Big Weed (4 page)

I didn't know. The sick fact was that, at the time I was gobbling up those properties, I was a thirty-eight-year-old who had never learned the meaning of
enough.
If I made $1 million, I'd want $10 million. If I made $10 million, I'd want $100 million. If I made $100 million, I'd want $1 billion. And I was closing in on that billion, for my company at least, when it all tanked.

My goals in life had consisted of running toward a finish line painted with a dollar sign.

Some nights I couldn't sleep, thinking of how I was going to move the next mountain to expand our holdings. The daily stress had been so unbearable that I'd nearly ruined my health. I was lucky to have escaped alive.

And now, as I looked out over the ashes of that company, I had to wonder: What was the point of it all?

I realized I had measured my success in dollars, not the joy of living. I had chased wealth and status, not happiness and love. I hardly recognized the man I'd been.

And with that realization, a simple yet profound shift occurred inside me.

I saw with utter clarity that money was meaningless. I already knew how to make it anytime I wanted. In my career, I had earned it, lost it, and earned it back again. If money was that easy to make and lose, money could not be the focus of my life. There were things far more rare and more precious than money.
Those
were the things I ought to cherish, because they would only come around once in a blue moon.

Above all things, I wanted to be a loving and grateful husband and father.

If I was going to start a new business, I wanted to be in harmony with myself. I had to feel integrity.

I wanted to work with passion and purpose.

I wanted to create something that I loved and wanted to share with the world.

I wanted to be a good steward of my community.

I wanted to foster good careers—with good longevity—for my employees.

Money was nice, but if I had money without joy in all these areas of my life, then the money was worth much less. I might as well toss
it out and start all over again—just as I had already done many times before.

But as I say, my epiphany was not something I talked about openly with my wife, my friends, or my extended family. The bankruptcy had shaken up my wife. She was scared about our future. My getting a decent job and a decent paycheck was the only way she could see us moving forward. Such things represented stability to her.

I didn't want to give her more cause for alarm.

But legal weed was looking more and more like a smart thing to do.

I shared my thinking with people I trusted. One of them was a neighbor of mine I'll call Mr. Pink. He was an accountant, but not just an accountant. A
forensic
accountant. The sort of person the FBI or district attorneys called in to investigate the books of people they'd arrested for financial crimes. The fact that he could apply his intellect to someone else's illegal misdeeds and tell you exactly how it had been pulled off made him something of a badass in my eyes. On top of it, Mr. Pink is a great guy. Barrel chested and larger than life, he is memorable in a good way. Gregarious, engaging, and kind to children. We got along well; Mr. Pink knew money and opportunities when he saw them, and he liked what he was hearing about the legal marijuana trade.

“How much?” he'd say when I told him what people were earning.

His wife would snap, “Don't even think about it.”

His wife was a lawyer, and she took the same view my wife did: It was insane to contemplate a career selling legal weed. Colorado's law had been enacted on a whim, and it was liable to be repealed. And when it did, what would happen to all those people who had jumped into it feet first? They'd be rounded up and sent to jail. Or they'd lose their shirts.

Drugs were drugs. People killed people over this stuff.

Marijuana, in other words, was not a suitable business for a white, upper-middle-class guy from Denver.

And as much as Mr. Pink and I would hear those words or glean the subtext from what our wives were saying, we couldn't help dreaming about what a gold mine this was.

“Oh my God,” Mr. Pink would say on those occasions when we spoke about it. “We should totally
do this!
”

And his wife would say, “You're crazy!”

Mr. Pink was open to learning more. Maybe the laws really were on tenuous ground, but the only way to know was to start reading up on it. I was gearing up to educate myself the only way I knew how. I would start hanging out in as many dispensaries around town as possible. I would talk to customers. Talk to budtenders. Talk to owners like Jake. I would do my best to analyze their business models as well as I possibly could without getting too nosy. And I would read as much as I could about the legalization movement.

You know those moments when a gust of wind blows through and steals your old life? Those moments when you're forced to dig deep and decide: What am I going to do with the rest of my life?

Call them what you like: moments of growth, of change, of personal development, of enlightenment.

