Marijuana Venture

VENTUREM A R I J U A N A

US $7.99 / CAN $9.99

JULY 2017

AWARD-WINNING NATIONAL CANNABIS BUSINESS MAGAZINE

CALIFORNIA’S GOLDEN TICKET: CULTIVATION LICENSES

INVESTING IN CANNABIS:Know the rules before dumping money into the Green Rush

THE WAROVER PATENTS

INNOVATIONIN CANADA

COLORADO’S TOP RETAIL CHAINS

WOMENTO WATCH15

http://nanoluxtech.com

NanoLux



Kushy Punch

http://kushypunch.com

Berger

http://berger.ca

Futurola

http://futurolausa.com/

http://futurolausa.com/

Bio Hazard

http://ncwgs.com

NCWGS (Nickle city)

http://ncwgs.com

8 MARIJUANA VENTURE | OCTOBER 2017

58THE LONG GAME

While waiting for approval and construction,

Canada's Brighton develops value through innovation

74WOMEN TO WATCH

Our annual Women in the Industry issue

features 14 women to watch in 2018

64BEST CALIFORNIA

REAL ESTATECalifornia's market is by no

means a sure thing if you repeat the mistakes made in

Washington and Oregon

50CHAIN

REACTIONTwo of Colorado’s

top marijuana retail chains share their

secrets for longevity in a difficult market

FEATURES

California Lightworks


BASICS 24 Calendar 42 Product Spotlights 153 P.O.V. 159 Ad Directory 160 Photo of the Month

PROFILES 38 Jim McAlpine

112 PatentsExpert advice on the three

types of patents and how they can apply to the cannabis business.

120 Temporary EmployeesAttorney Alex Wheatley

lays out the pros and cons of hiring temporary employees.

126 Living the DreamEntrepreneurs address

the highs and lows of running cannabis businesses.

132 The Green PagesWashington's Walden

Cannabis shares its organic secrets and techniques for farming top-quality cannabis.

BEST PRACTICES 140 Loyalty Programs 144 Employer Accommodations

LEGAL PAGES 146 How to protect your cannabis business from sabotage. 148 Expanding medical programs in New York and New Jersey. 150 Converting a nonprofit into a traditional business.

OPINIONS 18 Message from the Publisher 22 Letter from the Editor 32 Quick Hits

132

ABOUT THE COVER: About the Cover: Rachel Hazlett, the CEO of Lucky 420, sits on her BMW R65 at a grow in Northern California. Photo by Rhett Bingham.

IN THIS ISSUE

46

127


US $7.99 / CAN $9.99

OCTOBER 2017


CALIFORNIA’S BEST PLACES TO GROW

INVESTING IN CANNABIS:Know the rules before dumping money into the Green Rush

THE WAROVER PATENTS INNOVATIONIN CANADA

COLORADO’S TOP RETAIL CHAINS

WOMENTO WATCH14

VENTUREVENTURENATIONALNATIONAL CANNABISCANNABIS BUSINESSBUSINESS MAGAZINEMAGAZINE

OCT cover.indd 6 8/31/17 9:14 AM

KES Science

http://airoclean420.com

Crop King

http://cropkingseeds.com

http://cropkingseeds.com

JUNE 2016 $6.99

M A R I J U A N AVENTURETHE JOURNAL OF PROFESSIONAL CANNABIS GROWERS AND RETAILERS

BIG APPLE IN BIG TROUBLE • GREENHOUSE DESIGN • NOW HIRING

LIGHT DEP TECHNIQUES / FEDS CONSIDER RESCHEDULING / LAS VEGAS MEGA-GROW

RISING

Marathon runner Katina Morales leads a pack of exciting young entrepreneurs

STARS

— 40 UNDER 40 —

OF CANNABISPlus:TECH SUPERSTARS

SAVVY GROWERSRETAIL TYCOONS

MILITARY HEROESBRAND-BUILDERS

and more!JUNE 2016 $6.99

M A R I J U A N AVENTURETHE JOURNAL OF PROFESSIONAL CANNABIS GROWERS AND RETAILERS

BIG APPLE IN BIG TROUBLE • GREENHOUSE DESIGN • NOW HIRING

LIGHT DEP TECHNIQUES / FEDS CONSIDER RESCHEDULING / LAS VEGAS MEGA-GROW

RISING

Marathon runner Katina Morales leads a pack of exciting young entrepreneurs

STARS

— 40 UNDER 40 —

OF CANNABISPlus:

TECH SUPERSTARSSAVVY GROWERSRETAIL TYCOONS

MILITARY HEROESBRAND-BUILDERS

and more!

IIII 11:11 AM 100%

IIII 11:11 AM 100%

Marijuana Venture

$39.99SunGrower & Greenhouse

$29.99

Three easy ways to subscribe:Visit www.MarijuanaVenture.com | Call (425) 656-3621 | Mail a check to: PO Box 1419, Renton, WA, 98057

SUBSCRIBE TODAY!The most trusted sources in the legal cannabis industry

Lambert Peat Moss


DAVID KERR is of counsel with Fifth Avenue Law Group in Seattle. He helps clients in the cannabis space buy or sell businesses and navigate compliance and regulatory issues, business transactions and state licensing. He has more than 20 years of experience working as in-house counsel, directing government affairs and working with state and local governments. He can be reached at [email protected].

DR. RACHEL KNOX is the co-founder and consulting physician at The American Cannabinoid Clinics in Oregon. Knox received her medical and business degrees from Tufts University after completing undergraduate work at Duke. She is a cannabis specialist who believes in using lifestyle as medicine to treat and prevent disease. Knox is a member of the Minority Cannabis Business Association.

SUZANNE WAINWRIGHT-EVANS has been in the horticulture industry for more than 25 years, focusing on biological control and proper use of pesticides. She has worked throughout the U.S. and internationally as a consultant for greenhouses, nurseries and gardens. She is the owner of Buglady Consulting, now in business 15 years.

CATHERINE MORISETT is an experienced litigator and partner in the Seattle office of Fisher & Phillips LLP, a national law firm committed to providing business solutions for employers’ workplace legal problems. She counsels cannabis retailers, growers and other supporting industries with operations in California, Colorado, Oregon and Washington in all aspects of employment law. She can be reached at [email protected].

NADIA SABEH, PH.D., also known as Dr. Greenhouse, specializes in agriculture heating and cooling system designs. She has a Ph.D. in agricultural and biosystems engineering from the University of Arizona and works as a licensed mechanical engineer in Sacramento, California, where she designs HVAC systems for controlled environment agriculture production facilities.

BRENDA WELLS, PH.D. is the Robert F. Bird Distinguished Scholar of Risk and Insurance at East Carolina University. During her career she has taught insurance courses that include commercial liability, commercial property and insurer operations, and has published articles on the risk management implications of cannabis legalization. She can be contacted at [email protected].

SCOTT WARNER provides guidance on intellectual property rights and represents a diverse array of clients at Garvey Schubert Barer Law Firm, including hospitals, software, hardware and video game companies and more. He was once named “Washington’s Most Amazing Lawyer” by Washington CEO Magazine.

Marijuana Venture seeks out well-respected experts in their fields to contribute content and guidance for cannabis industry business owners and managers.

ADVISORY PANEL

GreenBroz

http://greenbroz.com


PUBLISHERGREG JAMES

[email protected]

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFGARRETT RUDOLPH

[email protected]

MANAGING EDITORBRIAN BECKLEY

[email protected]

SALES MANAGERLISA SMITH

[email protected]

ASSOCIATE EDITORPATRICK WAGNER

ART DIRECTORCHLOÉ MEHRING

MARKETING INTERNBRANDON OWEN

SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVEAARON GREENREICH

CONTRIBUTORSJoseph Bondy

Matthew ClearyArnab Mitra

Lindsay MooreAnthony Phillips

Lilach Mazor Power

Lauren RudickKavita Goswamy

ShelatBrenda Wells

Alex Wheatley

MARIJUANA VENTURE VOL. 4, ISSUE 10Marijuana Venture (ISSN #2376-0710) is published monthly by MJ Directions LLC. PO Box 1419, Renton, WA, 98057. Phone: (425)656-3621. Website: www.marijuanaventure.com. Copyright 2016 by Marijuana Venture. All rights re-served. Reprinting, in whole or in part, is expressly forbidden without written permission from the publisher.

ADVERTISINGFor advertising rates, call (425)656-3621 or email [email protected].

SUBSCRIPTION SERVICESFor subscription services, please call (425)656-3621, visit www.marijuanaventure.com or email [email protected]. For change of address, please include the old address and new address, along with an address label from a recent issue, if possible. Please allow up to three weeks for address to be changed. If an address is not updated when the magazine is mailed, we are not responsible for delivery of your magazine. If the Post Office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we will suspend our subscription until a correct address is received. Marijuana Venture assumes no responsibility for any claims or representations contained in the magazine or in any adver-tisement. All materials contained are for educational purposes and intended for the legal marijuana business where allowed by state law. Marijuana Venture does not encourage the illegal use of any of the products contained within.

A n article in the Seattle Times re-cently caught my

interest. It turns out that Seattle has more high-rise construction cranes than any other big city in Amer-ica — 58 to be exact!

The next closest is Los Angeles, which comes in second at 36, followed by Chi-cago (35), Denver (34), Portland (32), San Francisco (22) and Washington, D.C. (20). The only red (Republican) city listed in the Rider Levett Bucknall report was Phoenix, with a measly five. Also worth noting is the fact that marijuana is legal in six of the top seven cities.

It is the second year in a row Seattle has led the nation in high-rise cranes. When you also add that the two richest guys in the world both live here (Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos) and that two of the five most valuable companies in the plan-et are Seattle-based (Microsoft and Am-azon), you have to wonder if there’s something in the wa-ter. (And I’m not even mentioning Starbucks, Costco and Boeing.)

The other interesting thing about the West Coast in general is that Seattle and its other big cities are solidly Democrat, voted against Trump, have booming economies and legalized adult use recreational mari-juana. It makes you wonder: If conserva-tive Republican policies are so wonderful and good for the economy (as our presi-dent likes to say), then why do red states and cities consistently fall way behind the ones run by — and populated with — lib-eral Democrats?

I pointed out in an earlier editorial that Trump himself is no dummy when it comes to real estate, and despite all his professed love of red America, he only builds Trump properties in blue communities: New York,

Chicago, Miami, LA, Honolulu and Las Ve-gas! Not a single Trump hotel or high-rise is located in a red/Republican city. It’s funny that the guy who rails against big govern-ment and regulations builds in cities with both, yet avoids places like Houston and Dallas, which have virtually no zoning laws and allow builders to do, basically, what-ever they want. Maybe it has something to do with higher property values in cities with good laws and sensible zoning. I guess it’s just another example of Trump himself being a monumental phony who says one thing, but practices another.

But back to Seattle, it’s a great city, the center of the legal marijuana universe (for now) and a place with lots of opportunities. Up here in the Pacific Northwest, we know the world is changing and we act accord-

ingly. Some of Wash-ington’s rural counties are now bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in canna-bis revenues, and the plant is currently third behind apples and pota-toes in agriculture dol-lars generated.

But there are prob-lems in Seattle too: Our traffic is horrendous; it’s gray for at least half the year; our baseball

team is marginal at best; and if Mount Rain-ier ever goes off, it’ll make Mount St. Hel-ens look like child’s play. However, over-all, the good stuff far outweighs the bad: Our water comes from the nearby Cascade Mountains; the economy is booming; snow skiing is less than an hour away; we have some of the most amazing scenery on the planet; ocean beaches are close; and you can walk into a friendly local retail shop and buy some really good pot for $5 a gram with nothing more than ID proving you’re at least 21.

No wonder this city is booming.

GREG JAMESPUBLISHER

Go West, young man!Booming economies, blue politics and legal weed

SOME OF WASHINGTON’S

RURAL COUNTIES ARE NOW BRINGING

IN HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF

DOLLARS A YEAR IN CANNABIS REVENUES

“

A MESSAGE FROM THE PUBLISHER

Mom & Pop Business Funding

MJ Biz Conference

http://mjbizcon.com

http://mjbizcon.com


Whether it’s dis-co music, alien

conspiracy theories, Pokémon GO or Street Fighter, everybody has their guilty pleasures.

Mine are marijuana TV shows.

Yes, I’ve probably seen them all, or at least all the ones that have graced Netflix with their presence, including the bad (“Pot Barons of Colorado”), to the really bad (“High Profits”), to the downright awful (“American Weed”).

It’s hard to explain, but sometimes I’m a little disappointed when these shows are actually good. Despite my deeply imbed-ded hatred for reality television, I find it tremendously entertaining to see how can-nabis enthusiasts, consumers and the in-dustry itself are portrayed by show-runners who are obviously looking for an outra-geous personality or storyline upon which to focus their cameras.

For somebody who believes in the pow-er of the media, and believes that now more than ever, this industry needs to be viewed as legitimate, I find myself somewhat torn.

On one hand, it’s easy to be put off by the shows, even to be offended by the way some stereotypes are proliferated or even celebrated.

But at the same time, I embrace the fact that we live in a time when these shows can even exist. Twenty years ago, marijuana shows would never be fit for network tele-vision, regardless if it were a quality docu-mentary, schlocky reality show or a work of pure fiction.

Like it or not, cannabis never would have made it this far without having mass media on board. For the past three and a half years, I’ve talked with probably hun-dreds of marijuana entrepreneurs and it’s amazing how many people referenced CNN’s “Weed” series as a major turning point. People will often say their parents looked at them like drug dealers until they watched Sanjay Gupta speak with the fam-

ily of a child with epilepsy. Advocacy organizations like NORML

and events like Seattle’s venerated Hemp-fest have been around for decades, slowly chipping away at unjust cannabis laws. They started the movement, but cannabis never would have made its giant leap toward ac-ceptance and toward legalization without “Weed.” Yet, “Weed” never would have hap-pened without protestivals and pioneers de-manding progress in the face of unrelenting stigmatization and nearly a century of inertia keeping cannabis illegal.

And this goes for the news media as well. Twenty years ago, a major bust would have made front-page news (back when big cities had multiple dailies competing against each other for the scoop). Ten years ago, busts may have taken a back seat to more sen-sational crime, but the fluctuating price of marijuana never would have been discussed even in local newspapers — let alone a major national news organization. On Aug. 30, the Wall Street Journal, of all papers, published a story about the “withering” price of can-nabis in legal states. (According to Cannabis Benchmarks, the vast majority of wholesale cannabis sold in the U.S. in August went for less than $1,500 a pound.)

The mainstream media — and I do not use that term derisively — will also drive the next evolution of legal cannabis. Few report-ers have dug into the actual carbon footprint of the cannabis industry or how much waste is being produced by roughly a billion dol-lars worth of vape cartridges, plastic pre-roll tubes and mylar bags. But when they do, some changes may be forced upon the indus-try — a burden initially, but better for all in the long run.

So for now, I’ll enjoy cringing at the eye-roll-inducing stereotypes and over-the-top caricatures on the new Netflix sitcom with Kathy Bates.

We may have a long way to go, but this is progress.

GARRETT RUDOLPHEDITOR

Even bad television shows indicate progress for potMedia support magnifies pro-legalization efforts

Cannabiz Collects

GROW YOUR

GREEN.

NO

COLLECTION.

NO FEES.

PERIOD.

WE’LL COLLECT IT.

The Nation’s First & Only

Cannabis Collection Agency.

cannabizcollects.com(720) 724 - 7810

ARE YOU OWED

MONEY?

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

http://cannabizcollects.com

Salient


With a focus on disruptive technology and game-changing innovations, New West Summit 3.0 will highlight the intersection of cannabis business, technology and media on Oct. 13-15 at the Marriott City Center in Oakland, California. The summit hosts 100 exhibitors, 45 panels and more than 3,000 attendees for three days of busi-ness-to-business networking.

Keynote speakers at the summit include Par-liament Funkadelic frontman George Clinton, Path co-founder and CEO David Morin and Na-tional Geographic TV host Jason Silva.

New to the summit this year is the consumer day on Oct. 15, featuring classes, samples, exhib-its and career opportunities.

Attendees looking to pitch their company, in-vention or idea can reach active and accredited investors at the summit and listen in on panel discussions about trend forecasts, investment models and how they have changed over the past few years. The New West Summit antici-pates more than 1,000 investors and entrepre-

neurs to be in attendance.Technology is the backbone of the event and

show organizers intend to showcase new soft-ware, hardware and tools. There is also an em-phasis on disruptive new business models that companies like Uber, Yelp and GrubHub employ to great effect.

Media, while often co-dependent on technol-ogy through social apps and digital platforms, bridges businesses directly with consum-ers and plays a similar role at the New West Summit. Show organizers have scheduled nu-merous opportunities for attendees to educate themselves on branding, marketing, editorial trends, social media and more over the course of the three-day event.

Those looking to get into the industry should also note the Bloom Farms job fair, which gath-ers several employers to the summit to meet pro-spective team members.

Tickets for the New West Summit start at $50 and are available now at newwestsummit.com.

New West Summit shines spotlight on new technology

Founder Jim McAlpine, right, with Sensi Chew co-founder Liz Tollner at the inaugural 2015 New West Summit.

– MORE EVENTS –

September 21-22California Cannabis Business ConferenceAnaheim MarriottAnaheim, CaliforniaCost: $250-895Californiacannabisbusiness-conference.com

September 29-30King Cannabis ExpoSpokane Convention CenterSpokane, WashingtonCost: $40-300Kingcannabisexpo.com

October 4-6Cannabis World Congress and Business ExpositionJohn B. Hynes Convention CenterBostonCost: $99-499Cwcbexpo.com

October 6Cannabis Law and Practice 101The Robert A. Clifford Seminar RoomChicagoCost: $210-425Pincusproed.com

October 6-7Grow Up Cannabis Conference and ExpoScotiabank Convention CenterNiagara Falls, CanadaCost: $20-199Growupconference.com

October 11-12The Cannabis Industry Energy ChallengeHyatt Regency San Francisco San FranciscoCost: $495-1,795Euci.com

October 11-13CEA Hands-on WorkshopCEA Learning Center EastWindsor, Connecticut Cost: $995Growerssupply.com/techcenter

CANNABIS CALENDAR


October 12-14Southwest Cannabis Conference and ExpoPhoenix Convention Center PhoenixCost: $50-85Swccexpo.com

October 13-15SpannabisFira de CornelláBarcelona, SpainCost: $21-50 (18-43€)

October 13-15New West SummitMarriott City CenterOakland, CaliforniaCost: $199-599Newwestsummit.com

October 17The Cannabis Industry: Growth Opportunities for

Professionals, Operators and InvestorsHilton Boston Dedham HotelDedham, MassachusettsCost: $199-299Burnslev.com

October 17-18Second Cannabis Sustainability SymposiumEmbassy Suites by Hilton DenverDenverCost: $85Cannabissustainability.org

October 23-24Cannabis Business Leadership ForumEmbassy Suites by HiltonDenver Cost: $1,395-1,985Canadianinstitute.com/canna-bis-business-leadership-forum

October 25-26CannaTech Global – Canna-bis Innovation SummitOld Truman BreweryLondonCost: $130-487 (£100-375)Canna-tech.co

October 28-29The 6th CannaGrow ExpoCrowne Plaza Denver Airport Hotel & Convention CenterDenverCost: $99-649Cannagrowexpo.com

November 5-7Native American Healthcare ConferenceMorongo Casino Resort and Spa Cabazon, California Cost: $395-895Nativenationevents.org

▼ November 8-9Fall InterchangeRenton PavilionRenton, WashingtonCost: $0-3,000Marijuanaventure.com/inter-change

November 15-17Marijuana Business ConferenceLas Vegas Convention CenterLas VegasCost: $199-1,447Mjbizconference.com

Maverick Label

CANNABIS CALENDAR

http://cannamav.com/mv3

Interchange

INTERCHANGE FALL2017

CALL NOW TO REGISTER! • (425) 656-3621 • [email protected]

Interchange is not just another trade show, it is a buy/sell event for the legal marijuana industry where buyers meet with new vendors and do business!

• Limited to 40 growers and 40 retailers • Two days of face-to-face meetings • Industry only. No public.• The biggest legal marijuana market in the world

Washington’s #1 trade event for cultivators and retailers

NOV. 8-9, 2017 • RENTON PAVILION IN RENTON, WASHINGTON

We received over

$100,000 in orders and commitments at the last event”

Kim Harriman, Owner, K&M Growers

I met 20 new retail customers in two days. THE BEST trade event for cultivators”

Roy Arms, 7 Hills Farm

The average Interchange grower/vendor saw an INCREASE IN SALES of between

15-25% for the three months after the event”

Brian Yauger, Lemonhaze Analytics

http://marijuanaventure.com/interchange/


November 14-16CEA Hands-on WorkshopCEA Learning Center WestDyersville, Iowa Cost: $995Growerssupply.com/techcenter

November 19The Science of Cannabis SummitMargaritaville Hollywood Beach ResortFort Lauderdale, FloridaCost: $99-119Scienceofcannabis.com

December 1-3International Cannabis Business ConferenceGrand Hyatt HotelKauai, HawaiiCost: $399-599Internationalcbc.com

December 9-10Emerald CupSonoma County FairgroundsSonoma CaliforniaCost: TBATheemeraldcup.com

January 6-7, 2018Maui Cannabis Conference Hyatt Regency Resort and SpaLahaina, Maui, HawaiiCost: $20-75Mauicannabisconference.com

January 10-12Cannabis Business Executive ConferenceWashington, D.C. Cost: $395-1,395Cbec2018.com

FEATURED January 17-18

RAD ExpoOregon Convention CenterPortland, OregonCost: Free for qualified buyersTheRADExpo.com

January 24-26ExtraxxCost: TBALos AngelesCost: $350-600Extraxx.com

To submit an event for inclu-sion in the Marijuana Venture calendar, email [email protected].

Retail & Dispensary Expo

FEATURED EVENT : RAD EXPOThe RAD (Retail and Dispensary) Expo is a new national trade show exclusively for retailers and dispensaries. RAD is targeted solely at the retail side of the business. Exhibitors will include products and services aimed at increasing sales, efficiency, compliance, store foot traffic, security, design aesthetic and anything else a cannabis retailer may need.

January 17-18, 2018 • Portland, Oregon

WWW.THERADEXPO.COM

Bridge West

CANNABIS CALENDAR

http://bridgewestcpas.com

Mills Nutrients

Cannabis Benchmarks

http://cannabisbenchmarks.com

420 Careers


Fun and Games

Dope of the Month: Roger Stone

By the Numbers

A look inside International Church of Cannabis, which opened on April 20 in Denver. The artwork inside the church was painted by Okuda San Miguel and Kenny Scharf. Though ad-herents, known as “Elevationists,” use the “sacred flower to reveal the best version of self, discover a creative voice and enrich their community with the fruits of that creativity,” no con-sumption is allowed inside the church. Photo courtesy of the International Church of Cannabis.

Sources: Marijuana Business Daily, The Cannabist, Headset, Inc.

Despite being an advocate of cannabis legalization, Roger Stone brings with him a ton of racist, bigoted, mi-sogynistic and anti-Semitic baggage, as well as a pedi-gree that runs from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. For those of you keeping score at home, that's the president that launched the War on Drugs in order to arrest African-Americans, the president who turned the War on Drugs into a trillion-dollar enterprise and the president whose attorney general said the KKK were good people until he heard they smoked pot. So forgive us if we're not swayed by your keynote speech at the CWCB. We're pretty sure that no one with a tattoo of Nixon's face on their back should be trusted...

The Name Game

Former Daily Show host Jon Stewart played an “enhancement smoker,” a stoner archetype who believes that everything was better if “on weed,” in the pot comedy, “Half-Baked.” With legalization now sweeping

the country, numerous companies are taking the everything's better “on weed” approach to product development. Can readers of

Marijuana Venture identify the proper pot products from the mock marijuana merch listed below? See

the next page for answers.

The percentage of women-owned marijuana business according to a Marijuana Business Daily survey (down from 36% in 2015).27% Estimated value of 11,400 plants removed from public and private land in San Matteo, California as part of the state Department of Justice's campaign to root out illegal grows.

$22.8M The amount an average cannabis consumer spends on marijuana in one year, according to Headset, Inc.$643

Blowing Smoke

“We must create and foster a culture that is hostile to drug abuse. Accommodation to a rattlesnake in your bed is a path to disaster.”

— Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the “accommodating messages” about drugs being created in Hollywood.

“If they show up with a hay bale of marijuana, it’s definitely going to be more than a citation. It’s going to be up to the discretion of the officer.”

— Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen on enforcement during the Burning Man festival, which takes place in Nevada, but on federal land.

