Editor’s note: This article was first published in March 2012. The franchise figures, an investment of 30,000 euros and premises of at least 50 square metres, and the count of more than 30 grow shops in the province of Granada are from that year.
Cannabis shops, or grow shops, are expanding fast. Some franchises have even appeared that you can join with an investment of €30,000 and premises of at least 50 m², although you can also set up this business on your own.
The core of the business is organic farming: these shops sell not only cannabis, but also seeds, natural fertilizers and soil feeds. According to the newspaper Ideal.es, the province of Granada alone already has more than 30 shops of this kind, and their best-selling product is cannabis seeds, in hundreds of varieties. The business is completely legal, since the law only requires that everything you sell be for personal consumption. In other words, the end consumer may not sell what they grow.
Part of the success of these shops comes from the well-known healing properties of cannabis. Their regular customers tend to be people with cancer, patients undergoing chemotherapy, or people with conditions such as fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis or glaucoma, who find relief in this product for chronic pain or for the side effects of some treatments.
Of course, not every plant has the same effect, so for these patients some shops have set up what they call a “solidarity box”, where they donate part of the harvest at its optimal point so the patient doesn’t have to wait to use it.
You could say these entrepreneurs have built a social business, because it solves two problems: first, customers don’t have to turn to the black market to buy seeds or plants; second, in a way, it brings cannabis into the taxed economy.
Finally, for people who aren’t willing to smoke cannabis, these shops offer the option of using vaporizers instead.
These entrepreneurs face the crisis with a different philosophy. They have even been called “the entrepreneurs of joy”, although according to the Granada spokesman, most of their customers don’t use cannabis for pleasure but to ease their ailments, and in many cases they come on the advice of their own doctors.
For now, and as long as the law allows it, grow shops are profitable businesses and growing. Some brave words from Chus, a cannabis entrepreneur, caught my attention:
“If a judge ever decided the business isn’t legal, he can do what he likes with me. Before a legal conscience, I have a human conscience.”
Further reading
- Selling tobacco legally without paying taxes: a business idea
- 9 business ideas with no investment and no commercial premises
Featured image: Doalex, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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