Big Weed

by Christian Hageseth

  “I know it’s legal, but you can’t really buy it, can you?”

  “It’s still against the law, though, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t care if it’s legal—it’s still wrong!”

  And on and on.

  I remember the first time my then wife confronted me about it. “What’s with this marijuana stuff?” she said.

  “It’s going to be huge,” I said. “It’s an amazing opportunity. I am going to take some time and look into it.”

  “You have children,” she reminded me. “You have a family. You need to get a job and bring home a paycheck!”

  She had grown up in a fairly conservative Colorado family. Sure, like a lot of people her age, she had smoked marijuana, but she didn’t like it, and that was that. Marijuana was wrong. It was something stoners, losers, and criminals did. She didn’t see why I found it intriguing. And she had a very different risk tolerance. My entrepreneurship had always made her uncomfortable. Being an entrepreneur in the weed business really made her uncomfortable.

  You don’t have time to be wasting on bullshit “opportunities,” she thought.

  We have five mouths to feed.

  We have an expensive lifestyle with a mortgage and a couple of cars to pay for.

  Chris, what you need right now is a good job.

  A real job.

  With a decent paycheck.

  You know—like the one you used to have.

  Apparently I used to be somebody. A contender. A mover. A shaker.

  Once I was the founder and CEO of a national real estate company. During the booming housing market, which lasted from 2002 to 2008, I developed a novel way of financing pools of real estate. I had executed it only a couple of times before forming a company to do more, similar deals. You can only structure so many securities before you exhaust your exemptions with the Securities and Exchange Commission. If I wanted to keep using this method, I had to launch a public offering. I’d never done such a thing. I was thirty-eight years old at the time and a self-made millionaire.

  I’d spent the last six years building a real estate corporation initially devoted to increasing the value of residential real estate. As the housing market started heating up in the United States, my company began buying properties all over the country. The demand for housing was insatiable, and it seemed as if every investor and bank on the planet was throwing money at us.

  Our process was fairly simple. Basically, we’d assemble a group of, say, twenty investors, each of whom would buy one property. Each investor would then contribute the property in a tax-deferred exchange into a limited partnership. Then the pool of properties would be managed and eventually sold or exploited for their cash-flow potential. The owners of the limited partnership would then receive the benefit of the sale or the cash flow that stemmed from the rent we were charging our tenants. A structure like this allowed each investor to spread the risk over the entire pool of properties. This diversification of risk and normalization of return was the premise I’d built my business upon. And it had worked wonderfully—until it didn’t.

  Everything I’d done in the last six years was building up to that public offering, with a net asset value of $1 billion.

  My company stood to earn $17 million at offering alone and much more over time.

  And I, the humble servant to this paragon of American entrepreneurship, would be taking home a solid seven-figure payday to my loving wife and three adorable daughters.

  I made this happen.

  I had it coming to me.

  I had earned it.

  It was American capitalism at its best.

  Yeah, I know now: I and my investor buddies had just participated in the biggest real estate fuck-up in the history of American business. We just didn’t see it.

  The first glimmers of the collapse, in fact, were barely noticeable.

  Some people saw it on Wall Street. Me, I learned about it firsthand from the comments the SEC tacked onto the first set of documents we sent describing our public offering. It asked us to get the financing underwritten.

  “No problem,” I said.

  I’d done this hundreds of times and had connections throughout the industry. I started taking meetings with the lenders with whom I had worked over the last several years, thinking it would be an easy sell. But every time I wrapped my pitch, they’d be sitting there, staring at me, with an awkward grin on their faces.

  Yeeaahhhh, that look said, we’re not going to be investing in that anymore. The market’s turning . . .

  I figured they were just skittish, so I took more meetings. Guys, do you see the opportunity here? A billion fucking dollars. Can you smell that, guys? We are within a month of the offering! We’ve been working on this for more than a year . . .

  Crickets.

  It took me only a few meetings to realize that nobody was biting. That no one would ever bite again. The worm had turned. The industry was sunk. My company was in over its head and heading toward bankruptcy. We had spent a majority of our cash reserves on the costs of the public offering. My personal assets were safe; I’d wisely kept them apart from those of the company. But now I had to dismantle the behemoth I’d created. It took me fifteen months to shut the whole thing down, while, on the sidelines, millions of other less fortunate investors were scrambling to save themselves and their skins.

  Fifteen months of shucking off what I had worked so hard to create and what everyone in America was now regarding as the world’s worst idea ever.

  I tried to be philosophical about the loss. After all, business was in my blood. I’d started that chain of ice cream shops when I was fresh out of college. Then I’d sold them and moved on to another business, then another and another. It was what I did. I was an entrepreneur. Guys like me don’t just go out and get a job. We look for opportunities and we create businesses where there are none. People, products, and services are our paint, brush, and canvas. Creating those companies is what inspires us.

  But something had changed inside me. Something I had rarely spoken about, even to my wife.

  When I was dismantling my latest company, I came across some documents that forced me to rethink the course of my entire life. Among them was a list of my company’s assets on one particular day: September 30, 2006. Looking it over, it occurred to me that if I had stopped buying properties on that day alone and sold off everything, my company would have escaped the housing crash unscathed.

  Why didn’t you stop, Chris? I asked myself.

  The answer, when it came, was hard to stomach.

  Because it wasn’t enough.

  What was enough, Chris?

  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.