I was right there. I knew if I jumped, the net would appear. I had seen it in my mind's eye.

Marijuana would be my salvation. But only if it was meant to be. Only if it worked for me. Only if it brought joy to me and those around me.

I would work my ass off doing the due diligence.

Something would click, but only if it was aligned with my highest and best self.

I hoped it was.

2

My Education

Go ahead and laugh, but there's only one way to research legal marijuana. And I did it. Again and again and again.

Thus began my education. My baptism by fire—er, smoke.

Maybe you've had that experience where you get really into something and then you start seeing it everywhere. You buy yourself that Mini Cooper you've always wanted, and from that day forward, you see nothing but Mini Coopers on the road. “Wow,” you think, “they're everywhere!”

Well, I saw medical marijuana everywhere I looked. I took every opportunity I could to check out medical dispensaries in every quarter of Denver. I kept lists of establishments I was going to check out. I bought books about the history and cultivation of marijuana. I'd pick up
High Times
—a magazine I hadn't seen since my teenage years—whenever I saw it on a newsstand. At the time there seemed to be a story about legal marijuana on Denver's TV news every single night. The topic was often a featured story in the
Denver Post.
Marijuana was everywhere.

I was a man on a mission.

What an amazing time it was.

Colorado's medical marijuana laws were rapidly evolving. They'd been first conceived as a way to allow sick patients to grow
their own marijuana plants at home. But citizens who needed it the most—such as cancer patients—were too sick to raise finicky plants. So the law was created to license “caregivers”—family, friends, nurses—who could grow marijuana for their intended patients. You could see where this would inevitably lead: Most caregivers didn't have the expertise to grow marijuana. So the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment decided to allow the licensing of formal dispensaries—stores that sold product that had been grown by professional growers. If you were sick or in pain, you didn't have to rely on your nephew's brown thumb for your supply. You could just bop into a store and buy some weed from a complete stranger.

The law had transformed a portion of Broadway, in downtown Denver, into a carnival of marijuana dispensaries that locals had dubbed the Green Mile. At least twenty dispensaries dotted this strip of Broadway within a mile of the intersection with Evans Avenue. Neon signs of green crosses and flashing marijuana leaves soon peeked out of many windows.

By law, you could not enter a marijuana dispensary unless you were an employee or a customer with a red card. Inside, you'd find long counters where budtenders proudly displayed glass jars brimming with sticky buds. They'd also sell all the tools you needed: glass pipes, bongs, vaporizers, lighters, you name it. Other ganjapreneurs were making and selling their own edibles—the legendary marijuana brownies, not to mention chocolate bars, suckers, cookies, fudge, hard candies, and gummy bears laden with marijuana. They would bake, cook, or mold them elsewhere and bring them to the dispensaries to be sold to eager customers who clamored for the novelty of it all.

These days, you are prevented by law from lighting up or eating your purchase in dispensaries. The industry firmly adheres to the liquor store model. You buy your product, you get it wrapped in
childproof packaging, and you leave the premises to consume it. And no, you cannot consume it right outside the premises or anywhere else in public, nor behind the wheel of your car.

But, hey, this was 2009—the crazy days of medical marijuana's ascendancy. You'd walk into dispensaries to find insanely long lines, and the management's solution to take the edge off the wait was to pass a lighted joint down the line for everyone to enjoy.

I remember from my days running those ice cream shops how wonderful it was to watch people walk out the door with smiles on their faces. They had just bought some of our delicious product, and they were heading out into a warm summer night to enjoy it with their friends and family. For me, that was one of the pleasures of being a retailer. It was hard to observe the same reaction in the world of corporate real estate. But here, watching these folks, it all came back to me. It was beautiful to see people of all walks of life—some of them very obviously ill—partaking in this communal bakefest. It was in these times I saw the calming effect of weed. It brought people together, it was creating unity. I was stunned and was left wondering “Why had this ever been illegal?”

When you got to the head of the line, the budtenders asked the question I'd been hearing all over town. The question that was at once esoteric, mysterious, and frustrating: “So, what kind of weed do you like to smoke?”