QUICK HITS

Canna Nail Polish

Canna Gym

Canna Coffin

Canna Roller Skates

TOP

PHO

TO C

RED

IT: L

IZZI

E O

CH

OA

/ V

IA C

REAT

IVE

CO

MM

ON

S LI

CEN

SE

Centurion Pro

TOP

PHO

TO C

RED

IT: L

IZZI

E O

CH

OA

/ V

IA C

REAT

IVE

CO

MM

ON

S LI

CEN

SE


The Name GameIn The News

Feedback

New Jersey senator introduceslatest legalization bill

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker in August introduced a bill in Congress to remove marijuana from the federal con-trolled substance list.

The “Marijuana Justice Act” (S.1689) would not only legalize marijuana at the federal level, but also incentivize states through federal funds to change their cannabis laws if those laws were shown to have a disproportionate effect on low-income individuals and/or people of color and even retroactively apply to those already serving time behind bars for marijuana-related offenses.

“Our country’s drug laws are badly bro-ken and need to be fixed,” Booker said in a press release. “Descheduling marijuana and applying that change retroactively to people currently serving time for marijua-na offenses is a necessary step in correct-ing this unjust system.”

Cannabis industry sales spur money-counting machine buys

The cash-only legal marijuana industry not only creates difficulties for growers and retailers, but can also cause issues for state and local governments, such as the one in Grants Pass, Oregon, which spent nearly $2,000 on a new cash-counting machine this summer.

According to reports from the Daily Courier, the decision was made after a cultivator paid a $3,000 permit bill in $5 and $10 bills. The cash payments forced staff to count the money at the counter, causing other customers to wait and creat-ing stress for employees not comfortable with handling that much money in public.

Due primarily to the state's legal mari-juana industry, revenue collected by mu-nicipalities is way up over previous years. In Josephine County, building fees jumped

61%, electrical fees climbed 80% and planning division fees increased 64% over the same period last year, though officials said increased residential construction also contributed to the higher numbers.

MassRoots adds to portfolio with CannaRegs purchase

Denver-based MassRoots, a cannabis social network, continued its eight-month buying spree in August, purchasing CannaRegs, Ltd., in a $12 million stock swap. CannaRegs is a technology platform that tracks changes in cannabis regulations and taxation at the municipal, state and federal levels.

The purchase is part of a busy year for MassRoots, which also announced plans to buy Odava Inc., a regulatory com-pliance and point-of-sale software firm and DDDigital Inc., the company behind cannabis ordering platform Whaxy.

Denver begins accepting applications for social use clubs

The city of Denver in August began accepting applications for licensing under its voter-approved initiative to provide legal, public spaces for marijuana usage. Voters in Denver approved the measure in November 2016 and officials do not ex-pect any licenses to be issued in the near future, due to the regulatory process put in place. Businesses that want to provide specific 21-and-over areas for marijuana consumption may not be within 1,000 feet of any restricted sites, have to obtain backing from a nearby neighborhood or business group and must include support-ing documents and plans with the applica-tion. There is also a $1,000 fee.

Under state law, marijuana retailers can’t allow consumption on site.

Marijuana Venture wants to hear from you! We encourage our readers to take part in the conversation about cannabis, whether it’s regarding legalization, business-related issues, cultivation questions or just to say hi and share some interesting pictures.

To submit a letter to the editor, a question for an upcoming “ask the expert” segment, a photo for the POV or just to pass along a compliment or complaint email [email protected].

CANNA NAIL POLISH

P Dope Nailz targets “stoner babes” with multiple colors available

at dopenailzlacquer.com.

CANNA GYM

PPower Plant Fitness is a Jim McAlpine joint, find out more on page 38.

CANNA COFFIN

Q Although it could put the “fun” in a “funeral,” most enthusiasts would probably

prefer cremation.

CANNA ROLLER SKATES

Q Shockingly, nobody has yet combined cannabis and roller-skating in the

commercial, legal market.

QUICK HITS

Left Coast Wholesale

Cannaline

https://cannaline.com/

https://cannaline.com/


Somebody has to keep things interesting in the developing world of legal cannabis and Jim McAlpine is happy to be the guy who pushes the enve-

lope in that regard. In addition to being the executive director

of the New West Summit, he’s also the pres-ident and founder of the 420 Games and pro-prietor of quite likely the nation’s only canna-bis-friendly gym — Power Plant Fitness.

“Cannabis and athletics is kind of my gig,” McAlpine says.

He’s even the co-owner of an edibles line called Canna Athlete.

“It’s a brand that has THC and CBD prod-ucts for focus and recovery and that kind of stuff that is in line with the gym and the 420

Games,” McAlpine says. McAlpine’s gym concept stems from his

high school days of smoking with his friends and working out in his parent’s garage, but the realization of the 420 Games and Power Plant Fitness is much more nuanced then it would seem at first blush.

For starters, Power Plant Fitness is, first and foremost, a gym. Adding a dab of can-nabis to the formula seems to have polluted the message for many outlets who reported on Power Plant’s planned openings in San Fran-cisco and San Jose, California in 2017 and McAlpine’s partnership with former NFL star Ricky Williams only further distorted the goal of the business.

The gym simply gives patrons the op-tion of consuming cannabis in a room ad-

jacent to the main workout area, McAlpine says. Cannabis use isn’t mandatory. In fact, McAlpine wants Power Plant newcomers to go through an interview process and a su-pervised trial run before they can pump iron and puff cannabis.

At the 420 Games, McAlpine asks com-petitors not to smoke at all. For him, the competition is about changing the percep-tion of what a cannabis user looks like, he says. McAlpine hopes putting health-con-scious and athletic individuals center stage will overpower the negative image of the lazy stoner on a couch.

The 420 Games feature a 4.2-mile course of varied calisthenics in succession. Announc-ers at the events guide competitors through sections of the course, which include dexteri-ty-based tire runs, pivot races and keg-carry-ing races. At different intervals, participants are instructed to perform more traditional ex-ercises like lunges, push-ups, frog jumps and burpees. Attendees watching the events can be heard gasping with equal amounts of awe and sympathy for competitors.

McAlpine hosted five 420 Games in 2017. Since his goal is to change the pub-lic perception of what a cannabis user looks like, he has consistently held the events at popular outdoor venues in major recre-ational hub cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, San Francisco and Portland, Ore-gon. The events have plenty to offer after the sweat has dried, including beer gardens, live music performances, industry vendors and at the end of it all, hopefully, McAlpine says, a few changed perspectives.

JIM MCALPINE–

Cannabis-fueled calisthenics, competitions and conventions — welcome to the world of Jim McAlpine

By PATRICK WAGNER

PERSONALITY PROFILE

COMING TO LAS VEGAS?Las Vegas Cannabis Deals can help with your Medical or Recreational needs

www.lasvegascannabisdeals.com

HAVE A 420-FRIENDLY PROPERTY TO RENT IN LAS VEGAS?List it on www.lasvegas420rooms.com

LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO STAY WHERE YOU CAN CONSUME?Search Las Vegas 420 Rooms

LVC Deals

COMING TO LAS VEGAS?Las Vegas Cannabis Deals can help with your Medical or Recreational needs

www.lasvegascannabisdeals.com

HAVE A 420-FRIENDLY PROPERTY TO RENT IN LAS VEGAS?List it on www.lasvegas420rooms.com

LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO STAY WHERE YOU CAN CONSUME?Search Las Vegas 420 Rooms

RAD Expo 1Retail & Dispensary Expo

™

OREGON CONVENTION CENTER • JANUARY 17-18, 2018

The FIRST national trade show exclusively made for marijuana retail and dispensary owners!Exhibitors will include: POS sales products, shelving, display cases, accessories, food, drinks, refrigerators, programming consultants, packaging, POP displays, legal, accounting, CBD products, medical products, and just about everything and anything a retail store owner or dispensary will need to stock their store or set up a new store.

WWW.THERADEXPO.COM 425-656-3621FOR MOREINFORMATION:

WHY ATTEND RADEXPO?

Most retail and dispensary owners don’t bother attending today’s cannabis trade shows for a variety of reasons: Admission prices are too high; many vendors are targeting cultivators; the public are allowed in; they lack focus; the same speakers talk about the same tired subjects at every event, etc.

RAD Expo is different.

• RAD Expo is a business-only event that is 100% focused on the retail side of the industry.

• Attendance is free for licensed retail stores and dispensaries, as well as qualified applicants in states not yet issuing licenses.

• All exhibitors will have products and services aimed at making retailers more profitable.

• Our speakers will have serious retail and marketing experience.

• It’s a national show featuring businesses from all over the U.S.

• Portland, Oregon sits squarely in the middle of the biggest legal

marijuana market in the world. (60 million people in California,

Oregon, Washington and Alaska.)

Produced by:

The nation’s #1 business publication for the legal marijuana industry.


http://theradexpo.com

Retail & Dispensary Expo

™

OREGON CONVENTION CENTER • JANUARY 17-18, 2018

The FIRST national trade show exclusively made for marijuana retail and dispensary owners!Exhibitors will include: POS sales products, shelving, display cases, accessories, food, drinks, refrigerators, programming consultants, packaging, POP displays, legal, accounting, CBD products, medical products, and just about everything and anything a retail store owner or dispensary will need to stock their store or set up a new store.

WWW.THERADEXPO.COM 425-656-3621FOR MOREINFORMATION:

WHY ATTEND RADEXPO?

Most retail and dispensary owners don’t bother attending today’s cannabis trade shows for a variety of reasons: Admission prices are too high; many vendors are targeting cultivators; the public are allowed in; they lack focus; the same speakers talk about the same tired subjects at every event, etc.

RAD Expo is different.

• RAD Expo is a business-only event that is 100% focused on the retail side of the industry.

• Attendance is free for licensed retail stores and dispensaries, as well as qualified applicants in states not yet issuing licenses.

• All exhibitors will have products and services aimed at making retailers more profitable.

• Our speakers will have serious retail and marketing experience.

• It’s a national show featuring businesses from all over the U.S.

• Portland, Oregon sits squarely in the middle of the biggest legal

marijuana market in the world. (60 million people in California,

Oregon, Washington and Alaska.)

Produced by:

The nation’s #1 business publication for the legal marijuana industry.




PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT

Judge JarsDescribed as “the only hanging dis-

play stash jar,” the patent-pending Judge Jar offers a new way to display cannabis, either at retail shops or in a personal collection. The Judge Jar, un-like traditional storage containers, hangs buds from the lid to exhibit them more clearly and to prevent any crushing or other misshaping of the product.

The Judge Jar uses neodymium mag-nets to secure a small clip in the jar's cork top. According to the company, the magnets can hold up to 12 ounces. The lids are made with cork to create an air-tight seal and reduce costs.

WWW.JUDGEJARS.COM

Triminator TRP StackWith legalization comes evolution. The

rosin press — a device unique to canna-bis extraction — is a prime example. Ros-in presses have come a long way from the hair crimpers and Harbor Freight-based devices of yore and the latest evolution is Triminator’s new offering: the TRP Stack.

With two pressing surfaces, the ma-chine is capable of processing one pound of plant material per squeeze — and reportedly achieving a throughput in ex-cess of four pounds per hour. Triminator also incorporated a “driptech” feature into the design to increase terpene retention. The TRP Stack tips forward to allow the pressed oil to flow directly downward, minimizing exposure to the hot plates and reducing terpene loss.

“The oil pours out like a waterfall,” says Ángel Torrado, Triminator’s design and development engineer. Triminator also plans to stack additional plates for even greater capacity.

WWW.THETRIMINATOR.COM

Nexus Greenhouse


PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT

TopGrow T5 LEDsTopGrow Lighting in August

unveiled the new 6500K full-spectrum LED T5 lamp, made to replace fluo-rescent T5 grow lights while using the same fixtures. According to the compa-ny, the LED T5 has been independently verified to produce light in the 450-500 nanometer spectrum, a range that is critical for stimulating seedling develop-ment for more uniform, stocky and fast-er-greening plants.

“This definitely fulfills the hopes and dreams of LED technology for growers,” TopGrow Lighting sales director Joseph Hazani says. “Our sample growers were automatically skeptical because of the over-promises from LEDs in the past, but they couldn’t be happier after seeing their lower electric bill and grow results.”

The 4-foot LED T5s have a five-year/50,000-hour operating life rating, yet use only 24 watts per lamp, an en-ergy savings of more than 50% while producing substantially less heat than a typical fluorescent.

TOPGROWLIGHTING.COM

RediRoot containersRediRoot containers are

heavy-duty planting containers that encourage healthy root growth and aeration of the root system. De-signed by Nursery Source, the con-tainers prevent roots from circling, allowing them to thrive.

The containers also make trans-planting easier and reduce trans-plant shock to the plants. In addition, they are offset from the ground to

ensure complete drainage and dis-courage the development of root rot.

RediRoot containers come in six sizes and are ideal for all types of plants. They can be complemented by the RediRoot propagation sys-tem, which is available in three siz-es. An optional fabric liner is also available and useful for flood and drain applications.

WWW.NURSERYSOURCE.COM

Azentive Sun On-DemandCalifornia-based technology company Azentive

this summer released the new Sun On-Demand plas-ma lighting solution aimed at the medical cannabis industry. According to a press release, European growers that have been using plasma lighting technology report crops with higher cannabi-noid levels, as well as yield increases of 25% to 90%.

The company attributes the success to the spectrum the lights produce and the density optimization of the plasma light by German inventor Boris Lutterbach. According to a press release, the light accurately replicates the sun's spectrum and power and offers a high-density, uniform lighting that covers a larger area than current competitors.

Specifications from the company indicate a maximum efficiency of up to 110 to 145 lumens of light output per watt. Maximum coverage for a 2.6-kilo-watt system evenly covers approximately 225 square feet.

AZENTIVE.COM

FarmTek

PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT

WaterWorks Crystals

WaterWorks Crystals are a water-saving copolymer for greenhouse growers, landscapers and nursery managers.

When added to soil me-dia, the crystals can absorb and hold up to 400 times their weight in water. The plant roots grow into the crystals and take in water through capillary action/osmosis, keeping the soil slightly moist — not fully wet. The water is captured in the crystals, rather than running out of the container or leaching into the ground, allowing growers to reduce wa-ter needs by 50-90%, according to the company. The crystals will also absorb any water-soluble fertilizer, preventing excessive runoff.

The constant expansion and contrac-tion of the crystals keeps the soil aerat-ed and porous, increasing the speed of

root

growth. The crystals displace about 15-20% of the soil when hydrated and will last at least five years. They are 100% non-toxic and contain no heavy metals.

WWW.1WATER.COM

Jungle Control FerociousThere's a new player in the nutrient

game with the launch of Jungle Con-trol and its flagship product, Ferocious. According to the company, Ferocious is a “plant-optimizing additive” that contains “rare, non-toxic (to plants and human tissue), natural substances with molecular structures similar to water.” The additive delivers concentrated forms of hydrogen and oxygen, allow-ing plants to become larger with poten-tially greater yields.

The company also claims that Fe-rocious helps enhance other nutrients by acting as a transporter for those substances and promoting efficiency of absorption. The clear, liquid con-centrate is available for commercial and home growers.

WWW.JUNGLECONTROL.IT


Twister Trimmer

http://twistertrimmer.com

Forever Green

AVAILABLE IN: Barnes & Noble • 7-Eleven • Hudson News • Amazon Books-A-Million • QFC • Fred Meyer • Fry’s Electronics • King SoopersAND IN CANADA: Chapters • Indigo • SafewayAs well as many independent bookstores across North America

For information on advertising, call 425.656.3621 or email [email protected]

#1 SOURCE OF BUSINESSINFORMATION FOR THE LEGAL

CANNABIS INDUSTRY

NEW! Find Marijuana Venturein select airports across the U.S.


US $7.99 / CAN $9.99

AUGUST 2017


CALIFORNIA’S TOP RETAILERS BRACE FOR CHANGES

LIVING THE DREAM

Washington farmers plant the fi rst seeds

THE RISE OF

LEGAL HEMP

CANADA’S ORGANIC ALTERNATIVE

Hawaiian Grower Embraces Tradition

VENTUREVENTURENATIONALNATIONAL CANNABISCANNABIS BUSINESSBUSINESS

Entrepreneurs provide insight into the highs and lows of running a cannabis company

AUG cover.indd 16 6/27/17 4:20 PM


RETAIL PROFILE: COLORADO

Rocky Mountain HigHs

Colorado retailers Medicine Man and Green Dragon discuss expansion and longevity in one of the nation’s most competitive markets

― ― ―By PATRICK WAGNER

But businesses that have proven them-selves capable of integrating the constantly changing rules have had the opportunity to buy up other licenses and expand into new territories. Marijuana Venture recent-ly spoke with two of the leading Colora-do retail chains, each at different stages of growth, about their longevity, expansion plans and what it takes to stay in the hearts and minds of their consumers.

MEDICINE MAN The Williams family has been a disrup-

tive force in the cannabis industry since starting Medicine Man in Denver in 2009.

When the company first started as a cannabis wholesaler, competitors tried to dissuade Medicine Man from upsetting the apple cart with an aggressive pricing model.

“We had an operator up the street tell us, ‘We got a good thing out here. Don’t inter-

rupt it,’” Medicine Man co-founder Andy Williams says. “My brother, who is the nicest guy and just as honest as can be, smiled and said ‘No, we’re pretty much going to put you out of business.’ Then he walked out.”

Shortly after the encounter, the company took out an ad in Denver’s weekly maga-zine, Westword. Williams says his brother, the nice one, insisted the ad should read “Let the Price Wars Begin.”

That war never stopped, but it did change. In 2011, the government stepped in and man-dated vertical integration, effectively cutting the number of independent businesses in half. Medicine Man expanded into retail and Wil-liams says it was one of the best things that has happened for the business.

With each transition of Colorado’s cannabis market — from unregulated to regulated; from medical to recreational; from mandated vertical integration to open market; from a wide range of independent licensees to an increasing-ly consolidated faction of retail chains — operators have been forced to adapt quickly or die on the vine.

WWW.MARIJUANAVENTURE.COM 51

The company now has 93 full-time em-ployees (10 of which are family members, including Williams’ mom, who helped launch the company), two retail locations, a cultivation facility, its own line of nutri-ents and a sister research corporation, Med-Pharm. Through it all, Medicine Man has grown in accordance with its own set of rules and little compromise.

“Being successful in any business is a lot of good planning and knowledge and a lot of it is luck,” Williams says. “There were a lot

of people that just weren’t capable of verti-cal integration for all kinds of reasons and one of the big ones was facility. We had this big warehouse in the middle of an industrial area and, as dumb luck would have it, our building was zoned in a way that allowed us to have a retail center in the front of it.”

The Williams brothers wanted to model the company after Costco and set forth a ba-sic mission statement — the “secret sauce” as Williams puts it — containing five key points: high quality, value pricing, tested

and safe, consistency and customer ser-vice. Other businesses have echoed similar missions, but Medicine Man takes a lot of the guesswork out of the equation by con-trolling the products on its shelves.

“We only sell our own cannabis out of our dispensaries,” Williams says. “Our model is one that we don’t open a store un-less we can supply it with 100% of our own cannabis.”

Medicine Man is preparing to open its third location, in Thornton, and is also look-

Medicine Man, Aurora

Medicine Man, Denver

Green Dragon


ing for a location to plant a fourth retail outlet. Every store will continue the model established by the Williams brothers and replicates the infrastructure of the compa-ny’s flagship location in Denver.

“Having that kind of model and not just shotgunning out and starting dispensaries all over the place really keeps our costs down,” Williams says. “Everywhere you go you have to duplicate the management, security, network, infrastructure, license payments and so forth. All of that adds to your cost. Since we don’t do that, we can keep our costs down and pass those savings on to the consumer.”

However, Williams warns that keeping costs low for consumers is a double-edge sword.

“One thing customers hate is fluctuation in prices, unless it is in a downward direc-tion,” Williams says. “Customers under-stand sales, but holy cow, if you raise the price on them, even if it’s still lower than other people around you, they’ll get pissed off and leave you for a while.”

Consistency is another pain-point for most marijuana retailers. It’s something that Medicine Man continues to work on, but by controlling 100% of the flower on store shelves, Williams doesn’t have to worry about other cultivators’ practices. A top-sell-ing flower strain such as Blue Dream can vary drastically from grower to grower,

with different flavors, cannabinoid profiles and trim techniques. That discrepancy also means customers buying the same strain can leave with different experiences and ulti-mately, with an unclear opinion on whether they like the strain in the first place.

“People don’t like that,” Williams says. “They don’t go to Starbucks every day for a surprise coffee. They go for their favorite and they want it to be the same.”

GREEN DRAGONGreen Dragon Cannabis Co. has grown to

become one of the largest chains in Colorado. The company has 200 employees and 12 re-tail outlets, including several acquisitions that were rebranded as Green Dragon stores.

As with Medicine Man, vertical integra-tion plays a major role in providing Green Dragon with a competitive edge. Unlike many Colorado cannabis businesses, Green Dragon elected from the outset not to divide its consumer base into two categories.

“One of our corporate decisions was to sell only recreational cannabis,” director of operations Alex Levine says. “By just focus-ing on the recreational market, we were able to significantly realize cost savings in the grows and on the corporate level in compli-ance, and by reducing redundancies in staff-ing. We were then able to pass these savings onto our customers.”

The company designed and constructed

a three-acre, “state-of-the-art indoor/green-house hybrid system” in Denver. The facility took two years to build and features automat-ed controls for CO2 levels, humidity, tem-perature, light intensity and fertigation. The facility was also one of the first in the country to incorporate a fully-automated packaging system with air-proof nitrogen seals.

Levine says the company has always perceived itself to be on the forefront of a changing landscape. He believes that as medical laws are adopted and approved throughout the country, recreational laws would soon follow.

“Based on these assumptions, our plan

LEFT Tucked away in an industrial park, the Denver Medicine Man store started as a cultivation facility, but its competitive pricing model has consistently driven consumers to its doorstep.


A row of sniffer jars contain top-selling cannabis strains at Green Dragon’s Byers Place location in Denver. In the middle sits a jar of coffee beans with which patrons can cleanse their palate.


was to grow within the state of Colorado through acquisitions and by winning licenses in newly opened municipalities, and then slowly to enter into additional states,” Levine says.

The company was originally called Green-werkz, but adopted the Green Dragon name in 2015 after acquiring a pair of retail stores and a 30,000-square-foot grow, because the new name offered “more branding opportunities,” Levine says.

Next, Green Dragon purchased Backcountry Cannabis Company, a dispensary made famous by the CNN reality show “High Profits” when it was known as Breckenridge Cannabis Club.

“The dispensary was forced to move off of Main Street in Breckenridge and was relocated to Airport Road on the outskirts of the town,” Levine says. “Many marijuana companies find it difficult to come back after a devastating fi-nancial blow, so we were lucky to be at the right place at the right time to take advantage of the opportunity to acquire this location.”

In 2017, Green Dragon acquired three Tru Cannabis locations in Aurora, Denver and Moun-tain View to round out its current repertoire of retail outlets.

“When evaluating acquisitions, we look for

strategic locations that have high-traffic volume and have the potential to succeed,” Levine says. “Once we purchase a new store we rebrand it with the Green Dragon design and colors.”

While much of the company’s expansion has come through acquisitions, Green Dragon remains committed to winning licenses in Col-orado’s newly-opened municipalities. Though competition is steep, the company recently pitted itself against 400 other applicants in Aurora to become one of 24 new license-holders within the city. There, Levine says, the company secured a plot where it could build a new dispensary from the ground up.

“We were also awarded a license to open a re-tail store in the city of Thornton in another highly competitive application process in which only four licenses were awarded,” Levine says. “This also involved building a store from the ground up, which should be completed by the end of 2017.”

As with the rebranded dispensaries and the original three Greenwerkz locations, Levine says all the Green Dragon stores share a similar design and color scheme to retain a uniform brand iden-tity — a major key to the company’s continued success as it looks ahead to 2018.

The Byers Place storefront is one of Green Dragon’s two Denver locations in the company’s chain of 12 retail stores across Colorado.

Bio Nova

RAD Expo 2

NATIONAL MARIJUANA RETAIL & DISPENSARY EXPO

™

OREGON CONVENTION CENTER • JANUARY 17-18, 2018 WHY ATTEND RADEXPO?Most retail and dispensary owners don’t bother attending today’s cannabis trade shows for a variety of reasons: Admission prices are too high; many vendors are targeting cultivators; the public are allowed in; they lack focus; the same speakers talk about the same tired subjects at every event, etc.

RAD Expo is different.• RAD Expo is a business-only event that is 100% focused on the retail side of the industry.

