Alex Halperin (00:05):
I’m Alex Halperin.

Donnell Alexander (00:06):
And I’m Donnell Alexander.

Alex Halperin (00:08):
This is the weed week podcast. You can subscribe to our free newsletters WeedWeek, WeedWeek California and WeedWeek Canada all at www.weedweek.net. And you can find this on Twitter and Instagram @weedweeknews. Got any feedback? Write to us at hello@weedweek.net. This episode of WeedWeek is brought to you by Social(k)’s big green retirement plan. These are retirement plans designed to help you sleep at night, knowing you’re changing the world for the better. They don’t invest in fossil fuels, tobacco, weapons or companies involved in deforestation. They do invest in companies that respect gender equality, Social(k)’s big green offers investment fiduciary 338 and administrative fiduciary 316 services. Go to socialk.com for more information.

Donnell Alexander (00:52):
Joining this week is the inevitable returning champion Jesse Staniforth, he’s WeedWeek’s Canada editor and the guest who never fails to blow my mind. This time I really enjoyed seeing him get his mind blown by shopping for cannabis in the States.

Alex Halperin (01:07):
It sounds like buying weed in Canada is nothing like buying weed in Las Vegas.

Donnell Alexander (01:11):
Well, buying edibles sure isn’t. What’s the limitation per package? 10 milligrams?

Alex Halperin (01:16):
10 milligrams per package.

Donnell Alexander (01:17):
Oh my God. I just know I’d get fat. I wouldn’t get high because I’m high anyway, but I would be really fat. And I just want to make that clear, since I’m the producer of this podcast, a lot less stone, just to be clear. Our episode with Mr. Sherbinski was one of our more popular episodes, but I was so high. I remember apologizing to both of you and Hannah for that. Here’s what I wanted to say about Jesse. He brings up legalization 2.0. And I feel like we watch them and have who we were a little while ago, but a little warped, what does legalization 2.0 mean to you from where we are?

Alex Halperin (01:53):
It doesn’t mean anything to Americans. In Canada, 2.0 is how they refer to the rollout of manufactured products, including edibles and vape pens and other stuff like that, which until this point they haven’t legally had.

Donnell Alexander (02:08):
There’s a lack of respect for the legal market that is there, is so different from here. I’ve heard of Spurgeon’s cast on legal weed in California, but it really doesn’t hold that much water. And up there, it seems like the rule of the land.

Alex Halperin (02:20):
I was talking to Steve DeAngelo the other day for my upcoming WeedWeek California report. And he was talking about how so many of the people in cannabis in Canada came from finance and from the oil industry and they didn’t necessarily know anything about it. And they’ve had all sorts of issues with production and stuff like that. In California, I mean, maybe there are some people who complain about legal product quality, but I don’t hear too much about it. Whereas in Canada it’s a big deal.

Donnell Alexander (02:53):
It’s an ongoing thing. If you’re on Twitter, that’s just the understanding, legal weed is terrible. And we’ll hear more detail from Jesse, but first we’re going to talk about the fruit of your recent moonlighting.

Alex Halperin (03:00):
Oh yeah. So I’ve got a new book called The Cannabis Dictionary. You can preorder it now at Amazon, or you can order it now from the WeedWeek store, which is weedweekreports.com with the promo code “signed copy.” You’ll get a discount and an assigned copy.
Donnell Alexander (03:23):
Well, I’d expect as much. What made you do that? Why did you feel like we needed this? And why did you want to devote this amount of time to something so exhaustive.
Alex Halperin (03:30):
To writing a book?
Donnell Alexander (03:31):
Well, a dictionary. It’s just so authoritative, you have taken a lot on when you wrote a dictionary.

