Alex Halperin (00:06):
Welcome to WeedWeek. I’m Alex Halperin.

Donnell Alexander (00:08):
And I’m Donnell Alexander.

Alex Halperin (00:11):
This is the WeedWeek podcast. You can subscribe to our free newsletters, WeedWeek Canada and WeedWeek California all at www.weedweek.net and you can find us on Twitter and Instagram @weedweeknews, subscribe and review or like us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Podcast Addict and iHeart radio, among other platforms.

Donnell Alexander (00:30):
Our guest this week is the son of an author who wrote a book many of you know by name but very few of you have read. Our guest is Dan Herer whose father is Jack Herer and his book is called “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.”

Alex Halperin (00:47):
I think that’s a really good way to put it, that you’ve heard the name but you haven’t read it and I think that’s the case with a lot of books that are sort of phenomenally influential, is that people haven’t necessarily gone back to the original text because they think they know what it says or they have an idea of what it says, and they think that’s enough. And I will confess that with me that is the case with “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.” I have not read it. Have you?

Donnell Alexander (01:17):
No, I have not. I watched the documentary and learned a lot about his father. He’s a complicated figure. It doesn’t seem like he tried to ingratiate himself into the movement, but sometimes movements need people like that. He just kind of bulldoze the head and I love the stories that Dan gives about his father.

Alex Halperin (01:35):
Yeah, it’s a really interesting conversation in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of sort of colorful history and the story of a complicated and very influential figure.

Donnell Alexander (01:48):
Yeah. Cannabis isn’t turning out people like that anymore.

Alex Halperin (01:52):
But you can still find a lot of weed named after him.

Donnell Alexander (01:56):
Yeah and that is one of the tertiary conversations that we get into Jack Herer the smoker, as opposed to Jack Herer the man, funny story right there. But first we’re going to talk about a deal that confounds me, really intrigues me and I’m hoping you have some insights on it because I don’t fully understand. Let’s talk about the High Times deal.

Alex Halperin (02:15):
Yeah. So, the deal with High Times, as far as I can tell, they’ve been struggling for a long time to sort of adapt to the legalization era. High Times is sort of a hub of information on cannabis. There’s not the same need for it as there was during the time of prohibition. And also, of course now that we have the internet, it’s a lot easier to communicate so much of this stuff.

Donnell Alexander (02:40):
And this pivot has taken a couple of turns. It’s not as though they went directly from putting out the magazine to this $80 million pot deal.

Alex Halperin (02:48):
So, they’ve tried to go public and I think they’re still trying to raise some money to go public, but it hasn’t gone quite as well as they had hoped. They’re essentially pivoting from being a media company to being cannabis merchants. So, they’re going to be opening High Times dispensers. And as I understand it, basically there’s an MSO, a multi-state operator, called Harvest Health and Recreation. They’re based in Arizona, they’ve got a presence in a lot of states. And a lot of these companies that are based in a lot of states are sort of realizing that strategy doesn’t make sense and they’re offloading, I think about a dozen dispensaries to High Times, and this has been in the works for a little while. The dispensary is either most of them or all of them aren’t yet open and the hope is that people are going to really want to buy weed from the High Times dispensary.

Donnell Alexander (03:46):
Well, just following along with everything that’s happened since 2018 they’ve looked a lot like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They were putting on these Cannabis Cup events and there were complaints in Sacramento. I’m not sure that they can go back to San Bernardino. I thought from covering them in the California newsletter that they were a company just destined to beef it. This tough looks a little bit like an opportunity.

Alex Halperin (04:09):
Yeah. I don’t remember exactly what happened with those events, but there was that lawsuit from a woman who’s handicapped and who felt that she had been mistreated and now you know, they want to be weed merchants. We’ll see if it works.

Donnell Alexander (04:26):
And here’s Dan.