• Attendance is free for licensed retail stores and dispensaries, as well as qualified applicants in states not yet issuing licenses.• All exhibitors will have products and services aimed at making retailers more profitable.• Our speakers will have serious retail and marketing experience.• It’s a national show featuring businesses from all over the U.S.• Portland, Oregon sits squarely in the middle of the biggest legal marijuana market in the world. (60 million people in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska.)

WWW.THERADEXPO.COM425-656-3621

Produced by:


The FIRST national trade show exclusively for marijuana retail and dispensary owners!


NATIONAL MARIJUANA RETAIL & DISPENSARY EXPO

™

OREGON CONVENTION CENTER • JANUARY 17-18, 2018 WHY ATTEND RADEXPO?Most retail and dispensary owners don’t bother attending today’s cannabis trade shows for a variety of reasons: Admission prices are too high; many vendors are targeting cultivators; the public are allowed in; they lack focus; the same speakers talk about the same tired subjects at every event, etc.

RAD Expo is different.• RAD Expo is a business-only event that is 100% focused on the retail side of the industry.

• Attendance is free for licensed retail stores and dispensaries, as well as qualified applicants in states not yet issuing licenses.• All exhibitors will have products and services aimed at making retailers more profitable.• Our speakers will have serious retail and marketing experience.• It’s a national show featuring businesses from all over the U.S.• Portland, Oregon sits squarely in the middle of the biggest legal marijuana market in the world. (60 million people in California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska.)

WWW.THERADEXPO.COM425-656-3621

Produced by:


The FIRST national trade show exclusively for marijuana retail and dispensary owners!



Canada’s Brighton invents new products

during its review and construction process

By BRIAN BECKLEY

THE WAITING GAME

The folks at Brighton have traveled a long road to get to where they are, but plenty of miles remain before they can build their new cul-tivation center on a 66-acre site in Alberta, Canada.

The company has been approved by Health Canada to grow cannabis and it has completed

the review process needed to begin construction. It’s taken 22 months to get to this point, with about a year still ahead before it can begin growing, but the company’s executives are not letting that stop them from moving ahead.

The leadership team turned their attention to the company's intellectual property division in the interim, so Brighton has been refining new dosage and delivery products designed to provide consistent, reliable doses of cannabis. The company hopes the two pieces of patent-pending technology will give doctors more


RETAIL TECHNOLOGY: BUILDING A BETTER DISPENSARYFrom apps to smart tables, innovation is booming for marijuana retailersBy BRIAN BECKLEY and PATRICK WAGNER

THE WAITING GAME

confidence in recommending marijuana as medicine.“You can see we had some extra time on our hands to do

something,” CEO Grant Gillott says.

BE RIGHT ONThe company that would eventually become Brighton got its

start in 2006 when founder Kiley Geddie received a permit to grow cannabis at home to treat the symptoms from his spinal cord injury. Geddie, a quadriplegic, used medical marijuana to help him get off opiates that had been prescribed for his pain, according to Gillott.

When regulations changed in 2013, Geddie received a cease and desist for his personal grow, but began the application pro-cess for a commercial license.

Gillot and chief operating officer Dave Davis also got involved at that time. Together, the trio formed htKa, LLC (it

stands for “honor truth Knowledge action”), which took over the licensing process the company is still in the midst of today, four years later.

But despite not being able to actually grow cannabis, Gillott, Davis and Geddie have kept busy. Facing extraordinary delays prior to opening, but needing a return on investment, the team asked doctors and medical providers who recommend cannabis about their experience and concerns with the drug, hoping to better position themselves to meet customer needs.

Gillott says doctors were concerned about dosage and con-sistency, the delivery methods available and the awkwardness of recommending a patient “Green Crack” or some other oddly named strain of marijuana.

Gillott, Davis and Geddie formed a second company, Compressed Perforated Puck Technology, Inc., and Davis, who received his first patent in 1988, began working on a solution


to the physicians’ concerns. The result is the company's Compressed Perforated Puck and Metered Dosage Inhaler, rolling out to the market later this year.

A third company, Canmaridon Holdings, Ltd. was created to handle the intellectual property rights and protect the group's pat-ents. In July 2017, all three companies were combined under the name Brighton Cares, Ltd. Gillott says the spelling and message — B-Right-On — immediately sold the team on the new name.

A SLICE OF HISTORYGillott and Davis have known each other

since 1988 and have worked together for 25 years. Prior to joining the Brighton team, Gil-lott owned four successful Chuck E. Cheese franchises in Canada. He says the kitchen staff initially trained him on procedures and he realized that without quality people on your team, you are simply out there on your own.

“There shouldn't be a division between your line staff and your executive,” Gillott says.

It was Gillott's experience in the corporate

world that led Davis and Geddie to bring him on board. Davis, who understands cultivation and worked with Gillott as a technician during the Chuck E. Cheese years, says Gillott knew the basics of forming and running a company and helped make sure everything was priori-tized properly.

With the license and facility on hold, the puck and dosing meter became the top priorities.

Gillott and Davis believe the Compressed Perforated Puck solves dosage concerns by allowing users to combine any two known strains of cannabis into a flat disc with a specific CBD:THC ratio that can be vaporized in the company's inhaler. Terpenes, flavonoids or other additives can also be compressed into the puck to enhance flavor.

“It's all about the ratio of medicine,” Davis says.

Brighton plans to license the puck to cultivators who can blend any ratio they want. Users can also grind their own cannabis and press it into a puck for use in the company’s inhaler device, which is also patented and keeps track of how often it is used and the

Seen from above, this artist’s rendering shows the full scope of the plans for Brighton’s 66-acre site, which includes 2.8 million square feet of production space.

RX Green Solutions

http://rxgreensolutions.com


time between uses to help patients keep better track of their dosage.

The company is yet to offer the puck for sale, as it wants to launch it with its own product before allowing others to create their own.

READY TO GOBecause of that, Brighton still plans to

get its production facility up and running as soon as possible, with the hope that

it will become the company's “bread and butter.” As Canada makes the move toward legalized, recreational cannabis, cultivators will be expected to pick up the slack to help meet rising demand in the face of shrinking supplies.

“We've got a real production problem north of the border here,” Gillott says.

And with 66 acres, Brighton is ready to become a major player in helping meet the country's needs.

“We can put as many buildings on there as we want,” he says.

All three of Brighton's founders believe strongly in the healing power of cannabis, especially after watching the plant help Geddie get off opiates and get his life back.

“We are as genuine as you can imag-ine,” Gillott says. “It wasn't the money that motivated us. It's something we felt compelled to get into.”

Campbell Nelson

The folks at Brighton pride themselves on being an “integrated company” with knowledge of every aspect of the business, from the facility to the cultivation and production of marijuana to the branding and distribution of the final products.

http://campbellnissancommercial.com/commercial-form-contact

Data Aire


California’s Best Places to Grow

Investors may see a cultivation license in California as a fast path to riches, but they need to avoid mistakes made in Washington and Colorado to capitalize on the opportunity BY GREG JAMES

With the legalization of recreational cannabis in Califor-nia, cultivation on a grand scale is a forgone conclusion. As with other states that have made adult-use cannabis a regulated, taxed industry, growing and processing mar-ijuana will easily become a multibillion-dollar industry.

However, if mistakes made in Washington and Colo-rado are repeated — and it’s likely they will be — investors looking at a cultivation license as a fast path to riches are in for a big surprise.

CALIFORNIA BY THE NUMBERSAlthough California may be a bit smaller geographically than Texas, it dwarfs

every other U.S. state by almost every other measure. The state covers 160,000 square miles and it is 800 miles long from its northern

border to the southern tip. It has the highest and lowest points in the Lower 48 (Mount Whitney and Death Valley, respectively). It has the largest population of any state at nearly 40 million.

California’s economy is the largest of any U.S. state with a gross domestic prod-uct of $2.5 trillion — the world’s sixth-largest standalone economy. It has three of the world’s five largest companies by market capitalization: Apple, Google and Facebook. (The other two, Microsoft and Amazon, are based in Washington, anoth-er blue state with legal marijuana!)

In short, just about everything in California is big, from its physical size, to its economy, to its geographical diversity.

Erich Pearson, CEO of SPARC, a vertically integrated retail chain, on site at his new farm in Sonoma County. Photo by Joseph Guillory.


AGRICULTURECalifornia is best known for its beaches, Hollywood

movies and tech companies. However, the Golden State is also an agricultural giant, producing a staggering $45 billion a year in fruits, vegetables, nuts and other crops to lead all other states by a wide margin.

It’s the nation’s No. 1 producer of many agricultural products, including celery, almonds, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, grapes and peaches, among others. California’s Central Valley, which stretches 450 miles from Bakers-field to Redding, is the largest single patch of Class I soil in the world.

Soils are rated in terms of their agricultural limita-tions. Class I soils have the fewest limitations; Class VIII is considered not appropriate for agriculture.

According to the USDA’s Natural Resources Con-servation Service, Class I soils are “suited to a wide range of plants and may be used safely for cultivated crops, pasture, range, woodland and wildlife. … They are deep, generally well drained and easily worked. They hold water well and are either fairly well sup-plied with plant nutrients or highly responsive to in-puts or fertilizer. … They are productive and suited to intensive cropping.”

Based on sales figures in Washington and Colorado, simple math indicates that the legal, recreational mari-

juana market in California will rapidly reach between $5 billion and $7 billion per year.

Furthermore, with its enormous stretch of Class I soil and ideal climate for growing, California’s productivity per acre will likely be much greater than the other states with legal cannabis.

LESSONS LEARNEDWhen Washington first legalized recreational mari-

juana, would-be growers scrambled to find suitable lo-cations. Long-vacant warehouses and sub-par agricultur-al land got snapped up quickly, often at rates far above fair-market value.

Cannabis cultivators who had little experience in leases and commercial agriculture were often targeted by shady operators. Many made deals they soon regretted on properties no savvy farmer or orchardist would have given a second look. Compounding the problem, many businesses hired so-called “master growers” with little more experience than growing cannabis in a garage or basement to manage a sprawling commercial farm.

The results were often disastrous for investors and license-holders. But the good news is that the lessons learned in Washington and Colorado can easily be avoid-ed with a little advice from real experts and some simple due diligence on the part of the investors.

Wine country making way for weed county: One of the many vineyards in Northern California that is now sharing its hillside with marijuana producers. Photo by Joshua Hoffman.

NCFI Polyurethane

THE RIGHT HIREThe owners of struggling cannabis farms often make

the same mistakes. They spend too much money on labor. They overes-

timate the wholesale value of cannabis when setting up their business plan. They believe quality alone will gen-erate sales and demand for their products.

But the most common flaw usually involves hiring unqualified operators. The aforementioned “master grower” who learned cultivation techniques by reading High Times and other marijuana books is not going to know how to run a full-scale commercial farm.

Cannabis, with its cult-like following of backyard “experts,” is not difficult to grow — despite what the purveyors of “how-to” books would like you to believe. In fact, cannabis is an extremely hardy annual that can survive — and even thrive — in a wide variety of en-vironments and the plants will grow a foot a week with good sun, soil and the occasional dose of fertilizer.

Successful businesses in Washington have shown that the correct person to run a commercial cannabis opera-tion has managed a professional greenhouse, graduated from a university with a degree in plant sciences or has real-world experience in commercial agriculture. In the long run, success in the commercial cultivation of canna-bis will boil down to efficiency, just like every other field of commercial agriculture.

SELECTING A SITEWithout a doubt, selecting the right location for a new

cannabis farm is going to have more impact on success or failure than any other single decision in the process. In drought-prone, federally-irrigated California, water may be the single-most important consideration of all.

While the Central Valley might seem like the ultimate location because of its superior soil and abundant sun, the issue of water/irrigation is a potential business killer.

“The smart money is in water,” says Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association (www.calgrowersassociation.org). “Current U.S. law does not allow for federal irrigation water use in the cul-tivation of cannabis, and almost all the irrigation in the Central Valley is part of a huge federal project.”

If the Central Valley is a problem, what about the Salinas Valley? According to Allen, the problems in the Salinas Valley could be just as acute because of rapidly disappearing ground water and severe restrictions on the use of well water.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIAThe traditional center of illegal marijuana cultivation

in California has been the area known as the Emerald Triangle.

In the past, it was a favored because of its rugged geography and low population density. Ironically, for a

The new SPARC cultivation hub in Sonoma County prepares for the California recreational launch. Photos by Joshua Hoffman.


THE MEDICAL MARIJUANA

COMMUNITY IS VERY LARGE IN PUERTO RICO“

Puradigm Solutions

http://puradigmsolutions.com


completely different set of reasons, it might still be the safest location for legal marijuana cultivation. If water ends up being the most important consideration for a good location, Northern California, including Hum-boldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties, could end up the clear winner.

Consider some of the average annual rainfall totals in different Cal-ifornia cities:

Bakersfield, near the southern end of Central Valley, receives an av-erage of six inches of rainfall per year. Further north, Fresno in the San Joaquin Valley, receives 13 inches.

Napa, located closer to the center of the state, receives 27 inches. Meanwhile, in Northern California, Eureka in Humboldt County and

Ukiah in Mendocino County both receive 40 inches of rain annually and Redding in Shasta County receives 35 inches.

Crescent City in Del Norte County, just south of California’s northern border, receives an incredible 71 inches of rainfall on average — more than double the rainfall of notoriously wet Seattle.

Put in simple terms, Northern California and the Emerald Triangle have good average rainfall totals that will support a thriving cannabis industry without the need for outside irrigation and with little worry of wells drying out.

Allen suggests that a smart cannabis farmer could easily set up a rain catchment system that takes advantage of the ample winter rains by storing it for use during dry summer months when rainfall is his-torically low.

BUYING LANDIt’s always advisable to hire a professional when making a real estate

purchase. That rule applies to residential houses and recreational prop-erties, but it’s especially important with commercial real estate. Many pioneering growers in Washington and Colorado, who had little experi-

ence in farming, made bad deals they came to regret. Working with an experienced real estate agent can save a lot of heartache.

Real estate broker Kyla Tripodi says the most common mistake among buyers is failing to research and fully un-

BAKERSFIELD

FRESNO

NAPA

REDDING

EUREKA

CRESCENTCITY

40

71

40

27

13

6

450 MILE STRETCH OF CLASS 1 SOIL

AVERAGE ANNUAL RAINFALL IN INCHES

While California’s Central Valley features excellent soil and an ideal

climate for growing a wide range of crops, Northern California

may be better suited to can-nabis production due to higher annual rainfall to-tals, allowing growers in the Emerald Triangle and nearby counties to grow without using

federal irrigation.

Seeds Here Now


Accelerated Growth Solutions

derstand Humboldt County’s ordinance before they invest.

“While we are on the forefront of cul-tivation in California, based both on rep-utation as well as being the first county in the state to pass an ordinance, the process is still complex,” says Tripodi, who owns The Land Man Office along with her fa-ther. “The permit application is lengthy and requires compliance with several dif-ferent county, state and federal agencies. Additionally, there are ongoing mainte-nance requirements once a permit is is-sued, including inspections from various departments.”

Sandi DeLuca, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker in Arcata, says, “The cannabis industry is well established (in Humboldt County), and with the pass-ing of legalized marijuana, the Building and Planning Department has said that it wants to be seen as a friendly, pro-busi-ness area for the industry. Property own-ers are working with lawmakers, contrac-tors, engineers, surveyors, consultants and

California Fish and Game to get all their ducks in a row.”

When looking at a site in the Emerald Triangle, DeLuca, who represents buyers and sellers in Northern California, em-phasizes the importance of working with someone who knows the “ins and outs” of both the industry and local regulations. She says she’s seen outsiders get bad advice that led to a poor purchase.

“I have seen and cleaned up a lot of deals done by a handshake in the hills — properties sold that had no water, no le-gal roads, improper transfers, liens, etc.,” she says. “I recently heard of a property owner who refused to return a deposit on a piece of land that an out-of-town buy-er was hoping to purchase, even though the land was not even zoned for cannabis cultivation.”

When evaluating land in Northern Cal-ifornia, DeLuca says the main things to look for depend on what the property will be used for.

“Zoning can affect not only current

use, but also future use,” she says. “The commercial cannabis cultivation permits offered in Humboldt County had dead-lines. Did the seller meet those? What was applied for? Water and its source are huge considerations.”

Roads, slope, easements and liens can also have big impacts on selecting the right location for a business, she says.

While the price of properties that meet the county’s cultivation ordinance have grown exponentially, Tripodi says there are still deals to be found.

“The county stopped taking permits at the end of 2016, which led to a limit-ed supply of cultivation properties on the market while buyers from out of the area continued to flood in,” she says. “Howev-er, it appears that prices have peaked, and may come down. Some overpriced proper-ties have not moved. When you consider everything the county has to offer, and the price in the rest of California for an acre of land, Humboldt County is still a relatively good deal.”

The Land Man Office


14 WOMEN TO WATCH IN 2018


The cannabis industry has continued to grow exponentially every year, but 2018 is expected to be nothing short of revolutionary. For Marijuana Venture’s third annual issue focused on women in the industry, we’re featuring 14 women who will play pivotal roles in building a brighter tomorrow for marijuana businesses throughout North America, in addition to the keynote guest column by Lilach Mazor Power. More than just standouts in their fields, these women are harbingers of the positive change that diverse leadership can bring to any industry. Ranging in back grounds from country music to ordained minister, these women each bring their own unique talents and specialties to this new frontier.

Hydrologic

http://hyper-logic.com


I meet every candidate before they join the Giving Tree family, even though it does take time out of my sched-ule and slows down the hiring process. People ask me why and my answer is always the same: people are the most important ingredient of any company. I believe my job is to make sure every person who joins the Giving Tree will have a better job in a year. My job will never change; it is my personal goal.

We started this company five years ago when it was still very hard to recruit professionals into the cannabis industry, and I want-ed to change that. We offered something different with our bene-fits package and our philanthropic mission. It attracted different kinds of candidates, the truly passionate ones. I knew from the beginning that our company would not be for everyone, but I was determined to find candidates who are a perfect fit.

We now have more than 50 team members working in our cul-tivation and extraction facilities and our dispensaries. We created a second family for them; together we are an amazing team working hard for the same goal. Our employees all agree on our vision, mission and core values, and it makes a big difference.

In an industry that is so new, with so many opportunities, I wanted to create a place the team would enjoy coming to every morning, a place that would make them jump out of bed for years to come. Culture is what creates a work-family environment, something that has always been crucial to me. We spend most of our waking hours at our workplace, so it only makes sense for it to be more than just a job.

I also believe that with so many opportunities out there, creat-ing a company that people want to be a part of is an essential step to getting your business where you want it to be. At the Giving Tree, we provide a culture that listens to every employee, no mat-ter how new or in what position. We uphold the belief that every person matters. We could not achieve success without our employ-ees, and we care for them on both a personal and professional level. In return, they care about the company, are loyal and work for the greater good.

As a result, we have the keys to success: stability, low turnover and passion.

In cannabis, we are all working for a startup company in a startup industry. The cannabis industry has no set standards to fol-low; we are creating them as we go and we must pave the road to our own destiny. Some people thrive under this kind of pressure and others suffer. When hiring my team, I wanted to make sure that my potential employees understood this about the industry and were choosing it despite the guaranteed hurdles.

How we cultivated an Amazing CultureGROWING YOUR BUSINESS STARTS WITH ASSEMBLING THE RIGHT TEAM

–By Lilach Mazor Power

WOMEN IN THE INDUSTRY: KEYNOTE


While the difficulties have certainly presented themselves over the years, one of the benefits I have discovered in this in-dustry is the passion people have for it. Finding passionate in-dividuals is half the battle in creating your company culture. I pick the people who are not only passionate about cannabis but passionate about what we do at the Giving Tree. We do things differently and we are not always clear on where our ideas will take us, but we have always known it would be big and excit-ing. We started our philanthropy programs three months after we opened our doors — way before we paid ourselves — because we knew generosity was an essential part of our company cul-ture. We now participate in two major fundraising events: Take Steps for Crohn’s and Colitis in April, and Making Strides for Breast Cancer in October. The whole company voluntarily joins us for the walks.

We also collect money every holiday season for Chrysalis, a domestic abuse shelter, and we sponsor its Fourth of July barbe-cue every year where we create fun activities for the kids while serving the residents. Again, our team participates voluntarily.

Our growers donate their time and talent at gardens around town and are becoming part of StreetLightUSA, a healing center for sex trafficking victims between the ages of 11 and 17.

We are part of something that is bigger than our walls and our work, bigger than our industry. We are part of a change.

I don’t think anyone can be a part of the Giving Tree family if they don’t want to be part of this big-ger mission. It is not for everyone. This culture fits us; it unites us as a team, it is who we are as people and who we want to become. This is the

reason I hand-pick every person in the company — to make sure our culture fits them and to make sure they identify with our core values and goals. Our company’s success is intertwined with our culture and core values.

Creating a culture in your own company should start with identifying your core values, mission and vision. Once you have mapped that out, finding people who fit is imperative — both to cultivate your culture and their happiness. When you cultivate the right culture, people feel like they are part of something bigger and they enjoy being a part of it. This creates loyalty and retention, as well as a shared vision and a love for the job.

I have been lucky to create a culture in our own company that brought 54 amazing, caring, professional, talented human beings together. Bringing this group together is the secret to our success and what got us to where we are now. We learn from each other and care for each other. I don’t think we could do it without them and I don’t think just anyone can do what they do.

Our employees are also our ambassadors. They believe in who we are beyond what we sell and they become our best advertising tool. They must want to be a part of it in order to push us there, and they do — we are a team and we don’t give up. We work togeth-

er toward the same goal and that is what has created our success.

Our team is a diverse group of people who were hand-picked to be part of the Giving Tree. I smile when I see them walk into work and even more when I see them giving back to the community, not because they are getting paid for it or because they have to, but because they are happy to be part of it. I hope they know how humbled and thankful I am that they chose to share their work life with us.

Lilach Mazor Power is the co-founder and man-aging director of the Giving Tree. She oversees all employees and services, keeping the company at the forefront and its employees in-the-know of new technologies and policies and the latest in cannabis education, legislation and research. The Giving Tree (www.givingtreeaz.com) was founded in 2013 and operates cultivation and extraction centers at two medical cannabis wellness centers in Arizona, one in Mesa and one in Phoenix.

Powers opened The Giving Tree with the help of Dr. Gina

Berman, a former emergency room physician, in 2013.

VC999

http://vc999.com


BY GARRETT RUDOLPH

The digital revolution is chang-ing every sector of retail in the U.S.

Across the country, brick-and-mortar stores of all varieties are struggling to maintain foot traf-fic as web-based alternatives offer a level of conve-nience that can’t be matched else-where. It seems

like only a matter of time before consumers demand that level of ef-ficiency from cannabis retail as well.

Several states, including Ore-gon, California and Nevada, have already approved marijuana deliv-ery services, and dozens of tech companies and cannabis entrepre-neurs are rushing to fill that need — somewhat similar to food delivery apps like Grubhub.

One trendsetter looking to bridge the gap between tradition-al retail and modern convenience is Koushi Sunder, the founder and CEO of Stemless, an ordering plat-form that allows customers to buy marijuana online for in-store pickup or delivery.

Customers can browse and pur-chase cannabis directly through the Stemless website (www.stemless.co) or through a plug-in hosted on the retail store’s website, eliminat-ing the need for cash on hand. After making their purchase, customers can either pick up the product di-

rectly from the retail outlet or have it delivered to their home, if the store offers that service.

Retail shops pay a monthly fee to access the platform, and Stemless offers automated inventory uploads.

Sunder, who has an MBA from Dartmouth and a background in fi-nancial services, began developing the concept for Stemless shortly after her first time visiting a recre-ational cannabis shop.

“At that time I was living in New York and it seemed so far out there to go to a dispensary and just buy cannabis by showing somebody my ID,” she says. “It was super excit-ing. We were tourists. It was going to be great — and the experience was anything but.”

The lines were long, most cus-tomers needed a lot of personal attention, every purchase required cash and the budtender scoffed ar-rogantly at a simple mispronuncia-tion of a strain name.

Recognizing the need for a more efficient process, Sunder launched Stemless in April 2016. There are currently 25 marijuana retail stores in Oregon using the platform, in-cluding Maritime Café, Farma, Bridge City Collective, The Grass Shack and Serra. Stemless is avail-able in every state with legal can-nabis.

In addition to managing the day-to-day operations of the company, Sunder spends a lot of time keep-ing an eye out for new talent. She says it’s important to have people in mind for new positions before it’s

critical for the company to hire — and prospective employees have to “bring more to the table than your love of weed.”