Alex Halperin (03:50):
I know. I mean, that was part of the appeal to write something called The Cannabis Dictionary. It just sort of fell in my lap probably because for a while I was writing a column for The Guardian about the new age of cannabis. I got an email from an editor in Hachette Octopus Books. They had done dictionaries on tattoos and on I think tequila and a couple of other subjects. So, it’s a series. They invited me to write the cannabis version and it was cool because as I’ve said before, it’s fun to get high, but getting high isn’t necessarily the most interesting thing about the cannabis experience and that there’s so much going on. There’s history, there’s science, there’s issues surrounding criminal justice and social justice. With the dictionary it was really an opportunity to bring all of those things together, sort of the culture of the illegal market, the plants, deep history that goes back to antiquity, as well as sort of the current phase of hyper commercialization. And there’s some great illustrations in it too.
Donnell Alexander (04:43):
And this is out next month.
Alex Halperin (04:44):
It drops March 3rd, but you can preorder it now.
Donnell Alexander (04:48):
Alright. Well, I’m ready for it.
Alex Halperin (04:51):
And the links to preorder it at Amazon or through the WeedWeek store will be in the show notes.
Donnell Alexander (04:57):
Okay. So, we’ve had our fun, let’s have some more fun talking to Jesse. The last of our Vegas sessions, here’s Jessie.
Song (05:06):
I’ve been all across this country. From the East coast to the west. And I’ve been asked about a thousand times what places I like best. Well I’ve had to base my answers On the friendly people I’ve found. And if you’re inclined to take the time this is where you’ll find my stompin’ grounds. Just take a little piece of P.E.I & old Saskatchewan Nova Scotia & New Brunswick, we’re back in Newfoundland Alberta & Manitoba Ontario & B.C. And you’ll have found the stompin’ grounds of all my friends & me.

Alex Halperin (05:48):
Jesse. So glad to have you back.

Jesse Staniforth (05:49):
It is always a pleasure.

Donnell Alexander (05:50):
And you’re not in our studio. We’re not in Canada. Where are we?

Jesse Staniforth (05:54):
We’re in beautiful sunny Las Vegas.

Donnell Alexander (05:57):
We are in the old part of the strip, aren’t we?

Alex Halperin (05:58):
We’re in the Sahara Hotel on the strip. So glad to have you here in the country.

Jesse Staniforth (06:03):
Overjoyed to be in your presence.

Donnell Alexander (06:04):
I imagine you’re buying weed.

Jesse Staniforth (06:05):
I am. When I was here last year, I was not using cannabis. I am only a very recent medical cannabis user and I wasn’t at the time. So I just walked by the dispensaries last year and I thought, well, they look kind of flashy. And this year I went into them and I discovered that there is a whole world of difference between what is available in Las Vegas and what is available anywhere in Canada.

Alex Halperin (06:27):
So tell us about that.

Jesse Staniforth (06:27):
First of all, there’s advertising. As you know, in Canada, advertising cannabis is just deeply, deeply restricted. It’s virtually banned. Whereas here it’s compulsory, you get out of the airport and everything is telling you to go to MedMen or to go to Planet 13.

Alex Halperin (06:48):
Like their cars, the cabs are covered in MedMen or Planet13 ads.

Jesse Staniforth (06:53):
Yeah.

Donnell Alexander (06:54):
But you don’t really mean compulsory.

Jesse Staniforth (06:55):
No. I mean, you get the feeling that this is a place where everybody wants to sell you cannabis. And I even took a photo in Planet 13 where they were advertising: “If you’re looking for the strongest THC in a pre-rolled buy this.” And I thought, man, that breaks about three laws in Canada.

Alex Halperin (07:16):
So Planet 13 call themselves the cannabis superstore. So, they like activities and stuff. How does that work?

Jesse Staniforth (07:23):
You come in and you have to basically text to like get your number in line, but then it’s the same experience you have anywhere. Well, not really the same experience you have anywhere in Canada, but the same experience that you seem to have in a dispensary here, which is that you speak with a budtender and they’re really knowledgeable and you tell them about your needs and they ask you, well, have you tried this before? What do you think? And they basically guide you along your way. So it’s just a huge showroom with obviously lots and lots and lots of different products. And the fellow responded to my needs super well, gave me a couple out of the box suggestions. He gave me some RSO, which I’d never tried.

