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Cannabis, Marijuana, Weed, Pot? Just Call It a Job
Posted by CN Staff on April 26, 2019 at 05:29:02 PT
By Conor Dougherty
Source: New York Times
San Francisco -- David Dancer is a 48-year-old marketing executive who has worked for big brands like Charles Schwab and Teleflora. A year ago, he got a call from a recruiter for a different kind of company: MedMen, a cannabis retailer that has been called “the Apple Store of weed.” The opening was for a chief marketing officer. He took it.One of Mr. Dancer’s early projects was a slick two-minute video by the director Spike Jonze that begins with an anecdote about George Washington as a hemp grower, a staple of dorm-room conversation. It concludes with a suburban couple coming home with a bright red bag of legally purchased pot, symbolizing “the new normal” — an ending that, like his own career twist, seemed improbable not long ago.
“It can and should be a part of anyone’s everyday life,” Mr. Dancer said in a recent interview, sounding very much like a man who has been hired to do marketing.Although cannabis remains illegal on the federal level, 33 states now allow its sale at least for medical purposes. Ten of them, including California, have legalized recreational use. And as new markets open and capital continues to flood in, the cannabis industry has become, by some measures, one of the country’s fastest-growing job sectors.The jobs range from hourly work at farms and stores to executive positions. They also span the country. Columbia Care, a medical cannabis company that is based in New York and has 500 employees, has indoor farms and manufacturing plants in Massachusetts, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Arizona and the District of Columbia.It’s hard to know exactly how many jobs there are in the legal cannabis business. The United States Labor Department collects data from cannabis farms and retailers, but does not provide figures for the industry. Still, listings for cannabis-related positions have rocketed to the top echelon of the fastest-growing-job categories on sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter.Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, said the company’s data put the number of cannabis jobs nationwide at 200,000 to 300,000. Most of those jobs are on the lower end of the pay scale, consisting of rote agricultural work like plant trimming ($10 to $15 an hour) and “budtenders” (about $25,000 a year), who help customers decide what kind of cannabis they want and then weigh and bag it.But as the industry expands, there has also been a strong demand for better-paid positions like chemists, software engineers, and nurses who consult with patients about using cannabis for anxiety and other medical conditions.“The early signs are that this will grow rapidly,” Ms. Pollak said.A few years ago, navigating the marijuana industry felt like a journey to the fringes of legitimacy. Cannabis-prescribing doctors set up shop in strip malls and record stores, or consulted with patients over brief video chats. Dispensaries were often in barred storefronts, and their employees had to engage in the charade of scolding their prescription-bearing customers if they talked about sharing purchases with friends.Now cannabis dispensaries occupy brightly lit spaces on prime retail strips that have showcase buds in glass cases and tinctures in small squeezer bottles, along with $80 pot lotions and $20 bars of pot soap. Six months ago, Canada became the first major world economy to legalize recreational marijuana use, and several dozen cannabis stocks — many for companies that are American in all but name but unable to list in the United States — now trade on the Canadian Securities Exchange.Vivien Azer, a managing director at Cowen in New York, became the first major Wall Street analyst to follow the cannabis industry in 2016. She has since been joined by competitors at Jefferies and Piper Jaffray, and cannabis companies now attend investor events alongside big consumer products companies like Kellogg, Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. Ms. Azer projects that the legal United States cannabis market will grow to $80 billion by 2030, a forecast that assumes federal legalization.Ms. Azer tracked alcohol and tobacco companies, and cannabis seemed a natural extension. “I’m just talking about them as stocks like any other stock that I cover,” she said.For investors, it’s a two-pronged thesis. The first is that many people like recreational use. The second is that as cannabis becomes more widely used, in particular the strains rich in cannabidiol, or CBD, it is increasingly a therapeutic remedy that people substitute for pain pills, sleep aids and other pharmaceuticals.The pioneers who brought the industry out of the shadows are being joined by professional managers and executives — “talent,” in