Hey, young America, we need to talk about something called grass.
Not that grass.
I'm talking about marijuana.
It's stimulating, mind expanding, safer to use that alcohol. It's the ind thing, the hula hoop of the jet generation, and as much a part of growing up as smoking cornsilk behind the back fence. Such are the myths concerning marijuana, myths that low thousands of young people into experimenting with a noxious weed. The facts are otherwise. Marijuana is an intoxicating, mind muddling drug. Every case history tells the same story, a story that's a tragic pattern of men and women's
lives cause marijuana. This harmless looking cigarette is cloaked in many innocent disguises, but like the man sho inhale the smoke and it becomes an invitation to your own murder. This killer and the man who sells it has no respect for anybody.
That's how the US has largely campaigned against marijuana, from the regular television ads to PSAs straight from the American Medical Association, and even movies. That last clip you heard is from the nineteen forty nine movie She Should Have Said No. Also known as wild weed. It's one of those movies that's filled with messages about how bad drugs and especially marijuana really are, watching morality tales like she should have said. No, they're not very subtle in their messaging.
No they're not a lot of the messaging around weed has been about how bad it is for your health, your youth, your overall life direction, and that has perpetuated the notion that those who deal in the industry are basically criminals and terrible people. And it's kind of crazy to contrast those movies with what's happening now. So what's it like running a weed truck.
Well, you know, it's pretty fun. You got some free samples from it, that's for sure. We've had a couple of customers come up and they're like, can I smoke this? Like is this okay to do? And it's like they're not used to it, and they think it's still, you know, this forbidden thing. But then we have customers who are like, oh, yeah, this is great to see that it's finally stortying to open up.
That's a bud tender. Get it at a local weed truck in New York and those have become as ubiquitous on Manhattan streets as hot dog carts or ice cream vendors, and she says attitudes towards pot have changed a lot. You still have people who can't believe that this is legal, but she says she sees all types of people coming to buy weed nowadays, even parents with their adult children.
Welcome back to pot lots. We've talked about the illicit market in New York and the business of legal weed, and in this episode, we're going to be speaking about one of the things that makes New York unique because not all is the state trying to use legalized lead to raise tax revenue and create a new industry with lots of jobs. It's also trying to use the program to rectify some of the wrongs of the past.
Two historical policies were particularly damaging to black and brown communities across the state. The first is the Rockefeller drug laws, and Governor Rockefeller at the time, you know, there was a big panic across the country about drugs and drug use, and you know, those drug laws really created these insanely harmful mandatory minimum sentences for minor possession in the sale of elicit drugs. And the second thing was stop and frisk that Stamian Fagan.
He probably has one of the most interesting government jobs in the world right now. He's Chief Equity Officer at New York's Office of Cannabis Management, so he thinks about this idea of social justice a lot, as well as
the legacy of previous drug policies. Former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller toughened up punishment for drug offenses in the nineteen seventies in response to a crime wave in the city, and stop in frisk, which allowed New York police officers to temporarily detain people and check them for contraband, was practiced for many years, including under Mike Bloomberg's tenure as mayor. Bloomberg is of course the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP.
And so the combination of the Rockfeller drug laws and stop in frisk led to people spending years in prison for minor cannabis possession and predominantly, you know, with the implementation of stop and frisk, you know, we have all the numbers now, one point two million individual arrests over forty years. Almost close to sixty percent of those arrested were black in a state that is fifteen percent black.
This is the kind of injustice that New York's legalized weed program is trying to address. So when it comes to handing out weed licenses, priority is given to people with prior pot related convictions or their relatives, as well as nonprofits. Some of the taxes from legal weed sales are also being used for reinvestment fund that's supposed to be used to support communities that have been most affected by the War on drugs.
The biggest social equity goal laid out in the cannabis laws fifty percent licenses going to social equity applicants. The second biggest component of it is this community Reinvestment fund, and so this is probably for me, the most impactful part of the cannabis law. Forty percent of all the tax revenue generated in perpetuity in the state of New York from cannabis sales will get reinvested into communities disproportionally
impacted by the enforcement disapportion enforcement of cannabis. And so that looks like three hundred million dollars a year for you know, decades, every year being given out in grants for re entry services, nonprofits, park projects, schools in those communities in places like East Brooklyn, South Bronx East Buffalo, and that is where the impact is really going to be felt long term, that's going to create generational opportunity
for a lot of these communities. And so those are the two pillars, the fifty percent licenses in the reinvestment. And so these were tools that were really weaponized against already marginalized communities for decades. And you know when things like that happen in America and we look back and we're like, wow, I can't believe we did that. Oh well, let's move forward, like we couldn't do that this time.