Alex Halperin (08:00):
That’s Rick Simpson Oil, that’s really strong right?

Jesse Staniforth (08:02):
It’s really strong. Yeah. It goes a long way. So I was really overjoyed with it, but it’s so different from the Canadian experience where you are in many cases, particularly in Quebec, where I’m from, it’s very Soviet style where you wait in line and you speak to a consultant and they’re not allowed to tell you very much, they’re not allowed to say anything about medical, anything, and they’re not allowed to promote the product in any way or to show enthusiasm.

Donnell Alexander (08:28):
You do realize that what you described as just everyday life who’ve gone into a dispensary in America. What does it feel like? Is it this high contrast? Is it like being in Vegas period?

Jesse Staniforth (08:38):
It’s similar to buying in illicit dispensaries in Canada, but the difference is that this is all tested. This is all, you know exactly what your product is going to get. So if you get edibles, you know exactly how much THC or to the extent that labs are able to test that, whereas buying in the illicit dispensary days, you had no idea what you were getting and you have to take the person’s word.

Donnell Alexander (08:59):
And Cannabis you mean getting it is every bit as spectacular as the legal weed in Canada, right?

Jesse Staniforth (09:06):
So there are a lot of people and I gotta be very careful about this because there are some licensed producers in Canada that are producing fantastic cannabis. But across the board, many people’s experience of legal cannabis has been what we would call in Canada mids. Small, dry, crunchy, a little popcorn halves.

Donnell Alexander (09:32):
Is it like mids and quads?

Jesse Staniforth (09:34):
Yeah, we have a system of mids, traps and quads that explains the quads or your four-star flour trips or your three and mids are below that.

Donnell Alexander (09:44):
And there’s one below that.

Jesse Staniforth (09:45):
One below that is schwag, which Americans have heard of. Legal cannabis here is a lot better. I mean, just in the sense that I’ve been going in and just buying whatever. And the quality is clearly so much better than the vast majority of the legal cannabis up on Canada.

Donnell Alexander (09:59):
Americans out there complaining about your legal weed and all the little shit, shut up.

Alex Halperin (10:04):
I also would say the same thing about Americans yearning for Canadian healthcare.

Donnell Alexander (10:10):
So what else have you got.

Alex Halperin (10:11):
Right now Canada is going through legalization 2.0, which is the legalization of vapes, as well as edibles. How’s that all going, what’s going on?

Jesse Staniforth (10:23):
Ontario is not going to have them. Quebec is definitely not going to have them. Manitoba says they’re going to have them. A couple of other provinces are saying that they expect to have them in stock. So even if they do have them, people are warning. They’re not going to be a lot of selection for the first month or two, as people are getting these things going because as they laid this out, the process has been fairly fast and prior when it was just dry flour and oil, you had two products and now companies have a lot of decisions to make.

Alex Halperin (10:53):
What kind of oil is that? Because that’s a different kind of oil than vaping oil.

Jesse Staniforth (10:57):
Yeah. I’ve never actually bought any of it. I think it’s about 10% or something. It’s very low THC.

Alex Halperin (11:10):
And you put it in a drink or something?

Jesse Staniforth (11:12):
Yeah or you squirt under your tongue or you squirt mouth and swallow it.

Alex Halperin (11:16):
But there’s not much market for this.

Jesse Staniforth (11:17):
No that was unfortunately not, Canopy gambled on it. They were hoping there was going to be a lot of money to be made on the oils and that one just crashed and burned.

Alex Halperin (11:27):
The biggest excitement about what’s happening in Canada with the legalization 2.0, are these sort of higher touch drinks, major drinks companies. I think both alcoholic and maybe nonalcoholic drinks companies have partnered with Canadian companies to make drinks in a way that hasn’t happened in the US and here there are some drinks but they are not a huge part of the market. And there is a fair amount of skepticism. Even a few higher end products do seem to be coming out. Whereas in Canada, it’s a much more substantial component of the market. Can you tell us a little bit about sort of the bet companies are making on drinks and whether people think it’s going to pay off?

