Big Weed (16 page)

I was sitting in a business meeting in the middle of the day, smoking some weed, taking notes, and loving my life.

In my old life, business meetings were a necessary evil. I had several a day. They appeared on my calendar, and I marched through them like an automaton, trying to cover as much ground as possible. Meet some new people. Make some decisions. Close some deals. Inevitably I'd get stuck in a dog of a meeting where whoever was running the show wasn't keeping his charges on task. The meetings dragged on. My eyes glazed over. I was bored out of my mind.

In my new life, meetings were joyful events. Corey would sometimes show up with some fantastic new product. As with any business, a new product means a host of new decisions. How does this fit into our line? Does it have any special features we ought to call out in our marketing? How did it do in the grow? Was it an eight-week strain, or longer or shorter than that benchmark? Did we get 1 pound per light in the grow room, more or less? What are we telling our
customers about it? How will it help the medical customers? And the biggest question of all: What's it like to smoke?

There was only one way to know.

I've always had a high tolerance for THC. I can smoke plenty of weed without becoming debilitated. When I was still in my twenties and starting my first ice cream business, I'd smoke in the back room to get ready for the day or when we were closing up at night. When I was running my real estate company, I'd smoke on my time—never in the office, never around clients or others I imagined wouldn't approve.

But all that's changed in my new life. At one point I have even participated in lengthy testing meetings where I've done about forty or fifty hits of various strains, then gone straight into an afternoon conference call without noticeable impairment.

This is actually consistent with the science on marijuana. Studies do show that people react differently to marijuana and that people do build up a tolerance to the drug over time with frequent use. In some studies, however, the tolerance has been shown to be
nonuniform.

That means that while one hit of a joint no longer gives longtime users the same high and their cognitive function remains unimpaired, the bud will still impact them physically. They don't get as high, but the product still eradicates their aches and pains. In general, this tends to be good news for a lot of our medical patients. They don't need to smoke more to feel better physically.

Perhaps my tolerance has something to do with my size or my general metabolism, but it's always been that way, even when I was an adolescent. My brother and his friends would be stoned on one or two hits, but I'd need ten to reach that point. Once, when I got into the business, I happened to share a joint with a friend. One puff affected him so strongly that I needed to stub out the joint and take him out for lunch and a beer—anything to process that THC out of his system.

Only a few of my employees allow themselves to smoke when we're in these meetings. They know that they're better off getting high on their own time. As fun a place as ours is to work, it's still work. They don't want to be laughing giddily when we need them to think cogently. A few hits will throw them off their game for the rest of the meeting, or even the afternoon. So most don't indulge.

But those of us with a high tolerance—me, Corey, and Barb—
will
light up, smoke, and discuss the finer points of the product.

So this is Grape Cola. Cool.

I see the purple color and I'm getting the astringent smell I'd expect from the bud. Nice.

It tastes good and the effect is nicely indica, but not too overbearing.

Oh, this is Sour Diesel.

Yeah—but the diesel smell is off. It won't sell.

People will call bullshit if we try to pass this off as Sour D, even though the provenance and taste are there. Without that smell it won't sell.

We were excited. The Cannabis Cup was coming to Denver for the second time in history.
High Times,
the same magazine I'd read as a kid when I was first initiated into the mysteries of cannabis, has sponsored a legendary Amsterdam event each November for the past thirty years. In 2010,
High Times
began running events in the U.S. states where marijuana was legal. As I write this, the magazine now runs six events worldwide every year—in Seattle; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Denver; Clio, Michigan; and Amsterdam, of course.

It was time for another strain selection party. We were going for the big one.

The number 420 holds a special significance for marijuana enthusiasts. The trouble is, no one has bothered to record precisely why the number is special. I've heard various theories. One legend says
it's the time—4:20 p.m.—when a group of weed-smoking teenagers would gather outside their high school in San Rafael, California, in the 1970s to light up. Others say that the 420 tradition originated in a 1939 short story by the science fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, in which an explorer to the planet Venus falls under the influence of a mysterious, hallucinogenic “mirage-plant” that sounds a lot like marijuana. When the explorer's reverie ceases, the man looks at his watch and is “astonished to find the time was only 4:20.”

Regardless of the origin, this number has inspired millions of people worldwide to designate April 20 as the day marijuana smokers raise a silent joint in honor of their blessed herb.

Well, on that day in April 2012, Denver's EXDO Center, a city block with outdoor space connecting four separate buildings, was packed to the gills with thirty thousand people. A sell-out crowd. For three days I had been hawking our wares out of a booth.