Those people who are arrested, those people who you know, had to see their kids through a glass because they were smoking a plant outside of Nightja housing, you know, they're still here. They're still their kids are here, their families are here. They're mad. And so it's often very easy and convenient for Americans to sort of just like, oh, it's really bad that we did that, but can't do
anything better now. But we absolutely can. This cannabis law isn't actually going to fix a lot of the structural issues and all the consequences of those policies, but it can definitely make life better for a lot of these communities, and it definitely can create a more exciting industry with a lot more participation from everyday New Yorkers.
For New York, it means walking a fine line between nurturing this new legal industry and making sure it can succeed, and also avoiding going back to the injustices of the past by cracking down too harshly on the illicit sellers.
Now Damien betting that some of this will happen naturally. It is the legal weed business matures. Consumers will migrate towards the regulated shops and product.
If you build the legal weed bodega, they will come.
We're never going back to a place where people go behind bars for selling a plant. We're just we're not doing that as a state. It's already re traumatizing people the minimal of enforcement tactics we're doing right now. But what we are going to do is we're going to look at the scale of the challenge of the illicit
market very differently. So what we've seen in other states is that as you increase the legal footprint of your legal market and you give consumers safe, tested, affordable legal product on their corners, the illicit market fades into the background. At a certain point, these guys are going to look like they're selling bath to bourbon outside of a liquor store, and consumers are just not going to go for it.
They're not going to go for a place or a store that you know can't tell them where they got the product from and it's in a grocery bag, when there's a place right next door that's selling safe, tested product from a family farm that you know upstate. And so that's on us in a lot of ways to step up the rollout of these legal options because New Yorkers are going to smoke weed, and if they don't have a legal place to buy it, these stores will proliferate.
So we have to meet that demand where it's at a lot of people think that this is enforcement challenge, but it's actually just a timing challenge. Eventually, these stores will just supply and demand will remove them for us. And then the second thing is consumer education. I don't think people understand how expensive it is for the City of New York or Schenectady to send five police officers to a shop to bag and tag all the product in there, to write it up, to issue a summons.
Sett in competition from the illicit market. Aside, there are other impediments for people who want to open a legal weed business, and by extension, impediments for New York social justice ambition when it comes to weed.
We touched on this a bit in our first episode, but getting a license and setting up a brick and mortar business isn't cheap, and it might be especially difficult for the people that New York is trying to give priority to.
The cost of entering this space is central to the lack of demographic diversity in ownership in the industry. And so when I look at the demographics of ownership across the state, across the country, I'm seeing the racial wealth gap. I'm not seeing a competitive market where the best got to the top. It's really who had access to private capital at the time of legalization in their state respective state.
And so when we the designers of the cannabis law in New York, were looking at other markets, one market jumped out to them as more accessible, more stable, and more consumer friendly than any other state, and that's Washington State. Washington State has a two tier market, so they separated retailers from producers, essentially banning vertical integration in the cannabis space. Much of the reasons for doing stuff like this is the same reasons you wouldn't want Jack Daniels opening up
a liquor store right after prohibition. You're never going to get better whiskeys. You're just going to get Jack Daniels because they control everything in the supply chain and eventually would consolidate the market. And so by creating that two
tier structure, you're creating access points for small business. So now instead of having to do the grow, processing, manufacturing, distribution, and retail in a twenty million dollar business, you can just do the distribution facility for half a million dollars. You can get a retail store in Schenectady for half a million dollars. You could start a farm for one
hundred thousand dollars. There's access points for small business operators in a two tier market that they wouldn't normally have access to in a vertically integrated industry.
But for Damien, if New York can get it right, if it can use the legal weed industry to try to begin to address some of the social inequities of the past, then that makes sense, not just from a social justice perspective, but also from a business one.
He says New York wants to create a vibrant and stable marijuana industry, one where there are lots of small scale, independent operators rather than a few dominant players. Think of a vibrant craft beer scene rather than a few big corporate beer brands. And he's looking to Washington State as a blueprint of how New York can achieve.