Jesse Staniforth (12:09):
You’re very right that the companies are making big bets. So, what we know right now about the appeal of cannabis beverages really comes from US markets. And we do know that they don’t sell very well. I think there’s somewhere around 4% or something like that in California.

Alex Halperin (12:30):
There are 4% of edibles in California.

Jesse Staniforth (12:33):
Yeah. I think, well not 4%. I guess it is less than| 4%. It’s very small in the US but at the same time, we know that they haven’t really been marketed in a really aggressive way with real big corporations behind them. If we´re looking at what’s happening with Canopy right now, where they’ve just installed someone from Constellation as the CEO, or you look at the deal between, Hexo and Molson to make Truss and these other companies.

Donnell Alexander (13:03):
Wait, Hexo and Molson did what?

Jesse Staniforth (13:04):
They created a beverage company called Truss.

Donnell Alexander (13:07):
Why is that remarkable?

Jesse Staniforth (13:09):
Well, because I mean, Molson’s a big name in Canadian beer, and Hexo is one of the bigger, I mean, they are in the top 10, I think. Certainly, they’re also a very respected company and that’s really worth mentioning too.

Donnell Alexander (13:25):
Does that deal mean anything? Does it boat anything?
Jesse Staniforth (13:29):
It shows that beer companies are struggling, their sales have been going down. I think certainly the last couple of years, maybe the last five years, possibly the last decade, and they’re really looking to move into the cannabis space. So they’re going to invest a lot to try and make these drinks hit. Now, of course, they’re gonna come up against that most Canadian of obstacles, which is the health Canada regulation, which prevents them, of course, from advertising virtually anything.
Donnell Alexander (13:56):
Being here in Vegas, where cannabis is so part of the fabric, the strip and all that, do you (inaudible), the cultural contrast that seems so stark. I read your newsletter regularly just to like go someplace new and it seems it’s almost it’s foreign and drab at the same time and it’s innocent, but full of promise. I think Canada’s super interesting.

Jesse Staniforth (14:21):
Well, I mean, it’s funny because when I read WeedWeek California, I think about how it all seems so jaded. But no it’s a completely different legal culture here, but it’s a completely different legal culture here because it grew out of the original underground culture. What we in Canada politely called the legacy market, those who do not wish to enter the new market who have remained in the legacy that’s really much more a part of the culture of legal cannabis here. Whereas in Canada, there is a great divide between the growers and the people who were doing, you know, you’ll see people on Twitter often that have these letters. I was talking to you about the alphabet soup of Canada medical licenses over the years, MMAR MMPR ACMPR. You’ll see these on Twitter, and these are people who are proud to say, look at how long I have been growing. You know, in many cases they are growers where they are proxy growers for a sick person who doesn’t feel competent at growing their own cannabis. So that legacy market is very strong and it really does not overlap. It’s very hostile to the legal rec market. And these people, if you follow Twitter, you’re going to see the greatest shots fired are coming from the legacy growers across the bow, people like Canopy or Organic Graham or whoever they have a real bone to pick with them.

Donnell Alexander (15:47):
Alex, I have to ask, because you’ve seen both markets, you’ve lived in Canada, you lived here. Is it that different from here in terms of that conflict? Do we have a conflict like that?

Alex Halperin (15:56):
I think it depends on which state you’re in; California has made a real effort to sort of bring the legacy market online and into the market. And it’s proving to be an immensely complicated process. And it’s a reason that I think may get short shrift in California’s problems in terms of trying to be inclusive in that way. Whereas in Colorado, it was the exact opposite. There was very little transition from the legacy market to the legal market. And there was a result that sort of it’s much more corporate than in California and probably much more controlled and better regulated.