“For us, we nerd out on things that other people don’t necessarily get excited about,” she says. “For me, if someone has a passion for lo-gistics, that’s very exciting.”

Having worked for more tradi-tional financial service companies in the past, entrepreneurship is a new challenge for Sunder, but it’s one that fits her personality.

“It’s a different beast and I love doing this,” she says. “At the end of the day, a lot of the skill sets you pick up throughout the course of your career are applicable to start-ing a company. Even though it’s stressful, the highs are way higher — no pun intended — than when I was working for someone else.”

Now that she is her own boss, Sunder’s best piece of advice for people looking to get into the can-nabis business is to do it only if it matters to them. Don’t do it just be-cause of news articles that say can-nabis is the fastest growing industry in North America.

“If you are an entrepreneur, there are going to be a lot of late nights and a lot of early mornings and for a long time nobody’s going to care what you’re doing, nobody is going to be interested,” she says. “You’re going to be the only one who cares, so you have to care. During those dark days of starting out, just keep going, keep doing the right things, don’t cut cor-ners, don’t take shortcuts.”

THE

TRENDSETTER

KOUSHI SUNDERFounder and CEOStemlessPortland, Oregon


"IT WAS SUPER EXCITING. WE WERE TOURISTS. IT WAS GOING TO BE GREAT — AND THE EXPERIENCE WAS ANYTHING BUT."


BY GARRETT RUDOLPH

There’s a common misconcep-tion that cannabis research is nearly impossible in the United States due to the federal government’s errone-ous and deceitful stance that mari-juana is a dangerous, highly addic-tive drug with no medical benefits.

Neuroscientist Michele Ross is living proof of the government’s lies and she also contradicts the percep-

tion of marijua-na research.

“If you have private fund-ing, you can do almost any re-search you want in the United States,” says Ross, executive director of IM-

PACT Network, a 501(c)3 nonprof-it that recently launched the largest study ever into the medical efficacy of cannabis for women.

“As an independent research in-stitute, we’re able to do research that sometimes you can’t do at a college campus or a university,” she says, “because they have restrictions on using cannabis that doesn’t come from the federal government.”

Not only are certain illnesses un-derserved in traditional medicine, but with some diseases, there is no published research on any cannabi-noid therapy.

“It’s not even about analyzing the research,” Ross says. “The research simply doesn’t exist.”

This creates fertile ground for

scientific studies. Even a relatively small amount of information might provide some direction and a tre-mendous amount of help for those suffering from an illness.

Ross and her husband started IM-PACT in 2013 with the goal of bridg-ing knowledge from traditional med-icine to applications in cannabinoid therapy for women with illnesses such as breast cancer, endometriosis, pelvic pain and autoimmune disor-ders, among others. To accomplish its mission, IMPACT partnered with Strainprint Technologies in August to launch the WMEDS Study (Wom-en’s Health and Marijuana Efficacy Data Set Study). The ongoing proj-ect aims to fill in the gaps in canna-bis research with critical data. The data could be published in scientific journals, used to apply for grants or even spur legislative change. Even-tually it could lead to much-needed clinical trials.

“Our thinking is that it doesn’t make sense that there are thousands of women using these products and yet, when someone goes to their doc-tor and says they should try cannabis for this, the doctor laughs at them because there’s nothing published anywhere,” says Ross, who credits her own health to medical marijuana.

“Without cannabis, I’m very, very ill,” she says.

Based on the extensive list of ail-ments she’s had — endometriosis, blood clots, a heart attack, collapsed lungs, brain damage and nerve dam-age, among others — most people expect her to be taking a battalion of pharmaceuticals. Miraculously,

she’s not on any. “I was written off by the medical

community,” she says. “They told me I would be disabled: ‘Get used to not being a scientist. Your life will never be the same.’”

Since Ross has been able to dial in her cannabis regimen, she’s gone from being confined to a wheelchair to regaining a sense of normalcy.

“I’m never going to run mara-thons again,” she says. “That’s not in my future, but I’m able to not only function, but do more than I ever did in my career, thanks to cannabis.”

Despite her research background, Ross faced the same challenge as many patients when it comes to us-ing cannabis for medicinal purposes: there’s little information available about finding the right products, dos-ing, possible drug interactions, etc.

“It was very frustrating because I’m a scientist,” she says. “If I can’t experiment on myself, how hard is it for everyone else?”

The process was particularly tough for Ross, because her body cannot effectively process high doses of THC. It took a great deal of exper-imenting to find the “magic formula.”

“It’s important to realize every person is so different,” she says. “And there is a reason for it; it’s just that science hasn’t caught up to those reasons.”

Ross grew up in New Jersey and became interested in drug addiction treatment at a young age.

“Instead of becoming a doctor, I decided to become a scientist,” she says.

She earned her Ph.D. from the

The SCIENTIST

MICHELE ROSS, PH.D. Executive Director IMPACT Network Denver, Colorado

What is WMEDS?According to the IMPACT Network website, the WMEDS Study is a long-term health study focused on the safety and efficacy of cannabinoid medicine in women. It consists of an observational registry through the Strainprint app. IMPACT, which stands for Improving Marijuana Policy and Cannabis Therapeutics for Women Worldwide, is seeking to enroll thousands of women in the United States to participate over the course of several years.Women interested in taking part can download the Strainprint app and use an enrollment code located on the IMPACT website (www.impactcannabis.org).Strainprint Technologies (www.strainprint.ca) is a Toronto-based company that provides consumer analytics for the medical cannabis industry.

University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas.

“I wasn’t always a cannabis con-sumer, so if you’d told me 15 years ago that I’d be leading a cannabis nonprofit for women, I would have laughed in your face.”

Even now, with cannabis gaining mainstream recognition across the U.S., there’s a stigma that follows her career choice. Colleagues often view her as a drug dealer.

Even though her business is “100% by the book,” she says “per-ceptions are shaped by laws.”

But as laws evolve, it’s vital that people have a resource for get-ting good, reliable information. Too many patients rely on budtenders, complete strangers or online fo-rums to access medical information. When it comes to so-called cannabis consultants, people “are not sure if they’re talking to a real expert or a charlatan,” Ross says. Plus, medical doctors may not understand medical cannabis — some, even in Colorado, don’t know the difference between THC and CBD — and they’re also restricted in what they can say by medical boards.

“The reality is that if you walk into a dispensary anywhere in the country and ask for something that helps you go to sleep, you may get five differ-ent products,” Ross says. “They’re not giving bad information because they’re rude; it’s just that they don’t know any better. It’s like asking your Target cashier to be your pharmacist.”


PHO

TO C

REDIT: KERRY G

OO

DW

IN PH

OTO

GRA

PHY



BY PATRICK WAGNER

Drawing on her vast industry ex-perience in Colorado, Jaime Lewis is preparing to make a splash in one of the country’s newest marijuana mar-kets with the launch of her Massachu-setts-based chain of dispensaries, May-flower Medicinals.

Lewis has been a staunch canna-bis advocate for more than 15 years, including the past nine years building Mountain Medicine into one of the more prominent edibles manufac-turers in Colorado. She’s using this experience to build out the first two Mayflower Medicinals retail locations, as well as its cultivation facility, ex-traction lab and commercial kitchen.

“Experience is the key to all of this,” Lewis says. “It’s like being a chef: You’re always, constantly, trying to perfect a recipe, but it will never re-ally be quite perfect.”

Massachusetts represents one of the most exciting markets in the U.S. — a nascent industry ready to awak-en as soon as regulations allow. While other states have allowed the market to develop through years of medical regulations, Massachusetts expects a flashflood of marijuana businesses overnight.

“I think that in the next year, this is going to be an exciting place to watch, in terms of all the growth that is going to take place and as licensees open up,” Lewis says. “From that, I think there is going to be a lot of interesting changes in the culture and awareness in terms of cannabis being a community.”

Massachusetts currently has just 12

medical dispensaries open, according the state Department of Public Health’s website. But more than 80 businesses are ready to open in early 2018, now that progress is finally being made to finalize the implementation of its adult-use program.

Lewis says Mayflower Medicinals will plant its first seeds in mid-October. The medical dispensary is slated for a grand opening in the spring of 2018 be-fore transitioning to include recreation-al sales in the summer. Plans are also in place for a third retail location.

While Lewis spent the majority of 2017 working on her Mayflower store in Boston, she technically still lives in Colorado.

Mountain Medicine was one of the first marijuana-infused producers to go recreational in Colorado. The company launched in 2009 to criti-cal acclaim and was one of the few kitchens to remain independent as the market evolved. The company has ex-panded slowly and focuses on keeping overhead to a minimum. But part of its success stems from Lewis’ past life in California, where she worked as a chef before joining a co-op dispensary in 2006. It was her first experience in the cannabis industry.

She says the stark contrast between the two coasts is palpable.

“California is as far away from Boston as it could get on many lev-els,” Lewis says. “I joke around with my colleagues that I’m a bit lonely. I am lacking that cannabis-community piece that is so much of what we have all grown to love.”

Unlike other recreational states,

only a handful of Massachusetts’ can-nabis entrepreneurs have been active-ly involved in grassroots advocacy groups and as early medical operators.

It’s been an interesting transition for Lewis, who was born and raised in Califor-nia, the first state to legalize medical marijuana. That culture of like-minded individu-als who could be relied upon in dif-ficult times — “all the women I got to work with from different compa-nies, just huge powerhouse ladies in our support group,” she says — is an element that’s largely absent in New England right now.

But she looks forward to develop-ing that community and the inevitable merger between the venture capitalists and the grassroots advocates to create “an industry from both sides.”

Lewis has been a force in helping unite the cannabis industry through-out the United States. In addition to an appointment on Massachusetts’ recreational rulemaking committee, she’s also one of the founders of the Cannabis Business Alliance and has been elected for a third term as the chairwoman of the National Canna-bis Industry Association.

“I think the reason why I get elect-ed into these roles is that I don’t view it as one business owner’s needs and ne-cessities,” she says. “I really try to dive deep and think about what it means to standardize the industry as a whole.”

the ADVOCATE

JAIME LEWISCEO Mayflower Medicinals Boston, Massachusetts

PHO

TO C

REDIT: KERRY G

OO

DW

IN PH

OTO

GRA

PHY


BY BRIAN BECKLEY

verseIt’s a long way from Nashville

to California, but sometimes life takes turns like that.

Like the country music songs she used to write and sing, Ali-cia Katy had success, heartbreak, life-changing troubles and final-ly triumph and happiness as she makes her way in a whole new in-dustry on a whole new coast.

“Music has always been one of my biggest passions in life,” Katy says.

But today, Katy works as a business development executive for Canndescent, a fast-growing Southern California company with a focus on “effects-based” instead

of “strain-spe-cific” products, with stylish, sim-ple and modern packaging. While she admits there is little crossover between strum-ming a six-string and pushing pot products, her ex-

perience touring and building re-lationships in the music industry helped prepare for her new job in cannabis.

“My job is to create relation-ships,” she says. “I’m a road war-rior.”

theTroubadour

ALICIA KATY Business Development ExecutiveCanndescent Santa Barbara, California

chorusKaty’s journey to cannabis has

the familiarity of one of her songs: Unique, but at the same time relat-able and easy to sing along to.

Blonde-haired, brown-eyed and blessed with a beautiful voice and the talent to back it up, Katy seemed destined for country music stardom. Music is in her blood — her father is a former musician — and Katy signed a record deal right out of high school and moved from her home in Chesapeake, Virginia to the heart of the country music in Tennessee. In the videos still available on You-Tube, Katy belts out earnest, heart-felt tunes with conviction, usually accompanied by acoustic guitars.

But at the end of 2013, she was diagnosed with late-stage Lyme dis-ease, putting her music career on hold and forcing her to focus on her health.

She traveled to California to get treatment and reconnected with a high school friend who co-founded Fruit Slabs, a THC- and CBD-in-fused fruit leather product for med-ical marijuana patients. Her friend suggested cannabis oil as a treatment and after she “prayed and meditated” on the possibility of using cannabis, and in the end decided to try medi-cal marijuana as a more holistic ap-proach to treating her Lyme disease.

“Long story short,” she says, “10 months later I got retested and I was Lyme-free.”

bridgeSoon after, Katy decided to walk

away from her burgeoning music ca-reer and moved to California perma-nently, where she “dove head-first into the cannabis industry,” helping her friend at Fruit Slabs and getting her feet wet in the business. From there, she met the CEO of Calyx, a cannabis distribution company and was hired as the Southern California sales rep, educating budtenders and dispensary owners about the more than 30 brands the company repre-sented.

“I started learning and really ex-panding my horizons in the cannabis world,” she says.

After little more than a year, she was contacted by the folks at Can-ndescent and today works as the company’s Southern California ter-ritory as a sales rep. Canndescent currently has a 22,000-square-foot medical grow operation in Desert Hot Springs and is at work building 33,000 square feet of new green-house space, set to open this fall, as the Golden State moves toward opening its adult-use market. The company has made a name for itself by not focusing its branding on the strains being grown, but on the in-tended effect of the product: Calm, Cruise, Create, Connect or Charge.

“We’re taking the guessing game away from patients,” Katy says, add-ing that some dispensaries pushed back at first, but the response from patients has been the company’s big-gest selling point.

TOP RIG

HT PH

OTO

CRED

IT: PAVLIN

TOD

ORO

V


codaLike country music, the demo-

graphics of the cannabis industry tend to lean male, but Katy says unlike in Nashville, there are more women in leadership roles, creating and navigat-ing new companies through the diffi-cult waters of an emerging economy, one that is “on the forefront” for wom-en in business.

“If anything, I’m so proud to be a part of the cannabis industry because there are so many CEOs who are women,” she says. “I’m proud of all the women in the industry.”

Katy says the community she found in cannabis is strong and sup-portive and she is “honored” to be a part of it, representing an up-and-com-ing company in an up-and-coming sector. And while it may not be from a stage or through a radio dial, Katy is excited to still be touching lives, even if it means leaving her shot at stardom.

“It’s really exciting to be part of an industry growing so rapidly,” she says. “It’s a really, really cool community to be a part of.”

TOP RIG

HT PH

OTO

CRED

IT: PAVLIN

TOD

ORO

V

She doesn’t tour anymore, but in her role as business development executive for Canndescent, Alicia Katy travels to dispensaries in Southern California to promote the company’s line of effects-based products.


BY GARRETT RUDOLPH

Following one delay after anoth-er, Maryland’s first wave of state-le-gal marijuana growers have finally

been licensed. The state’s

much-maligned process to launch its medical can-nabis industry began with the governor’s sig-nature in 2013, but roadblocks at every turn

forced prospective licensees into a years-long game of wait-and-see. In the interim, there was only so much

Wendy Bronfein could do in her ca-pacity as marketing director for Curio Wellness, one of the first eight appli-cants to be approved for a cultivation license on Aug. 14.

“I tell people that last year I got my job,” she says, “and this year I can actually do my job.”

Bronfein brings a wealth of tele-vision production and marketing experience to the cannabis indus-try. She handled on-air marketing for some of the most well-known entertainment brands in the world, including BBC America, Comedy Central, MTV, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros., winning awards for her work for John Oliver and “Live with Kelly & Michael.”

Bronfein’s goal had been to eventually run the network, prompt-ing her to go back to school to get her MBA from New York Universi-ty’s Stern School of Business. But shortly after her graduation in 2014, during a family getaway in Colora-do, the concept of starting a canna-bis business began to materialize.

She pitched the idea to her fa-ther, Michael Bronfein, a high-ly successful entrepreneur in the health care space, and now Curio’s CEO. Without any way of knowing how much Maryland’s application process would be delayed, they be-gan researching opportunities in the space, looking for a reason to either back off or go full-speed ahead.

THEMARKETING EXEC THE

MARKETING EXEC

THEMARKETING EXEC

WENDY BRONFEINDirector of Marketing and Product DevelopmentCurio WellnessBaltimore, Maryland

TOP RIG

HT PH

OTO

CRED

IT: AN

DREA

STEIN PH

OTO

GRA

PHY


“There was nothing that was saying no,” Wendy Bronfein says. “Everything just kept spurring it along.”

Now, more than three years later, Curio Wellness is on track to launch its first product line in November.

The company has the exclusive rights to manufacture and distribute Dixie Brands products in Mary-land. Along with flower, these will be the company’s first products on the market, with vape pens and tinctures coming at a later date. Cu-rio’s high-end production facility features nine hygienic cultivation chambers, high-tech water filtration units and a chiller system with inde-pendent air handlers in every room.

In addition to the marketing ef-forts, Bronfein is also responsible for product development, working directly with the company’s Scien-tific Advisory Board.

“I’m an aspirational consum-er by nature, so I think I definitely lean toward creating an aspirational brand,” she says. “I think it’s well-matched here, because you want to feel like you’ve got a good product and you’re choosing something that’s making your life better.”

While she’s not likely to produce a television commercial for Curio Wellness in the near future, many of the skills she honed in television will cross over perfectly to cannabis — albeit with a much higher level of regulation.

“It’s frustrating to be con-strained,” she says, “but I think it’s a nice challenge.”

At the same time, being limited to the Maryland market mitigates the burden of launching a national brand. It’s easier to work directly with the dispensaries, to meet peo-ple face to face and spread the Cu-rio brand through word of mouth, Bronfein says.

And in marketing, whether it’s

an entertainment brand or a con-sumable product, one of the most important elements is being able to engage the audience.

Bronfein has spent years laying the groundwork, researching the market and overseeing the brand development.

Now all she has to do is deliver.

“I’M AN ASPIRATIONAL CONSUMER BY NATURE, SO I THINK I DEFINITELY LEAN TOWARD CREATING AN ASPIRATIONAL BRAND.”

TOP RIG

HT PH

OTO

CRED

IT: AN

DREA

STEIN PH

OTO

GRA

PHY

PHO

TO C

REDIT: RH

ETT BING

HA

M



BY GARRETT RUDOLPH

The increasing legalization of cannabis is bringing an element of fun back to the product.

Step by step, the soulless pack-aging styles of the original medical markets are coming to life in the hands of innovative, forward-think-ing creatives and branding profes-sionals. Repurposed pill jars and generic white envelopes are being replaced with stylish glass jars and die-cut boxes, designed specifical-ly to attract attention, rather than to promote obscurity.

When the Lucky 420 co-founders began conceptualizing their brand, they wanted to create “something affordable that didn’t skimp on style and sex appeal,” CEO Rachel Ha-zlett says.

The result was a rapidly growing brand with a decidedly retro vibe, in-spired by films of the 1970s.

“It harkens back to the time when cannabis started to become more widely used in the states, which re-ally started in the 1960s and people have an association with marijuana

and flower power and the hippies,” Hazlett says. “I just love that time period, but the ‘70s is when that lifestyle made its way into film and there was a little bit more grit. There was an edge, almost a cynicism that had set in by the time Hollywood caught up to the ethos of the ‘60s.”

She says that era feels reflective of the current time period.

“Cannabis is becoming normal-ized in a new way, a legal way,” she says. “But the fight isn’t over. We’re not there yet. It does take some grit and the people who are doing this work have definitely sustained some bumps and bruises along the way.”

The company markets Lucky 420 with a fictional back story of the 1970s secret agent lifestyle, a mishmash of Charlie’s Angels, Cleo-patra Jones and James Bond. Its foil-stamped black packaging with red and orange racing stripes looks right at home in the ash tray of a classic Trans-Am. Throughout the intense research and development process, the company continued to develop the brand and the marketing strategy.

“It was the most fun thing I’ve

ever worked on,” says Hazlett, who originally studied journalism and got into documentary filmmaking, which led her into the marketing business. She worked as the marketing direc-tor for a day spa, before starting her first company, Dinner & Pie, which cooked and delivered healthy meals — including pie, of course — to people in North Carolina.

“In doing that, I knew that I wanted to chal-lenge myself and expand into some-thing bigger,” she says. “It was just a matter of waiting for the right op-portunity to come along.”

That opportu-nity turned out to be a cross-country move to Califor-nia to work in the marijuana indus-try.

She and her fellow Lucky 420 co-founders saw many brands in California’s market targeting high-end consumers and aiming to be the most expensive products on the shelf.

After running the numbers and exploring several different models, Lucky 420 settled on a line of cig-arette-style pre-rolls, with seven joints in a pack going for a suggest-ed retail price of about $34 and ful-filling what Hazlett calls a need for “nice manufactured products at a good price point.”

Rather than the cone-shaped pre-rolls that have become wildly popu-

THESECRET AGENT

PHO

TO C

REDIT: RH

ETT BING

HA

M

RACHEL HAZLETT Co-founder and CEO Lucky 420 Northern California

"BUT THE FIGHT ISN’T OVER. WE’RE NOT THERE YET. IT DOES TAKE SOME GRIT AND THE PEOPLE WHO ARE DOING THIS WORK HAVE DEFINITELY SUSTAINED SOME BUMPS AND BRUISES ALONG THE WAY."


lar in the older recreational markets, or the ubiquitous vape pens that have flooded the industry, Lucky 420’s strikes an increasingly rare chord.

Smoking, after all, is part of the experience for some people. The can-nabis cigarette itself also fits with the 1970s theme, a time when smoking

was still glamorous and the stars of film and television dangled an Em-bassy Filter from their bottom lip.

“We knew we enjoyed the com-bustion of marijuana,” Hazlett says.

The pre-rolls are manufactured at the company’s cigarette factory in Northern California, with a com-bination of work done by both ma-chine and by hand. The crew faced some production challenges early in the process, namely the difficul-ty of working with a product that is sticky and resinous, as well as figur-ing out the best method to maintain freshness.

The company does not do any of its own cultivation, instead buying wholesale cannabis from selected Northern California growers who use cultivation practices approved by the Lucky 420 leadership team.

“We love our farmers,” Hazlett says.

Lucky 420 officially launched its product line in February, and the

response has been overwhelming, Hazlett says. Over the course of the first six months, more than 60 retail outlets have started carrying the pre-roll packs, including both brick-and-mortar dispensaries and delivery services.

“It’s been a fast ride and we’ve had fun,” Hazlett says. “We’ve got a great team and we’re just giving it all we’ve got.”

The company’s growth has been fast — and will likely only contin-ue to accelerate as California’s mar-ket transitions toward the adult-use launch — but Hazlett says Lucky 420 is fully prepared to handle the additional work load.

“We’ve been very organized and diligent in laying the groundwork of our operation,” she says. “We have really clear insights into where our operation is at today and what it can grow into. We know that we have all the pieces we need to grow it to the places we want to reach.”

PHO

TO C

RED

IT: G

ARY

OTT

ON

ELLO

Trimpro

PHO

TO C

RED

IT: G

ARY

OTT

ON

ELLO

http://trimpro.com

Sinowell


BY BRIAN BECKLEY

When Anne van Leynseele started practicing cannabis law in 2014, Wash-ington’s legal industry was just begin-ning to set its roots.

Her firm, 7 Point Law — or North-west Marijuana Law, as it was known then — consisted primarily of van Leynseele, her cell phone and a laptop. Within one year, she was representing 118 clients all across Washington state.

“We, like the industry, matured rapidly,” says van Leynseele, who helped write the Obamacare legis-lation prior to starting 7 Point. “It’s been really exciting.”

In the beginning, van Leynseele did a lot of work on licensing, shareholder agreements and compliance matters, but as the industry has grown and de-veloped, her practice dealt with more nonpayment concerns, zoning varianc-es and landlord issues.

Today, the firm handles typical corporate law matters, such as partner-ship disputes, employee litigation and trademark issues.

The change in van Leynseele’s practice reflects the industry’s growth from mom-and-pop operations to large, legal corporations pulling in millions in revenue. She saw early on that many of the lawyers in the space

were criminal defense attorneys with experience in marijuana, but not in the corporate side of the law that entrepre-neurs needed.

“What they re-ally needed was a corporate lawyer who understands business operat-ing in highly reg-ulated industries,” she says. When she started her firm, she was among the few attor-neys in the space with a business law background. “It really was unusual at that moment.”

ANNE VAN LEYNSEELEFounder 7 Point LawSeattle, Washington

THE

FUTURE JUDGE

Eden Labs

http://edenlabs.com


A DIFFERENT TYPE OF LAW FIRM

Van Leynseele credits her success, in part, to the lack of “power-based machismo” often seen at other top law firms. Rather than buying into the hi-erarchical structure of traditional firms, van Leynseele favors a holistic ap-proach that includes a strategic council where all 7 Point attorneys weigh in on major cases and issues.

Because cannabis law touches on 23 traditional areas of practice, van Leynseele credits the council and the lack of a classic structure as bring-ing the firm’s customer service to a higher level.