This what we want the New York market to look like. I think that when people were drafting the MRTA and drafting our canabis regulations and looking at Washington State, we were also looking at the economic data from what is now a legal market that's eight years old in Washington. So when Washington first legalized, they had thirteen hundred farmers growing cannabis across the state. They had growed about five hundred retail stores. Eight years after legalization, they have eleven
hundred and fifty farmers. So that's a stable marketplace. After almost a decade, they've barely consolidated their production footprint. Those farmers are still making good money. Another big data point that we looked at in Washington State is skews. You know how many products are on the shelves on average in each dispensary, and in Washington State there's on average
seventeen hundred different products in each dispensary. We compared that to say Florida, where you know, they have a medical cannabis market that very much for all intensive purposes acts like a recreational market. They have on average seventy products per store. And that is a consequence of vertical integration
versus a two tier market. And so that's what we're really looking for to judge our success is diversity of consumer experiences, diversity of products, diversity of participation on the brand side and on the production side. In terms of business ownership, ultimately, you know, we want large operators, medium sized operators, and thousands of small businesses to be competing interdependently on one another in a very dynamic supply chain.
We see this as a huge opportunity for New York to put its cultural stamp on cannabis.
But this is all still very new, and Damien stresses that the work is ongoing. If President Biden were to decide to reschedule marijuana as a Class one drug, New York State's entire calculus for how this is meant to work could change, and so could its business plans.
What you've seen so far, what you will see in the coming years from our office and from all Benny generally about cannabis is it's the most flexible you'll ever see government. And that is because, you know, one, because it's a brand new industry, and we have to be able to respond to the dramatically changing landscape of legal cannabis. You know, President Biden could reschedule next week and it would completely change the calculus of a lot of our programming.
You know, we could see interstate commerce before federal legalization, and that would also completely change the dynamics of how businesses in New York operate. And so we have to be prepared to respond to all these changing dynamics. There's also no blueprint for how to do this right. And I really want to stress that is that you know, majority of other states who have launched illegal cannabis industries, they're not great industries.
But even if New York is successful in all these ambitious goals, we're talking about decades of harm that were done to minorities and marginalized communities.
So I met people up there who'd been resting five six seven times over the course of ten years. You know, almost every time they stepped out of their house, there was a cop there waiting for them to pat them down because they smelled cannabis and arrest them. And so people looking me dead in the eye and saying, like, you know, if you gave me a license and a million dollars, it would not make up for like the years I missed with my kid. What you're doing isn't enough.
And so I've had a lot of those interactions with not you know, and these aren't young people. These are fifty sixty year old men who are who have been struggling to get back on track ever since some of those arrests. I think about them a lot of my work because it just makes me want to go harder.
This is cost Marte. When Damien talks about people who have been repeatedly arrested for pot with police, for instance, waiting outside their houses to catch them, this is kind of who he's talking about. Costs was arrested multiple times for drug dealing and even went to prison for many years.
I grew up in a neighborhood that I was being stopped multiple times per day sometimes, you know, it was a normalcy where I could just be walking to school and have a bag of weed on me, and I'm being placed on the wall, now being searched, now that being incarcerated, now going through the system. I've been arrested a nine times total, and it became something that I felt normalized but also traumatized in a sense because I
had to find better ways to hide my weed. If I would have grown up probably in Scars Day in Westchester, I would not worry where I would carry my weed at.
You know.
Sometimes I had to hide it in my underwear or you know, stash it in different spots because I felt like, all right, there's a cop there, I gotta be careful, you know, or I got to walk a certain way. I can't even smoke in the streets. Even today, when I walk down and I see an NYPD officer, I feel like I'm doing something wrong because I was targeted so many times. I mean I got stopped by cops
over total hundred times. I served a total of six years in prison for dealing drugs, for dealing in marijuana. It was troubling because I feel traumatized. This has not only affected myself, but also if the family members that I had to experience this by visiting me in Ryker's Island multiple times. My son who grew up talking to me through a payphone while I was incarcerated. It's just a crazy system.
When COST got out of prison, the former drug kingpin transformed his entrepreneurial experience and his newfound appreciation for working out into a gym business called con Body. Then he watched as New York made an announcement after announcement about its legal weed plans.
I went into prison for running a multimillion dollar drug business. We had a delivery service generating about five million dollars of revenue. I was profiting about two million dollars myself between my partner and I back then, and I was sentenced to seven years in prison. And what we did. We had a delivery service. We had dispatchers, we had runners, we had even texters in the visuals that we had
to hire so we could do personal text messages. Because we didn't have these touch screen phones like today where we could send a text message right away. We had to literally hold on the number two to spend to spell the letter A, and that took three seconds at a time. But that's why I went to prison. I believe we're in a great state right now. There's no other state that has given an opportunity and first DIBs for formerly incarcery individuals to be the first one to market.