Donnell Alexander (16:40):
Jessie knows I invited him here because I wanted to have this holistic view of North America because on the planet, this is the place where all this interesting stuff is going on. The impetus for that was Mexico because they very nearly had legalization, a very progressive legalization and that didn’t happen. We have our political forces and we have our corporate forces which is more powerful in cannabis right now?

Jesse Staniforth (17:02):
I can say in Canada that it’s certainly more corporate than political. And there’s a number of reasons for that. We just had an election where we have a whole bunch of parties, but the parties that were really in play in the last election where the social democratic NDP, and they didn’t really have very much to say about cannabis, but then the major two parties that were fighting for the leadership, the conservatives and the liberals, the conservatives were very opposed to legalization. And so they weren’t going to talk about it after it happened as something that they failed to block, whereas the liberals, particularly because Justin Trudeau, Bruce Linton said, “Justin Trudeau is a former drama teacher, right? He’s afraid of looking fluffy. He wants to look like a very serious politician.” So after he created all these jobs and brought all of this money into the legal economy, he just kind of went quiet about it.

Donnell Alexander (17:55):
I don’t understand why that would make him look fluffy. I don’t even actually understand the whole fluffy thing.

Jesse Staniforth (17:59):
People would think of him as a not especially serious person who was a pothead. And he was, and this is something where he admitted that he consumed illicit cannabis years before rec legalization, while he was in parliament.

Donnell Alexander (18:14):
I did not know that.

Jesse Staniforth (18:14):
Oh yeah, absolutely. We were gonna discuss Justin Trudeau beyond cannabis on this.

Donnell Alexander (18:20):
This break is sponsored by a company that operates your organization, hundreds of environmental, social, and government screened retirement funds, Social(k)’s, big green retirement plan. Do your investments mirror your beliefs? If not go to socialk.com for information.

Alex Halperin (18:42):
Canopy’s just named a permanent CEO who was the former executive with Constellation Brands, which is the US wicker company that has a big stake in Canopy. What’s that about? Tell us what that means.

Jesse Staniforth (18:54):
The way that I guess a lot of people are looking at this decision is when they fired Bruce Linton as CEO, you know, the cofounder, of canopy this summer, many people said that this is the end of an era. This is the end of Canopy as a startup in a sense, this is the end of Canopy as a dreaming incubator for this guy who had a lot of peculiar ideas. And this is the sign that the liquor people who have Harvard MBAs want to come in and standardize this. And many people in the industry were opposed to that and say, Oh, no, this is our industry. We don’t want these liquor people coming in. They have a different attitude towards things, but you know, a lot of people on the financial end have been saying, Hey, it’s going to be great to get everything kind of settled down in standard form and focused. And that’s what clients have been saying is, this is going to be the time for them to begin making serious choices about what their product lines are going to be and what their brands are gonna represent.

Alex Halperin (19:50):
Does that mean their product is going to get better? Have you tried it?

Jesse Staniforth (19:53):
I’ve got a couple of Tweed products, the Houndstooth and stuff. In my case, they were quite dry. They were quite small. I mean, I think…

Donnell Alexander (20:02):
I think we have to stop and tell our generally American audience. I mean, I didn’t know this until I think I’ve followed your Twitter feed. Tweed a fairly well-known brand North of the border is thought of as this really shitty week.

Jesse Staniforth (20:15):
Well, yeah. That has a lot to do with the hostility of the legacy people towards, you know, Canopy is the biggest fish. So it’s going to get the biggest amount of just attitude from people. But Tweed is a huge brand and the problem that many of these companies are having right now, they’re having a lot of problems with quality control.
Donnell Alexander (20:37):
Explain why, because we’re not having that aren’t we? We don’t have that.

Alex Halperin (20:41):
Well, there was the vape crisis.

Donnell Alexander (20:42):
Well, that’s a whole separate circus issue.

