Marin County’s ‘Godmother of Marijuana’ Is Back in Business

She’s baaaaaack! Lynette “Bluesetta” Shaw is a first-generation pioneer of California’s massive medical marijuana market. Her decades-long legal saga is finally ending and her groundbreaking dispensary, which was shut down in 2011, is back in business — under the same permit. Mayberry, on acid — that’s how Fairfax, California is described by one of the people swarming what passes for an office park in the small Marin County town, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. Next door to a weathered building with a long, low-pitched roof (reminiscent of a Japanese Buddhist temple—or a Pizza Hut without the crown) is a Little League baseball diamond, which shares a parking lot with the office park’s anchor commercial tenants; a co-working space that calls itself a “business sanctuary,” a hot-tub complex with a clothing-optional sundeck and, underneath the roof, Lynette Shaw’s Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana — one of the first medical-marijuana dispensaries in the United States and the only legal cannabis outlet in Marin county. MAMM, often just called “The Alliance,” is hosting its grand reopening today — a triumphant return after winning a federal court case that began in the late 1990s. Before its closure in 2011, about 10 percent of the Fairfax townsfolk — roughly 800 people — were members. Today the dispensary’s small, rectangular sales floor sees many feet, but the young man and woman working the counter are doing only modest business. Instead, most of the attention is focused on Shaw, a gregarious woman with a large…

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