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Showing posts from November 24, 2009

The Last Man Standing

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A few short months ago, I reported that Granada Hills had more medical marijuana dispensaries than it did Starbucks. That is true no longer. The landscape has quickly changed over the course of the past five months, and now there's only one place left in town to legally buy pot. One might think that any business owner would be pleased to have all of his competition eliminated. But Junior Martinez, the owner of California Herbal Providers, or CHP, located on Chatsworth near Encino Avenue, is actually feeling a lot of pressure, because he knows that as the last man standing, he's under intense scrutiny. "We're the only people they're watching -- and they're watching us like a hawk," he says. In the recent sweep that shut down every Granada Hills dispensary but one, how did CHP wind up as the sole survivor? "Because we play by the rules," Junior says plainly. "I'm not just some neighborhood drug dealer. We have all of our permits, we