We've seen this time and time again where we see other states make the decision very complicated for people that been justice impacted to get involved with selling cannabis, and New York State is doing the reverse. They're allowing individuals that have been convicted also have previously ran a business be first in line and be first in line for a while. They're now ditting anybody else get in the industry for a year after we get in it. So I mean, I think it's a great opportunity for us
to jump on board. I was very excited to get on board early. I've been talking about criminal justice reform, marijuana reform for a very long time. I had a particular friend that was asking me to work and run one of his dispensaries in the state of Massachusetts, but they were not allowing me to work there because of my criminal record and conviction for cannabis, and so it was like a catch twenty two. I'm an expert in the field. You from my past experience, why can I
do this? And they changed that in Massachusetts today now they have a social equity program over there, But back then, I'm talking about five years ago, when they started first rolling this out, it was just deterring, and I started speaking on panels behind it, and I saw like I wanted to get into this industry and advocate for people
that have been justice impacted to be in there. First, I thought it was really unfair for these big operate usually white men, to run the industry when they had no experience in it and they're just looking to make a dollar. And this was a platform where we could be a voice for the formerly incarcerated, be a voice for individuals that been affected, whether it was being arrested or having a family member convicted for this and having done a deal with the I would say collateral consequences.
So years after serving that seven year prison sentence for dealing Costs is still in the drug business. He's still a dealer. The difference is now it's legal and he has a business called Kanbud and a team behind him. Meet the Kanbud co founders, Alfredo Angueira and Junior Martinez and together they've applied for and received a New York City license.
My name is Alfredo Angida. I am an attorney. My background phrenominantly was in economic development. Also assisted in mates on Records Island doing their pro state litigation motions, did a variety of things which ultimately led into me doing real estate and business. Currently, we own a couple of restaurants in the Bronx and now one of the founding partners of Combat and hopefully we'll be opening up a dispensary very soon.
My name is Junior Martinez. I come from the hospitality industry, multiple restaurants throughout New York City, Bronx, Manhattan, real estate background and born and raised in Harlem. When New York rode out and legalized marijuana and started rolling out the guidelines,
initially it spoke right to us. And once they started dishing out guidelines on their giving first option over to formerly convicted individuals of marijuana couse, Alfredo and I were sitting in a room and immediately we said, you know, let's go for this. Let's join forces and apply for one of the these licenses and hopefully we could get it because our qualifications were exactly what the guidelines were written for.
And so they teamed up with costs.
Cannabis is a billion dollar industry stop period, right, We all know this. So to get the opportunity as a business to get in on the ground floor on a billion dollar industry is huge. That's the changing of generational wealth for individuals who were impacted the most, for the individuals and the families who suffered the most from the War on drugs. So getting the opportunity to get in on the ground floor on that is game changing for everyone.
New York State, the current state of the cannabis market in New York State has been a little bit topsy turvy, and that's because they're going at it fast.
Right.
They have a social justice mission. They understand what that mission is to them, but to execute that in the timeframe that they want to execute it, there are a couple of loose ends, but they have a strong framework.
We asked them what the transition between a legal dealing and legal wead selling is actually like, because on the one hand, you can imagine guys like us have lots of experience with their product, but on the other hand, you have to imagine that some of the bureaucratic red tape and things like paying taxes are brand new and plus, of course they're still competing with the illicit sellers that we talked about on episode one.
There's a lot of transferable skills that I'm using from the streets to the legal game. I think the biggest differentiation is taxes. Now I'm paying them to taxes. But I mean I had to learn what the product was. I had to be educated on what is going to be doing to the consumer. I had to market it, I had to brand it. I had to do p and ls in a different type of way. I mean, today I obviously know how to read a balance sheet
in a P and L and how investment works. And in the streets, you know, it was a totally different way of investing. You know, maybe you get a friend who gives you some money and you pay them back
after time. It's a handshake deal. It's different when you're dealing on the corporate side, when you have legal paperwork to I mean, there's a lot of differences between both of them, but a lot of similarities and a lot of things that I could carry over from what I learned in the streets to the legal market.
