Julietta Neas remembers the struggle she faced immigrating to southern New Mexico from Central Mexico as a child. Initially, when she, her mother, and two sisters finally reached Truth or Consequences (yes, that’s a real city; look it up), they were free but homeless.
They eventually reached Albuquerque, but many challenges lay ahead. For one, when they first arrived, no one in her family spoke English. Fortunately, what they lacked in linguistic proficiency, they made up for in tenacity and unbreakable spirits. Julietta eventually overcame that initial hurdle, enrolling in public school and eventually graduating at the top of her class before going on to dominate at UNM (go Lobos!) with degrees in criminology and Latin American Studies, which enabled an 11-year career in social work. However, after years of dedicated service, she felt a strong desire to refocus on her personal goals. This led her to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Phoenix and sparked her interest in business and business ownership as the next steps in her journey.
Julietta loved working with other people, and when the opportunity arose to enter the private sector as a cannabis entrepreneur, she went for it, using the same resilience and commitment that shaped her life as an immigrant to America.
Nowadays, she’s the owner of a thriving group of dispensaries known in these parts as Amnesia Dispensaries and Accessories LLC, a homegrown business that now includes 4 locations and an edibles bakery called Sunbaked. As if her sprawling empire wasn’t already enough to handle, she’s also working on getting a farming operation started in Albuquerque’s South Valley.
“I came here, to the US, when I was nine, in the 1980s. I’m the oldest of three children who traveled with my mom to the US to find a better life. Now, my sister and I are both in the [cannabis] business.” For Julietta, there wasn’t much of a learning curve. Her ‘ganjapreneurial’ aspirations only began five years ago when her brother opened a smoke shop.
“He asked if I would like to join him,” she recalls. “I went to his business for a while and really liked it. I started working with him, and we ended up having five shops. But when COVID hit, it had a big effect on that upward momentum. We lost two of the smoke shop locations to the pandemic.”
But these setbacks only caused Julietta to redouble her efforts, as she continued to work for sustainable economic success as an American small business owner.
“I really didn’t know how I was going to recover our businesses after the pandemic,” she states candidly. “You know, it was hard every day; rents continued to rise, wages and taxes needed to be paid, but there was no money coming in … and we weren’t considered an essential business, so for a while, it seemed like the end of us. But I had my business degree to fall back on. I didn’t want to go back to social work because it takes an emotional toll. Even though things were very tough, I still preferred the business environment.”
When presented with an extreme but on-track opportunity, she took it—and she went all in.
“I decided I had to figure out a way to finance a new business project that was related to the smoke shops, but something new,” Julietta says. “New Mexico was on the path to legalization at that time, and that came to mind. I couldn’t get a conventional business loan, though. They’re really hard to get for these sorts of businesses. But … I made up my mind to go for it. I sold my home to finance the first shop.”
"We want to make cannabis affordable to everyone. The way that we look at marijuana here is basically medical in nature. We don’t want cannabis and the cannabis space to be like big pharma, where people can’t get what they need at a sustainably affordable price."
The now-successful cannabis entrepreneur explains her intense move; although it was a gamble, she felt it was going to pay off. “It is what it is; money comes, and money goes,” Julietta states with a shrug. “I came to this country with nothing, but when I started my first baby, the first Amnesia shop, I immediately started collaborating with a friend of mine and my sister too. Sharing resources and time in that kind of partnership really helped the business take off. Now here we are, the store started doing really well, and recently customers started asking about our expansion plans . . . that’s the kind of business we’ve been doing.”
Of course, initial success doesn’t make the next phase easy. The entrepreneurial road is always curvy and never without its obstacles and potholes, a fact that Julietta knows all too well. For example, for a long time, Julietta and her team had been actively looking for a building to open a South Valley location, as a large portion of their customers were coming across town from there. They eventually found a location, but there was a huge asterisk. “The only problem was that the location is next to a sheriff’s substation,” she offers, completely aware of the punchline quality of this twist in the story. Going back to the entrepreneurial road, though, the twists and turns can be as fortuitous as they are ominous. “We didn’t know how that was going to work out. But they’ve really helped us grow, too; they let us use their parking lot, for example, the customers always appreciate good parking. The South Valley is very friendly.”
And there are more locations in the works, says Julietta. “In the last three months, we opened a third location in the NE Heights, and then the other one, near the Freeway on the north side of town, is about to open next month.”
Moving forward into the future, Julietta says that her main goal is based on customer satisfaction but with an edge. “We want to make cannabis affordable to everyone. The way that we look at marijuana here is basically medical in nature. We don’t want cannabis and the cannabis space to be like big pharma, where people can’t get what they need at a sustainably affordable price. I’ve worked very hard to establish that by creating tier pricing for our customers. In some cases, we have no profit margin at all; we want to help the community, so we pass on low prices to people who might not otherwise be able to see if cannabis is a good choice for them.”
Julietta’s only reservations about the new legal cannabis system in New Mexico, she says, have to do with where the 25 percent retail tax on recreational marijuana is going. Right now, it goes into the state’s general fund, but Neas thinks this should change so that the money goes back into the community. “I think this tax revenue needs to be directly allocated to our education department. Hunger, public health, child illiteracy—these are all still big problems here, and the tax money from recreational cannabis sales sure could help.”
Regardless of her misgivings, at the end of the day, Neas is sure that cannabis is making a positive impact on American culture and is psyched about what’s next. She concluded our uplifting conversation by stating, “It really is a good thing. If you look at how the laws were working [before legalization] as compared to today, you don’t see the same level of fear; law enforcement can concentrate on more important problems. Marijuana laws were used for years to oppress people of color, and I’m just glad that is no longer going on in New Mexico. Cannabis has been a traditional medicine for centuries, but it has also been demonized in the past 75 years. Being part of changing that is challenging and exciting for me and for my customers.”