corporate speak — who have had careers in other industries. For upper-level managers and executives, companies say they prefer candidates with a background in highly regulated industries like alcohol or pharmaceuticals.Steve DeAngelo’s website calls him the “Father of the Cannabis Industry” and has a picture of him, smiling, in what pot enthusiasts know as his trademark look of a blue fedora atop graying Willie Nelson braids that rest on the shoulders of his jacket. And there he was in the same get-up on a recent Friday afternoon, standing by a pair of A.T.M.s watching the long line of customers waiting to buy cannabis at Harborside, a cannabis dispensary and farming company that he and a partner founded in 2006 in Oakland, Calif.Mr. DeAngelo was there to introduce Menna Tesfatsion, his company’s new chief operating officer. Whereas Mr. DeAngelo’s background includes a history of radical politics, interviews in High Times and an arrest for marijuana possession, Mr. Tesfatsion is a lawyer who worked in real estate and property development before getting into the cannabis industry.“It’s a generational opportunity,” said Mr. Tesfatsion, who was wearing a vest, as Bay Area executives do. “We’re just beginning to scale.”Mr. DeAngelo said the ability to attract professional managers would go a long way toward determining how well cannabis companies did from here.“We’re the world’s best experts in cannabis,” he said of the early entrepreneurs. “But we didn’t have much opportunity to learn mainstream business skill sets like finance and compliance and marketing and real estate.”Eager to shake the image of being high-end drug dealers, cannabis companies have become hypersensitive to anything that sounds unprofessional — hence the insistence on calling the substance cannabis instead of pot, weed or marijuana. Buds are “flower.” Hash is “extract.” Stoners are “high per-capita consumption consumers.”Bryan Passman, a longtime executive search consultant in Miami, recently started a cannabis-centric recruiting firm. It was originally called The Grass Is Greener Global (The GIGG), but he changed it to Hunter & Esquire because clients told him that they’d prefer he had a more professional-sounding name.Mr. Passman advises interviewees that if they want to let a prospective cannabis employer know that they partake in the company’s product, they should avoid saying, “I like to smoke pot,” and instead try something like “I have a relationship with the plant.”The idea, he said, is to be “purposefully subtle.”Jobs in the industry come with a few caveats. Because cannabis is still illegal from the federal perspective, noncitizens should probably stay away for now, lest they risk their immigration status, Mr. Passman advises. If you’re collecting a federal pension, you should consult a financial adviser to see if it’s at risk. Also: Be realistic about the stigma you might face from employers in other industries.After a decade in pharmaceutical marketing at companies including Gilead Sciences, Julie Raque recently became the vice president for marketing at Cannabistry Labs, a cannabis research and testing company in Chicago. She was intrigued by the industry and eager to join a start-up, but had to take a pay cut in exchange for company stock — and to accept that her decision might be a one-way door.“I highly doubt companies would want to hire me back,” she said. “I knew I was about to do something big, and since then I’ve not looked back, because I’m having so much fun.”Thomas Fuller contributed reporting.Source: New York Times (NY) Author: Conor DoughertyPublished: April 25, 2019Copyright: 2019 The New York Times CompanyContact: letters nytimes.comWebsite: http://www.nytimes.com/URL: http://drugsense.org/url/6gAePCtzCannabisNews -- Cannabis Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml
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Comment #6 posted by afterburner on May 19, 2019 at 07:19:21 PT
The Significance of the Term The Entourage Effect
Here's an interesting article I found yesterday.The Entourage Effect: Whole-Plant Cannabis Medicine.
Medical Marijuana: Much More Than Just THC and CBD.
by Dr. Malik Burnett
https://www.medicaljane.com/2014/05/14/thc-cbd-and-more-the-entourage-effect-of-whole-plant-cannabis-medicine/Excerpt:"... the Big Six cannabinoids: THC, CBD, CBG, CBN, CBC, and THCV. Each cannabis plant contains these and many other cannabinoids at various percentages as part of the plant’s total chemical profile."In addition to cannabinoids, the chemical profile of the cannabis plant contains other compounds like terpenoids, amino acids, proteins, sugars, enzymes, fatty acids, esters, and flavonoids, just to name a few."
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Comment #5 posted by afterburner on May 17, 2019 at 12:42:45 PT
Cali Entrepreneur Mixes Determination & Location
My Future is a Growth Industry, And Yours Can Be Too!
