08/06/2026
Today, when most people hear the terms “budtender” and “dispensary," they know they refer to a retail store and the people who work in them. What you might not know is where the terms came from and why we use them....
Although the school was formally established in 2007, Oaksterdam’s founders opened some of the world’s first cannabis retail storefronts in the mid 1990s in downtown Oakland—before California legalized medical use in 1996.
Jeff Jones launched the Oakland C Buyers’ Cooperative (OCBC) in 1995 as a bike-delivery service and converted it into a storefront on July 4, 1996. In November, California voters passed Proposition 215, legalizing medical ma*****na and igniting the national movement towards law reform. At OCBC, Jeff and his team considered themselves “therapeutic counselors” because, when they provided patients with C, they found they also needed to provide extensive guidance.
“We would completely unveil what c@nn@b!s could be for patients — edibles, pills, flowers, vaporizing. We guided them to the solution that fit their needs.”
Photo: Oaksterdam founders Richard Lee, Dale Sky Jones and Jeff Jones
Jeff says the terms “budtender” and “dispensary” originated in conversations with Oaksterdam University’s other co-founder, Richard Lee, about how distribution was evolving in the semi-legal California market.
“Richard really liked the idea of making [dispensaries] like a bar and calling it a ‘bud bar, Jeff recalls. “I always described it more like a dispensary—a medical office where patients received medicine based on their doctor’s recommendation.”
Both Jeff and Richard’s terminology stuck, and today the budtender fills the same critical void for consumers by helping them navigate cannabis sold in dispensaries.
Budtenders are the most influential people in the industry because they interact with consumers every day. Because of their outsized role in the supply chain, it is vital that budtenders know how to provide real, meaningful product guidance without making things up or becoming a liability by dispensing unqualified medical advice.
Oaksterdam University trained the world’s first budtenders, and we continue to train the world’s b
