Many different groups are descending upon this industry while, simultaneously, the people who’ve been working with cannabis for decades are feeling displaced and disrupted by the newcomers.
Investors, corporate leaders from other businesses, and a tsunami of mainstream industries like agriculture, extraction, and retail, are all jumping in with high-level relationships and funding.
On the other side of the station, we see legacy growers, Black and Brown activists fighting for social equity, small business owners and operators of medical cannabis establishments, patients who need safe and affordable access, and caregivers intent on giving medicinal cannabis to their suffering clients.
Similar patterns are happening in Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, and nearly every state where cannabis is legal: the underground market is doing a better job of delivering access, affordability, and quality ganja to the masses.
The growing size of the legal cannabis market over the next 10 years makes me optimistic that there’s plenty of room to do this right and allow all the trains to run smoothly on the tracks of a new kind of capitalism.
Above all else, it will require all of us to give voice to this silent problem and engage each other in loud and transparent debates to arrive at the best solutions.
Now is the time to have the hard conversations, understand the complexities of all the issues, and forge our tracks together to take everyone on the ride of the century.
I’m co-founder and Chairperson of the Board for the non-profit Last Prisoner Project and a co-founder and advisor to Harborside, where we pioneered legal cannabis business processes and provided political engagement and thought leadership to the cannabis community — leading the design and development of gold-standard cannabis retail by innovating many “firsts” for the industry.