By Michaela Toscas - Special to Cannabis Culture on May 17, 2019
https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2019/05/17/my-future-is-a-growth-industry-and-yours-can-be-too/
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Comment #4 posted by Hope on May 03, 2019 at 03:40:19 PT
Afterburner
People are still trying to use email campaigns, phone calls, letters, visits and other routes ... and speaking to Dan Patrick, still. Organizations are still rattling cages. People are still trying to be heard. Dan Patrick is braced to ignore them.Ultimately, the Lieutenant Governor, Patrick, is a one man dam against the majority of the people's hope for change. Rather like Pete Sessions was in the U.S. Senate for decades. It seemed like Sessions couldn't be dislodged. But he was.Patrick is out. He may not be out tomorrow, but he might as well start quacking and calling himself a lame duck. He refuses to hear the people. He knows better then. He's protecting them from themselves. He's the Big Daddy. He wasn't elected to Big Daddy. He was elected to represent, and he's not.Since tomorrow is Saturday, there isn't going to be a mass arrest assembly tomorrow, of course. So that's out for the moment. I, and a lot of other people, do feel desperately frustrated. Obviously. Sigh. It's just going to take a couple more years, unless they can get Patrick to relent to the wishes of the people of this state, this session, and let some bills to the floor of the people's senate. It might not have the votes if it goes to the floor, but it might.Not likely, I know. We'll see what the peacemakers can do. Right now he thinks it's just Dan Patrick's Senate and he's on his throne looking down on all the rabble that want their laws changed to something more about protecting the people from the government, than destoying or causing them harm and loss to stop them from using a green leafy substance.
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Comment #3 posted by afterburner on May 01, 2019 at 10:33:56 PT
Hope #1
Something needs to be done to get the Texas Legislature to consider a responsible approach to satisfying the wants and needs of the Texas people. However, I still remember then President George H. W. Bush saying that we will build "more prisons." Made by History. Perspective.
George H.W. Bush’s biggest failure? The war on drugs.
How noble motives spawned destructive policies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/06/george-hw-bushs-biggest-failure-war-drugs/?utm_term=.8b0f7fb1f1b1 As you yourself have stated, there are still many dangerous Prohibitionists in power who still support the War on (some) Drugs. It seems to be a kind of deranged faith, resistant to reason, evidence and public needs.
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Comment #2 posted by afterburner on May 01, 2019 at 09:33:48 PT
Legal Like Alcohol, but not the Same Effects
Cannabis.
April 30, 2019 12:07 pm.
Updated: April 30, 2019 12:09 pm.
4 things we misunderstand about marijuana when we think of it like alcohol.
By Patrick Cain, National Online Journalist, News, Global News
https://globalnews.ca/news/5199498/marijuana-alcohol-differences/?utm_source=Article&utm_medium=EditorsPick&utm_campaign=2015
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Comment #1 posted by Hope on May 01, 2019 at 08:58:08 PT
People of Texas and other repressive states.
It might be time to drag out an old tactic we used to talk about doing some twenty years go. As some of you may know, a watered down decrim bill passed through the Texas House of Representatives with a large majority and was sent to the Senate. The next day the lieutenant Governor announced that the bill was "Dead" in the Senate. No vote allowed. Nothing. One man... announced it "Dead" before it ever reached the floor. We've been so nice. Trying to do it the right way. The sanest way. Peacefully. The power of our voices and pushing it through congress... the right way. It might be time to push a lot harder. It might be time to get down and dirty.Every person that is ready for the laws to be changed to something rational and sensible, it might be time to step up and get some skin in the game. Legalization or bust for all the local and state authorities!The idea I am recalling wasn't a bad idea, back twenty years ago, and it's an even better idea today. Next Saturday, everyone that wants to help, march on all the municipalities. Police stations. Sheriff's office. Highway Patrol. Or just march down the streets. Desperate times could, at this point, mean desperate measures.No guns. No rocks and sticks. No torches. Although some tarring and feathering might be hinted at. Everyone gather and everyone, doobie or spliff in hand, present themselves, in mass, to law enforcement everywhere, all over the state. They don't even have to be loaded with real weed. Ha! Ha! They can test it! An uprising. Thousands of arrests. Maybe we can do it. What do you guys at NORML of Texas and Republicans Against Marijuana Prohibition think? All of our organizations. All of you guys watching from the sidelines. The prohibitionists would love it, wouldn't they? All the people they hate getting busted in one day.The point is busting the system. Causing it great expense and involvement. Getting their attention! Showing them that we mean business and we are sick and tired of the obstructionists.We need to organize before the legislature adjourns for another freaking two years.
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