The last time you might’ve heard a weed enthusiast raving about a coffee shop, it’s likely they had come back from a trip to Amsterdam, where once tourists flocked to quaint cafés to sip coffee and legally puff on joints. Now you need not go further than Los Angeles. Doug Dracup — famous for Hitman Glass, an artisan pipe company, and for Chalice California, a weed, culture, and arts festival in San Bernardino — just launched Hitman Coffee Shop.
Located amongst trendy furniture stores and vintage shops on La Brea Avenue, Hitman Coffee Shop is something of an art gallery/coffeehouse/coworking space. And of course, it’s an open space where you can BYO-weed and get high with like minded folk.
The space showcases Hitman’s ornate glassware, in the shape of glass blown dragons or simple, realistic looking fruit, all worth about six figures per art piece. Membership with Hitman Coffee Shop costs a pretty penny, as well: about $400 a month or $4,000 a year, comparable to other coworking spaces. Though, he also offers reduced rate trials for anyone over 21.
Members can bring their own joints, dab rigs, pipes and whatever else they want and smoke out on the patio. Dracup doesn’t actually sell cannabis at the Coffee Shop. (California’s adult use licensing regulations don’t go into effect until 2018.) He does, however, give members free coffee and refreshments.
“It’s a stoner’s dream to have their own coffee shop, it’s something I’ve always wanted to do,” Dracup tells Jane Street. He got the idea from a friend, whom he calls the “hash queen” from Amsterdam. “Her social norm is that she’s around coffee shops all the time,” he says. Now with California’s new adult use law, anyone over 21 can have up to an ounce of weed or up to 8 grams of concentrates — stuff they can bring to the Coffee Shop and smoke.
“It’s everything but the sale of cannabis there,” he says. As everyone else gets caught up in the sale, manufacturing, and cultivation of cannabis, Dracup says he’s more focused on creating an experience. “When you went to Amsterdam as a tourist, at first it’s about the novelty of buying weed,” he says, but once you’ve bought more flower and hash you could possibly consume, it becomes about the novelty of smoking it in a community space as you would drink a beer at a lounge or bar.
But Dracup emphasizes that the Coffee Shop is not a smoking lounge, but more of an office and networking space. “The fact that it’s a cannabis friendly space is almost secondary to what it is,” he says. “One guy takes phone calls, uses it as an office, pops in there everyday, grabs his coffee, he’s on his laptop, he’s taking a dab, he’s popping into a conversation to meet somebody. I’ve already seen so many great meetings happen there.” With different areas for private conversations, a pool table, an indoor cafe, and outdoor patio, the idea for the space is to be both productive and dynamic. Hitman Coffee Shop is something of a hub for the cannabis industry, a place to mingle and work if you’re already in the cannabis space, or a welcoming venue for those trying to get into it.
With night time events, including reggae and jazz performances, hash and weed tastings, educational seminars, product releases, and pop up shops, the Coffee Shop is a useful platform to target various demographics within the world of weed.
“I want to help normalize our ability {to use cannabis} and not feel criminal going out socializing,” Dracup says. “People are no longer criminal, it’s time to celebrate that. We are a new generation. Hitman Coffee Shop is a celebration of the change in law.”