The Cannabis Cup looked like every trade show you've ever attended—with one exception. Everything you saw was devoted to the glory of marijuana.

You know those trade shows where people give you key chains and candy and other useless trinkets? Imagine instead walking down the aisle and being invited to take a hit from a bong or vaporizer.

You can't pull off a show like this easily. For one thing, since transporting marijuana across state lines is still a violation of federal law, the state of Colorado had officials on site to check that every ounce of marijuana was sourced from a Colorado grower. In that respect, it was a little like a dog or antiques show. Every ounce had its own papers, its own provenance.

You had to be eighteen to get in the doors and have a valid red card to be able to enter the designated “medicating”—that is,
smoking
area, which you could easily spot as soon as you entered. It was where everyone was headed: the building in the EXDO Center that was filled with a thick, resinous cloud. Our booth was located there.

I had taken our precious Colorado Cup off the shelf and transported it to a place of honor in the center of our booth. It was bolted down to the table with a high-tech cable, and our staffers took turns lighting it all weekend long.

People were loving it.

Every day I was on my feet for eight hours, passing out brochures, selling our Green Man T-shirts, and inviting people to try out our products.

I was baked off my ass.

Seriously, I've never been so high in my entire life. At one point I thought I was hallucinating.

Forget what I just said about my legendary tolerance. Tolerance meets its match in a 20,000-square-foot hall packed with a steady stream of people and clouds of marijuana smoke. People came in, took their hits, exhaled, then walked out of our booth, only to be replaced by others who did exactly the same thing. Eventually the cloud of smoke inside this large exhibit hall was dense. Simply breathing in this space was like taking a little hit with every breath.

My head was swimming. It was actually stimulating to be in the presence of so many people who no longer had to hide the fact that they enjoyed marijuana.

The other buildings and the outdoor area of the EXDO Center were smoke-free. There the show featured a good number of educational sessions throughout the weekend. People were learning how to set up their own grows. Fitness instructors we giving classes on how to exercise and manage pain with marijuana. Activist attorneys were lecturing on various aspects of the legalization movement. There were panel discussions on how our society would be changed by the presence of legal marijuana.

Most people were there to smoke and shop and enjoy the music. To take it all in, to be part of this moment of change. Images of the marijuana leaf were everywhere. The rediscovery of marijuana in modern America owes a lot to young hippies who embraced the drug
in the 1960s. Remarkably, much of what I was seeing that weekend was merely an extension of the old 1960s imagery.

It made me wonder: If marijuana was going to grow beyond the demographic of enthusiasts, would it need to adopt a new imagery or look?

I wanted our business to grow. Everyone was talking about the possibility that marijuana would one day be legal for all adults in the state of Colorado, not just those with medical conditions. If adult recreational use was approved, we'd see a new clientele in our dispensaries. People who had always been curious about smoking marijuana but were not willing to break the law to try it. People who had sneaked a smoke as adolescents but who never smoked it again as adults.

If you wanted those people to feel comfortable giving you their business, was the tie-dyed aesthetic of the 1960s still the way to go? Or did we need a new aesthetic?

I knew I was on to something, but I was too busy to give it more than a fleeting thought. But that show was what got me thinking about the ways in which branding permeates our lives.

I'd venture to say that anyone in the world who sees a distinctive red-and-white swirl on any product will immediately think “Coca-Cola,” even though those words or their abbreviation, “Coke,” is nowhere to be found on the object. Show anyone a swoosh design on sporting apparel and they will immediately know the brand even if the critical four letters—N-I-K-E—are not present. The same goes for that little transparent apple with the bite taken out of it; millions know what that symbol stands for.

Admittedly, I've chosen three of the world's biggest brands. But lesser brands are still highly recognizable by their logos, and that recognizability can have an enormous impact on those brands' fortunes. Chances are good, for example, that you have at some point in your life seen someone wearing a T-shirt or sweatshirt with the image of a black dog on it. Those shirts are the brand of the Black
Dog Tavern, which opened in 1971 on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts. Today the brand has grown to include numerous gift shops and general stores. When you see someone wearing one of those shirts, your recognition of that brand is reinforced. Should your travels take you to Massachusetts, you're likely to make a point of visiting one of the company's locations—if only to see what all the fuss is about.

Our industry was still small, so small that a Black Dog, a Sam Adams, an Apple, or a Starbucks had yet to emerge. But in time, one certainly would.