On behalf of myself and the early California cannabis businesses, the ones you were seeing all over mainstream news in the early 2000s, you’re welcome, and I apologize. We led the rest of the world to believe that the cannabis plant was a money tree that could make anyone rich. 

When my partner Ricardo and I opened California Healthcare Collective (CHC), the first dispensary in California’s Central Valley in 2004, we began making so much cash we had to rent a house just to count, store, and manage it. I write about this in my book High Price (you can read about it here) and feature scenes based on it in the music video for Business Man. 

Now, nearly twenty years later, everyone is trying to get their piece of the pie. The narrative that cannabis would make individuals, private businesses, and governments rich was certainly the most compelling, but not the most accurate, way to sell legalization to the public. Legacy operators who grew and sold good cannabis and pushed the boundaries to make it legal for everyone must now exist side-by-side with corporations owned by the same people who profited from locking people up for “cannabis crimes.” 

With the amount of investment flowing into them, big corporations have tried to dominate the market by shaping legislation in the individual states. Still, they have never been able to compete with many legacy operators when it comes to high-quality cannabis because they don’t understand just how much consumers value it when they know the difference. This is why, despite legalization in states like New York and Ohio, California weed is still sold in all 50 states and various other countries. 

The cannabis industry before legalization allowed people who worked hard and made a good product to thrive as a sustaining small business, but most of these new state markets have very high barriers to entry. When we started CHC, the most significant barrier to entry was fear of the federal government enforcing federal law. As a result of the very real fears of the consequences of going public, very few people did. CHC was the only dispensary for a 100-mile radius at the time and was the only access point for millions of customers. And while what we made in a year was a flash in the pan to a major corporation today, it was life-changing for our families and community. 

The reality is that the more competition there is, the less money we will all make. That’s ok, though, because competition fuels innovation and results in a wide variety of choices for consumers. As markets mature and more consumers recognize the difference in quality, there is an opportunity to reward the small, legacy, and quality-focused producers holding on tight for federal law and interstate commerce laws to change. 

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