Big Weed (18 page)

In 2002, Ed had been arrested by federal agents when he was found to be managing a marijuana nursery in Oakland, California. The feds threatened him with twenty years in prison, but Ed refused to take a plea. The way he saw it, he was in the right and the feds were wrong. First, he had been growing those plants with the blessing of Oakland's municipal administration and its city attorney. The plants in that nursery were earmarked as starter plants for the city's medical marijuana patients. (Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996.) Ed had been working on behalf of his local government, and now he was on the hook for felony charges and looking at a long prison sentence. He and an attorney from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) fought the charges in court. The judge ultimately took Ed's side, sentencing him to time
served plus one day in jail. I could not help thinking how courageously Ed had faced that nightmare. Most people would have been afraid to take the case to court. They would have allowed the federal government to intimidate them; they would have taken the plea agreement and done the time.

Each of us—Soma, Ed, and I—had approached marijuana in our own way. I was thrilled to be in the presence of these pioneers. It was one of the most enlightening times I've spent in this industry. Without their sacrifices over the years, I would not have been able to pursue the business I was in.

One day Ed took me to one of the Green House Seeds cafés in Amsterdam. The café was large and nicely appointed. When we arrived, Soma was sitting at the bud bar, smoking away. Turned out he was dating the budtender, a beautiful, much-younger woman who had been at his flat the other day. While sitting there smoking with Ed and Soma again, I saw displayed on the far wall not one but
twenty-one
Cannabis Cups. (The firm has won more than thirty-five Cannabis Cups for strain excellence under the tutelage of Arjan Roskam, who is known as the king of cannabis.) I was blown away. Humbled, actually. Wow, I thought, I've got a lot of catching up to do.

You cannot think of Amsterdam without thinking of those pretty canals and small boats and cyclists everywhere. Every home appears to have been built at a time when aesthetics still mattered. Every canal you see has been dug by human hands, so the Dutch could float their goods and possessions gracefully down waterways instead of hauling them overland. I admired the sorts of minds who could build a city with such intention. The Dutch didn't seem to sweat the small stuff. The whole nation, so far as I could see, got around on beat-up bicycles. If one was swiped from its stand, I couldn't see them fretting about it. They probably just went out and bought another beat-up bicycle. One night, while Ed and I were smoking in a café, I happened to look out the window to see a family of three—father, mother, and daughter, all tall, all blond—pushing their bicycles home with their
groceries tucked in their baskets. Their calm, accepting expressions as they passed a busy marijuana café spoke volumes to me.

In Ed's company I would later stroll along those canals, drinking in the city's relaxed atmosphere and hitting every marijuana establishment we could, and a few museums too. The owner of Sensi Seeds, Ben Dronkers, also owns the world-famous Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum. We were guests of Ben's and were staying in his apartment directly above this museum. One of the reasons Ed had come to Amsterdam this specific week was to attend to the Cannabis Culture Awards, and he brought me along with him.

That event was an eye-opening experience for this naive if otherwise worldly American. Here I was with people like the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, Sir Richard Branson, who had served on the United Nations' global commission on drug policy, which was calling on world nations to institute sensible drug policies and admit that the decades-long “drug war” had not worked. The commission on which Branson had served was receiving the Cannabis Culture Award from the museum for its work. The former foreign minister of Norway, Thorvald Stoltenberg, was accepting the award on the commission's behalf. That award was being presented by Dries van Agt, the former president of the Netherlands.

Titans of industry and heads of state hobnobbing together, happily gathering to accept an award from a
marijuana
museum? In what kind of bizarro universe had I just landed?

What was happening around me forced me to rethink the culture I had left behind in the United States.

On one hand, the laws governing legal marijuana in Colorado and California were far less restrictive that what was going on in the Netherlands. But for the life of me, I could not imagine going to a marijuana award event in the United States and discovering, say, Microsoft's Bill Gates, former president Bill Clinton, and both of the former presidents Bush in attendance.

Imagine that they had all served on a committee that found marijuana drug policy to be a waste of time, money, and effort. Imagine if they were telling world nations to relax their policies on this plant because the evidence showed it to be relatively benign compared to, say, alcohol and tobacco.

Sadly, I could not imagine such a thing happening. Not for a long, long time.

