Common Citizen, Rare Perspective
By: Matthew Gervais
Down a forgotten strip of Averill on Flint’s east side sits a peculiar gem. Passerby’s for months have speculated as to its purpose while they watched what was once the Checkpoint Lounge transform into... something? A coffee shop, said some. Bank was another popular guess, until a green light appeared one day on the side of the building. That seems odd for a bank? Then billboards featuring happy people in striking black and white, with a single featured line “Cannabis For Humanity”.
This, of course, meant it was time for the MM Report to get involved. We sat down with Michael Elias, CEO and one of the four founders of Common Citizen, at their state licensed pilot marijuana provisioning center, not bank, to get to the bottom of the mystery and find out a little about him and his thoughts on the cannabis industry in Michigan.
Straight to the point, what is Common Citizen?
“Common citizen is a purpose driven human-centric brand that was established, really the journey took about three years to get where we’re at today, and it’s centered on the local environment, the people that look like you and I every day that consume for various reasons. Whether it be social, medical, wellness, or just a solo consumer who is looking to alternatives for alcohol and potent pharmaceuticals that present too many side effects. And so the idea of Common Citizen is to create this unpretentious brand that allows the common person to look in and see themselves in the store. For us, If you don’t see yourself in my store, then you will never think about consuming or looking for alternatives. It’s really to accelerate the normalization of cannabis in the state.”
Why choose Flint to start this endeavour?
“The four founders were born and raised in Michigan. I grew up in Detroit, 7 Mile and Ryan, and you know that house is long gone, it is quite the ghetto these days. But we know Michigan, we know Detroit, Common Citizen is a brand born in Detroit. We chose Flint because Flint was the epicenter of the economic hub of the world at some point back in the day, and we believe that there is not only a renaissance going on here, but a renaissance going on in Detroit. We think that renaissance parallels the renaissance of cannabis beautifully. So we think this is a great location to sping board from and really hold true to our roots. You know this store, we put about $1.2 - $1.3 million into this store, and people said we were crazy, it’s Flint Michigan, why would you do such a thing? We believe Flint deserves better.”
Will you tell us a bit about your professional background?
“‘Lean manufacturing is a big part of my background, I ran a hospital, 450 bed quaternary facility. Spent a lot of time at the bedside as an administrator, looking at the issues around patient care, and not only the patient but the families that support the patient. You had to look beyond the patient in some cases because the families that support those patients are just as important. When they go home and they take that patient when they get discharged, what that family does effects the trajectory of that patient though the system. And so for us, we are looking at the total patient when they come in, and lean is a big part of continuous improvement in Common Citizen, it’s a 70 year old methodology that keeps the patient in the center of the design. The learnings I got in healthcare was that most healthcare systems are not designed with patient in mind, they evolve. It’s just a Frankenstien bunch of Band-Aide fixes, and what I spent 21 years doing in healthcare was unravelling those Band-Aide fixes and trying to get back to why we do what we do as clinicians and design with the patient in the middle.”
So how is that sort of experience applied to selling cannabis products?
“I feel that a lot of that experience is coming into this space, and so when I see a customer walk in it’s a huge highlight for me. To be able to tap their wisdom, and their experience, to be able to take whatever it is they’re saying could be improved and immediately imbed that into the standard work for the staff. Lean is very nimble in that regard, it’s real time corrective action. So we are building, in every one of these Citizen Advisors, the capability to be, essentially, industrial engineers in a service level environment where they can take these soft technologies and methodologies that have been around for 70 years and implement them in real time, which really creates a powerful environment for the staff.”
Citizen Advisors?
“We call them Citizen Advisors rather than Bud Tenders. Outside of the customers the staff are the most important thing for me. We have a whole employee happiness strategy that we put together that essentially ensures that they are incredibly happy at work. I use the word incredible because it is not enough that they are happy, they need to be passionate about the space that they’re in. I don’t want them coming in and punching a clock. I want them to feel that they are part of a movement, and spending their time in the community doing things that are important for Flint residents. Those are pre-requisites to employment, that they have a passion. For example, we are going to have Wednesday water drives, it was driven by one of the Citizen Advisors. That wasn’t something I came up with, it was a Citizen Advisor who is already involved in trying to improve the water situation in Flint. Essentially we are funding her vision, because it made sense. It fit the brand beautifully.”
Does the brand just do provisioning, or are there plans for more?
“We are vertically integrated, meaning that we manufacture, we provision, and we process, pharmacutical grade cannabis. We can not transport, obviously, because the state won’t let you do that, if you are into those three, and we can’t test, but we do have our own testing service.”
As someone in business at multiple levels of the cannabis industry, what are your thoughts on the black market?
