In the two years since opening Gorilla Rx and the four years prior spent fighting for the right to do just that, Kika Keith became a force in Los Angeles cannabis. But the idea wasn’t on a whim. The serial entrepreneur told High Times she first got the idea to open the South-Central Los Angeles dispensary in 2007. She was attempting to get her non-infused beverage line Gorilla Life into dispensaries when one of the owners recommended adding some decarboxylated hash.
“We ended up partnering on an infused version of Gorilla Life called Chronic Tonic; it sold really well,” Keith said of her first dip into the cannabis game during the Prop. 215 era in California. “When I found out about recreational cannabis being legalized, I had an opportunity to get in as a social equity entrepreneur. And so that’s when I was like, ‘OK.’”
At first, she thought she would be returning to the beverage space. She’d done well in it before, and as the last few years have shown, it’s definitely lucrative. But the real play for social equity early on was not in manufacturing.
“The first opportunity was really to come in on the retail side for social equity. And so that kind of just changed my trajectory to launching Gorilla Rx as a retail dispensary,” Keith said.
High Times Magazine, January 2024
As 2017 rolled on towards the beginning of legal sales the following year, Keith saw the writing on the wall as she attended meetings on social equity and what the forthcoming LA recreational market would look like.
One of the early mandates of social equity, which has now been tossed out due to predatory landlords and the clearing of generational wealth, required someone applying for a license to already possess the property, whether it …
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Author: Jimi Devine / High Times