Song (04:29):
Nobody wanted to appear a fool. Nobody that is except one little boy who for some strange reason hadn’t heard about the King’s new magic soup and didn’t know what he was supposed to see. Well, he took one look at the King, turned a little pale and said, look at the King, look at the King. The King, the King isn’t they altogether, but all together, they are all together is all together as naked as the day [inaudible] but all together they all together. It’s all together. The very least the King has ever worn.

Donnell Alexander (05:07):
Dan Herer. Welcome to WeedWeek.

Dan Herer (05:09):
Thanks for having me.

Donnell Alexander (05:10):
Why don’t you tell us for just a moment about Jack Herer?

Dan Herer (05:14):
Well, Jack Herer was just as normal as anybody else growing up in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s.

Donnell Alexander (05:22):
What does that mean?

Dan Herer (05:22):
He was completely uninformed. The only thing he’s ever known at that point was what he learned in school, what he learned from the government. And, in the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, that was a narrative about cannabis and life that was pretty black and white, until he was 30. He never really understood what cannabis was, other than the most dangerous substance on the planet, according to our government and Reefer Madness.

Donnell Alexander (05:51):
So, what happened when he turned 30?

Dan Herer (05:54):
Well, at the age of 30, he met a girl. This was an example of a leopard actually changing his spots because prior to 1969, my father was married with children, go to work every day, come home, 4 door sedan, listen to KFWB news, you know, praise the political party that he believed in at the time. And that was life to my father.

Alex Halperin (06:25):
He was a Goldwater Republican, right?

Dan Herer (06:28):
Yeah. He was a super hardcore Barry Goldwater Republican. So much that even my older brother, my father’s first son, his godfather was actually Barry Goldwater Sr.

Donnell Alexander (06:44):
Yikes.

Dan Herer (06:45):
My father idolized him. And at the time after him and my mother got divorced, he moved into this super hippy building, but he didn’t know it was at the time. So, he moved in midweek basically. And then on the weekend when it came the time to go meet the neighbors, to speak, when he wasn’t working he walked outside and realized that everybody out at the pool were hippies and this was not his world. And he thought that he had moved into hell.

Alex Halperin (07:25):
Where does this happened?

Dan Herer (07:25):
This happened in the San Fernando Valley in 1969, he moved into a little building right off of the 101 freeway in Woodman Boulevard or Woodman Avenue. And he moved into this place called the South Bay Club and it was sort of like a swingers/hippie building. And he moved in unknowingly. And afterwards he couldn’t afford to move out. A girl caught his eye and he started trying to ask her to date and she said, “Sorry, Jack, you’re too square, you don’t know enough about the world.” My dad was 30 and she was only 20. And she’s like, “Your views on everything are completely backwards. You don’t understand what you’re talking about most of the time. You’re just a square. I can’t hang out with you.” And then he caught my mother smoking cannabis in her apartment where me and my two brothers lived, where she was at home from work. She was a waitress and she was smoking with one of her girlfriends and he catches her smoking pot and he threatens to send her to jail, to turn her into the police because she was smoking cannabis.

Donnell Alexander (08:42):
What year are we talking about?

Dan Herer (08:42):
In 1969.

Donnell Alexander (08:44):
Okay. So, how does he get to be an activist? And the guy who writes “The Emperor Wears No Clothes”?

Dan Herer (08:48):
He meets this girl at the building, and she says, “Jack, if you want us, if you want to date, you have to get high with me.” And after months of resisting, he finally smokes a joint with her and then another, and he ends up getting high in her apartment and she puts on earphones, headphones at the time, and listens to music. He says that he saw it in color, he ate amazing food that night, had an amazing time with her. Woke up the next day and said, okay, I just smoked marijuana, I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t go crazy. I had the best time of my life. I had the best sex of my life. I had the best food of my life. I heard the best music in my life. How is this illegal? How is this wrong? How could I have gotten this so wrong? And it upset him that it seemed like everything that he had learned was incorrect. That it was completely the opposite. And he was a very well-read person and very educated, even though he wasn’t college educated. And when he read things, he absorbed them, he remembered them, and he had a great memory. So, he was like, how do I not know any of this? How do I not know that cannabis is really this? Or at the time, marijuana or pot. And he finally decides that he’s going to start looking it up and researching it and understanding what it is that he was now feeling. And he wanted to validate that his feelings were right. And when he started to educate himself, he realized that the country that he had loved and fought for had lied to him. My father was very upset, to the point of becoming quite rebellious. In the early 1970s, he started helping on Proposition 19, which was 1972 Cannabis initiative, and was the first one in the country since prohibition, and it actually made the ballot. It did not pass, it got 38% of the vote in California Van Nuys, California is where we all live since 1967.