“My biggest issue is the black market, the grey market, oversupplying the market with sub-par product that isn’t safe. Those things all have the ability to unravel the commercial environment. The whole point of the commercial environment is to get good quality tested regulated product to the consumer. When you allow for black market activities, or grey market activities, that could bypass those regulatory constraints that ensure good quality product, I think you have a problem. From a business stand-point and from a patient safety stand-point. You know, we got case studies in Oregon, we got case studies in Cali. I’m not making this up. We can just look at what went wrong in those states and hopefully we can learn and build that into our regulatory framework. So that’s my big concern, oversupplying the market. But to allow certain laws on the books today to not be enforced I think is a huge problem. And today there is a level of complacency. You’ve got mixed signals, you’ve got folks in the higher ups that have come out and declared that their not going to commit enforcement dollars to cannabis related infractions, and I think that has created a mixed signal to enforcement. But there are current laws, on the books today, that should be enforced. If it’s a money issue, let’s talk about ways to improve that. Maybe there are ways the operators could contribute to providing law enforcement with the resouces they need to be able to do what they need to do to adhere to the laws that are on the books today. So I think there are some problems from an enforcement standpoint, and there are problems from an oversupply standpoint. If that price per pound comes down significantly, to the extent where we can’t compete with black market activities, well then all those sales are going to go black market and now you’re back to untested unregulated product, and all the money we put into GMP, the $66,000 per license we have to pay, the cost of compliance, bringing in your compliance officers to make sure you adhere to regs, resources dedicated to just the metric system, I mean there are some significant costs here to make sure that we operate properly, then we’re going to have to fold.”
And caregivers?
“I think absolutely caregivers, microbusinesses can co-exist, there is no reason why they can’t. But they should be adhering to the same regs, standards, that any one of the big guys should be, as well. I mean that makes sense when it comes to GMP, when it comes to safe handling of product, when it comes to delivering high quality product, all the cost of compliance that we went through, they should be going through that on a smaller scale. I think as long as they can meet those regs, then it’s fair game. “
You mentioned GMP a couple of times, could you elaborate on that?
“Good Manufacturing Practice, it’s a coveted designation that the FDA uses for food and drug today. Any mass consumable that is regulated by the FDA must be GMP, it essentially drives a significant reduction in contamination and food safety issues. The problem with cannabis is that things are going so quickly that the state of Michigan does not regulate operators to be GMP today, which I think is a huge problem. We are lobbying hard to change that view. Yes, we are asking for more regs, believe it or not, and people always say, what’s your angle, guy? And I am thinking the angle is I’m a healthcare guy, number one, I spent years seeing what horrible process and medication administration does to a patient who is already immunocompromised. The fact that we are not implementing Good Manufacturing Practice, as a proactive measure, to mitigate contamination, is just mind boggling to me. Look, FDA is coming, and when it does manufacturers and operators like us are going to be held to a completely different standard, and that standard is GMP. For operators today that are not GMP to retrofit your entire building and implement the standards to drive GMP, is not an easy task, that’s a very costly one if you are not doing it today. What I’ve been trying to lobby the state to think about is, look, this is not only good for customers and patients, but this is good for business. To be one of the first states in the U.S. to drive a regulatory environment for GMP is a badge of honor. To me, it is what every state should be doing.”
Does Common Citizen plan to enter the recreational market?
“We are very excited about the fact that Michigan went rec, they’ve got a year or so, probably less now, to promulgate the rules, and of course we are going to be competing in that space. My big concern with recreational is that the municipalities we are in, we’re under a medical ordinance at this point, and we’re not clear whether those municipalities will engage in developing the recreational ordinance. If they don’t, then we’re going to have to look really hard at potentially leaving that city, because it just doesn’t make sense. The people have spoken, the state of Michigan has spoken, and so likewise I would see that the cities that we’re in would also reflect the will of the people, and if they don’t, business is going to be very difficult. So I am hoping that cities like Flint, Battle Creek, Warren, Marshall, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Pontiac, those cities start working on a recreational ordinance that makes sense. If not we’ll have to move out. That’s my biggest concern with the recreational space, and I think the rules that came out, you know, there’s a mixed bag of things. I am not a big fan of the fact that there are fewer barriers to entry on the recreational side. I think if we are going to raise the bar and we want the right operators in the space, I think you should have the capital to be able to deploy that business. It’s a very capital intensive business, and there should be some common sense barriers to making sure that operators in the space have the class and sophistication to pull it off. That raises the bar for everybody, and to me that’s what the commercial market is about. I’m still digesting those regs. But the other side, what I love about rec is the fact that it allows people access. We’ve been consuming this plant for 12,000 years. We have had a harmonious relationship with the plant, and Common Citizens job is to elevate the everyday for everyone.”
