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Instead, Rush took a job organizing for the meat-cutters union, a career path that led to UFCW. He had enough success to rise to a position called "statewide special operations director," in charge of identifying potential new members and signing them up.
Rush was spending the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in 2009 poring over ballot initiatives for the next year, seeing where UFCW could help out, when something caught his eye: A marijuana legalization initiative had qualified for the ballot. The campaign running it was in downtown Oakland, a few doors down from where Rush's grandmother would take him shopping as a child, and just a short Harley ride up Telegraph Avenue from the family's home near the MacArthur BART station.
Rush knew nothing about cannabis at the time. He did know that Oakland's long-moribund downtown was enjoying a revival thanks to the collection of dispensaries and marijuana businesses sprouting up on Broadway and Telegraph. And anyone or anything that was good for Oakland was good for Dan Rush. So he hopped on his Harley and rumbled up to the legalization campaign's headquarters in a building on Broadway near where his grandmother used to work. It was a Sunday morning and the election was almost a year away. He was surprised to see a buzzing office full of volunteers and piles of empty pizza boxes.
This was a chance. The legalizers had a cause and they had people. What they didn't have was an organization or political connections, two things that could help them win badly needed legitimacy, not to mention the election the next fall. UFCW had both. The legalization campaign, run by the leaders of downtown cannabis college Oaksterdam University, was thrilled to have the union.
Rush retells this story while sitting in a cramped office at the back of his house on a recent sultry June afternoon, feeds from multiple security cameras on a monitor in front him. He's surrounded by Superman kitsch, honorary proclamations from politicians, and memorabilia — including thank-you certificates — from a certain notorious motorcycle club with strong Oakland roots. "That chair you're sitting in — that's Sonny Barger's chair," he tells me, referring to one of the more notorious founding members of the Hell's Angels' Oakland chapter.
For Rush, signing up Oaksterdam's workers was a social justice issue. Even though they were paid well and treated well, "cannabis workers were absolutely marginalized," he says, "but not by their employers."
At Oaksterdam, Rush met a lesbian couple. They both worked in marijuana, and they were planning to get married. But they were afraid to go home and confront their families at Christmas — because they worked in weed, not because they were gay. Rush met another individual, an overweight man who wore unflattering skin-tight lycra bicycle wear to and from work. When asked why, the man explained: Proving that he literally had nothing to hide was the only way he could commute to and from work without being stopped and searched by police.
"And this was in fucking Oakland," Rush says, his voice rising. "If that's not a disparaged workforce, I don't know what is. They weren't oppressed at work. They were being oppressed by an ignorant society."
It was still a tough sell to union honchos. UFCW gives its locals a fair measure of autonomy, but this — a bunch of stoners breaking federal law — was something else entirely. Preferring to beg for forgiveness than ask permission, Rush told the legalizers that the union was in. Later, when pitching the idea to his union superiors, Rush keyed in on two points: One, cannabis is a retail product "for human consumption and wear," and UFCW represents workers in agriculture, textiles, and other similar industries; two, it was an expanding industry with great growth potential — and other unions were nowhere to be found. UFCW had the field to itself, if it wanted it.
On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend 2010, the union issued a press release announcing it had organized workers at Oaksterdam University and its affiliated dispensaries and businesses. "Four hundred" media outlets around the country ran the story, Rush says. With UFCW's help, the legalization measure, now called Prop. 19, received backing from the state NAACP as well as drug reform and marijuana advocates.
Most mainstream Democrats, however, stayed away. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein served as the "No" campaign's chairwoman. Financial support, other than the life savings of Oaksterdam founder Richard Lee, was in short supply. The final straw was an October surprise courtesy of the federal Justice Department, which said it would prosecute city officials who allowed legal weed operations to open. The initiative won more votes than Meg Whitman did in her bid to defeat Jerry Brown for governor, but still lost, barely, with 47.5 percent of Californians voting in favor.
UFCW was nevertheless committed. The union soon created a "national medical cannabis and hemp division," of which Rush was made director. He sold dispensary operators on UFCW's political clout, leverage that could be used to win them local approval to open. The union also worked city halls. When Oakland chose to expand the number of permitted dispensaries allowed in town from four to eight, UFCW ensured that when the "merit-based" permit applications were considered, union membership counted. (Of the four that were granted permits, only Magnolia Wellness was — and still is — organized.) A similar reward for union membership is in place in Berkeley, which will select one of eight applicants for an additional dispensary permit later this year.
The union also helped cannabis become more sophisticated. Most everybody working in California cannabis policy today has had at least a few meetings with UFCW. Or, as one Sacramento-level lobbyist told me recently, "Dan Rush fucking made me."
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