I left the event that night having two powerful feelings.

One: What the hell am I doing here among these people? Three years ago, I wasn't even in this business, and now I'm sitting with presidents and foreign ministers of various countries, talking about weed!

Two: How bad can marijuana be if these corporate presidents and foreign politicians see value in easing up laws restricting it?

I've always been an early riser. Each morning, I'd leave our flat above the museum early and walk the streets of Amsterdam well before people were heading off to work. It struck me that Amsterdam is a little like Europe's Vegas. When young men from the UK want to celebrate a buddy's bachelor party, they head to 'Dam, and spend a couple of nights making fools of themselves amid the hookers and clubs and marijuana cafés.

But now, as I watched in the early morning hours, I was amazed to see the waves of street cleaners go about their business, carefully erasing all evidence of the previous night's debauchery from Amsterdam's streets. By the time I was thinking of grabbing a newspaper and my morning coffee, last night's puke, trash, and broken bottles had disappeared. The city of canals had been transformed into a pristine city once again.

What did that say about the Dutch, I wondered, that they were so comfortable having both sides of human nature—debauchery and civility—dwell so intimately beside each other without getting bent out of shape about it?

High
has to be one of the most overused words in my profession, but I assure you that when I returned home from my trip, I was brimming with a natural sort of elation. The Amsterdam trip had opened my eyes. I had seen how other cultures embraced our little plant. I had bonded with one of world's top cannabis experts, whom I now counted as a friend. And I had seen how our Cannabis Cup win back home could open doors abroad.

No doubt about it—I was a happy SOB.

Soon after I got home, I took a trip out of town with my wife. While we were away, I got an anxious call from my grow team. At the time, we were still mired in our legal issues with two of our dispensary partners. An emergency appeal had been filed with Colorado's Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division, seeking to sever our relationship.

Once that emergency severance went into effect, we could not lawfully continue to grow all the plants covered by our partnerships. Three enforcement officers from the Department of Revenue had shown up at our grow and rounded up all the plants that had been tagged and earmarked for those two dispensaries. The officers used shrub clippers to hack all the plants from their growing mediums. They bundled up all the butchered plants—nearly half of our stock—stuffed them in giant plastic bags, and whisked them away.

As soon as I got back to town, I rushed down to the offices of the MMED to find out what I could. The officer I met with welcomed me into his office and told me to take a seat. “Hey,” he said with an awkward grin on his face. “I just came from burning your plants.”

They had rented an incinerator from the DEA not far from the airport to do the deed.

I felt sucker-punched. Those plants represented about $100,000. I took it well, I thought. I reminded myself that I could have failures
but still not fail. The Cannabis Cup win was a good barometer of our place in the business. Still . . . $100,000 lost? That was a big loss to come back from.

My award-winning plants had just gone up in smoke. I had gone from so high to so low so quickly.

12

Marijuana on the Ballot

The clock was ticking.

I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and checked the front page of the
Denver Post.

My eyes flicked down the headlines.

Nothing yet.

I stuck the phone back into my pocket and tried to get on with my day. But it was a little tough. I had a meeting that morning, and right after, as soon as I got back to my office, I pulled up the browser on my computer screen to check the news again.

The fate of my business—and so many others—rested with three counties in the state.

Still nothing.

It was Election Day, November 2012.

The citizens of our state had a big decision to make today, well beyond the battle for the presidency between the incumbent, President Obama, and the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney. No, every marijuana activist and enthusiast in the country was dying to know which way voters would swing on the matter of Colorado Amendment 64. Would they approve it or give it a pass?

Until now, marijuana sales in the state had been restricted to medical use only. Anyone who wanted to buy had to jump through the same hoops I had when I'd first gotten my medical red card years ago. But the question before the voters today was whether to permit the sale of marijuana
to adults age twenty-one or older for adult recreational use.
The precise wording of the referendum went like this:

Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning marijuana, and, in connection therewith, providing for the regulation of marijuana; permitting a person twenty-one years of age or older to consume or possess limited amounts of marijuana; providing for the licensing of cultivation facilities, product manufacturing facilities, testing facilities, and retail stores; permitting local governments to regulate or prohibit such facilities; requiring the general assembly to enact an excise tax to be levied upon wholesale sales of marijuana; requiring that the first $40 million in revenue raised annually by such tax be credited to the public school capital construction assistance fund; and requiring the general assembly to enact legislation governing the cultivation, processing, and sale of industrial hemp?

