When I was trying cannabis for the first time in school, my friends and I all wanted to get into the marijuana industry. Both of us talked about moving out west where cannabis was legal at the time. I entirely 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 school. 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 a single 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 laboring in the cannabis industry again, despite being in school to acquire 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 l acquired the painful truth about the corporatization of the cannabis industry. Some states still have marijuana markets that foster small and medium sized businesses, however my state has forced vertical integration. You cannot operate as a cannabis company in this state unless you grow and sell all of your products personally. That means you don’t have growers selling to several retail stores. The more than one have to be combined under a single company named. It’s aggravating when you want better selection for cannabis products in your home state.