When I was trying cannabis for the first time in college, my friends and I all wanted to get into the marijuana industry.
We talked about moving out west where cannabis was legal at the time.
I genuinely figured that my home state wouldn’t have legal weed for another decade because we are firmly entrenched in the south. For that reason mainly, I focused on applying to graduate schools in states that already had legal marijuan industries. Sadly, I wasn’t accepted and had to attend graduate school near my undergraduate college. That meant staying in the same state for at least another year and this wasn’t my initial plan or preference. But by some divine intervention, my state legalized cannabis for medical use just one year later. Suddenly I had a medical cannabis card and could shop at all of the legal weed stores in my state. I started to wonder about working in the cannabis industry again, despite being in school to earn a PhD at the time. However, when I saw that licenses for cannabis businesses had climbed over $100,000, that dream quickly evaporated. I did some research and learned the painful truth about the corporatization of the cannabis industry. Some states still have marijuana markets that foster small and medium sized businesses, but my state has forced vertical integration. You cannot operate as a cannabis business in this state unless you grow and sell all of your products personally. That means you don’t have growers selling to multiple retail stores. The two have to be combined under a single company named. It’s frustrating when you want better selection for cannabis products in your home state.