To my mind, the clunky legislative wording shook down to a couple of critical yes/no questions:

• Should law-abiding grown-ups be allowed to buy marijuana the way they bought cigarettes and tobacco—yes or no?
  
• Should those law-abiding grown-ups be allowed to grow up to six plants of marijuana in their homes, within reasonable restrictions—yes or no?
  
• Should they be able to possess or give as a gift to some other adult up to 1 ounce of marijuana without penalty—yes or no?
  
• Should dispensaries like mine be allowed to sell up to 1 ounce at a time to any adult age twenty-one or older—yes or no?
  

How the voters decided would have a huge impact on the way we did business. Such a law, if approved, could theoretically propel our sales into the stratosphere. It would transform the way citizens of the United States and the world viewed Colorado. In the same way that college kids dreamed of going to Amsterdam to drink in that city's marijuana-friendly lifestyle, they would now dream of vacations to Colorado for reasons well beyond the state's legendary ski slopes and mountain peaks.

We in the business were excited about the possibilities. In the past few years, I'd come to know so many different types of people who I saw as potential customers. There were high-functioning, otherwise law-abiding people who nevertheless smoked weed on a daily basis. Some continued to obtain their product the way they always had—illegally on the street. They didn't like doing so, but they had made their peace with this compromise a long time ago.

Others had been emboldened enough to apply for red cards. They had legitimate reasons for doing so, but they didn't want this part of their lives to become public knowledge. There was still too much of a stigma attached to marijuana. They didn't want their friends and neighbors to think they had exploited a loophole in the law just to get high.

And there were still others I met regularly who were curious about the herb but had never indulged for a very good reason: They feared breaking the law.

Until marijuana came out of the closet and was regarded by our culture as similar to a glass of wine at the end of day, each of these different classes of people would not rest easy.

The ballot initiative had been approved back in February 2012, and since then, a spirited debate had flourished in the media.
Surprisingly, quite a few of my colleagues in the industry thought that all-out legalization was the wrong way to go. They professed a fear of Amendment 64, and their objections seemed to be tainted with the old paranoia. They worried that if the amendment passed, the feds would grow impatient with Colorado's newfound permissiveness and crack down in the form of new legislation and enforcement. “Don't you see?” these people reasoned. “We have a good thing going with medical marijuana. If you really want it, you can apply for it and get it. Why do we have to rock the boat?”

I had a unique perspective on the battle for legalization. One of our attorneys, Christian Sederberg, and his partner Brian Vicente were instrumental in writing various state initiatives over the years, not just for Colorado but for other states, calling for more humane, realistic, and mature drug policies. They and activists from advocacy groups such as the Marijuana Policy Project, SAFER (Safer Alternative For Enjoyable Recreation), and the Colorado chapter of NORML had lobbied for years to make marijuana legal in our state, but their message had never clicked with the mainstream public. Interestingly, all these groups recently moved into the same building near the state capital building in Denver. Those of us in the business call it the Marijuana Mansion. It is the epicenter of thought leadership for the growing national marijuana industry.

Leading up to this Election Day, these groups tried a new approach. In their polling, they realized that many voters were still laboring under the delusion that marijuana was just another vice that was likely to be abused like alcohol. In the absence of solid information on the matter, the average citizen was assuming that marijuana was more harmful than booze. So why would they vote to add yet another way for people to destroy the lives of themselves and others?

That was the sticking point. These citizens had marijuana all wrong.

In 2012, the activists worked hard to get one important message across to voters:
Marijuana was safer than alcohol.

Period.

The evidence for their claim was statistically and evidentially valid. Every year, alcohol caused the deaths of 35,000 people in the United States. Alcohol was an addictive substance. Even those who were not alcoholics stood a chance of overdosing on alcohol. When drunk, citizens often abused their loved ones and others. A drunk behind the wheel of a car was a disaster in the making. You didn't have to persuade people of these facts. All Americans know this in their bones.

