 Harborside is one of Oakland, California's four licensed medical cannabis dispensaries and here we provide medical cannabis to California citizens who have a written recommendation from their doctor authorizing them to possess cannabis. We have over 30,000 members in our collective and we see about six or seven hundred patients per day. Harborside Health Center has the best selection of cannabis in the world. We usually have about a hundred different products on our menu every day. That breaks down typically to about 50 different varieties of cannabis bud, about 20 or 25 different types of concentrates or hashish and around an equal number 20 to 25 different edible preparations. In 1996 the voters of California passed a measure called Prop 215 which legalized the cultivation, possession and sharing of cannabis amongst people who had a written recommendation from their doctor to do so. Cannabis recommendation can be written for any illness as long as the cannabis helps the patient. I came to cannabis because the doctor was brave enough to start that conversation and utilize cannabis for the first time as medicine. Late 2001 I was diagnosed with systemic libous urethmias. Most people who suffer from complications died in the mid 50s. I was diagnosed in my early 20s. The second diagnosed was fibroid myasia. Between those two I was on a regimen of six different steroid dosages a day. I was on pain management pills. I got to the point where I was dealing with transdermal morphine patches. I was on probably 10 different psycho antidepressants. It was a major cocktail. During that time period I went through two surgeries for cancer and had several system tumors removed and in 2007 I got cancer for the third time and going through chemotherapy and doing that I couldn't imagine being able to be alive today had it not been for my cannabis. And so I moved out to California early this year to be a part of that movement and had the freedoms of having the medical cannabis patients protection here that several states don't allow. I don't take any other pharmaceutical anymore. It's my balance. I'm much more effective because of it. I'm not constantly dealing internally with pain. Now am I really fighting my diseases? No. But do I have a better quality of life? Absolutely. Am I more productive? Absolutely. Am I happy to be alive again? Absolutely. And again I get that because I have a balance of cannabis in my life versus the alternatives, the alternatives I didn't want to live with. It just was in a world I wanted to live in anymore and this is what I do. We don't really know exactly what specific disease patients have because that's not usually listed on the written recommendation that's presented to us. Usually the recommendation from the doctor simply states that the doctor has discussed the risks and benefits of cannabis with the patient and has found that the patient could benefit from cannabis use. The patient is then invited to become a member of our collective and they sign a collective cultivation agreement and they authorize all of the other patients in the collective to grow cannabis on their behalf. That brings us into compliance with the Attorney General's guidelines for cannabis distribution and it creates a 100% closed loop distribution system that completely insulates our patients from any contact with the illicit market because all of the medicine that we distribute here only comes from people who have signed that cultivation agreement and agreed to abide by all of our rules and regulations. There's a lot of very good reasons that people don't grow their own medicine and so California law allows patients to produce a little bit more than they need for themselves and share that with these other patients who are unable to grow for themselves. Usually you have a garden, a collective garden of several people and typically they will take cannabis and distribute it amongst the various different people that work in that garden. When patients have more medicine than they need for their own personal uses, they bring that medicine into us and we accept a maximum of three pounds on any one visit from a patient to avoid being connected to large illegal grow operations. I have a very well trained staff. They smell the medicine, they look at it under the microscope, they make a basic determination about the quality of that medicine and whether it is up to our standards. We only accept 10 to 20 percent of the medicine that's presented to us because most of it doesn't reach medical standards. We then take a sample out of each batch of medicine that's presented to us and we send it to an independent third party laboratory for analysis and we do a two-step process. First the laboratory screens for the presence of any pathogenic molds because there's some molds that grow in cannabis that can be harmful to patients with compromised immune systems. Then we also quantify the percentage of THC and other cannabinoids in the plant so that patients know the strength of the cannabis before they purchase it. Once we know that the test result is good and the cannabis is not dangerous that there's nothing harmful in it, we then package the medicine and distribute that to other patients who are unable to grow their own medicine. We purchase our cannabis for around 3000 to $3,500 a pound. We then put a 40 percent markup on that so the average sale here that a patient buys is $90 worth of medicine. A heart beside health center pays a number of different fees and taxes. There's a sales tax of I believe it's 9.75 percent now that all businesses pay and most of that money goes to the state of California. We pay $50,000 a year as a licensing fee as well. We also pay a 1.8 percent tax in Oakland that goes directly to the city of Oakland. This is a special tax. The dispensaries in Oakland went to the city and suggested we ask them to tax us because there's a budget crisis in Oakland and we wanted to do something to help the city. We also pay income tax on any profits that we make to the federal government and to the state of California. That doesn't amount to very much at Harvard's Light Health Center because we're a non-profit institution. We don't have very many profits left at the end of the year. The figure is estimated at $100 million a year in California from the medical cannabis industry now in taxes to the state. With the Obama administration coming into power there has been a change in the policy of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the federal agency, and where previously they launched very frequent raids of many, many different dispensaries. They now have said that the federal government will respect state law and that they will only target dispensaries who are out of compliance with state law. President Obama is to be credited for following through on the promises that he made on the campaign trail and for respecting the wishes of the American voters. I was proud to be American on the day that I heard that news. In a lot of states this is a luxury that dying people don't have and quite frankly why not? It needs to change and it starts with a conversation with people like us. If you want to learn more about Harvard Side Health Center you can come to our website at harvorsidehealthcenter.com it's quite a mouthful but be patient enter it all in you'll get there and yeah on we go let's let's let's keep on paving the way more freedom.