The bulletproof security glass inside Mission South Shore marijuana dispensary was supposed to be impenetrable. But it gave way Sunday afternoon to looters armed with crowbars and baseball bats.
They smashed through the front door first, then hacked away at the security glass, said Kris Krane, president and co-founder of 4Front Ventures, which owns the dispensary in the South Chicago neighborhood. Everything of value was taken, including the marijuana.
“The store’s been pretty much ransacked,” said Krane, who watched security camera footage of 30 or 40 people breaking into the dispensary. “Nothing was going to hold that many people back.”
Every dispensary in Chicago closed Monday — and some indefinitely — to prevent or clean up from weekend looting and vandalizing, fallout from George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis last week. The closures could cause problems for medical patients whose supplies run low.
All the staff members at Mission left before the looters arrived, Krane said. The dispensary shut down as neighboring businesses were looted and the situation appeared unsafe. It was boarded up Monday morning, and will be closed until further notice.
Krane said they are still assessing how deeply the loss of inventory will affect customers and patients.
Dispensary 33 in the Uptown neighborhood closed early Sunday and remained closed Monday, said general manager Paul Lee. The store reopened Tuesday, though with limited hours.
The dispensary’s storefront was broken and kicked down Saturday night, but no one entered the store.
Because of state regulations, marijuana dispensaries in Illinois have robust security systems. Many employ security guards, and, like Mission, have secured areas that customers must pass through before entering the showroom floor. Even there, marijuana products are not allowed to be displayed — they must be kept locked up, in a vault or secured room.
When looters on Saturday night shattered the windows and entered the Sunnyside dispensary in River North, which opened just last week, they did not penetrate the secure area and vault, where the cannabis is stored, said spokesman Jason Erkes.
Cresco Labs, which owns the dispensary, moved all the product out of its dispensaries in River North, Lakeview and Elmwood Park to a state-licensed, secure location. The stores are boarded up, and closed until further notice.
NuMed Chicago sent out a text alert letting customers know it is temporarily closing “due to ongoing protests in our area.” Illinois Supply and Provisions in Springfield also was closed Monday. MedMen, which operates dispensaries in Evanston and Oak Park, closed all of its stores nationwide Sunday.
The unrest follows the death of Floyd, an unarmed black man, at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer. City officials have drawn a distinction between the looters and the protesters.
Still, the unrest is striking an interesting chord in the marijuana industry, which has been criticized for being largely white-owned. Efforts to diversify the industry have been delayed because of the coronavirus.
Krane said he and everyone at Mission “believes deeply” in the causes of social justice, racial justice and ending police brutality. They support the protesters’ goals and don’t want what happened at the dispensary to minimize that, he said.
“The underlying events that caused the protests to erupt in the first place are still not resolved,” he said. “I don’t want us to look like a victim here and I don’t want that to detract from the broader cause and the broader movement.”
Twitter @AllyMarotti
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