In contrast, it was virtually impossible to overdose on marijuana. As far back as 1937, when the federal government made the substance illegal, experts had found it to be nonaddictive. And the statistics just weren't there to support the notion that people who were high on marijuana abused or killed others. Hell, you could get high on Sunday night and not even suffer a hangover come Monday. There was a good argument to be made that if the substance was legal, more people would avail themselves of the safer alternative; they'd get high, chill out, laugh a lot, scarf down a pizza, and stay safe indoors instead of getting drunk and risk hurting themselves or others.

All year long, ad campaigns had driven home this one simple message. Polling indicated that more and more people in the state were receptive to this thinking. The numbers were in favor of legalization, but they were still close enough to make those of us in the industry nervous. A few conservative counties in the state presented a significant hurdle to passage. I knew a lot of people who thought the same way as these county residents did. After a lifetime of hearing negative press on marijuana, would they really be willing to change their opinions? Would they buy the argument or assume it was a lie?

As a father, I was not unsympathetic to the notion that legal marijuana would present some challenges to all of us, but I thought the good outweighed the bad. If marijuana was legal, my children would someday be likely to try it. Perhaps they would even procure fake IDs the way young people did to buy alcohol. But at least there would be
a budtender on the other side of the counter inspecting their IDs. Last time I checked, drug dealers don't card. Drug dealers also don't offer a legitimate, clean, seed-to-sale provenance for their product. There literally is no telling where the weed you bought off the street came from, or what it was adulterated with. In some instances, drug dealers are also selling cocaine, meth, and other illegal drugs right alongside their illegal marijuana.

Legal marijuana would open a can of worms for the state's police officers. When someone's been drinking, you can test their blood alcohol content with a Breathalyzer test. The level of THC in one's blood can be determined only by a blood draw or urine sample. (At this writing, Colorado and Washington both use a 5-nanogram-per-milliliter driving-under-the-influence-of-drugs standard.) That means that a suspected driver would need to be taken into custody and escorted to a police station or hospital so the test can be administered. That test would need to be conducted soon after the road stop, and the suspect would need to be accompanied by a police officer the whole time to ensure the chain of evidence. That is a problem. One suspected stoner driving under the influence could effectively put one police officer out of rotation for an entire shift. That manpower sacrifice could be problematic for most police departments. To make matters worse, law enforcement agencies, marijuana activists, and researchers are still debating whether the 5-nanogram standard is reasonable. Some think it's too low; others insist it's too high.

I am not arguing that these issues don't present significant challenges. But if marijuana was legal, police officers would no longer be charged with busting people for possession. The entire judicial system would see a radical decrease in drug cases. This seems like a more than worthwhile trade-off.

I also saw a benefit for my medical marijuana clientele. Many of the people I saw in our dispensaries truly were sick. Their daily schedules consisted of going from one doctor's appointment to
another. Under the current system, medical marijuana red cards had to be renewed each year. If marijuana was legal for all adults, these sick patients wouldn't have to jump through hoops every year to get certified. They could just walk into a dispensary anytime they wanted, no questions asked.

The day of the vote, Ed Rosenthal was in town, and we spent some time together, talking about the significance of the referendum. Later in the afternoon I was tied up with a few administrative issues and took some phone calls. I didn't know what had happened until I heard some employees cheering.

I went out of my office and saw a group of people gathered around a computer. It was still early in the afternoon. The polls had not yet closed. We were still a long way from knowing who had won the presidency, but the votes were in on marijuana. The three critical counties had swung in favor of
yes
to Amendment 64.

Later that night, the story got even better. Obama had taken all nine of Colorado's electoral votes. But the number of Coloradans who had voted for him (51 percent) was still fewer than the number of people (53 percent) who voted for marijuana.

Weed was more popular than the president.

Up in Washington state, voters had passed Initiative Measure 502, legalizing marijuana in their state, by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent.

It was a fascinating election night. Voters in two U.S. states had said yes to marijuana. Our governor took to the airwaves that night, announcing that the state would live up to the letter of the law. “But don't break out the Cheetos and Goldfish too quickly,” he quipped.

On that Tuesday evening in November, all of our facilities were fully staffed. We didn't exactly follow the governor's advice. In our elation, we rolled some joints and walked proudly outside each building. On the chilly streets of Denver, we lit up and puffed away to celebrate the birth of a new market and the turning of the tide.