“This is not your classic law firm,” she says. “We write our own rule book for how this firm is run.”

And in the ever-changing world of cannabis regulations, 7 Point’s nimble structure allows the firm to respond immediately if anything changes. In Washington, for example, a large cache of new regulations went into effect July 23, something van Leynseele has been working to make sure all her clients know.

She says one of the major difficul-ties in dealing with folks who are not traditional business people is explain-ing the need to retain a business lawyer like herself. Without specific deadlines or court dates, some clients do not al-ways see the value until it is too late.

And in a rapidly-changing, high-ly-regulated industry like cannabis, “too late” can sometimes mean the end of your business.

PATH TO POTVan Leynseele’s path to working

in the cannabis industry went, of all places, through the White House. Af-ter graduating from the Seattle Uni-versity School of Law in 2008, van Leynseele was diagnosed with breast cancer and found the health insurance world to be maddening and confus-ing. She ultimately consolidated ev-erything she learned into a document called “The Layperson’s Guide to Insurance” that found its way to the Obama White House.

Based on that piece, the adminis-tration recruited her to join their efforts to reshape the country’s health care in-dustry and she headed east. Van Leyn-seele helped work on the Affordable Care Act and had a chance to meet the president, though she admits she was a bit more excited to meet a fellow prac-ticing attorney.

“More impressive, I met the First Lady,” she says of Michelle Obama.

When her four-year appointment was complete, van Leynseele moved back to the Evergreen State where she saw a news article about the fed-eral Bureau of Reclamation denying water rights to legally licensed can-nabis growers.

“It pissed me off,” she says. “That’s federalism run amok.”

It also bothered her that she had spent four years working for the White House, only to come home and find what she referred to as “my adminis-tration” making things difficult for le-gitimate Washington businesses.

She decided then that is was time to make her move.

NEW APPROACHVan Leynseele decided to approach

her new law firm and its clients differ-ently than most attorneys in the field. She wanted to focus on the profession-al, corporate and regulatory side of the industry, something she found lacking in other firms.

“They were still stuck in crisis re-sponse rather than building a stable foundation like all other industries do,” van Leynseele says.

She tells the story of one client to whom she recommended putting 10% of sales revenue into an emergency fund, something she says is a “rule of thumb” in the corporate world. Sure

enough, a neighbor eventually forced the client out of their location and into a new one, something van Leynseele says would not have been possible had they not followed her advice to put money aside.

“It would have (bankrupt) any company that didn’t follow that rule of thumb,” she says.

MOVING FORWARDAs the industry continues to grow,

change and adapt, so does 7 Point Law.In February 2016, van Leynseele

recruited and hired Aaron Pelley, a trial attorney she respected after squaring off against him in court. The two combined their practices, giving the firm experience in both corporate law and litigation.

Van Leynseele estimates that 7 Point now represents a quarter of Washington’s legal cannabis industry.

As the firm continues to grow in Washington, van Leynseele and her team are beginning to branch out to other states that have legalized. The firm opened an office in Portland, Or-egon in 2016 and plans to open one in Los Angeles in January 2018, just in time for the first wave of licenses to be approved in the Golden State. She also consults for a business in Mary-land and has a farm in Hawaii, where she someday hopes to retire. The farm currently grows coffee and avocados, among other crops, but van Leynseele hopes to be the first sitting judge in Ha-waii to grow pot on her family farm.

Until then, she is excited about the prospects the future hold for both her firm and her clients, whose “gen-uine and earnest” nature continue to impress her.

“It’s an honor and a privilege to serve these businesses,” she says.

"THIS IS NOT YOUR CLASSIC LAW FIRM. WE WRITE OUR OWN RULE BOOK FOR HOW THIS FIRM IS RUN."


BY PATRICK WAGNER

Sue Taylor has an infectious cha-risma that is hard to nail down. Per-haps it’s the homespun inflection that hangs off the end of her sentences or the earnest way she talks to each per-

son — friends and strangers alike — as if she’d been waiting to hear from them all day.

Or maybe it’s just her genuine enthusiasm for life.

“It chose me,” Taylor says of the

cannabis industry. “I didn’t choose it. The universe used my son to tell me.”

The mother of three is an ordained minister, a member of the Alameda County Advisory Commission on Ag-ing, a former Catholic school principal and co-author of a book on parenting called, “Who’s Running the Show?” She has degrees in social science, education and divinity and has been certified by the state to provide medi-cal marijuana education to health-care providers and administrators. She also moonlights as an aerobics instructor.

And she’s a leading entrepreneur in California’s blossoming cannabis industry with plans to open her own dispensary, iCann Health in Oakland, about six blocks from her prior life as school principal for the Oakland Catholic Diocese.

Her son was the first person to try and convince her of cannabis being a viable medicine, but at that time, more than a decade ago, she had a complete-

ly different perspective on the plant. “My immediate thought was

‘Lord, where did I go wrong?” Taylor says. “I sent him to college, put him in a good Catholic school and now he tells me he wants to sell weed.”

Taylor was originally devastated, but she researched some information on the medical uses of cannabis pro-vided by her son.

“I read what he sent me and I packed up all my stuff within two weeks and I haven’t gone back,” Tay-lor says. “I have a home in Buckhead, Georgia that I haven’t been to since.”

Her conversion to cannabis ad-vocate didn’t happen overnight — it actually took years — but seeing the medical benefits firsthand made her a true believer.

“I could not turn my back on the healing I witnessed,” Taylor says.

After being converted, Taylor’s passion took over. She spent five years as the senior outreach represen-tative for Harborside Health Center in Berkeley, traveling to senior care facilities to give presentations on the benefits and detriments of medi-cal cannabis, while also learning the concerns seniors have about canna-bis products. After learning the finer points of the cannabis industry and its relationship with seniors, Taylor set out to open her own dispensary.

Construction of the dispensary is being completed and, despite the city’s slow permitting process, iCann Health is slated to open Oct. 2. Taylor says if the city continues to drag its feet she may “go over there and ex-pedite the process” herself. Given her

penchant for discourse and attention to detail, nobody would be surprised if that kicked city officials into high gear. But in the event the opening gets pushed back a little, Taylor admits that it might be for the best.

“The way I see things, that dis-pensary is going to open when it’s supposed to,” Taylor says. “Because everything I do is perfectly in the right order and this is no different.”

While iCann will serve both rec-reational customers and medical

SUE TAYLOR FounderiCann Health Berkeley, California

The PHO

TO C

REDIT: BRA

ND

ON

WILKS


patients, the retail outlet will primar-ily focus on seniors as its core demo-graphic. Taylor’s background in edu-cation helps ensure all employees are properly trained to handle issues se-niors face that cannabis can alleviate.

“We want to have a place where seniors can come and feel comfort-able,” Taylor says. “We’ll train staff on how to talk to elders, because, you see, in the United States, there is an overall lack of respect for elders in our country and I aim to bring that back.”

Taylor says the first time she went to a dispensary, patience was a miss-ing virtue. When a senior visits a dis-pensary and asks the same question several times, it’s not because they don’t understand the answer, Tay-lor says; it’s because the employee doesn’t understand the question.

Taylor, like many Americans, is also concerned about the increasing dependence on pharmaceutical solu-tions for ailments.

“Most seniors have a bag of pills

when I meet them,” Taylor says. But she is careful to point out that

cannabis isn’t a miracle cure for all ailments. She wants to make sure pa-tients take a broader approach their wellbeing.

“I’ll promote total health for the body, mind and spirit,” Taylor says. “You want to be the best you, while you walk this Earth. It all works to-gether; cannabis is just one part of it. It’s a spiritual approach to canna-bis for me.”

PHO

TO C

REDIT: BRA

ND

ON

WILKS


PHO

TO C

REDIT: JO

SEPH V

ERDI


BY PATRICK WAGNER

There’s no doubt that legaliza-tion in California changes the land-scape of the entire cannabis indus-try. And regulations in Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest city, have the potential to impact busi-nesses and municipalities through-out the state.

When the city published its draft regulations in June, other munici-palities followed suit in considering a “limited immunity” structure for their jurisdictions — the repercus-sions of which are “absolutely hor-rifying,” according to Arial Clark, one of the leading attorneys and ac-tivists working toward an amicable solution in the City of Angels.

“This does not stave off feder-al enforcement whatsoever,” says Clark, the founder and chairwoman of the Los Angeles Cannabis Task Force. “When you don’t have clear rules and regulations, that actually invites enforcement.”

The task force was assembled to advocate fair and equitable reg-ulations in Los Angeles. By some accounts, the City of Angels has the densest population of marijua-na businesses on the planet, but

it’s been a quagmire of regulatory red tape and contradictory rules for years.

“The people in LA are not served by more hazy regulations,” Clark says. “A new wave of conscientious businesses, that’s what we can do if we are building this industry.”

While Clark is quick to deflect credit to other members of the task force, her leadership could rever-berate beyond the city’s borders.

“The city of LA is not singular,” she says. “It’s as big as the state.”

Clark estimates about 90% of the state’s 500-plus municipalities still don’t have local permitting or zon-ing rules in place, making it chal-lenging to stay on top of regulatory concerns throughout California.

“The number of moving parts is incredible,” Clark says. “But, you know, I like that stuff.”

The task force is just one import-ant project keeping her busy. Clark and business partner Nicole Neu-bert also have a seat on the state’s Cannabis Banking Work Group alongside representatives from law enforcement, state regulators, banks, taxing authorities, local gov-ernment and select members of the industry to help outline a resolution

for the cash-only industry. “The banking issue is one that is

huge,” Clark says. “Now that we’re on the precipice of for-profit busi-nesses and investment monies are coming in, we are able to proj-ect forward into a future where peo-ple are owning their businesses, licenses and per-mits as traditional assets.”

Clark’s firm, Clark Neubert LLP, also helps clients in Arizona, Colorado, Illi-nois, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

“I am seeing the bridge from the unregulated, self-regulated and quasi-legal into the very regulated, legal market,” she says. “It’s kind of a moving target for people, but our role is to step with them as they move into this regulated market.”

In some ways, Clark’s current practice is an extension of the work she did early in her career with Cal-ifornia Indian Legal Services. She has spent years working on behalf of marginalized groups and individ-uals.

“My life is about service and I am so grateful to be of service in all these different ways,” she says. “Who knew that working in Indian law and being around this industry my entire life would come to the place where I am now. It’s pretty amazing.”

theSocial ArchitectARIEL CLARK Founder and Chairwoman Los Angeles Cannabis Task Force Los Angeles, California

"MY LIFE IS ABOUT SERVICE AND I AM SO GRATEFUL TO BE OF SERVICE IN ALL THESE DIFFERENT WAYS."

PHO

TO C

REDIT: JO

SEPH V

ERDI


INTRO BY GARRETT RUDOLPH

INTERVIEW BY JOSEPH BONDY

Regular readers of Marijuana Venture probably recognize Lauren Rudick as a frequent contributor of le-gal columns to the magazine, but they probably don’t know much about her work behind the scenes.

In addition to being an accom-plished attorney, she’s a staunch ad-vocate for medical cannabis with in-dustry experience on both the East and West coasts. Her law firm, Hill-er PC, along with several other law-

yers, are in the process of suing At-torney General Jeff Sessions, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration on behalf of multiple plaintiffs in what could be the most important marijuana-related court case in history.

If the lawsuit is successful, canna-bis would be removed from the fed-eral government’s schedule of con-trolled substances.

Over the summer, Rudick was a guest on the “In the Know 420” pod-cast hosted by well-known criminal defense attorney Joseph Bondy to talk all things cannabis and give listeners — and now Marijuana Venture read-ers — a glimpse into what makes her a woman to watch in 2018.

Joseph Bondy: Through the year, I have become increasingly im-pressed with your legal acumen and your knowledge of the whole subject matter and what appears to be your tentacular reach.

Lauren Rudick: Thank you. It has been sort of an explosive year of growth. I can’t lie. My practice grew from about 15% cannabis to 110% cannabis, almost overnight.

JB: Where were you born and where did you go to college?

LR: That’s a loaded question. I was born in Southern California. I was in Lagu-na for about six years before my family moved to Westport, Connecticut, but my father stayed in California, so we were somewhat of a bicoastal family for several years. We stayed in West-port right up until I graduated from high school, at which time we sold the house and moved to the east end of Long Is-land, which is where I now go home to.

I went to undergraduate at Buck-nell in Central Pennsylvania and then moved to New York City for law school. I attended New York Law School and graduated in 2004.

JB: And unbeknownst to many people, you have a certain special talent: You play instruments.

LR: I do play instruments. Not as much anymore, but I was a music ma-jor in college. I played violin, I played piano and I used to sing. I definitely come from a musical family and it’s very important to me.

JB: You graduated law school in 2004, and there’s no can-nabis industry to speak of, so what do you do when you get out of law school?

LR: I wasn’t a cannabis lawyer right away. I came to cannabis through unfortunate circumstances, through my mother’s end-of-life care about five years after I graduated from law school. But being in New York, I repre-sent a lot of investors. There is a lot of investment activity happening here in New York and there’s a lot of tech ac-tivity happening here in New York. So we’re able to sort of support the busi-nesses as they grow out in the western United States and now very soon Mas-sachusetts, Maine and hopefully very soon New York and New Jersey.

JB: I think the thing that opens your eyes to cannabis has to do with your mom. Is that right?

LR: I definitely came at this from a patient advocacy perspective. I lost my mother to a rare form of pancre-atic cancer. We were very fortunate at the time to be living in the great state of California, where they have been treating cancer with medical cannabis as a frontline course of treatment.

This was 2009; pre-Cole Mem-orandum. My family had moved to California, where my sister was also a fellow at the University of Southern California. There was an excellent team of experts there, and of course there was access to medical canna-bis and there was no question that we were going to use it.

THE

AUTHORITY

LAUREN RUDICK Partner Hiller PC New York City, New York

I was her registered caregiver. You have to go through a very similar regis-tration process as patients and agree to follow the regulations, whatever they may be. There are very strict guidelines with respect to how much you can pur-chase at a time, how you can deliver it, who you may give it to, how many pa-tients you may be a caregiver for.

JB: Were you cultivating cannabis?

LR: We were not. You work with these collectives in Southern Califor-nia. At the time, they’re all organized as nonprofit organizations and they’re allowed to grow a certain number of plants based on how many patients have registered with them. We were very lucky, we found a small dispen-sary with an owner who really appre-ciated my mother’s very sensitive med-ical condition because his mother also passed from some sort of gastric cancer — which is probably one of the most cruel of all cancers. So his commitment to clean medicine was very important.

JB: Did your mom benefit from the use of cannabis?

LR: Absolutely. She never liked to be high. She never took drugs, even when she would go to the dentist, for example, but there was a very big difference from when she would be practically doubled over in pain and almost unable to move, and then a nice, speedy sativa would just get her off the couch and cleaning the house or going to yoga, smiling, eating. It was a huge difference. But it was a challenge because we didn’t quite have as many delivery systems back then as we do now. There was no va-ping. There was no oil, no tinctures. It was just these sweet edibles.

You sort of had to experiment. There wasn’t much known about dos-ing. She really didn’t want to be high, so she really would have benefited from some of the high-CBD strains that are being bred.

JB: At some point, having had real, hands-on experience touch-ing the flower in the context of a medical relationship, you came back to New York and you resume working at a law firm. Was there a shift in your practice area?

LR: Not immediately. There was no medical cannabis in New York at the time, so we just sort of sat on it and kept an eye on it, followed closely with the policy organizations, Mari-juana Policy Project and NORML and just watched the industry grow out West, knowing that we were going to somehow play a part. Then, flash for-ward to 2014, when Compassionate Care was enacted in New York, my then-boss — now partner — and I sort of looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s represent medical cannabis businesses and patients and physicians, industry players.’

JB: What do you do as firm that puts a footprint in the cannabis industry?

LR: I have a great relationship with my existing clients. My investing cli-ents were already putting money into risky endeavors such as media and tech and they knew me and saw this liberalization happening, and they just turned to me and said, ‘Hey, Lauren, we were thinking about putting money into cannabis. Can you help us do it?’ At the time there really wasn’t anyone else doing it in terms of developing due diligence and figuring out how to structure these transac-tions. There’s absolutely no re-liable metric that we can base a valuation on, so it was really an opportunity.

It was a huge responsibility, but we accepted the challenge and just started doing it. I start-ed going to trade shows. I met the folks at Marijuana Venture at the Marijuana Business Daily trade

show in Las Vegas, which was huge when I got that writing gig, and then I think doors really opened for me when I attended the Women Grow Leader-ship Summit in Denver the following February (2016). I attended that sum-mit curious as to whether I would be a member and I left knowing that I had a lot more to offer that organization other than membership, and I soon thereafter became their lawyer and representing one of the largest trade associations and the business really opened up a lot of doors.



JB: What are you working on now (aside from the federal lawsuit)?

LR: So many different projects. I even put my litigation hat back on a little bit. I do a lot of work for Women Grow. I do a lot of work for ancillary businesses that don’t touch the plant, like childproof packaging. I represent AssurPack. I represent Love and Mar-ij, which is a website that is dedicated to cannabis-themed weddings. And then I represent Mission Pennsylva-nia, which is the proud winner of a dispensary permit in Pennsylvania. They’re going to be located in Lehigh Valley. That is our first location and we’ll probably choose two more loca-tions as the law allows.

JB: Was that the only application your firm filed?

LR: We had other clients looking to invest, but not necessarily have a con-trolling interest, so this was the only client that we had in Region 2 that was actively going through the application process. It was a whirlwind in terms of raising capital and putting the team to-gether. Your team is so important. You’re only as strong as your weakest link.

JB: For the state to properly im-plement a medical marijuana pro-gram, you want licensees who are properly financed and can deliver medicine to patients. On the other side of the fence, you hear that the high cost of entry into this market forecloses a lot of people, in particular people of color, from successfully receiv-ing licenses. Is that true?

LR: Yes. I firmly believe in an open competition model, somewhat similar to what they have in Oregon. I think open competition will determine who’s best. It will establish the play-ers who are deserving of funding.

In Oregon, it’s regulated like al-cohol. The people who are there first certainly got a benefit, but it’s open to anybody who wants to compete. You apply for a license, just like you would a liquor license. Of course, you’re subject to distance require-ments. Land use and zoning, in effect, put caps on the numbers of operators that can exist in a given territory.

JB: Don’t they have the same problem with people of color en-tering the industry, because they don’t have the land, infrastruc-ture and access to capital?

LR: Businesses need to commit to diverse workforces. It’s very import-ant. Our Pennsylvania application committed a certain amount of equity to support those sorts of initiatives. I think that there are certain regulato-ry enactments that require businesses to consider diversity. For example, in Oakland, 50% of those business licenses are going to be awarded to minority players who are most dis-proportionately affected by the failed War on Drugs.

You’re seeing this across the board. In Pennsylvania, diversity and community impact constituted more than 20% of an applicant’s to-tal score. In Massachusetts, you need support from the local community. You need to really show that you’re

going to be a benefit there. I think that the people who are in

the business for the right reasons, the ones who came to it with an eye for patient advocacy or they came to it with an eye for social Justice reform, are really going to last in this industry because we cannot forget the people who came before us. Patients paved the way for adult-use and there’s no way that we should capitalize on this business, leaving behind all of those who were incarcerated.

JB: I think we need to have some legal protections in place some-time soon. I think the Cole Memo is this perilous read upon which to hang a multibillion-dollar in-dustry. To that end, what can a person do?

LR: Call your elected official. Change hearts and minds. Even if your rep-resentatives are supportive, they may not have all the education they need to convince their naysaying peers. Show up at you state capitol.

We have to stop treating people who use cannabis like junkies or crim-inals. It’s time to shift the dialogue. It’s amazing how little education our elected officials have about this topic.

This interview is an excerpt from Joseph Bondy’s “In the Know 420” podcast and republished with permis-sion. Bondy is a New York-based crim-inal defense attorney and cannabis advocate. He is a life member of the National Association of Criminal De-fense Lawyers and the legal committee for NORML. Over the past 22 years, he has represented hundreds of people at every stage of criminal litigation, winning numerous dismissals, acquit-tals, reduced sentences and appellate reversals. He is also an avid gardener and Shaolin kung fu practitioner.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The full podcast can be found at the website: talkradio.nyc/shows/in-the-know-420.

"WE CANNOT FORGET THE PEOPLE WHO CAME BEFORE US. PATIENTS PAVED THE WAY FOR ADULT-USE AND THERE’S NO WAY THAT WE SHOULD CAPITALIZE ON THIS BUSINESS, LEAVING BEHIND ALL OF THOSE WHO WERE INCARCERATED."

Rambridge

http://rambridge.com


BY BRIAN BECKLEY

Amy Poinsett and Jessica Billings-ley have never put much stock in ste-reotypes that said women should not be in the corporate world or that they should stay away from the tech fields or any other garbage used to define gender roles.

But then, both had excellent role models. Poinsett’s mother was a high-level executive in the defense in-

dustry and Bill-ingsley’s mother was the majori-ty owner in her family’s con-struction busi-ness, running everything but the actual con-struction team.

It showed the two women who

would go on to found MJ Freeway, the most prominent seed-to-sale tracker in the cannabis industry, that not only could they do anything, they should.

“I’m very fortunate that I have had some truly exceptional women as role models in my life, starting with my mom,” Poinsett says, adding that through her childhood she learned, “That’s what a woman’s job looks like in the corporate world.”

With that in mind, Poinsett and Billingsley both rose through the ranks of the male-dominated tech industry and started “two of the only wom-en-owned tech companies in western Colorado,” as Poinsett puts it, before teaming up to form MJ Freeway, a

company that is run a bit differently and owes at least some of its success to its female-led C-suite.

MOVING FORWARDThe women of MJ Freeway are

not resting on their accomplishments, however.

2017 was a tumultuous year for the company. It began with a hacking attack in January that brought down the entire system, resulting in dozens of retailers being offline and having to close their doors for several days. In response, the company changed some practices, including a new hosting en-vironment and more intense “penetra-tion testing” on the database. Informa-tion from the attack was turned over to Colorado authorities and the investiga-tion is still active.

But 2017 also brought two new state contracts for its Leaf Data Sys-tems product: Pennsylvania and Wash-ington.

The latter is causing some conster-nation among Evergreen State grow-ers who, despite many complaints in the program’s early days, are familiar with the current system and worried about the transition. They’ve gone so far as to label the transition “Y502K,” a combination of the voter initiative number that legalized recreational use — I-502 — with “Y2K,” the common nomenclature for what was expected to be computer and programming dif-ficulties when the calendar rolled over from 1999 to 2000.

“I have heard that!” Poinsett says when asked about the phrase. “Both we and our counterparts at the state are

committed to making this transition as smooth as it can possibly be.”

The company is taking on addi-tional support staff during the transi-tion and has plans for extensive out-reach and training efforts throughout Washington.

“We know people are feeling anx-ious so we’ll be doing a little tour around Washington for a meet-and-greet session,” Poinsett says.

Along with its seed-to-sale track-ing software, MJ Freeway also offers data products that give users insights on how their business is performing, based on the company’s extensive data set compiled over the past seven years.

“We’ve been in the regulated can-nabis business longer than most,” Poinsett says, “starting back before there was a regulated cannabis busi-ness.”

FLEXIBILITYBut the women of MJ Freeway are

innovating more than just the product. When Poinsett, the CEO, and Billing-sley, the COO, founded MJ Freeway in 2010, they installed a flexible, 30-hour work week aimed at women with families who needed more flexibility in their schedules.

It was something Poinsett started at her previous company after watch-ing too many women drop out of the workforce due to a tech industry cul-ture that routinely requires more than traditional 40-hour work weeks. That may be less of a problem for young men, the demographic that makes up the majority of the industry, but it can create tension for women who want to

THE INDUSTRY VETERANS

AMY POINSETT & JESSICA BILLINGSLEYCo-founders MJ Freeway Denver, Colorado


start a family, but do not want to aban-don their careers.

Billingsley says at many tech com-panies, “the deck is stacked against you” in terms of sheer numbers, which creates a culture that is “very male” and not always welcoming to women.

“When you’re in a field that’s nine-to-one, male-to-female and you’re go-ing to take maternity leave or pick up a kid from school … the culture around that is not there in most tech compa-nies,” Billingsley says.

The flexible hours allowed MJ Freeway to hire the lead develop-er from Poinsett’s prior company, a woman who had family issues that prevented her from staying at the of-fice for long hours, but whose skill was undeniable. Today, with her chil-dren older, the woman still works at MJ Freeway and her hours are back up to full time.

Not all of the company’s positions are suited for the 30-hour week and employees who choose that option may not use the time to take a second job, but it allows the company more leeway when seeking new employees in a highly competitive field.