Jesse Staniforth (20:45):
You guys have never had a predominant bad weed problem in any legal state, as far as I know.

Donnell Alexander (20:51):
Exactly.

Jesse Staniforth (20:52):
And we do. Let me tell you the story of legal weed and cannabis, starting with the Flin Flon mine in Flin Flon, Manitoba, the first prairie plant systems. That was the first grower and they were down in the bottom of a mine because the government of Canada was so convinced that if they licensed a cannabis grower, people would just come like zombies in Dawn of the dead.

Alex Halperin (21:15):
And they’d come to Winnipeg.

Jesse Staniforth (21:16):
Exactly. They were, and they produced famously bad bud, which is how I believe that’s how the MMAR, our medical licensing system came into being so that people could grow their own.

Donnell Alexander (21:28):
As a regulatory agency to make sure there was credible cannabis?

Jesse Staniforth (21:32):
To allow people to grow their own because it’s constitutionally protected. And then the conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper got rid of that. And he brought in the licensed producer system. And when he brought that system in, he brought in people from corporate, he brought them. And those were the people who wanted it. And those were the people who had the businesses built up. And so in many cases we have businesses that have only been around for a few years that have been run by people who are not cannabis growers or cannabis users. And what all they wanted to do was produce the largest amount of cannabis possible and they scaled up very quickly, often and warehouses and things that it’s really hard to move air around and regulate moisture. And basically, people have blamed the failure of the bad Canadian cannabis really on the scale of the grower.

Donnell Alexander (22:20):
You know, we have this thing here where we feel like legal weed needs to get closer to illicit cannabis. And I thought of it as a specifically American problem. And clearly, it’s a version of it up there.

Jesse Staniforth (22:30):
Just absolutely. It’s night and day and you can very easily and at a pretty affordable price point, go on the web and buy illicit stuff that is like huge fist size nugs, and all various sort of spongy. And it’s not really, I mean, it’s cheaper than legal. It’s just not that expensive for illicit stuff. Because there’s so many growers in BC and there still are, they’re not going away.

Alex Halperin (22:59):
This is sort of like the kind of thing Republicans would complain about government regulation stifling industry, and maybe they’re right. Like famously the worst weed in America right now anyway, is Grow, is the only official weed grown by the US government at the University of Mississippi. I mean, I’ve seen pictures of it. It looks sort of like pinecones, like pine needles. There was one trial that sort of got permission, but they wouldn’t use it because they felt that it wouldn’t even be adequate for their medical trial. Whatever they’re doing wrong in Mississippi, hasn’t really caught on with other growers.

Donnell Alexander (23:33):
I’m going to make a prediction that the next state sanctioned weed grow is going to be in the UC System in California, just because UCLA is making their moves. I’m thinking maybe UC Davis, which is a great act school, but it’s going to happen.

Jesse Staniforth (23:48):
I just wanted to add that I had a conversation last year with a well-placed executive in an American company that I can’t name. And this fellow said to me, I’ve had the fortune of being able to see the top 10 grows in the United States and the top 10 grows in Canada. And I don’t know what you guys are doing in Canada because the top 10 grows, your flour is awful. It’s piddly. It’s tiny. It’s really quite bad.

Alex Halperin (24:15):
But the grows are big. They’re enormous. They’re like the size of airports.

Jesse Staniforth (24:20):
Last year we went to that dope party back when high times existed, I was blowing some growers with pictures of the Hexo warehouse that I had been in because they’d never seen an indoor grow that big. And that was one room 20,000 feet.

Donnell Alexander (24:35):
And buds that small?

Jesse Staniforth (24:37):
Well, they just blend in with all the sugar leaves.

Donnell Alexander (24:41):
Here’s the thing you guys are talking, but I still don’t fully comprehend why systemically there would be lesser quality pot. People are growing from the same seeds at the end of the day. Correct? It’s just the process.

