By John Lord

As I sit here getting ready to express my views on the Cannabis Industry, I want to make sure you understand that my experience in what I write comes from living among the culture on the West Coast for the past seven years, both asking questions and just observing folks.

On the flip side, I am originally from South Florida where a cannabis culture also existed but it was more of a smuggler culture then a hippie, peace, love, and happiness culture.

In other words, I certainly understand both sides of the country and their love for pot.

The demand for the flower always starts with local indulgence and consumption. This was also the case for the South Florida marketplace, but it didn’t take into account not the large quantities of marijuana that were entering through that Caribbean corridor into the United States. The tremendous amount of marijuana entering through Florida was staggering, but Miami was just the staging area for national smuggling groups looking to traffic marijuana to every state in the nation.

The 1970’s made smoking this flower a cool and fun thing until Richard Nixon declared the “War on Drugs.” We won’t get into too much detail on that ridiculous war, because it also tagged marijuana as a Scheduled I Controlled Substance. It’s classification next to heroin gave it a stigma of a junky drug, and 40 years later, we finally realize it was all so far from the truth.

The fallout included children losing their fathers to incarceration for both possessing and distributing the flower, wives losing their husbands for decades, and mothers who had to serve the same draconian sentences. How sad!

I am blessed to find myself in the middle of the perfect storm, in the epicenter of the cannabis revolution, a movement that has been out west for decades.

According to Wikipedia, California led the way with Proposition 215, or the Compassionate Use Act of 1996. This is a California law allowing the use of medical cannabis despite marijuana’s lack of the normal Food and Drug Administration testing for safety and efficacy. It was enacted, on Nov. 5,1996, by means of the initiative process, and passed with 5,382,915 (55.6 percent) votes in favor and 4,301,960 (44.4 percent) against.

The proposition was a statewide voter initiative authored by Dennis Peron; Anna Boyce, RN; John Entwistle, Jr.; Valerie Corral; Dale Gieringer; William Panzer; Scott Imler; attorney Leo Paoli; and psychiatrist Tod H. Mikuriya, and approved by California voters. It allows patients with a valid doctor’s recommendation, and the patients’ designated Primary Caregivers, to possess and cultivate marijuana for personal medical use, and has since been expanded to protect a growing system of collective and cooperative distribution.

This has now been in place for 20 years!

Moving from South Florida in 2009, I had no idea this sort of liberal way of thinking existed, it captivated me. I lived thru the Miami of the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s,where there was truly a war, where most heads of the households ended up in prison, others dead. A simple thing as possessing a joint would have led to your arrest back in 2009. Today I read and hear how South Florida too is decriminalizing marijuana, and I think to myself, it’s about time!

The culture and movement that the West Coast has is different from anything I ever saw back East. I know New York also has a hippie population but again, these western territories are just the epicenter of the hippie movement and also, the cannabis revolution! California leads the way but then there’s Oregon, Washington, Arizona, New Mexico, Las Vegas, etc., that also have a unique culture when it comes to pot.

Today,due to licensing and regulations, many of the pioneers or the people who have been putting in a tremendous amount of work for a tremendous amount of years are fighting for their piece of the newly minted industry. There is no better expert than the ones whose lives were lived in the trenches, risking their freedom for the belief they should be allowed to grow and consume this plant.

Many are worried now that a pivotal point has been reached. We are only where we are due to those great tracks laid by the early pioneers. Today change is finally happening in America!

Legalization brings regulations and those regulations may in some instances forget the “little guys.” We have seen this happen in territories like New York, where only five licenses were granted statewide. Until now, Florida also only granted five licenses for their Charlotte’s Web program.

This is cause for a bunch of worried people. You must realize that depending how those regulations are written by state governments, the future possibilities for many small business owners may or may not be affected. Even in a state like California, where state rules have been announced and allows for many to enter the marketplace, there still seems to be a barrier to entry that some might not be able to overcome.

The entrance of “the suits” into the Cannabis Industry is seen by some pioneering figures as hypocritical and opportunistic at best. What we are witnessing is the entrance of corporate America, who is definitively planning it’s ownership of the legal marijuana business. They own the liquor and tobacco industry, no matter what they try to put over people’s heads, and everyone sees what struggles are happening at the ground level.

A cultural takeover might take a lot of time for corporate America to fully realize. They understand how it will take time and money, but in the end, they will always control these kinds of industries. I believe our duty is to find our niche in the marketplace and gain as much market share as possible before that begins to happen.

Nobody will be able to stop that corporate machine once it starts to buy market share from those who have it now and have it set up the proper way. If not, then you have a great business on hand, but I just don’t see how the gobbling by corporate America won’t happen.

This realization needs to be understood by everyone, including those early cannabis activists, marijuana freedom fighters, risk takers and believers, that one day their underground or gray market will become legal, as will their industry. Most will go corporate at the end of the day, but not all. Bacardi is a perfect example of how one family kept a liquor company private for seven generations.

Bur for now, you still see two factions rising. On one side you have guys who went to the school of hard knocks, like myself. We are creative innovators, leaders and team builders, relentless fighters.

I grew up with one foot on each side of the tracks. Even though I could feel comfortable without a suit, whenever the day came to wear one, I could easily do that, too. I feel my disability in not learning corporate language doesn’t necessarily put me at a disadvantage because I learned a different instinct, the grind of the street side, which doesn’t necessarily exist in the DNA of the corporate world.

On the other side of the coin you have the guys who did go to some of America’s best universities, the schools where education is designed to create the next generation leaders of industry.

The perfect storm is also in place for those corporate types. What better time to be alive then when a market of a prohibited narcotic is growing right in front of your face? Prohibition is dying, and your skills are perfect to help take this new industry to the moon. All you must do is implement all you learned at school and you could be the next John Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan or Henry Ford.

These two types of businessmen control the future of the Cannabis Industry today! How do you see yourself surviving this tussle?