By then, I had begun digging into the history and lore of marijuana. I knew that there were three basic species:
Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica,
and
Cannabis ruderalis.
The sativas, which grow no taller than 6 feet high, are known for impacting one's mind, for conjuring psychedelic highs. The indicas, which can grow in the wild as tall as 25 feet high, impact your body. If you are suffering from physical pain, as so many cancer, AIDS, and glaucoma patients are, indicas are what budtenders are likely to recommend. The ruderalises, which have very low amounts of the psychoactive ingredient
tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), are of little use for our purposes but are great for growing hemp—marijuana's hardworking, industrial cousin.

The Green Mile was like a crash course at Marijuana University. The better-organized shops would have twenty-five different types of pots, all with exotic-sounding, evocative names: OG Kush. Bubba Kush. Cheesequake. Grape Cola. Waldo. White Dawg. White Queen. White Rhino. Supernova. Alaskan Thunder Fuck. And these were just the tip of the iceberg.

No one knows how many strains there actually are. Some people have opined that there are as many as five thousand, but the number is probably limited only by the human imagination, much like varieties of roses. These marijuana strains are grown from seeds that had been noticed by humans at least twelve thousand years ago, around the dawn of agriculture, in southern and central Asia. Holy men and women in every ancient culture would have prized the plant as a necessary ingredient in their sacramental toolkit. Its highly aromatic buds could be used for perfumes, medicines, and of course desirable intoxicants.

If ancient humans did not care for cannabis, they wouldn't have bothered to transport the seeds of this indigenous plant from the foothills of the Himalayas to the rest of world. Modern archaeologists have turned up evidence of cannabis at sites that date as far back as eight thousand years ago, in places ranging from China to Romania to India and Egypt and Europe. Once shared, these seeds and their resulting buds flourished throughout the world. The ancestors of the strains I saw in the Colorado dispensaries had been smoked by ancient shamans during religious rites, and their effect had been prized as a way to achieve spiritual transcendence.

Historical figures closer to our time loved the bud, too. Researchers have found pipes in William Shakespeare's garden in England that show evidence of having been used to smoke not tobacco but
cannabis. We have to wonder: When Shakespeare sang the praises of “a noted weed” in Sonnet 76, was he thinking of marijuana?

The less psychoactive version of the plant, hemp, has thousands of industrial uses. Its seeds can be eaten as a protein-rich food, its durable stalks can be woven into fabric and paper, and its resins can be pressed into service as lamp oil or ethanol. Mariners fashioned sails and clothing out of its precious fibers. At least three of the American founders—George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—commented on the plant's usefulness in their writings. Washington and Jefferson grew it on their plantations and left us detailed notes on its cultivation. Mind you, there's no evidence that Americans during this period knew or understood the potential of cannabis as a recreational intoxicant. The plant they grew had little THC in it, so unless they had exceptionally experimental personalities, they probably wouldn't have bothered smoking it. The plant the Founding Fathers knew was a low-maintenance cash crop that put money in their pockets.

With tobacco, you cure and smoke the leaf. With cannabis, the object of devotion is the flowering, resinous bud of the female plant. The smell of these buds is heady and intoxicating. Even with the lid of a glass jar clamped shut, you can catch a whiff and start to imagine that you're getting a little high.

Outwardly, all buds look a little alike and a little different. Hold them in your hand, peer at them closely, and you'll see dried strands of the plant's stigmas, the long parts of the plants that aid in pollination. Those parts will look tan, orange, even yellow. Sniff the buds and you'll catch hints of everything from skunk to citrus, fruit punch, spicy cloves, grape, cola, or even lemon meringue pie.

On my first couple of outings to Denver's dispensaries, my naïveté didn't surprise the clerks. They went out of their way to teach me.

“Look,” they'd say. “What kind of effect do you want? Do you want some couch lock? After you've smoked, you can't pry your body
off the couch, except for the promise of half a bag of Oreos and a gallon of ice-cold milk? Or do you want some dance-your-ass-off-and-talk-all-night weed?”

Wow, I thought. There's a lot to know, and I can see only the tip of the iceberg.

Their coaching quickly veered into the realm of the connoisseur:

Was I looking for a mellow high?