Jesse Staniforth (24:54):
As far as I understand it, a lot of people who are in positions as growers, they weren’t educated that way. And companies wanted to hire people who had some kind of formal education over people who had experience in the illicit market. And there are some doubts about people’s ability to really bring the magic out of the plant. And that’s the thing, is that people are not creating widgets in a factory here. They’re wrestling with a really complicated organic thing and trying to really cause it to squirt out the most potent THC and terpenes and all of the different cannabinoids and so forth. And they’re doing it on a huge scale. And in many cases, these are people who are relatively new to growing cannabis.

Donnell Alexander (25:39):
I have one more question I’m gonna ask both of you. Can you give me your trends? Where we are headed.

Jesse Staniforth (25:44):
We’re going to see whether or not cannabis beverages do it, right? Whether they take off in a market with a lot of money behind them and a lot of money bet on them, this is going to be their big chance.

Donnell Alexander (25:59):
Is a drink the same as a gummy?

Jesse Staniforth (26:01):
It depends. The Canopy drinks are 2, 5 and 10 milligrams THC. And then I think up to 20 CBD, and I think they’re between $8 and $10.

Alex Halperin (26:10):
And because Canada doesn’t allow any package to contain more than 10 milligrams, that means, I guess you buy one 10 milligram gummy bear at a time. Are they going to charge $10 for a 10-milligram gummy bear?

Jesse Staniforth (26:22):
They’d better not.

Donnell Alexander (26:23):
They’re charging the equivalent, whether it’s a size of a gummy or a brownie or a big gulp, it’s still the same amount of THC. You know how expensive it would be for me to get high in Canada legally?

Alex Halperin (26:33):
Right. Because in California, a pack of 10 milligram gummies is $18 to $20.

Jesse Staniforth (26:41):
I mean, that is a good deal, cheaper. I’m hoping I don’t really know what the edible price point is going to be but also we’re going to see at the beginning, that’s going to start to fluctuate because prices are moving in Canada and they’re moving in a slight downward direction, not a huge downward direction, but everybody’s hoping that things are going to, we don’t want to become Oregon and have $40 an ounce. I mean, obviously the consumers want that.

Donnell Alexander (27:07):
You have much better weed.

Jesse Staniforth (27:09):
Well, yeah. I mean, that’s going to be a big thing. Alex, you got a prediction?

Alex Halperin (27:16):
Just sort of to something I’m watching. I would say I’m watching the presidential election. I’m curious what part this is going to play in it. Some people have said Trump is going to legalize marijuana as sort of a gambit to get reelected. And I don’t quite think that it’s true. It doesn’t really seem to be on his radar. A lot of his supporters are pretty skeptical. Even though a majority of Republicans favor free, full legalization, the Fox News hosts to whom he pays a lot of attention, are definitely not on board the legalization. So, I don’t think he’s going to go in that direction, but I think legalization could play out in interesting ways for the election. So for example, it looks like both Florida and Arizona and perhaps potentially other swing states, but certainly Florida and Arizona look like they could have bout referendums this year, which would sway voter turnout to some degree. It’d be interesting to see how that all gets managed.

Donnell Alexander (28:23):
Hey man, really glad you came and hung out with us.

Jesse Staniforth (28:26):
I’m so happy to be in a room with you guys rather than talking to you guys over Slack.

Alex Halperin (28:30):
Cool. Thanks so much. Enjoy the rest of the conference, Jesse.

Donnell Alexander (28:32):
And that’s our show for today.

Alex Halperin (28:33):
As always, you can find this on Twitter and Instagram at WeedWeek news or email us at hello@weedweek.net. For lots more weed news, you can sign up for our newsletters, WeedWeek, WeedWeek California, and WeedWeek Canada, all at www.weedweek.net. I’m Alex Halperin.

Donnell Alexander (28:48):
And I’m Donnell Alexander.

Alex Halperin (28:49):
Our show producer is Donny Alexander and engineered by Larry Buhl. Alicia Byer wrote our theme music. We’ll catch you again here next week.