A new cannabis dispensary called Green Field is set to open at 4687 Mission St. in the Excelsior's Persia Triangle — and if the timeline doesn't make you want to light one up, nothing will. According to the owner's brother, the shop has been seven years in the making.

Seven. Years.

Let that sink in. California legalized recreational cannabis in 2016. You could have started a family, earned a doctorate, or watched three full economic cycles in the time it took to get the green light to sell a legal product in San Francisco. This isn't a story about weed — it's a story about a city that makes it nearly impossible to do business.

San Francisco's cannabis permitting process is legendary for all the wrong reasons. Between Planning Commission reviews, neighborhood notifications, conditional use hearings, equity program requirements, and the usual bureaucratic black hole, aspiring dispensary owners face a gauntlet that would make a DMV clerk blush. The city claims it wants to support small business and cannabis equity applicants, but the labyrinthine approval process tells a very different story.

To Green Field's owners: congratulations, genuinely. Opening any small business in this city is an act of stubborn optimism, and doing it in the Excelsior — a neighborhood that could use more investment and foot traffic — is commendable. The Persia Triangle is a vibrant corridor that deserves entrepreneurs willing to put down roots.

But let's not pretend this timeline is normal or acceptable. Seven years of someone's life, capital tied up, dreams deferred — all for a perfectly legal retail operation. Every month of delay is money burned on rent, lawyers, and consultants navigating a system that seems designed to exhaust rather than enable.

If San Francisco actually wants to be the progressive, business-friendly city it markets itself as, maybe the real high should be cutting permitting timelines in half. A legal business shouldn't require the patience of a saint and the lifespan of a redwood to open its doors.