tend to stick with those strains and request those strains.” The vast cultivation network in California provides for various forms of herbal relief beyond the inhalable kind—tinctures, capsules, edibles. “I have questions about whether that would be possible under the D.C. model,” DeAngelo says.

Before you sell cannabis to the ailing, you have to sell your storefront to the neighbors. Even before the new law officially took effect last month, the Kahns had already pitched their dispensary plan community groups like the Old Takoma Business Association, Neighbors, Inc., and the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission 4B.

Rabbi Kahn says the efforts to preempt the NIMBYs reflects lessons he’s picked up about problems in other newly legalized pot markets, where critics complained about insufficient public notification. “They just awarded the dispensary locations in Maine, and once that came out in the paper, that’s when neighbors first found out that there was going to be a dispensary in their neighborhood,” he says. “That seems like a crazy way to do it.”

Of course, telling the neighbors about your pot business plan isn’t just optional in D.C. The regulations Fenty proposed last week delegate licensing authority to the District’s Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration (ABRA) and Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) Board—and not the Department of Health, as in other states. (The health department will still register qualified patients and doctors authorized to prescribe pot.)

Marijuana advocates have denounced ABRA’s involvement as a misguided blurring of the line between the medicinal and recreational uses of the drug. But from a practical standpoint, it makes some sense: Liquor regulators are the most experienced in vetting venues that dispense a controlled substance—not to mention balancing the concerns of consumers, businesses, and neighbors.

In awarding the licenses to grow or sell marijuana, the liquor board has been instructed to give “great weight” to the recommendations of local advisory neighborhood commissions. The regulations specifically call on the ANCs to address “the potential adverse impact of the proposed location to the neighborhood.” As any experienced D.C. nightclub operator can tell you, wrangling with the local advisory boards can be a dicey proposition, to say the least.

Which means that, efforts to cast his store as a health-care facility notwithstanding, Rabbi Kahn may be in for a tough fight. “The only opposition we hear is, ‘OK, fine, but please not near me,’” he says. Trouble is, that sentiment has a substantial echo in ANC4B.

The rabbi shows up at the group’s July 26 meeting at their local police station clad in a conservative navy blue Ralph Lauren button-down, gray slacks and black shoes. His wife wears a floral jacket and black pants with a red handbag and matching ladybug bracelet. There’s not a single strand of industrial hemp between them. “We are very straight-laced people,” she says.

But as the evening wears on, it’s clear that their neighbors—or at least this panel of their elected representatives—aren’t so convinced.

It’s about the kids! ANC Commissioner Judi Jones , who criticizes the Kahns’ concept as a “a ready-made market for illicit drug sales,” points to the presence of “young people” at a previous discussion of the dispensary plan back the week earlier. “I found that most interesting,” she says, noting that one of youths had openly stated that “he knows some of his friends can’t wait for that clinic to open.”

Nonsense, the Kahns say. Teens seeking access to the Wellness Center will have to contend with a security plan that will keep unwanted stoners out—and a municipal record-keeping requirement that will ensure that no stray herb ever escapes. “It’s going to be monitored,” Stephanie Kahn notes. “Every quarter of a half of a gram. Every little speck. Dust!”

There’s an easier place for teenagers to score: “They can probably get all they want at Coolidge [Senior High School],” she says. “I mean, please.”

The rabbi seems almost as ruffled by another commissioner’s comment about possible profiteering. “We alerted you to the issue, and we enjoy having this conversation with you,” he shoots back. “But don’t accuse me of retail or profit or anything you don’t know about.”

Neighborhood e-mail discussions about the proposed dispensary have been generally more supportive and on point. “On Listservs, we’ve had people who come out and say lots of nice things,” notes Stephanie Kahn. “They don’t necessarily come out to these meetings.” No kidding: “I think this is our ninth community meeting and I’m already trying to get beyond trying to correct them with proper information, because they just come back the next week and say the same thing,” the rabbi says.

Things don’t get any easier outside. In the hallway, ANC Commissioner Sara Green sidles up to suggest the couple look for alternative locations across the state line in famously liberal Takoma Park, Md. “I can tell you right now that when you just go on the other side of that Metro station, you’re in another community, you’re in Granola Park,” Green says. “You may have a lot more acceptance if this were in Maryland.”

“It’s illegal in Maryland,” Kahn points out. “What we have in our community here in the District of Columbia is approval. In Maryland, it lost.”

Green says that’s not the point. “Very many of these people in my community do not want this…Given the tenor, the tone of the conversation we’ve had, because I know these people very well, I can tell you, you may be facing a vote of opposition.”

Stephanie Kahn asks whether Green has any suggestions to improve relations with the ANC. “I don’t,” she says.

Amsterdam, for his part, expects a better reception in Adams Morgan, where the local ANC1C passed a resolution in support of medical marijuana last February. It already has a neon hemp leaf highlighting one of its storefronts: his. “This neighborhood is a little more laid back,” he says.

Rabbi Kahn, meanwhile, seems to be having second thoughts about bringing the issue to the ANC’s attention in the first place.

“You know, we approached them a long time ago with the idea that we could kind of have nice conversations over a period of months and kind of form a partnership with them and see how this could be done so it really benefits the community,” the rabbi says.

“I’ve been to other meetings where the conversation is very different,” he adds. “There have been people who are upset because the D.C. law is so restrictive, that there are people with illnesses whose needs are not going to be met, that the sickest people probably need more marijuana per month than what it is that our law [is] going to offer, so the sickest people aren’t even going to be helped by our law.”

At least one person at the Takoma ANC meeting seems positive about the Kahns. Of course, her argument—that what the wellness center would sell is better than junk food or malt liquor—isn’t exactly the marketing message the rabbi has in mind. “Listen, y’all can put it in my basement,” says Wanda Oates , who approaches the couple after the meeting. “My goodness! You know, we’ve got liquor stores, we’ve got candy stores, we’ve got all this stuff that’s more detrimental to your health than marijuana ever could be.”

A week after the ANC meeting, the mayor’s office releases its long awaited regulations on the new medical-marijuana program.

For the Kahns, the timeline represents something of a let-down. The couple had been hoping to open their dispensary in the fall. But under the new rules, regulators aren’t authorized to judge the applications until Jan. 1. Even if the first cultivation center were to be authorized on New Year’s Day, it would still take several more months for the first legal batch of the stuff to mature. That means spring at the earliest.

The rules also say that officials will consider applications on a “first-come, first-served” basis, making the Kahns wonder whether all of their advance maneuvering was worth it. “Am I going to have to stand outside ABRA for three days as if I was waiting for the first iPhone?” the rabbi asks.

“We’re just a little disappointed that it looks like it’s going to drag out so long,” he says. “Not so much personally disappointed, but disappointed for the patients who’ve been waiting for so long, and a little concerned that delay leads to delay, and now we’re going to an election.”

The rabbi is all too aware that the shifting political scene could stop the program dead in its tracks. Republicans could potentially regain control of Congress and overturn the will of the voters yet again. “It seems a shame that after waiting 13 years, it can’t be done quicker,” he says.