“It’s a nice way to level the playing field,” Poinsett says, adding that the 30-hour week is also available to male employees. “We have always hired the best person for the job.”

Though Poinsett and Billingsley say their development team still skews a bit male, the rest of the company is split 50/50 between men and women, a fact they say gives them a leg up since research shows more diverse teams tend to approach problem-solv-ing from multiple angles.

“We understand the value of differ-ent perspectives,” Billingsley says.

RISK-TAKINGMJ Freeway’s origin stems from

Billingsley’s investment in a medi-cal marijuana company in Colorado in 2009. The business in which she invested was having trouble finding cannabis-specific software and ap-proached her about the possibility of creating something.

Soon after, Billingsley and Poin-

sett were discussing the lack of soft-ware for marijuana businesses and saw the looming adult-use market as an opportunity.

“We really thought technology could help,” Poinsett says, adding with a laugh, “I rather famously said ‘How hard can it be?’”

Billingsley says being risk-averse is one of the stereotypes about wom-en; there is a “cultural construct” that teaches girls, but not boys, to stay away from taking risks. However, if she and Poinsett bought into that, they would never have risen to run their own companies, let alone start an in-dustry-leading cannabis company that made the Inc. 5000 list of the country’s fastest-growing private companies. MJ Freeway was No. 1,506 on the 2017 list released in August (other cannabis companies that made the ranking were Marijuana Business Daily, Your Green Contractor and Apeks Supercritical).

It’s something Billingsley empha-sizes to young women and is trying to instill in her 10-year-old daughter: You have to take risks to get rewards.

“I can’t say that enough,” she says.And it seems to be working.

According to Inc. Magazine, Den-ver-based MJ Freeway generated $5.5 million in revenue in 2016 with a three-year growth rate of 270%. As of this publication, the company had 78 employees.

But even with that growth rate, there’s a high level of risk, both in the tech sector and the marijuana business. Being successful is about managing that risk, staying focused and believ-ing in yourself and your business, even if at first you might be the only one, the MJ Freeway executives say. It’s a lesson the two successful corporate executives try to make sure young women know: Stereotypes and glass ceilings are meant to be broken, and risk — even in an industry that seems to be slanted against you — can lead to great reward.

“When we first started, there were very, very few women who were working in this industry,” Bill-ingsley says, adding that it was MJ Freeway’s early jump into the can-nabis space that helped set the com-pany up for its current success. “It’s always the early movers that are go-ing to have a head start.”


BY PATRICK WAGNER

After undergoing what would be her final bone marrow transplant, Cassandra Dittus found herself in

remission, but without the skills needed for a ca-reer.

“I had been sick through most of the time when people would normally go to college, so

I was in little bit of a strange spot for my age,” the cancer survivor ex-plains.

So when she met a local business owner who was opening a medical dispensary, she called him every day until he hired her. That was nine years ago.

Since then, Dittus has built a wealth of knowledge and now uses that experience to help Native Amer-ican tribes receive equal access to the cannabis industry.

“I was fortunate enough to be given an opportunity in this indus-try,” she says. “So, this is something that the tribes deserve to have too. It’s something that I believe in.”

Dittus was involved in the pas-sage of Nevada Senate Bill 375, which establishes the relationship between Native American tribes, the state government and recreational cannabis. Through state compacts, the law allows tribes to work inside a similar regulatory framework as Ne-vada’s licensed cannabis businesses.

The compacts give tribes the ability to license producers, retailers and processors to work in both the medical and recreational cannabis markets, and allow them to collect taxes from the businesses that fund their government and its services.

“They receive money from the federal government, but it’s nothing compared to what they can actually subsidize their communities with,” Dittus says. “This is something that can support a lot of people, but they just have to be able to do it right.”

The Ely Shoshone and Yerington Paiute are the first tribes Dittus helped to achieve reciprocity in Ne-

vada. Now that the compacts have been signed, her company can assist with the more traditional aspects of consulting, such as training, staffing, building standard operating proce-dures and designing facilities, as well as helping to make connections between Nevada licensees and tribal businesses.

“It was a wonderful thing for the tribes to get up and rolling with those,” Dittus says of the recent com-pacts in Nevada. “The tribes need to be able to access the industry, espe-cially when they are encompassed by a state with full-fledged medical or recreational marijuana.”

THE

NEGOTIATOR

CASSANDRA DITTUSCo-founder and PresidentTribal Cannabis Consulting Reno, Nevada

WeighPack

http://paxiom.com


BY PATRICK WAGNER

As the president, founder and chief scientist of one of the first can-nabis analytics laboratories in Cal-ifornia, Samantha Miller says she gets a little excited when new com-petitors enter the market.

“Whenever I hear about waves of new cannabis labs opening, I say, ‘That’s great. A least there will be a bunch of cheap equipment in

a year,’” Miller says.

Within the past year, her company, Pure Analytics in Santa Rosa, spent $350,000 on lab instruments to fin-ished upgrading its 4,000-square-foot facility in prepara-

tion for the Golden State’s upcoming adult-use launch in 2018.

The emerging recreational mar-ket also spurred Miller to expand her lab team. Despite what the odds and Google engineer memos suggest, she ended up with an all-women team composed of experts with master’s degrees in information technology, microbiology, analytical chemistry, biochemistry and forensic toxicolo-gy. Miller says the missing Y-chro-mosomes from the lab team is purely happenstance, but she now happily refers to the employees as her “pack of unicorns.”

“I recently read that only 6.7% of girls graduate with STEM (sci-ence, technology, engineering and

mathematics) degrees and only 0.7% of girls plan on pursuing a computer science degree,” Miller says. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I really have built an amazing team.’”

Miller says raising capital for Pure Analytics was somewhat of a social experiment to see whether a business could be built on nothing more than hard work and knowl-edge, without sacrificing its ethics.

“The answer is yes,” Miller says. “It just takes a little longer than if you take the venture capital to get to certain milestones.”

Pure Analytics is one of the few organically grown testing labs in California, established entirely with-out the aid of venture capital.

Still, it is far from where she started. Miller’s involvement in the cannabis industry began around 2007, when a high school friend reached out for some assistance on buying an analytical instrument for her dispensary.

“If you’re not going to hire a

scientist, you’re going to have a problem,” Miller recalls telling her friend. “You can buy this equipment, but there is more to it than that.”

To which her friend replied, “Why don’t you do it?”

At the time, Miller had a corner office, six-figure salary and vel-vet-roped path to corporate heaven. She wasn’t looking to leave her posi-tion, but the entrepreneurial seed had been planted.

After initially dismissing the notion of joining the cannabis in-dustry, she found herself sketching out a logo mockup, then estimating what her startup costs and branding options would be. Miller realized by having experience in federally regu-lated laboratories and managing ISO 9000 systems that she had “a pretty good background for operating this kind of business.”

“I looked at it and I said, ‘Shoot, I could do this,’” Miller says. “I’ve always had a signifi-cant appetite for risks — calculat-ed risks — and apparently that’s

THE STANDARD BEARER

SAMANTHA MILLER Founder, President and Chief Scientist Pure Analytics Santa Rosa, California

"I’VE ALWAYS HAD A SIGNIFICANT APPETITE FOR RISKS — CALCULATED RISKS — AND APPARENTLY THAT’S WHAT I LIKE, A LITTLE DISCOMFORT."

what I like, a little discomfort.”She founded Pure Analytics in

2008 and spent her evenings per-forming lab tests for local dispen-saries, while filing reports at mid-night for her corporate position at Idex, a manufacturer of analytic instruments.

Her friend, the dispensary owner, traded her a rent-free office space in exchange for free testing to help her get the company running. During the week, her husband would help out by collecting samples, before pick-ing Miller up from her day job. In 2010, she transitioned to Pure Ana-lytics full time.

But the cannabis industry was an entirely different world back in 2008, even in California, which en-acted the nation’s first legislation to legalize medical marijuana. Initial-ly, Miller had a hard time getting people to grasp the basic concept of testing cannabis. Growers and dispensary owners would argue that had “killer weed” but didn’t under-stand how contaminated product could actually kill someone.

Over time and as pes-ticide scandals crept into the public consciousness, Miller found her services required less and less ex-planation.

“It was such a differ-ent mentality than what we have today,” she says. “People are finding out that the work isn’t triv-ial and it takes years of expertise to do it. We now take in thousands and thousands of samples every year.”

From left to right, three of the “unicorns” at Pure Analytics: Lyda Negron, Karen Bernstein and Michelle Neeld.



THE IMPORTANCE OF PATENTS

Flood of innovation in the cannabis industry will make intellectual property rights a hot commodity

― ― ―By LINDSAY MOORE, PH.D.

Unlike federal trademarks, which, under the Lanham Act, cannot be issued for feder-ally illegal activities, there are no analogous laws that prevent patents from being issued to the marijuana industry. As more compa-nies become aware of the opportunity and importance of obtaining patent protection for their inventions, those companies are creating valuable assets and gaining stra-tegic competitive advantages within their markets while accruing, in virtue of their patents, enhanced business valuations.

PART I: PATENTABILITY AND

STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITYAccording to the 2016 Envision IP

study on medical marijuana patents, there were 266 patents in-force and 255 patents pending at of the end of 2016. Prior to 2000 and the increased legalization of medical marijuana, only a few cannabis-related pat-ents were issued to academic institutions,

research laboratories and the U.S. govern-ment. However, since 2009, patent filings have increased rapidly, and with the spread-ing decriminalization of recreational mar-ijuana starting in 2012, patent filings have now more than tripled.

Those who stake their claims early may obtain key intellectual property rights that will initially provide a broad marketplace advantage, while also helping create the basic topography of the industry going for-ward, particularly regarding industry stan-dards, the foundations for medical claims, compositions of matter, extraction technol-ogy, therapeutic use, delivery vehicles and other diverse products.

Early, industry-founding patents are com-monly the more highly monetized patents. They are either used to exclude competitors from the marketplace or licensed to create ongoing royalties. Early-stage patents are

The good news for the marijuana industry is that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has begun issuing patents for inventions with patentable subject-matter, and further, that many companies are starting to file patent applications to stake their claims to plant strains, breed-

ing methods, extraction techniques, growing technologies, pro-prietary software and novel products.

West Coast Horticulture

http://westcoasthorticulture.com

What is a patent?

By LINDSAY MOORE, PH.D.

According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office,

a patent is an intellectual property right that is granted by the U.S. government to an inventor. In ex-change for the public disclosure of the invention to stimulate inno-vation, patent owners are granted a legal monopoly on the invention for 20 years. During that term, the owner has a right to exclude or stop all others from making, using or offering for sale the protected invention with-out the permission of the patent holder.Patents protect inventions that are novel, nonobvious and useful. There are three types of patents: • Plant patents are for any inven-

tor who invents or discovers and asexually reproduces a distinct or new variety of a plant.

• Utility patents are available for machines, articles of manufacture, methods, processes, compositions of matter and in some cases, soft-ware and business methods.

• Design patents are for new, non-functional ornamental designs or distinct articles of manufacture.

Patents can be extremely valuable for both strategic and monetary reasons. Strategically, the monop-oly awarded by the government to the patent holder delivers a powerful competitive advantage in any marketplace. Monetarily, the value of patents as intellectual property and assets of a company is unsurpassed. For example, the patents held by the companies that make up the S&P Index are valued conservatively at more than $6.4 trillion (30%) as of Feb. 28, 2017 — approximately 30% of the index’s $21.4 trillion market capitalization.

suggestive of the nexuses of invention that exist at the start of a new industry, and the scope for innovation going forward. Patent filings and issuances within recent years range from hydroponic growing methods to trimming devices, drug screening equipment, transdermal delivery vehicles and the use of cannabinoids in the treatment of a number of diseases. The trend suggests that we are at the very beginning of a patent “gold rush” that will continue for years to come.

The innovation index of the marijuana industry, where everything has to be “rein-vented and discovered,” suggests that the industry will become patent-intensive, and that patents, with brands, will become the major business assets of the most successful cannabis businesses. Patents are not inex-pensive, often costing $25,000 to $35,000 over three years of prosecution. However, they offer a large return on investment by providing legal monopoly protection for de-cades, greater sales volume in virtue of con-sumer demand for better products, greatly increased margins because of premium pricing and favorable attention from sources of capital. For these reasons, it is likely that many businesses will seek patent protection for their technologies.

Fundamentally, patents are valuable business assets that are inexpensive to cre-ate. It is especially strategic to patent during the early stages of an industry, when the cost of patents buys more than it will after the patent landscape has been carved up and closely populated. Amortized over the life of a 20-year monopoly, $35,000 for a well-written patent actually turns out to be a small investment — $1,750 per year.

At this early stage in the industry, it may be hard for many to appreciate the monop-olistic power of a patent. It is a startling re-alization to suddenly find that another com-pany owns, for example, the most desirable strains of cannabis or the optimal extraction process. And while some patent owners may license selected rights to others for a

royalty, they also may exclude other players from the marketplace.

From the beginning, Apple used its pat-ents to keep others out of the cell phone market. The company’s modus operandi was to never license its intellectual property and to aggressively enforce its rights against those who infringed, taking them to court and often winning large awards for damages and the return of ill-gotten profits. Even af-ter Google invented its Android cell phone operating system and made it available as a “free” technology to other players, the company still couldn’t compete effectively against Apple because it didn’t have the so-phistication of the iPhone design and oper-ating system. Thus, it took Samsung years to become a formidable competitor.

Generally, it is cheaper to invent and fund patent portfolios than it is to license rights to become competitive or to defend against in-fringement in court. Licensees are always in a weaker position because they often have to pay substantial royalties off their gross reve-nues and accept reduced margins.

PART II: KEY COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES

At the beginning of every new industry, there is already enough know-how in the market space to allow the industry to emerge and start growing. Whatever knowledge is already out there is in the public domain. It isn’t owned by anyone and is free to all. Public domain know-how includes every-thing that has already been disclosed or used freely in commerce for at least one year and that is not protected or claimed by any party. However, new inventions on top of that pri-or knowledge can be filed for protection and patenting. For example, in the early days of the marijuana industry, anyone could come along with seeds and begin to grow cannabis plants without another party claiming they owned that respective “genus, species and variety of a plant.”


Seeds and genetics can offer unique trademark opportunities on

a state level.

Canna Ventures

http://canna-ventures.com


Irrespective of what is in the public domain, there is always a great need in the early stages of an industry to solve the initial problems of commercialization and industrial-ization. Under the rule of “reinven-tion and discovery,” there will be opportunity for innovation in every aspect and dimension of the indus-try. If we look at the natural adjacent industries, we can see the natural next steps and the obvious patent-able opportunities, especially those that are easy to overlook or sequence improperly. From the perspective of obtaining patent protection, the mar-ijuana industry will primarily focus on the following areas:

1. Plant Patents: The plants them-selves; plant breeding, cultivation and horticulture.

2. Utility Patents: Farming to in-clude plants, harvesting and handling; manufacturing of consumer products and the development of industry ser-vices; cannabis science and chemistry to include genomics, extraction, stan-dardization, biological tests, and the design and improvement of plants; product development.

3. Design Patents: Non-functional aspects of uniquely designed and or-namental objects of manufacture and product design and shapes, and para-phernalia.

PLANT PATENTSAs in other agricultural industries,

the fundamental base of the cannabis industry will largely come to be pro-tected by plant patents and patents re-garding the breeding and care of can-nabis. Marijuana plant patents have already been filed at the USPTO and at least one has issued: Patent No. US 2014/0287068 A1, titled “Breeding, Production, Processing and Use of

Specialty Cannabis.” It was filed in 2013 and issued in 2015 and it is, ac-cording to Vice News, “the first-ever patent for a plant containing signifi-cant amounts of THC.”

It is likely that there will be a large number of plant patents that will be filed during the coming years and the owner of each such patent will be able to exclude competitors from growing and commercializing that specific plant strain.

In time, disputes over who owns what intellectual property rights are likely to occur, and whoever owns the best strains and has title to their tax-onomy and the genomic details in vir-tue to a plant patent, will likely enjoy tremendous competitive advantage over those who merely plant seeds. In some cases, popular strains will be developed by specialized agricultural laboratories and companies, and then be sold and licensed to many growers in the industry. Breeding and cultiva-tion will also become a professional focus and an essential aspect of mar-ketplace success because they will be creating patentable subject matter.

The primary focus of patent filing will be to obtain the exclusive rights to the most valuable plant strains, to optimize breeding and cultivation and to continue to innovate new plants.

UTILITY PATENTSMost agricultural products require

specialized farming and harvesting equipment.

The techniques and methods for cultivating the most potent and high-yielding plants will be a simulta-neous focus for the industry. Because the industry is based on a plant, the growing, cultivating and harvesting of marijuana in all its forms will re-quire specialized and newly invented

methods, protocols, equipment and processes. Very little of it exists at this present time.

In this respect, the rise of the mari-juana plant as an economic plant with characteristics and specification un-like any other agricultural products, is similar to the situation that occurred with the rise of gluten-free foods in the natural and organic baked foods market. Gluten-free foods had to re-place grains like wheat, barley and rye with new grains and plants that had no gluten in them. The resulting concoctions often required grain in-gredients that weren’t being farmed on any scale. Further, the dough could not be manufactured with the traditional baking industry equipment because the gluten-free dough was so unlike traditional wheat-based dough. It was a tough, intractable, tacky dough that necessitated the invention of new manufacturing equipment and alternative processes to result in a de-sirable baked product.

In 2011, Dr. Jonathan Page and his team of scientists first sequenced the cannabis genome and began to put ge-nomic tools in the hands of breeders, so that new and improved varieties could be developed. These tools are essential to sort out the lineage and strains of marijuana and their charac-teristics. The scientific research about cannabis is just beginning and is largely focused upon differentiating the two main categories of marijua-na — sativa and indica — with their varying characteristics and the basic pharmacognosy of the plant.

As the work proceeds, much of it will be injected into the public do-main, but there will also be protectable subject-matter pertaining to commer-cialization and scaling the industry. Invention will be captured by the com-panies and laboratories that unpack the workings of marijuana chemistry and discover the right extraction method for the right product, calibration re-garding the potency, scent, flavor and texture of the products themselves and new ways to consume the products.

MARIJUANA ALREADY OFFERS AN EXPLOSION OF PRODUCT FORMS AND MODES OF CONSUMPTION THAT GO WELL BEYOND THE CIGARETTE INDUSTRY

Kush Bottles

http://kushbottles.com


The tobacco industry may be the clos-est comparison to show the promise of marijuana, but marijuana already offers an explosion of product forms and modes of consumption that go well beyond the ciga-rette industry. Tobacco has only been able to meaningfully differentiate itself with blends, filters, flavors, indicators of strength and brand imagery.

All these tobacco vectors are opportu-nities to invent and file patents in the mar-ijuana industry. The industry has certainly picked up on the advent of e-cigarettes to vape liquid and has adapted it admirably to its needs, all the while creating many in-stances of patentable subject matter.

E-cigarettes were born from the brain-child of a Chinese patent that protected a mechanism to vape nicotine. As e-ciga-rettes were adopted by Western companies, the owner of that Chinese patent began to enforce against the broad use of nicotine vaping devices, forcing many Western companies to come under license and pay astounding royalties. The vaping indus-try is currently valued at $5.2 billion and growing, about the same size the current legal marijuana industry.

DESIGN PATENTSThe marijuana industry has shown it has

the imagination to generate a large number of design patents, comparable to Coca-Co-la’s fluted bottle. Already paraphernalia, vaporizers and other delivery vehicles have resulted in many non-functional product de-signs, with shapes, color, arrangement and ornamental designs that provide the oppor-tunity for design patents.

PART III: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

KNOW-HOWA challenge for many companies in the

marijuana industry will be to learn to think in terms of patents, to understand why protect-ed assets are essential to business success and creating wealth and to learn the valuable art of creating “patentable subject matter.”

There is an abundance of opportunity to protect know-how, art and invention with patents, to strategically position enterprises in markets and to monetize companies going forward. The question will be if the indus-try can directly connect patents with market

share, monetary value and wealth. As intan-gible assets, patents accrue monetary value around their technological base, boosting the balance sheet of the company and driving revenues, profits and market capitalization.

Simply said, the central patent strategy is to pursue significant invention and innova-tion, articulate broad claims in well-written patents, assert rights against infringement and monetize patents through accruing rev-enues based upon patented inventions, and to license art to competitors.

It is in the interest of all cannabis busi-nesses to protect and leverage inventions and to enhance the wealth-producing critical mass of the industry.

Lindsay Moore is the CEO of KLM Inc., a strategic planning and branding consul-tancy in Colorado that also specializes in the management of intellectual property assets for companies. Moore received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado and is a former ad-junct professor of law at George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. She co-authored the book “Intellectual Cap-ital in Enterprise Success-Strategy Revisited,” published by John Wiley & Sons in 2008.

Gualala Robotics LightRail

Surna

http://surna.com/


PROS AND CONS OF TEMP EMPLOYEES

As harvest season approaches, many companies will be considering short-term staffing solutions to reduce expenses. But businesses should be aware of the

inherent pitfalls of seasonal workers. ― ― ―

By ALEX WHEATLEY

These temporary employees can provide companies with flexibility, as well as saving time and money, especially if hired through an agency. But using temporary or seasonal employees is not a magic bullet that relieves employers of all the headaches and expo-sure that come with hiring people. Employ-ers need to understand both the advantages of using temporary or seasonal employees, as well as the limitations of the temporary employment model.

FEAR OF EMPLOYMENTEmploying people can be scary. Busi-

ness owners hear horror stories from speak-ers at conferences, from reading articles like this one, or from just speaking with other employers.

Lawsuits can cost businesses dearly and employment laws are generally written in favor of the employees. If an employee sues his or her employer for violation of employ-ment laws and wins, that person can often

collect not only the actual damages that were suffered, but also penalties and attor-ney fees which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, even if the employer wins a lawsuit outright, the business still has to pay attorneys. And the law does not provide the employer with an avenue to recover those costs from the losing litigant.

People go into business because they love their product, believe in the community, see a potential for profit or some combination of these reasons. Most employers are not human resources professionals, and they certainly did not start a business because they really just wanted to hire and manage employees. Yet, as operations grow, owners know they

The harvest season is just around the corner and the holi-day retail surge is following close behind. Producers and retailers in the cannabis industry, like those outside the cannabis space, may be looking to bridge short-term staff-ing shortages with temporary or seasonal employees.

High Caliper Growing – Smart Pots

http://smartpots.com


need employees to meet demand. Plus, leveraging the work of employees maximizes profits and the return on their siz-able investment of time, anxiety, money and effort.

CONTINGENT EMPLOYMENTSo, workers are a must, but maybe having employees

is not. Is there an alternative? It’s usually at this point that a business decides to classify everyone as an independent contractor to avoid the whole employment mess. Unfortu-nately, this is not a good solution.

Businesses need workers who show up every day to do the same job consistently, as defined by the employer. The law says these kinds of workers are employees, not in-dependent contractors, and businesses cannot legally treat someone as an independent contractor if they are actually employees subject to the employer’s control. Misclassify-ing employees as independent contractors opens business-es up to significant damages and penalties, so it is not a viable alternative.

The next thought might be getting temporary or seasonal employees from a staffing agency. Some employers might believe the legal requirements would be the temp agency’s problem. After all, agency workers are properly classified as actual employees, meaning, hopefully, they are paid over-time appropriately and the staffing agency pays payroll tax-es and unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance premiums properly. However, the mere fact that employees are deemed to be “temporary” or they come from an agency

does not mean that the business managing the worker is free from all exposure. Hiring employees on a temporary or sea-sonal basis has definite advantages, but risk remains.

ADVANTAGESThe main advantages of hiring temporary or season-

al employees relate to time and cost savings. A business can save significant money by employing temporary or seasonal employees, particularly through an agency. Temp agencies are experts at hiring and they know how to evaluate resumes, conduct pre-employment screening and find the right talent to fit a firm’s needs. Also, many of the agencies handle the administrative tasks associat-ed with employment, including human resources, payroll and withholdings, administration of benefits and main-taining unemployment and workers’ compensation insur-ance. This alleviates the employer from handling these time-consuming tasks.

Temporary and seasonal employees may also help businesses lower costs and provide less exposure to litiga-tion than “regular” employees. Often, temporary employ-ees are hired for less pay than regular, full-time employ-ees, and businesses are not required to provide temporary employees with the same benefits. That savings, of course, is partially offset by the premium paid to the agency, but it still usually results in a net cost savings.

