The Well-Being Business

How the AIDS crisis led one dispensary owner into the cannabis industry

The front desk of Good Chemistry is more hotel lobby or nightclub anteroom than bullet-proof teller window. Hip hop drifts through the speakers, and a thin, neon-luminescent ‘g’ — subtly shaped as a pharmaceutical mortar and pestle — hovers behind the smiling staff as I sign in. The grey walls to either side feature bright, cascading graphics of indica and sativa, whose leaves I’m comparing just before Matthew Huron, Good Chemistry’s founder, walks in with Meg Collins, VP of Public Affairs.

“We opened this store April 9 of last year and were fortunate enough to get one of 20 licenses in Aurora,” Matthew explains.

“24,” Meg clarifies, “but they only awarded 23.”

“And they’re geographically dispersed throughout the city. This used to be a Blockbuster, and we found this out after the fact, but it turns out that this was the busiest Blockbuster in the state of Colorado,” he laughs. “So it’s a good location.”

A tall, dark-haired man with chiseled features and five-o’clock shadow, Matthew has a relaxed, confident demeanor cut by occasional glimpses of a competitive streak. “My core competency is growing marijuana,” he often claims, and that’s undeniable, as an owner of a business that cultivates over 60 strains of marijuana and employs 80+ people.

Founded in 2010, Good Chemistry has an edge on some of the other start-ups in Colorado, because Matthew brought 10 years of industry experience from California. This is partly why the lobby is so welcoming and also why Good Chemistry strains are sold at a flat, affordable rate — “$30 per 1/8th every strain, every day” — and why each strain is labeled through Good Chemistry’s four-category system: amplify, relax, relieve, and sleep.

“Our dispensary is an extension of the nursery,” Matthew says as he shows me a wooden cabinet of hand-tagged varieties, hung to dry. “We believe we grow the finest cannabis in Colorado, so we wanted to give customers a peek of our nursery.”

As we sit down to talk, I catch a glimpse of a photo on Matthew’s phone screen before he clicks it black. I ask who it was. “That’s my father,” he says, showing the two of them smiling only slightly in pale shirts. “That’s from his 60th birthday, and he died a month later.”

Without his father’s influence, Matthew may have never entered the cannabis industry.

Growing up in a gay household in San Francisco, blocks off of Castro Street, Matthew’s childhood was the exact opposite of many queer men. “My dad would have these dinner parties, and he would lament, ‘My son is straight — I don’t know what we did wrong.’”

Drag shows and a wide circle of uncles and “aunts” were part of Matthew’s life that he accepted as normal. “For a Christmas present one year, I got a huge bucket of condoms from one of my dad’s friends. And I worked really hard to get through them.”

San Francisco’s proud and liberated queer culture took a dark turn in the 80s. “When AIDS came around, my father and his partner both tested positive and pretty much all of their friends tested positive. And what was originally a very colorful social scene changed pretty quickly — my dad had all these dinner parties, which turned very quickly to friends not showing up. And it was, ‘Where’s Paulette?’ So many of my dad’s friends passed away.”

California legalized medical marijuana in 1996, and at a time when new highly active anti-retroviral treatments were being introduced, many patients — including Matthew’s father James Huron and James’ partner Elmar — used marijuana to treat aspects of the disease, particularly HIV wasting syndrome. (In fact, the first medical marijuana dispensary was started by Dennis Peron to help AIDS victims in San Francisco in 1992.)

In 2000, Matthew partnered with the two of them to create a medical-marijuana company. “Elmar was in an assisted-living facility [for HIV patients] and we were bringing marijuana to him. Next thing you know, we were bringing it to everybody in there. We thought, let’s help other people.”

The Elmar Lins Compassion Co-Op provided medical marijuana for free to HIV patients, selling some of their product to outside marijuana clubs to pay the bills, but always operating tenuously.

“The nurses at that time were cool with it, but a lot of these facilities are federally funded, so it was like, ‘Come on Wednesday at 5 o’clock. We’ll go out the back door, and you do what you need to do.’” 

With its frequent raids in those years and unclear laws, California ultimately proved “not really a good place to do business.” After Elmar passed away in 2008 and his father in 2009, Matthew wasn’t sure what he would do next. A friend convinced him to come check out Colorado’s newly emerging scene, and Matthew, impressed with the legal structures and regulations being implemented by the state, decided
to move.

Matthew brought the Compassion Program along with him to Colorado and continues to support nearly 50 terminally ill patients by providing them access to marijuana each week. “I believe we are the only dispensary in the state that offers a compassion program,” he says. “We provide high-quality cannabis to low-income, qualifying patients.”

Even after opening two stores in six highly successful years, he is cautious about the future of marijuana, recognizing that Colorado is a bubble and that marijuana is still federally illegal. “It’s only 24 months old,” he notes about the Colorado recreational industry as we talk about pending legislation to let in out-of-state funders. “[Out-of-state funding] is not a question of if — it’s when. But we need to remember that progress is not guaranteed; it’s always two steps forward, one step back. Just like gay marriage, we can’t take it for granted.”

“We don’t want to open the floodgates to come into the state that may not be committed to the state,” Meg adds. “It exposes the state to additional scrutiny that we may not need.”

For now, Good Chemistry is banking that marijuana legalization will expand to other states, embarking on a new education campaign that aims to turn customers into connoisseurs. For the last nine months, the Good Chemistry team has been designing and preparing a 28-page booklet that was released on April 14. The S.T.A.T.S. method (Sight, Touch, Aroma, Taste, and Sensation) is a guide to helping consumers evaluate essential aspects of the flower in order to make the most informed and satisfying purchase decisions.

“All of the stores are telling you, in some shape or form, ‘We are the best,’” Matthew explains. “So we did some secret shopping [and] noticed lots of tiered pricing. But even most of our competitors’ top shelf, we found, was sub par. We thought, ‘Don’t people know?’ and we realized they don’t know. A lot of marijuana consumers are starting to ask questions, and we want to educate them.”

Similar to the five Cs of diamonds, S.T.A.T.S. provides five fundamental criteria to judge the quality of a cannabis flower. The one-of-a-kind guide was developed as an industry-wide evaluation and education tool and will change the way consumers view and purchase cannabis flower.

“We’re big on education.” Meg says. “We’re not in this for the short term, as you’ve heard in Matthew’s story, but the long haul, so it’s important that we build educated customers.”

You can pick up your copy of S.T.A.T.S. at Good Chemistry’s Capitol Hill store (330 E. Colfax Ave.) or their Aurora location (16840 E. Iliff Ave).