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The Crisp Lounge and cannabis dispensary, which coupled weed sales and indoor consumption with everything from live music and comedy to pool tournaments, karaoke and “paranormal open mic” nights, is going out of business.

The owners announced the pending closure on social media this week, saying the smoking lounge’s last day of operations will be this Saturday while the dispensary at the other end of the building — a former used appliance store on Broadway, painted black with neon stoner graffiti — will remain open through the end of the year, or until its stock sells out. 

That marks two Eureka dispensary closure announcements in the past few days, with this one coming on the heels of one from the Gold Rush/Green Rush drive-through just half a mile down the road. 

Dean Crisp, the owner and founder of Crisp Lounge, said it’s a simple matter of supply and demand, with the city’s supply of weed shops far exceeding consumer demand in this depressed economy.

“There’s too many here,” Crisp said when we caught up with him at the lounge earlier today. “Why would I stay open when they’re gonna open four more here any day?” (There are, in fact, at least two more dispensaries expected to open on Broadway in the coming months.)

A Virginia native with a laid-back drawl, Crisp rode the rise and fall of Humboldt County’s green rush over the past 15-plus years. After building houses for a few years in Costa Rica, in 2009 he came to Humboldt (like many others) to trim weed and (like many others) wound up sticking around.

Crisp said he helped one guy build an indoor growing facility, which later burned to the ground. He then helped operate a farm for about a year before he and a friend “got our shit together” and started their own farming operation. Eventually, he was operating three farms off of Forest Service Route 1 in Southern Humboldt. 

“We had a good run for a while,” he said. “We created a lot of jobs and paid a lot of taxes.”

But legalization didn’t work out the way he (like many others) had hoped.

“We spent a fucking million dollars going legal — put in ponds and roads, you know, all the bullshit we had to do — and we didn’t make a fucking dime after doing all that shit,” Crisp said. “I used to pay over a hundred grand a year in taxes before I ever got a fucking plant in the ground.”

Still, he was optimistic when he sold his farms to launch Crisp Lounge. He began renovating the building right before the COVID pandemic but didn’t open until April of 2023 due mostly to permitting delays, he said. 

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“I thought it would be a huge hit here because it’s a cool thing,” Crisp said. “Where can you go anywhere and consume cannabis, let alone inside, right? A lot of people like to come here because they don’t want to go to a bar. They don’t want to be around a bunch of alcoholics. So they come in here and they hang out and they burn one or they get a cup of coffee and they chill.”

But expenses — including “crazy” monthly rent and $7,000 in annual permitting fees from the City of Eureka — are high. And as the region’s economy has tanked, his competition seems only to increase. There are now more than a dozen dispensaries in Eureka alone. 

He’s a bit jaded about the local government’s regulatory approach. 

“Here’s how I feel about it: They know what’s going to happen to people here,” he said, referring to Eureka officials. “They know that if you put $200,000 into a building here for cannabis, you’re not gonna make a fucking dime, dude. But they’re gonna get their $5,000 to get their fuckin’ cut.” 

He sighed. “Maybe I’m wrong, but … all we got here is thrift stores, head shops and dispensaries.”

He later acknowledged that he put all of his eggs into this one basket and wound up losing it all — all except for the knowledge he’s gained. Crisp said he loves Humboldt and doesn’t want to leave, but there are opportunities for him in Florida. He’s confident that he can use what he’s learned here to advise aspiring weed entrepreneurs on the East Coast. 

Crisp hopes to liquidate his inventory by the middle of December and move to Florida sometime in the next five months. 

He took one more dig at how the city and county have regulated the industry, saying they “killed it” and drove everybody out of business. But then he added, “It would have happened anyway. I don’t think it would have happened as fast, to be honest with you. But it was inevitable. The gold rush is over for cannabis.”

He still believes in the concept of an Amsterdam-style consumption lounge, a place where you can smoke weed, sip espresso or kombucha and hang out with your friends. But he said the surrounding economy will have to be better for such an operation to succeed.

Still, Crisp has maintained the laid-back equanimity of a true Humboldt local. Looking back on his cannabis experiences here, he said, “It was a good run, bro.”