I have to pay insurance for my workers. I have to make sure I have my workman's camp, I have my labor overhead, I have my inventory overhead, I have my taxes. On a business level, it is an unfair and unbalanced scale. Aside from the business aspect I had spoken to, it is a health issue, right, you don't know what you're getting. I'm from the Bronx, born and raised, my business partners from Harlem, my other business partners from
ls and we're both Afro Latino. That's how identify. We all identify as Afro Latino, which for those who may not know, is black and Latin. So we're from the hood. And you know, I grew up with nutcrackers, people selling alcohol out of a cooler on Dykeman and I never took one because that was made in your bathtub.
I really think that one those of us that have sold, we be for illegally. It'll be very hypocritical of us
to really knock it down. On the other side, if the state is coming in and giving you an opportunity to make money legitimate and giving you the resources there to transition from a legacy black market into a legitimate business, then it's very foolish of you to not take that route and be able to convert quickly and rapidly into a legal market where you could potentially build a multi million, multi billion dollar company. And that's the route that we have chosen.
In general, though, the combat team is excited for the opportunity and for what the future potentially holds. We actually spoke with them just after President Joe Biden announced a pardon of federal convictions for simple marijuana possession offenses in late twenty twenty two. It's a big deal for people like costs.
Criminal records from marijuana p possession have led the needless barriers to employment, to housing, educational opportunities. And that's before you address the racial disparities around who suffers the consequences. While white and black and brown people use marijuana at similar rates, black and brown people are arrested, prosecuted, and convicted at disproportionately higher rates. So today I'm taking three
steps to end this failed approach. First, I'm announcing a pardon for all prior federal offense federal offenses for the civil possession of marijuana or one thousand.
President Biden's pardon affects more than six five hundred people who were convicted for cannabis related crimes between nineteen ninety two and twenty twenty one.
I mean, well Biden has done. I think it's an incredible start. Still a lot of work to be done. He basically said he's going to release and part in all the individuals that have minor offenses. No one in federal prison has minor offenses. If you went to the Feds, you probably got caught with a lot of stuff, you know, So at first and foremost, so I don't think anybody with any amount of marijuana should be sitting in federal prison. Moving it from Schedule one would be a huge impact.
I mean, if they could change that, it could change a lot of stuff. We could talk about, like Safe Banking Act, where we'll be allowed to make transactions with regular bank. We had to sit with multiple banks and they're charging us a crazy amount just to hold our money. If we open up this dispensary because it's federally illegal, you know, so it'll be a huge move if we can make that happen. On on the Biden side, I
feel like it's an incredible opportunity. No matter what I feel like New York State is giving out some sort of reparation for the wrongs that they've done to people that have lived in these neighborhoods and people of color who've been targeted for years.
And on Broadway in downtown New York, there's a glimpse of the future. There's a line of people snaking outside of Housing Works, charity dedicated to helping people affected by HIV and homelessness. You might be asking yourself what the connection here is with weed, and the answer is destigmatizing drug use. It became the first legal recreational cannabis store to open its doors in December twenty twenty two after getting a license from the state.
It's been consistent business. I can't speak exactly to the amount of money that we've generated, but rest assured we have. We're about one hundred and fifty percent to our plan. We're killing our goals daily and monthly, and I'm really shocked by how much revenue we've generated over the past two months. It's really impressive and I'm happy that we're doing this for a clause.
Sasha Nugent is a retail manager and budmaster at Housing Works Cannabis Company. The dispensary is located just blocks away from Washington Square Park in Manhattan, where the illicit market is thriving and sellers like Charlie from Episode one, our selling product that's unregulated. And although business is going well for Housing Works, Sasha says, there are still challenges.
Number One, I don't know if people know, as far as New York regulations go, we can't do indoor grow, and I think that many customers are looking for that indoor grown cannabis from like a market like Los Angeles or California, rather New York is all out or grown. So that's kind of like eating at some of our profit. We have people who are die hard cannabis consumers that they love the cannabis from California, and it doesn't compare allegedly to the New York market, So that's kind of
a challenge that we have. Also, like the price points, we don't have it in our power to drop the price as low as the gray market area does, but we can guarantee that you're getting quality flower that's been tested for mold and pesticides, and you don't have to worry about it being tainted with anything else. So there's an upside with us having those regulations in place, but the downside is that we don't have as vast as a menu as the grain market areas do.
Not only has this dispensary seen competition from the legacy ilicit market, but meeting their own customer demand has been difficult.