Was I looking to bliss out into that ancient, shamanistic transcendence?

Did I have cancer? Did I want to quell the queasiness of chemotherapy?

Did I want to take the edge off arthritis or fibromyalgia?

Did I want to relieve the pressure in my eyeballs from my glaucoma?

Or—considering I looked healthy—was I just looking to throw a comforting blanket over my old snowboarding injury?

Because, whatever I wanted, there was a marijuana for that.

And if I didn't like any of the marijuana these guys sold, there was always another shop right next door.

With Colorado's red card in my pocket, the idiotic adolescent dance was banished forever. No longer did I have to call around to a buddy . . . who knew a guy who knew a guy. No longer did I have to hide what I was doing. No longer did I have to smoke skanky weed. All I had to do was hit up my ATM and fork over the cash for the prime stuff—good genetics grown with care and brought to market when it was still fresh. In the early days, I could smoke in the shop or in my home. Smoking in public was still frowned on.

All in all, I began to regard my new education as a beautiful yet somehow complex transaction.

If I can compare it to anything, it would be like that moment I talked about earlier, when you're out at a fine restaurant and the sommelier arrives at your table to talk about wine. The second she
speaks, she is initiating you into a specialized language honed over centuries to describe the seemingly indescribable—notes, nose, legs, palate, mouthfeel . . .

You know these words. If you're a reasonably educated person of a certain socioeconomic strata, words like these have undoubtedly entered your lexicon. Depending on the breadth of your connoisseurship, you might have trained your senses to notice and then talk about similar attributes of fine cigars, dark chocolate, and olive oil.

Marijuana, I was beginning to see, was like that—only more obviously so.

When you're buying wine, for example, you don't factor how drunk you're going to get into the equation. That's because all wines have about the same potency. Perhaps a better analogy for marijuana is the experience of walking into a microbrewery, where the chalkboard lists beers and their alcohol content. A visitor to these premises quickly picks up on the subtleties as she sips her way through a sample flight. “Oh,” she thinks, “this lager is only 4.5 percent, but this ‘high-gravity' bourbon stout is a brain-blowing 11 percent alcohol. Oh yeah—I can taste the alcohol.”

The interesting thing about marijuana, I was learning, was that the spectrum of intoxication was wider and growing every day.

Back in 1969, the kids who toked at the famous Woodstock Festival in upstate New York got high on marijuana that was a mere 3 percent THC. Considering how legendary Woodstock has become, you might think 3 percent is a lot. But today in the United States, commercial growers are cultivating numerous strains of marijuana that have been clocked at 23 percent THC or higher. That's a sevenfold increase over the weed that baked Woodstock.

It's nice to remember the old days, but I could not legitimately call myself a marijuana connoisseur until I'd dipped into these headier waters.

Why is the THC percentage increasing? The upswing actually has a lot to do with the time-honored tradition of breeding plants and animals to enhance certain aspects of each. Breeders around the world are obsessed with pushing the limits. They think it's cool to breed increasingly stronger strains. “Okay, that was good,” they'd say, “but how can we top what we just did?” They were dedicated to working with the various male and female plants, breeding them together, and testing the result working to get the “best”—this was
their
paint, brush, and canvas.

The new generation of legal American growers truly is unparalleled in this respect. For example, the Netherlands is renowned for its liberal marijuana policies. Weed is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but the state follows a blind-eye policy of tolerance. As a result, the Dutch are among the most educated growers of marijuana in the world. And yet the average THC sold in Amsterdam's cannabis cafés is only 13.5 percent, according to a 2013 report. That's several percentage points lower than some of the heavy-hitting strains I was finding as I prowled around downtown Denver.

At first glance, breeding plants with higher THC sounds awesome, but I could already see that high-THC marijuana would leave the nascent cannabis industry vulnerable to criticism if it did not take pains to explain to customers what they were buying. If retailers did not produce consistently potent products and educate their customers in a way that was meaningful to the customers and enabled them to make informed decisions, the states would step in and force them to do so. Most of the budtenders and dispensary owners I was meeting were conscientious on that score. They took extravagant pains to educate consumers as much as possible before they parted with their cash and went home to enjoy their weed.