Hiring employees on a temporary or seasonal basis also helps set expectations and reduces the risk of wrongful dis-charge claims. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, a temporary employee is one who will be with the employer for less than a year and who has a specific expiration date. Having a set termination date severely undermines tempo-rary employees’ ability to claim they were fired for an im-proper reason and cuts off their claim for lost wages.

Fired employees tend to search for an improper reason to explain their termination (such as their race, gender or sexuality, or because they complained about something) rather than admitting their performance was lacking. Hav-ing a set expiration date for employment reduces the like-lihood of hurt feelings and misunderstandings.

Finally, temporary employment allows a business to adjust quickly and flexibly to fluctuations in demand and it provides an opportunity to evaluate an employee’s per-formance without commitment. If a temporary employ-ee is really a good fit, the business may be able to hire that individual full time after the temporary assignment expires. In an at-will employment state, this “long in-terview” is of slightly less utility, but it still allows em-ployers to establish the expectation with the employee

A BUSINESS CAN SAVE SIGNIFICANT MONEY BY EMPLOYING TEMPORARY OR SEASONAL EMPLOYEES, PARTICULARLY THROUGH AN AGENCY

Long lines on opening day,

like this one at Pakalolo Supply in

Alaska, influence stores to enlist

temporary help.

Aessence


Assurpack

that the position is short-term and it still provides businesses a chance to hire those workers who really impress.

DISADVANTAGES

There are disadvantages and pitfalls that businesses considering hiring temporary employees should avoid. The most import-ant thing employers need to understand is that temporary and seasonal employment does not relieve the employer of its obliga-tions to comply with local, state and federal employment laws. Under almost all appli-cable statutes and doctrines, both the temp agency and the client employer can be held liable to employees for violations of the law.

The temp agency and the on-site em-ployer are considered “joint employers,” meaning both are responsible for ensuring compliance with the law. For example, if an employee is not paid overtime correctly or is not provided leave to which he or she is enti-tled, the employee can sue and often recover from both the on-site employer and the temp agency. Therefore, it is very important that the temp agency’s responsibilities, includ-ing, potentially, an obligation to indemnify the employer in the event of a lawsuit, are

clearly spelled out in the contract for tempo-rary employment services.

As long as the on-site employer under-stands and abides by its obligations to the employees and delineates the responsibili-ties and liabilities with the temp agency, us-ing temporary employees mitigates against the risk of employing people.

There are, however, a few additional common pitfalls and disadvantages employ-ers should know. Employers should under-stand that no matter how unskilled the posi-tion being filled, every employee will have to be trained to some degree, which is a drain on resources. Also, having a large contingent workforce can lower worker morale due to the regular turnover and lack of lasting rela-tionships. Finally, employers should be very careful not to change the at-will status of employment. The employer should make the end date of the temporary employment clear. The employers also should not promise any specific length of employment or guarantee that the employee will remain on staff for the specific period of time or through the season. Rather, the employee is employed on an at-will basis, and the only guarantee is that the employment will end on the date specified.

CONCLUSIONTemporary and seasonal employment

continues to grow in popularity among U.S. businesses because of the flexibility and cost savings they offer.

Employers, however, should under-stand that they still need to properly train temporary employees and not cut corners when it comes to hiring short-time help. Employers who properly understand their responsibilities can, indeed, save significant time and money, but tempo-rary employment can pose a trap for the unwary.

Good luck in the upcoming busy sea-son, and may all those employees be pro-ductive and problem-free!

Alex Wheatley is an attorney in the Portland office of Fisher Phillips (www.fisherphillips.com), a national law firm committed to providing business solutions for employers’ workplace legal problems. He defends employers in employment-re-lated administrative claims and lawsuits. He specializes in representing businesses in the cannabis industry to implement ef-fective workplace policies.

http://assurpack.com

Precision Extraction

http://precisionextraction.com


Marijuana Venture seeks out a group of professionals to tell the trials, tribulations and successes of everyday life in the legal marijuana industry.

LIVING THE dream

ROY ARMS Owner Boggy Boon Malaga, WA– –

It’s been quite a summer for us at Boggy Boon. Just over one year ago we made our first sale of legal cannabis for the Washing-ton state recreational market.

We sacrificed so much to achieve that first sale. My brother moved to Washington from Tennessee and we went to work in an old rock quarry near Wenatchee, right off the Columbia River. When we showed up there was no elec-tric, no heating, no cooling and not even water for those 110-degree summer days.

What we did have was dirt, rock and plenty of sunshine. So we spent seven months of 80- to 100-hour weeks building our state-of-the-art green-houses. Some days, before I was able to quit my full-time job, I would run out to the farm during my lunch break and pour a truckload of concrete footings, get them all leveled out, then head back to work. I will never forget spending 12 hours in the brutal 110-degree sun, picking up 70-pound rocks and tossing them onto our skid steer to try to level off the ground.

Nothing went exactly as we planned, but it sure did feel good to be out there chasing our dreams.

We quickly expanded and assembled the Boggy Boon team out of hard-workers, dream-ers, wanderers and adventurers. They put in long hours: start early, stay late, work on days off — whatever it takes — because they are pas-

sionate about bringing high-quality cannabis to the recreational market. We have approximately 35 full-time employees and we supplement with an additional 15 temporary/part-time employees at certain times. Our team has now produced more than 3,000 pounds of cannabis for Wash-ington’s regulated market, and we are just now catching our stride.

This year we’ve had a glorious summer in Central Washington. If you are one of the lucky cannabis farmers who get to work in greenhouses you are thankful for the sunshine outside (that pro-vides the ideal natural environment for growth), but also for the escape into the nice, cool, cli-mate-controlled air inside the facility.

It turns out, our plants are thankful for that environment as well. We just finished an experi-ment with plants in 5-gallon pots. We used iden-tical strains and placed some plants inside our greenhouses and others outside. We hand watered them (as we currently do for all the 10,000-plus plants we have at any given time) and we found approximately 15-20% better vegetative growth on the greenhouse plants. We think this is due to the plant thriving in the stress-free environment inside the greenhouse instead of struggling with the outdoor heat.

With the “race to the bottom” that currently exists for prices in Washington’s cannabis market, we need to implement every competitive edge we can. To help push ourselves — and the industry — forward, we are constantly reassessing work-flows for efficiencies, trying to ensure that every variable is optimized to produce the best quality cannabis, at the most affordable price.

Utilizing these efficiencies and the sun-filled summer, we have been able to exceed our antic-ipated yields by approximately 19% so far this year, and our biggest harvest of the year is just beginning!

It feels good to sit down and reminisce about all the long days, successes, failures and all the people who have come and gone along the way who helped us. It helps fuel the energy to continue chasing the next goal, meeting more amazing peo-ple and continuing this crazy adventure.


DANIELLE ROSELLISON Co-owner Trail Blazin’ ProductionsBellingham, WA– –

October is Fair Trade Month and I find myself asking over and over again: Do independent businesses — the mom-and-pops of the canna-bis industry — even have a chance?

I have never worked so hard to sell canna-bis (in the old days we would have just called it weed) in my life. It was once $40 an eighth with limited oversight. Now, growers are lucky if we get $16 an eighth, and that’s gross income! The last three and a half years have been, hands down, the most brutal roller coaster of my life.

I know the authors of Washington’s Initiative 502 worked hard to give the cottage industry a chance by making three different size tiers, an affordable $250 application fee and a $1,000 annual licensing fee. California has diligently tried to create a structure in which the legacy growers, the people who have supplied the ma-jority of our nation’s cannabis for the last ump-teen years, have an opportunity to survive. But it seems like no matter how hard the mom-and-

pops try to follow the intent of the law, there is some big, bad corporation with their team of highly paid lawyers working to skirt the system.

I used to worry about competing with people who had millions of dollars. Now we are com-peting with people who have billions.

This is a game of tenacity, a game of strategy. It’s a game of who can hold on the longest and of who can pivot fastest with the ever-changing times.

Don’t worry. We’re going to win. I’ve al-ways known we’re going to win. But in order to win, the independent businesses have to be the change that we want to see. We have to hold true to our morals and values, especially when times get tough. We have to cooperate. We have to be unified, seeing beyond each other as com-petition, but rather as a strategic partner in an intense game of chess.

The sooner the independent businesses start working together, the sooner we will stop trying to just survive and really begin to thrive.


Having a good understanding of each strain you are working with is very important. Stress indicators, pest dam-age and disease susceptibility often are static through a given crop, so the

further in front of any perceived loss one can get, the better. Keeping that in mind, it is worth men-tioning the importance of plant placement in the flowering environment.

Once the flowering environment cleaning and sanitation have been verified by ATP (adenosine triphosphate) swab testing, the fill can begin. Moving the plants can serve as a valuable time to scout for pest populations and disease, prune

excess leaf material and deploy any beneficial insects, all as the plants make the all-important transition into flower.

Consider things like the time it takes to fin-ish, likelihood of stress and overall familiarity with the genetic (you would not want to put a trial strain in the back of a flowering bay as it makes observation difficult). This is not as big of a consideration when working in a small garden, but in a large garden or greenhouse environment every step counts.

The more planning you do upfront, the less wasted movement there will be throughout the flower cycle.

MATT LASCALABotanistAdakaiPhoenix, AZ– –

LIVING THE DREAM

“The further in front of any perceived loss one can get, the better.”

MIKE HAYES Owner Miracle GreensBend, OR– –

For more than a year, the city of Bend, Oregon prepared for the Aug. 21 solar eclipse. Our city’s population was ex-pected to grow overnight from 80,000 to an estimated 1 million. This not only

brought about a problem for the restaurants, ho-tels and other businesses in our city, but also put a kink in the cannabis distribution channel. In fact, we were told by some farms and wholesalers that they would not be able to deliver product during the week of, or the week after, the eclipse.

For a restaurant with a well-established distri-bution channel, a hiccup in inventory is met with a strong backup plan by vendors. For an industry where farmers jump in their cars to deliver prod-uct, it produces a bigger problem.

Constant rotation and fresh product are essen-tial to our retail shop. Customers love the weekly change, but no deliveries for up to two weeks could alter that experience for the customer. Luckily, we prepared ourselves for the worst-case scenario. Going into the eclipse, the shelves were stocked and the back-stock was in place. We planned to have product when no one can deliver. It wasn’t easy, but careful planning and good relations with our current vendors was key.

The eclipse came and went and the distribution channel will reopen as roads clear of tourists, but the eclipse brought to light a problem we have in this industry: We have a weak distribution channel consisting of mostly of farmers hand-delivering product retailers in their personal vehicles. Don’t get me wrong, we love seeing the farms and build-ing the relationships we have with them, but we know driving long distances is not practical in the long term for some of these businesses.

My hope is the distribution channel will be-come more robust and equipped to handle unex-pected events. We can all prepare for an eclipse, but it’s the unknown event that we need to prepare for as this industry grows!

The miracle is in the greens.

Prior to the eclipse, Miracle Greens stockpiled additional products to meet tourist demand and avoid calling distributors while roads were packed.

Americover BOLD Light Dep

http://maximize-your-harvest.com


This month I wanted to describe one of the more interesting challenges of operating in a completely new industry and environment. We have been reflecting on this process of

making our way in the crazy world of legal can-nabis for almost three years now. But anyone with insider knowledge of the cannabis industry can tell you that California, especially the Los Angeles market, has been the “Wild West” for almost 15 years.

For investors and entrepreneurs coming into the industry from “conventional” businesses, one of the most surprising elements of the can-nabis business is how deals have been done in the pseudo-regulated “gray market.” Growers and retailers would be doing business togeth-er for years on end, exchanging large sums of cash with neither party knowing the other’s last name — referring to each other only by nicknames such as Spider and Fat Pat. There were no receipts or contracts to represent trans-actions. Trust was built by doing one deal at a time and being a guy that does what he says he’s going to do.

Essentially a billion-dollar industry, with cash flowing in incredibly large amounts, was

entirely based on handshakes and gut feelings.Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on

your view, this will not be the way in which le-gal cannabis will operate. Legal cannabis, like every other business, must introduce things like receipts, invoices, contracts, consultants and licensed contractors. This aspect, especially in the Southern California market, is incredibly challenging for so many “gray market” opera-tors. If you don’t build a proper team around you, including accountants and attorneys, then you will be left behind.

Most other industries can provide you with examples of how to structure a joint venture be-tween two companies. You can lean on previous deals to see what an even equity split would be. But we, unfortunately, do not operate in that en-vironment.

We are essentially creating and setting the standard at the same time. There is no “set way of doing things” in the legal cannabis market. As frontier business people, we are creating the platform on which people in our industry will operate 10, 20 and 50 years from now. P&S Ventures has been in the midst of this environ-ment for some time now; what a world we’re living in.

“Essentially a billion-dollar industry, with cash flowing in incredibly large amounts, was entirely based on handshakes and gut feelings.”

As California moves from a medical gray market into fully regulated adult use, companies like the OG Collective and its product line, right, are forced to bring on more traditional business employees so as not to be left behind.

LIVING THE DREAM

PATRICK G. MCMAHON Co-Founder The OG Collective Cathedral City, CA– –

Headset


the

GREEN PAGES


Playing the Field

Eastern Washington farm goes green on a commercial scale. BY PATRICK WAGNER

ACCORDING TO ANDERS TAYLOR, the CEO of Walden Can-nabis, the requirements for growing cannabis in Washington already set the bar high enough for nearly every outdoor grower to be certified as an organic operation — should the federal government ever allow such a thing.

But with four acres, a supportive community and an experi-enced horticulture director, Taylor has still found a number of ways to “take a more holistic approach that is closer to the national organic protocol” than other growers.

AgroecologyAlthough Washington’s Tier 3 license holders are limited to 30,000 square feet of cannabis canopy, they are not limited in the ways they use it. Walden Cannabis takes advantage of its massive property by reserving thousands of square feet for insectary beds and cover crops.

The farm’s size also allows Walden to utilize a system of crop rotation — somewhat of a rarity in the cannabis space. After each harvest, the company rotates its grow site to a new section of the property in order to maintain healthy soil. Walden, a Certified Kind farm, has yet to reuse the same plot of land since it first planted seeds in 2014.

While the majority of Walden’s cover crops play a role in sustaining the farm’s pesti-cide-free mission, Taylor uses one plant specifically for post-harvest help. After each cannabis harvest, Walden plants a crop of sunn hemp in its stead. Sunn hemp is a collo-

Walden Cannabis weaves protective layers of cover crops and insectary beds through the farm and around

its perimeter to mitigate pests and replenish the soils.


quial name for Crotalaria juncea, a cover crop that produces about 150 pounds of nitrogen per acre in eight to 12 weeks. The crop is best suited for warmer climates and thrives in sandy, drained soil, only requiring a little moisture to germinate and minimal watering afterward. The crop increases nitrogen, limits soil erosion, prevents root-knot nematodes and enriches the soil.

And despite the analogous name, sunn hemp bears little resem-blance to marijuana’s country cousin, industrial hemp, and there’s no danger of it cross-pollinating the neighboring cannabis plants. It would be like “trying to breed a rabbit with a fox,” Taylor says.

Sunn hemp has been a staple in Southern agricultural practices for decades and Walden horticultural director Jeffrey McConnaughey studied organic techniques while living in the South. McCon-naughey’s winding path to the cannabis industry included working for a vegetable garden in Massachusetts, an experimental tea farm in Georgia and an anarchist commune in Virginia.

After learning the basics of organic farming, he returned to school to get a bachelor’s degree in environmental science, followed by a master’s degree in horticulture.

“Then I found out that there were legit jobs in the cannabis industry and I hopped right on in,” McConnaughey says. “It’s honestly one of the other reasons I got into the horticulture industry. I knew that

one day it was going to legalize. I couldn’t wait to grow (cannabis) commercially.”

McConnaughey’s influences from both commercial and not-so-commercial farming have resulted in an amalgamation of the two styles. His unique blend of techniques has pushed the farm to be an outlier in the world of commercial cannabis production. During his wide-ranging career, he’s observed two schools of thought in organic horticulture. The first is what he describes as “industrialized horticulture,” in which massive operations replace conventional pesticides and fertilizers with organic alternatives. The other philosophy, agroecology, employs insectary beds, cover crops, hives and other natural solutions to fertilization and pest protection that don’t involve bottled ingredients.

“A lot of the stuff I’ve drawn from is from organic vegetable pro-duction, as well as flower production,” McConnaughey says. “So, I looked for new ways of constructing those as well as sustainability practices and methods like using raised beds and soil prep.”

“I think the industry is so young that things are still just being in-vented,” Taylor says. “People basically modified how they did it on a small scale and they aren’t using the same concepts that are used in bigger operations.”

Natural predators such as the praying mantis thrive inside the farm due its healthy ecosystem.

Air-Pot


Prepping the Field Walden Cannabis starts clones and seedlings in a typical fashion, protected in a greenhouse until they mature, and then transporting them into the field. But during their stay in the greenhouse, the young plants experience conditioning treatments that borrow from commercial agricultural practices utilized in desert climates.

The farm uses yucca root extract to help strengthen young plants against heat, drought, UV and salt stresses. The extract is added to the plant’s water supply, foliar sprays and fertigation schedule. Taylor says it makes a good replacement for early-veg practices that rely on manmade supplements and also helps plants acclimate to the summer sun.

Walden has tried numerous ways to prep the field for new crops over the past few years. One year the farm stapled weed barrier fabrics across the soil bed with long metal staples, a common practice of both cannabis and non-cannabis farms. Taylor says it minimizes dust and debris, but leaves too much contamination in its wake.

This year, the farm put its tractor to work with a four-stage plan to set up the soil beds. First the tractor uses a bed-shaper attachment to raise wide, flat-top mounds of dirt across the field. Then it uses another attachment that covers the mounds with a plastic layer and tucks the edges of the plastic underneath the soil — completely eliminating the need for metal staples. The plastic layer is recycled after harvest.

After that, another pass is made with the tractor pushing a water wheel to punch holes in the plastic. The water wheel, which looks similar to a steamroller, spaces the holes 18 inches apart and fills them with water to form perfectly aligned rows across the farm. Finally, farmhands attach seats to the back of the tractor — à la Mad Max — to ride along the field and plant the new season’s crop by hand.

“We basically set the tractor on cruise control and drive it at 0.3 mph and we got two people behind it, filling the holes as they’re being punched and watered,” Taylor says.

I THINK THE INDUSTRY IS SO

YOUNG THAT THINGS ARE STILL JUST

BEING INVENTED“

Walden’s water wheel preps the field with small, water-filled holes,

allowing rear-seated farmhands to easily plant this year’s crops.

Miller Soils

PREMIUM. ALL-NATURAL. ORGANIC.

YOU CAN’T BEAT BIOCHAR

Consistent quality from small batches to large-scale commercial quantities

Ready-to-plant soil blends increase yields, while saving time and money

Long-lasting moisture and nutrient holding ability works indoor and outdoor

Bulk loads shipped weekly throughout Washington, Oregon and Colorado

800-591-5925MillerSoilsLLC.com

[email protected]


Cover Crops and Insectary BedsThroughout the year, Walden plants a variety of cover crops. In the winter, Taylor says, the farm uses a “hardy mix of legumes and grain” — such as Austrian winter pea, hairy vetch and annual rye — to produce biomass and keep a fixed level of nitrogen in the soil.

Come summertime, the company plants rows of buckwheat, a fast-growing, smothering crop that accumulates phosphorus and “mines the element from the subsoil,” Taylor says. In addi-tion to its soil-enriching properties, Taylor says buckwheat also attracts bees and other beneficial insects.

Taylor keeps a separate stock of insectary beds to carry the brunt of his pest-control needs. One out of every four rows of crops at Walden Cannabis is an insectary bed that attracts predators to deter pests from the company’s money crop. At any given time, Walden uses 5,000 to 6,000 square feet for insectary beds and cover crops.

To attract ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies and predatory wasps, the farm uses chervil, coriander, parsley, clovers, calendula, alyssum, perilla, sunflowers, French marigolds, bee balm and yarrow (which also acts as an aphid trap). The farm also grows vegetables such as carrots, garlic, chives, basil and lima beans to the same effect, as well as eggplant as a trap crop for white flies.

“A lot of that ends up going to employees,” Taylor says of Walden’s edible bounty. “We can’t eat it all.”

Taylor originally planned for Walden to be based in Wenatchee, but when a local moratorium derailed his intentions, he moved the farm north to the banks of the Okanogan River in Brewster.

But what started out as a major setback turned out to be a blessing.

“We were lucky in some ways that it didn’t work out (in Wenatchee),” Taylor says. “It’s beautiful here.”

WE WERE LUCKY IN SOME WAYS THAT IT DIDN’T WORK OUT

(IN WENATCHEE). IT’S BEAUTIFUL HERE.“


The buckwheat field is planted in the summer to attract pollenating insects

and accumulate phosphorus from deep within the soil.


According to a report by Accenture Strategy, 78% of consumers are retracting loyalty, a faster rate than three years ago. One reason could be that companies are lumping all customers into one large group, without any specific strategy, rather than customizing a loyalty program specifically for their customers.

Understanding your customers at a mi-cro level is important to building a loyal customer base. Without customizing your program, what’s the point? Consumers don’t have the patience for a generic loy-alty program.

WHY ARE LOYALTY PROGRAMS IMPORTANT?

A customer loyalty program is a market-ing strategy used by businesses to attract and retain loyal customers. A good loyalty pro-gram helps businesses create a connection with their customers, fostering a deep, long-term relationship.

According to a Bain & Company study, roughly 60% to 80% of customers do not re-turn to do business, including customers who had a positive first experience. The problem is that customers have so many options and as a result, they don’t need to go back to the

same business. With a successful loyalty pro-gram, a business can entice new customers to revisit the establishment.

Plus, businesses with a successful loy-alty program can greatly improve profit-ability. According to a Harvard Business Journal study, if 5% of a company’s cus-tomers return more often, they can increase their profits by 95%.

CANNABIS INDUSTRY GROWTHThe marijuana industry is growing as

fast as the broadband Internet market did back in the early 2000s. Broadband Inter-net is one of the few consumer industries to reach $5 billion in annual sales and have 25% compound annual growth the next five years. According to Arcview Market Research, the North American marijuana market posted $6.7 billion in revenue in 2016, a 30% increase from 2015. Addition-ally, Arcview projects sales to grow by a compound annual rate of 25% until 2021. By 2021, the market is expected to top $20.2 billion.

This means it’s time for cannabis retailers to invest in their loyalty programs and lock in customers before the market becomes over-saturated with competition.

TAILOR-MADE FOR MARIJUANAFor marijuana retailers, a customer loyal-

ty program could add to their long-term suc-cess. Retailers can test new products, flavors, promotion types and more through their loyal customers. But they can also get something even more valuable through a customer loy-alty program: customer analytics.

Customer analytics provide retailers the information every business craves. Depend-ing on the loyalty platform, customer ana-lytics can include purchase information, so-cio-demographic breakdowns, social media activity, repeat customer history, promotion analysis and more. Plus, analytics give retail-ers a deeper breakdown of their sales, pro-viding information about whether more sales are coming from new customers or through repeat business.

TIPS FOR CREATING A WINNING LOYALTY PROGRAMRetail businesses can tailor programs specifically to their needs BY ARNAB MITRA

Over the past several years, the number of customer loyalty programs — and the number of customers joining those programs — has skyrocketed. Yet, the customer turnover rate is also increasing.

Confidence Analytics


Customer analytics provide retailers with the information needed to evaluate their business and understand what’s working and what’s not.

Since the cannabis industry is late to the customer loyalty party, marijuana retailers can avoid making the mistakes that many other businesses have made. One key to a successful customer loyalty program is that the program should be focused on customers.

Thus, the program should: • Be completely integrated: Customer

loyalty programs should be fully integrat-ed into each customer touch point, creating an omni-channel experience. When a cus-tomer visits the store or its website, their experience with the loyalty program does not change.

• Address customer pain points: Each business has its own pain points; for a can-nabis retailer, it could be in-store customer service experience, where wait times are high. One of the benefits of the customer loyalty program could be a personal cus-tomer service rep to the top-tier loyalty customers.

• Provide meaningful rewards: It isn’t enough to provide all customers with re-wards. The rewards should have a mean-

ingful value to each customer. Understand-ing buying habits can help tailor rewards to each customer type.

PERSONALIZING A PROGRAMThe first step to personalization is seg-

menting customers into different groups.The segments can be based on a variety

of criteria, whether it’s socio-demographic (including location, gender and age) or more specific criteria (including previous purchas-es and social media activity). Just remember to create the criteria to ensure the segments fit your business.