There has been a struggle to meet demand, and that is due to there being i think only six labs that are open in New York State that are doing the testing, and so that becomes tricky when you have really large purchase orders to fulfill and the tests aren't coming back on time. So that is something that we ran into several times actually, and also another factor like
the weather. For example, we placed the purchase order for more edibles and more vade pens, and because they're upstate New York, there's a huge nor'easter winter storm advisory, so that kind of creates an issue with us getting our product on time and keeping products in stack.
Sasha says she's experienced challenges with banking. Many of the weed trucks, like the one we were at earlier in this episode. US creative workarounds to be able to charge customers using payment systems like stating cookies or China needs take out on the receipt. Because cannabis is still a Schedule one substance, many banks just don't want to touch it.
It was difficult finding a bank that would process our transactions. Also, we did run into an issue with our payroll provider that we work with throughout housing Words not accepting our payroll because of cannabis, So we had to find somebody who would support That was actually very tricky to navigate. That's another thing that you know, if it's betterly legal, we wouldn't have to deal with. I mean, that would be incredible because then we would be able to expand
our menu, expand our partnerships with vendors and cultivators. Aside from generating a lot of revenue, it would just be an overall positive thing.
I think it may be that New Yorkers have to sacrifice California grown weed in the name of both social justice and tax revenue, but for many that may be a reasonable price to pay in return for a safe and regulated market.
So, Joe, we have reached the end.
Of I'm really glad we did that. I found out to be a very fascinating conversation. It's you know, it's one of those things where I think people can imagine. It's like, yeah, we're going to open this new industry. There's lots of demand.
It's going to be worth billions.
It's going to be worth a lot of money. It's going to create jobs, it's going to create tax revenue. We're going to have an opportunity to redress the wrongs of the past. And it's I guess my big takeaway is that's way easier said than done.
Absolutely. I also think there's an interesting tension here between some of these social equity ambitions that New York has stated and actually letting some of those smaller scale dealers
out in the open. This is something that the weed seller we spoke to in Washington Square Park actually brought up this idea that, Hey, like, if you're talking about true social justice, letting this guy who was in jail, who used to be in shelters sell openly on the street and basically make a living, that's one way of doing it.
Yeah, And then the other hand is if they're going to I guess the way I'm thinking about it is they clearly want the sort of the new legal licensed dealers to succeed and I think it's really important for the state and for the ambitions that they do succeed because I mean, think about how perverse it would be to imagine you have people who have come out of
marginalized communities, many have spent time in prison. Then they go through this long process of trying to get a license, trying to get a place, significant legal costs, et cetera. It's pretty important for this state to just put them in an opportunity to succeed so that they're not further falling back or not further like you know, massive personal cost they're facing.
My other big takeaway, probably the biggest takeaway from talking to everyone here, is that this is still all developing out in the open, and tomorrow we could wake up and maybe there is that big change on a federal level which immediately changes everything.
To my mind, like that's still the huge sort of like mark structure game changer. And I think back to some of the things we talked about with Craig Wiggins and some of the investors, like we're nowhere close to having a Coca Cola of cannabis for better or worse, because every state is basically has to be within state and there's no national brands, and all kinds of issues
that arise with payments, cross state imports and exports. You know, there's still the whole challenge of the fact that the unlicensed shops have access to California product that the license don't, all kinds of like very interesting, tricky market structure issues, and the lack of federal legalization still just seems like this huge problem, even if in a scenario in which all fifty states eventually legalized.
It absolutely well. On that note, shall we leave it there.
Let's leave it there.
Potlots is a special limited run mini series presented to you by All Lots. I'm your host Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway, and.
I'm your other host, Jill Wysenthal. Follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. And for more Bloomberg coverage of the legal marijuana industry, you should check out The Dose Tiffany carries weekly newsletter about the business of cannabis and psychedelics. Subscribe at Bloomberg dot com.
Potlots is written and reported by me, Tracy Alloway, Carmen Rodriguez, and Joe Wisenthal.
And it was produced by Carmen. She is found on Twitter at Carmen Arman. Our associate producers are Dashel Bennett you can follow him at dashbod and Moses Adnan. The awesome intro in soundscaping was engineered by Blake Maples. Special thanks to Sage Bauman are Head of Podcasts, Jilda de Carly, Jacqueline Kessler, Carly Snyder, and Molly Nugent.
Thanks for listening.