When I was trying cannabis for the first time in university, our 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 absolutely figured that our house state wouldn’t have legal weed for another decade because every one of us are firmly entrenched in the south. For that reason mainly, I focused on applying to graduate universitys in states that already had legal marijuan industries. Sadly, I wasn’t accepted and had to attend graduate university near our undergraduate university. That meant staying in the same state for at least another year and this wasn’t our initial method or preference. But by some divine intervention, our state legalized cannabis for medical use just a single year later. Suddenly I had a medical cannabis card and could shop at all of the legal weed stores in our state. I started to wonder about working in the cannabis industry again, despite being in university to earn a PhD at the time. However, when I saw that licenses for cannabis dealers had climbed over $100,000, that dream abruptly evaporated. I did some research and l received the painful truth about the corporatization of the cannabis industry. Some states still have marijuana markets that foster small and medium sized businesses, but our 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 many retail stores. The more than one have to be combined under a single contractor named. It’s annoying when you want better selection for cannabis products in your house state.