For example, customers can be segment-ed into the following age groups: 18-25, 26-35, 36-45, etc. Certain age groups may favor edibles, topicals or flowers more than other groups, so promotions, emails and push no-tification campaigns can be created for each group’s preferences.

• Promotions: Prepare an automatic trigger campaign to help customers stay en-gaged. For example, a trigger campaign can be deployed to send out a promotion to any customer that has not made a purchase within the past month. Since you know which cus-tomer groups prefer which products, tailor the promotion to each group. The more fo-

cused the promotion is, the more likely it is to help retain this customer.

• Gifts: One of the major reasons cus-tomers join loyalty programs is to get free gifts. Tailoring gifts to customers’ specific in-terests will keep them engaged and they will make more purchases to qualify for gifts.

• Exclusive product samples: You can offer all your customers the opportunity to sample the newest products. But retail outlets will get better results through personaliza-tion. For example, if you are providing a new topical sample to an age group that prefers flower, you might not get the best results.

Marijuana retailers and dispensaries that set up effective customer loyalty programs may be able to gain an advantage over their competitors. And a good customer loyalty program can actually help retailers reduce expenses and become more profitable.

Arnab Mitra is the marketing manager at SailPlay, a customer loyalty platform. He has experience from several different industries, including a mid-size insurance company and two Fortune 500 companies, Samsung and Panasonic, where he specialized in increas-ing customer engagement, retention and building customer loyalty.

Speedee Trim

Pincus Pro

Bud Bar

http://budbardisplays.com


Barbuto was told by a supervisor that it would not be a problem, but the company fired her just a few days after starting the new job. A human resources person told her that she was fired because the compa-ny, Advantage Sales and Marketing (ASM), complied with federal law by deeming mari-juana illegal. In other words, ASM reasoned that Massachusetts state law, which allows for medical marijuana use, does not super-sede the federal Controlled Substances Act, making marijuana an illegal substance.

Barbuto brought several claims against ASM, including handicap discrimination. She identified herself as a qualified hand-icapped person, who was capable of per-forming the essential functions of her job with a reasonable accommodation — a waiver of ASM’s drug-free policy. ASM ar-gued that the use of any marijuana, whether

medical or not, was still a federal crime.After the Suffolk County Superior Court

dismissed Barbuto’s case, she appealed to the Supreme Judicial Court. On July 17, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled that em-ployers in Massachusetts may not terminate an employee just because they use medical marijuana outside of work hours. According to the court, the medically authorized use of cannabis is as lawful as the use of any other prescribed medication, and employees may assert claims of handicap discrimination un-der state law against employers who fail to accommodate such use.

The court specifically said that the only person who risks being arrested for mari-juana is the employee who consumes it, not the employer. Thus, an employee who tests positive for legitimate medical marijuana use is not, in and of itself, an undue burden

on the employer in terms of disability ac-commodation.

The Supreme Judicial Court determined that employers have a duty to engage with the employee in a process of trying to deter-mine whether there is an equally effective and legal medication that could work in place of marijuana. The fact that ASM did not engage in the process of working with Barbuto to find out if a reasonable alterna-tive to cannabis existed was declared by the Supreme Judicial Court to be sufficient evidence to support a claim of handicap dis-crimination.

When an equally effective substitute for marijuana does not exist, it is then the employer’s burden to prove that the use of marijuana by the employee would cause an undue burden to the employer’s business. The court cited certain specific examples that would meet the definition of undue burden, including employers who have federal contracts that require a drug-free workplace and employers in the transpor-tation industry who are subject to Depart-ment of Transportation regulations, which forbid the use of marijuana by employees in safety-sensitive positions.

The case will now go back to the Supe-rior Court. Even if Barbuto loses, the Su-preme Judicial Court ruling is still a huge victory for medical marijuana patients. Em-ployers in Massachusetts are officially on notice that legitimate medical marijuana use by employees must be accommodated or must be proven to present an undue burden on the business.

Brenda Wells, Ph.D., is the Robert F. Bird Distinguished Professor of Risk and In-surance at East Carolina University and the owner of Risk Education Strategies. She has published articles on the risk management implications of cannabis legalization and is an expert in the risk management and insur-ance field. She can be reached at [email protected].

COURT FAVORS ACCOMMODATIONS FOR MEDICAL MARIJUANAMassachusetts court deems cannabis as lawful as other prescription medications BY BRENDA WELLS

n 2014, Cristina Barbuto told her new employer that she would flunk its mandatory pre-employment drug test, be-cause she had been using medical marijuana two to three times per week to manage her Crohn’s disease.

Hort Services

Method Seven

http://hortservicesinc.com

http://methodseven.com


Heavily-regulated industries leave

businesses vulnerable to internal sabotage.

The term “sabo-tage” evokes ideas of grand schemes and evil villains, but in the

cannabis industry, sabotage is generally done by petty former employees, current employees who feel they are being mis-treated, or greedy competitors. This makes hiring and location-siting two of the most important steps to a successful cannabis business.

As both a former enforcement officer for the Washington State Liquor and Can-nabis Board and a current corporate canna-bis attorney, I have seen a number of these incidents first-hand.

For example, one indoor grow oper-ation had a head grower who regularly failed to follow the regulations, leaving the business vulnerable to fines and penalties should an enforcement officer pop in for a surprise inspection. The business owners, after repeated warnings, were forced to fire the grower in an effort to avoid future vio-lations that were sure to happen with him there. Before leaving the licensed premis-es, while out of the owners’ direct line of sight, this grower went through the plants and began removing the tags and labels that identify each plant in the seed-to-sale tracking system. The owners did not realize this had happened and did not think to in-spect their entire premises after the grower was ousted. A few days later, an enforce-ment officer showed up in response to an anonymous complaint stating the business was not tagging its plants properly. Upon inspection, the enforcement officer found numerous violations and the business is now one or two violations away from po-tentially losing its license.

Alternatively, on the retail side, a fre-quent issue is employee theft. While theft

is a concern in all retail businesses, it is particularly problematic in cannabis, where every single piece of inventory is electroni-cally tracked throughout the plant’s growth and up to the point of sale. Cannabis re-tailers are at the mercy of their employees when it comes to inventory. Generally, en-forcement officers have the right to inspect the inventory count in a retail store without notice and if the physical count does not match the electronic records, the licensee receives a violation for failing to maintain its inventory and tracking system. In one instance, I saw a retail store’s inventory count off by nearly 1,000 items due to fre-quent employee theft.

While many prob-lems are created by bad employees or poor management, most are discovered due to industry sab-otage rather than in-tentional employee sabotage. In Wash-ington, for instance, it is a well-known, though impossible to prove, stance that many anonymous complaints are sent to enforcement offi-cers by competing cannabis business own-ers. This is especially true of retail stores. Many stores I have worked with tell sim-ilar stories about an unusually large num-ber of visits from enforcement officers in response to anonymous complaints, often after a good month of sales and generally with very specific requests. Officers are re-quired to verify the validity of each anon-ymous complaint and, due to the number of regulations and requirements placed on cannabis businesses, there is likely to be at least one violation at any given time if an officer is diligent enough.

There is a common thread among canna-bis industry members that shows a consistent

vision and desire to see cannabis legalized and available to the public, either due to its medicinal properties or purely for pleasure. However, it is still a business and, as such, attracts bad actors and destructive business practices. A large number of licensed can-nabis businesses — whether they are run by individuals who were actively involved in medical operations or newcomers with al-truistic intentions — love what they do and truly care for their industry, customers and/or patients. On the flip side, a similarly large number of cannabis businesses are owned and operated by those who saw the cannabis industry solely as a money-making opportu-nity and would rather see their competition crash and burn than worry about the public’s access to cannabis products.

What can be done then to protect your business? First, take your hiring practices seriously. Even the lowest-paid, part-time worker in a cannabis business has the pow-er to impair the license. If they are not dil-

igent in their work or are never taught the regulations they are required to follow, they are sure to miss something that will result in a violation when an enforcement officer drops by. Sec-ond, while we live in a capitalist society, remember that this industry is still new and in a precarious position. By calling

in fake complaints about competitors or at-tempting to get other businesses in trouble, the whole industry looks less secure, which could, in turn, be detrimental to other legal-ization efforts or lead to enhanced regula-tions in your area.

Matthew Cleary is an attorney at Van Kampen & Crowe PLLC, practicing busi-ness and transactional law in the cannabis industry. He has represented dozens of can-nabis businesses in all stages of development, as well as advising ancillary businesses at-tempting to reach the cannabis market. Be-fore practicing law, he was an enforcement officer for the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board. ([email protected])

Sabotage is a major concern for cannabis companiesGreedy competitors and disgruntled employees pose threats By Matthew Cleary

TAKE YOUR HIRING PRACTICES SERIOUSLY. EVEN

THE LOWEST-PAID, PART-TIME WORKER

IN A CANNABIS BUSINESS HAS THE POWER TO IMPAIR

THE LICENSE.

“

LEGAL PAGES

Vital Garden Supply

North Country Dis-tributors

http://vitalgardensupply.com

http://ncdwashington.com


Meaningful ex-pansions to the

medical cannabis pro-grams in New York and New Jersey have finally arrived.

Since the imple-mentation of their re-

spective programs, the health departments in both states have been continually criti-cized for the lack of patient access and qual-ity, consistent and affordable medication. But both state agencies have taken action to expand their programs and are asking the public to weigh in on further proposed regulatory modifications designed to in-crease both supply and demand.

NEW YORKThe original five registered organizations

permitted by the state to grow, process and sell certain (non-flower) cannabis products attempted to block the New York Department of Health from issuing licenses to five new organizations (those that placed 6-10 in the state’s notoriously rigorous and expensive application process).

But in August, the state announced the is-suance of new licenses anyway. The follow-ing organizations are preparing to open up to 20 new dispensaries: Citiva Medical, Fiorello Pharmaceuticals, New York Canna, PalliaT-ech and Valley Agriceuticals.

Valley Agriceuticals was recently ac-quired by Canada’s iAnthius (CSE: IAN) (OTCQB: ITHUF), a publicly traded fund with multiple cannabis holdings in the U.S. The $17.3 million deal was comprised of $2.3 million in cash and $15 million in iAn-thius stock and includes real estate and a cul-tivation facility.

The state and medical cannabis propo-nents hope the addition of five new registered organizations will increase competition, quality, product variety and geographic dis-tribution, while also reducing prices. Plus, the state Department of Health also made

changes to increase demand by adding chron-ic pain as a qualifying condition, allowing nurse practitioners and physician assistants to recommend medical cannabis, permitting home delivery and publishing a list of reg-istered physicians. In addition, the inclusion of post-traumatic stress disorder has been ap-proved by the Senate and the Assembly, but awaits Governor Andrew Cuomo’s signature.

According to the state Department of Health, as of Aug. 8, there were 1,155 physi-cians registered to recommend medical can-nabis to New Yorkers, and 26,561 patients have enrolled in the program — a whopping 77% increase since the inclusion of chronic pain in late March.

Riding this momentum, the state proposed in mid-August a series of additional improve-ments to the program, designed to improve the experience for patients, practitioners and registered organizations. The state hopes to: (a) expand the variety of medical prod-ucts available to patients to include topicals (lotions, ointments and patches), chewable and effervescent tablets and lozenges and non-smokable forms of ground plant matter; (b) allow prospective patients (accompanied by people other than their designated caregiv-ers) and practitioners to visit dispensaries and speak directly with principals for educational purposes; (c) offering a truncated two-hour course for practitioners to register (in addi-tion to the current four-hour course); and (d) implement a variety of other enhancements, including broadening marketing capabilities, streamlining manufacturing requirements, amending security requirements and clarify-ing laboratory testing requirements.

These proposed regulations were slated for publication Aug. 23 and subject to a 30-day comment period prior to adoption.

NEW JERSEYThe New Jersey Department of Health re-

ceived a formal recommendation in late July on behalf of the Medicinal Marijuana Review Panel to add certain debilitating conditions to

the list of qualifying conditions for medical cannabis under the Compassionate Use of Marijuana Act, including chronic pain relat-ed to musculoskeletal disorders, migraines, anxiety, chronic pain of visceral origin and Tourette’s syndrome.

To support this proposed expansion, the panel is considering a variety of statutory factors, including: the extent to which such conditions, and corresponding evidence of the medical efficacy of cannabis to treat those conditions, are generally accepted by the medical community, and the availability of conventional therapies to alleviate the suf-fering caused by such conditions. The recom-mendations were posted on July 21 and re-mained open to public comment for 60 days.

In addition, in early August, the state ap-proved licensure of Harmony Foundation in northern New Jersey, bringing the total num-ber of vertically integrated “alternative treat-ment centers” to six, which will produce and sell medical cannabis to patients in the 11th most populous state in the U.S. To date, there are more than 13,000 New Jersey patients and 620 caregivers enrolled in the program.

The expansion of the state’s medical program, however, is overshadowed by the prospect of an adult-use program. Gover-nor Chris Christie, a long-time opponent of medical cannabis, will be replaced in 2018, and the gubernatorial front-runner, Demo-crat Phil Murphy (D), seeks to prioritize im-plementing an adult-use program as among the first orders of business. Numerous law-makers also support regulating cannabis like alcohol, with Senate president Steve Swee-ney telling local media he’s “1,000%” in fa-vor of legalization.

As seen in states that have “gone rec,” existing medical providers would be per-mitted to immediately begin sales under the new initiative.

The uptick in activity in the Empire and Garden states is a boon to the industry and long overdue.

Lauren Rudick represents investors and startup organizations in all aspects of business and intellectual property law, specializing in cannabis, media and technology. Her law firm, Hiller, PC (www.hillerpc.com), is a white-shoe boutique firm with a track record for success and handling sophisticated legal matters that include business and corporate law.

Cannabis advancements in New York and New JerseyGarden State lawmakers support adult-use lawsBy Lauren Rudick

LEGAL PAGES

Netafim

Gleam Law

Picatti Brothers

http://netafimusa.com

http://gleamlaw.com

http://picatti.com/growing


California’s canna-bis entrepreneurs

and investors have cir-cled Jan. 1, 2018 on their calendar. It marks the official opening of California’s fully-legal, state-licensed, medici-

nal and recreational cannabis market. Heralded by analysts’ predictions of

sustained double-digit growth and $6.5 billion in annual revenue, expectations are high that the new market in California will generate enormous profits for those well-positioned to participate in it.

Yet, California already has a $2.8 bil-lion medicinal cannabis market — one built around a closed circuit of nonprofit collectives developed before cannabis en-tered the mainstream. Transforming that model into the golden goose anticipated by new investors will prove much more diffi-cult than turning the calendar page.

In 2004, to provide a more robust legal framework for widespread medicinal use, the state Legislature passed the Medical Marijuana Program Act (MMPA), which may have raised more questions than it an-swered.

The MMPA allowed medical marijuana cardholders to form cooperatives and “col-lectives” to grow, distribute and dispense cannabis. The act also imposed a strict prohibition on any for-profit cultivation or distribution, which remains California law today.

In 2008, California’s attorney general issued guidelines that became the roadmap for the state’s burgeoning medical marijua-na industry, noting that the MMPA’s col-lectives have no actual legal definition in state law. Nevertheless, cardholders could form business entities to act as collectives conducting medicinal marijuana activities. All participants in such activities had to be members of the collective and all cul-tivation, distribution and consumption had

to take place within a “closed circuit” of members.

The risk of noncompliance with these guidelines was criminal prosecution. In this uncertain environment, California’s medicinal marijuana pioneers stepped from the market shadows and into the cold light of corporate law. Corporations have been formed since medieval times to raise capital, mitigate risk and limit liability for business ventures. Shareholders receive a saleable interest in the corporation, a vote on corporation affairs and the right to sue if it is not run properly.

California’s Corporations Code estab-lishes various corporate forms for new ventures. Each offers degrees of flexibility in, for example, writing and amending by-laws; establishing ownership classes with different voting rights; and determining taxation.

One form is the nonprofit mutual ben-efit corporation (NMBC). The NMBC, most common among homeowners’ asso-ciations and professional organizations, became prevalent for California’s medical marijuana collectives. For early adopters, its attraction was simply having the word “nonprofit” in its name — all the better to satisfy MMPA compliance. The NMBC also lends itself to a membership model and, by statute, cannot distribute profits. Therefore, it most closely resembles the collective chimera invoked by the MMPA.

With NMBCs proliferating, the market grew exponentially and cannabis moved inexorably toward legalization. Today, NMBCs often hold precious local permits, own the strongest brands and will receive priority in the 2018 state-licensing applica-tion process. They are consequently prime targets for investors eying the potentially lucrative future.

But the nature of the NMBC entity and the concerns that motivated their founders do not necessarily lend themselves to a quick sale or an injection of capital from a

profit-motivated investor. NMBCs can neither issue shares nor

distribute profits. While they can sell assets or merge with another entity (including for-profit entities), such transactions may require a vote of the members. Considering a collective’s membership may include ev-ery patient, provider, vendor and employee that has participated in its activities, such votes may be difficult, expensive and un-certain.

Moreover, a right that NMBC mem-bers have in common with shareholders of for-profit corporations is the right to sue. So-called derivative lawsuits allege claims on a corporation’s own behalf, usu-ally against its own managers. In merger and acquisition cases, derivative suits of-ten allege that managers have engaged in self-dealing, made inadequate or deceptive disclosures, circumvented shareholder ap-proval, or offered unfair value in exchange for corporate assets or to shareholders los-ing their stakes.

Sometimes they are right. Often though, these are meritless “strike suits” brought by enterprising lawyers to extract legal fees by obstructing legitimate deals. Certainly, this is the view of commentators who bemoan that more than 90% of all mergers and ac-quisitions involving public companies in the U.S. now face a derivative lawsuit. Lit-igating and resolving derivative suits has become a cost of doing business.

The difficulties of any deal aiming to transform an NMBC into a for-profit entity will depend largely on the bylaws, mem-bership and voting structure of the non-profit in question — and those vary widely. With so many NMBC members as potential plaintiffs, the risk of derivative litigation is high, irrespective of how well thought-out the transaction may be.

Investors and managers looking for profits in 2018 should prepare accordingly.

Anthony Phillips is a founding mem-

ber of the cannabis law practice at Ar-cher Norris, which provides transactional and litigation services and legal advice to businesses in California’s legal cannabis industry. Archer Norris has more than 75 attorneys and four offices throughout Cali-fornia. He can be reach via email at [email protected].

Changing Shape: Nonprofits prep for the for-profit worldCalifornia collectives face a difficult transformationBy Anthony Phillips

LEGAL PAGES

KryptAll

GSB Law

Shirreff Insurance

http://gsblaw.com/industries/cannabis/

http://facebook.com/Shirreff-Insurance-Agency-160414610647603/

Clean Green Certified

Arbico Organics

Great Northern Dunnage

http://cleangreencert.com

http://cleangreencert.com


P.O.V. P.O.V. is a monthly section in Marijuana Venture showing images of operational cannabis businesses throughout the U.S. and Canada. To submit photos for consideration in future issues email: [email protected].


Marijuana Venture sales manager Lisa Smith (left) and hemp activist Joy Beckerman (center), pose for a photo with Senator Maria Cantwell at a fundraiser hosted by Marijuana Venture publisher Greg James at his home in Washington. James hosted the fundraiser to bring dozens of industry members together for a chance to show the senator how important cannabis is to the state economy. Below: Senator Cantwell addresses the dozens of cannabis industry representatives from across Washington that met at James’ home in August.

P.O.V.

GrassHopper Hub’s Heidi Arsenault (right) worked for Maria Cantwell at the tech firm Real Networks in the 1990s. During the fundraiser, industry participants like attorney Hal Snow had an opporunity to talk business (below, left) while others, including Byron Miller and Buffalo Mazzetti (below, right), were able to pose for photos with the three-term senator.


Sticker You

Energy Trust

Yarbro Auc-tioneers

P.O.V.


WWW.MARIJUANAVENTURE.COM 157 WWW.MARIJUANAVENTURE.COM 157

Crowds line up for the 26th annual Seattle Hempfest “protestival” that took over Myrtle Edwards Park on Aug. 18-20, and featured music, booths from law firms and small vendors alike, as well as after-hours parties that included photo booths for attendees.

GTH Law

Flying Skull

High Growth CPA

http://gth-law.com

http://flyingskull.net

http://highgrowthcpa.com


MARIJUANA VENTURE ADVERTISER DIRECTORY

Business IntelligenceCannabis Benchmarks��30Headset ��131

Consulting/educationBridge West ��28Canna Ventures ��115Clean Green Certified ��152Pincus Pro ��143

ContractorsPicatti Brothers ��149

DistributorsVital Garden Supply ��147

Employment Services420 Careers ��31

EventsInterchange Fall ‘17 ��27MJ Business Conference ��20RAD Expo ��40, 56

Extraction EquipmentAcross International ��162Apeks Supercritical ��25Eden Labs ��96Precision Extraction ��125

Financial ServicesCannabiz Collects��22High Growth CPA ��158Mom & Pop Business Funding ��19

GreenhousesGrowers Supply ��45Hort Services ��145Next G3N ��161Nexus ��43

Growing equipmentAccelerated Growth Solutions ��72Aessence ��123AiroClean420 ��11Air-Pot ��135BOLD Light Deprivation ��129High Caliper Growing System ��121HydroLogic ��76Left Coast Wholesale ��35

NCFI Polyurethane ��67Puradigm Solutions ��69Rambridge ��105Surna ��119

Heating/coolingData Aire ��63

InsuranceShirreff Insurance ��151

Investment OpportunitiesAvailable: MA Facility ��152The Land Man Office ��73Yarbro Auctioneers ��155

LegalGleam Law ��149Gordon Thomas Honeywell Law ��158GSB Law ��151

LightingCalifornia Lightworks �� 9Forever Green Indoors ��48LightRail ��118Nanolux Technology �� 1NCWGS �� 7Sinowell ��94

Misc.Energy Trust ��155LVC Deals ��39Method Seven ��145

PackagingAssurpack ��124Cannaline ��36Futurola �� 4Kush Bottles ��117Maverick Label ��26Sticker You ��155VC999 ��79WeighPack ��109

Producer/processorsKushy Punch �� 2

Retail services/equipmentBud Bar Displays ��143

SecurityKryptAll ��151Salient Systems ��23

SeedsCrop King ��12Seeds Here Now ��71

Soil/nutrients/pesticidesArbico Organics ��152Berger �� 3Bio Nova ��55Flying Skull ��158Lambert Peat Moss ��15Miller Soils ��137Mills Nutrients ��29Netafim ��149North Country Distributors ��147Rx Green Solutions ��61West Coast Horticulture ��113

Testing LabsConfidence Analytics ��141

TransportationCampbell Nelson ��62

TrimmingCenturion Pro ��33GreenBroz ��17Speedee Trim ��142Trimpro ��93Twister Trimmer ��47

Back issues of Marijuana Venture are available. Send an email to [email protected] or

check out www.marijuanaventure.com for details.


US $7.99 / CAN $9.99

JULY 2017


INVESTING IN CANADA’S LUCRATIVE MARIJUANA INDUSTRY

BUYING A BUSINESSStress-free guide to joining the green rush

Exclusive interview with the state’s new pot czar

FULL-SPEED AHEAD IN CALIFORNIA

TIPS14 For controlling russet mites organically

JUL cover.indd 12

6/2/17 10:38 AM


US $7.99 / CAN $9.99

JUNE 2017

AWARD-WINNING NATIONAL CANNABIS BUSINESS MAGAZINEVENTUREVENTUREAWARD-WINNINGAWARD-WINNING NATIONAL

NATIONAL CANNABISCANNABIS BUSINESS

BUSINESS MAGAZINEMAGAZINE

Doctors, growers,

retailers and more

are pioneering the

marijuana industry

THE GREEN PAGES:

Importance of sustainability and consumer education

spurs the rising demand for organic cannabis

Inside Canada’s

most innovative

production facility

CANNABIS IN

CANADA

CALIFORNIA’S FASTEST-GROWING CLONE FACTORY

JUN cover.indd 19

4/28/17 1:38 PM


PHOTO OF THE MONTH

Submit entries for Marijuana Venture’s photo of the month to [email protected]. We’re looking for the most interesting, unusual and just plain beautiful photos from any sector of the legal cannabis industry. You never know — your submission may end up on the cover!

Eclipse FeverThe moon begins to move in front of the sun during the Aug. 21 solar eclipse, as seen from a farm in Southern Oregon. Though the path of totality passed through the Beaver State, thankfully the

brief darkness was not enough to affect the light cycles of cannabis plants. Photo by Joey Benjamin

Next G3N

http://nextg3ngreenhouse.com

Across International

http://acrossinternational.com

Marijuana Venture

Documents

Transcript of Marijuana Venture