Donnell Alexander (10:59):
So, you know, that’s a good card to start talking about his place in the movement because he’s becoming an activist and he just sort of, didn’t really go through the ranks. Did your father kind of rankled the movement as he joined it and began to lead it?

Dan Herer (11:12):
I don’t think that he ever wanted to lead it, or he never really said that I wanted it. But what happened was that his education about cannabis in general overall was so much different than those who are just looking to defend pot smokers from being busted. My father’s view of cannabis was much different than that. He was looking at how it could change the world and when he started talking about that to folks like Bruce Margolin or Keith Stroup they were just like, “Jack, you’re out of your fucking mind.”

Donnell Alexander (11:45):
You should explain who those people are.

Dan Herer (11:47):
Okay, so, Bruce Margolin, head of NORML California and Keith Stroup the founder of NORML.

Donnell Alexander (11:57):
Their reaction was what?

Dan Herer (11:59):
“Jack, you’re out of your fucking mind. You’re bad for cannabis. You’re scaring people by saying that you know that cannabis is going to save the world and hemp is gonna save the world. And you know, that’s just too extreme for us.” My dad was like, “If you don’t want to come onto my team, go fuck yourselves because this is more important than just keeping people out of jail. This is about how we’re going to live on this planet. And it is all encompassing, whether it’s health, wealth, personal choice, whatever it is, the bottom line is that we need to save this planet. We need to save our species because of the way that things are going.” And he had already seen that back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, he already knew that there was these serious crisis that we needed to deal with and that with the things that he understood about cannabis, we had to stand up and start fighting for this so we can start making paper and fiber and fuel and clothing and cars and many of the same, all of the things that we’re doing today that we’re trying to use cannabis and he was screaming about that 30 years ago and he was being ignored for the most part.

Donnell Alexander (13:15):
He’s not a writer by trade, he’s an obsessive guy. How does he get these things into existence? So, it’s hard to get a book into print. Never mind a book that lasts for a really long time. How did that happen?

Dan Herer (13:27):
Well, the funny thing about truth is that, unlike us right now, the truth can’t be sequestered for too long. At some point it comes out and through my father’s researching, he found out that in 1914 the US government printed a $10 treasury note on cannabis paper and that on the back of that $10 bill, it depicts Cannabis Farming in America. It’s just you know, he found out in 1914 the US department of agriculture put out a document saying that one acre of hemp equaled as much paper making material, is up to four acres of trees and that we would never have to cut down another tree for the consumer package good industry or the newspaper industry or the packaging industry or the paper bag industry or any of that.

Donnell Alexander (14:19):
How does he get to the point where he writes the book?
Dan Herer (14:21):
Oh, well we can thank a bit of that to President Ronald Reagan. So, in 1980 I had just turned 18, my father was running the California marijuana initiative from 1980 and we were protesting on the lawn of the federal building in Westwood, California. And it was quite an encampment. We had live bands every weekend. We fed people for virtually 80 days that we were there on the property, and we were registering voters to vote, getting signatures for the initiative, and Ronald Reagan had been elected president. He was living in Bel Air, which is right on the other side of UCLA, which is right on the other side of Westwood federal building. And so, he left his house, he drove by the federal buildings and all these protesters and pulled up at the federal building with the presidential motorcade and gets out and the security welcomes him. And he says, “Hey, what are all the Canadians out there so upset about that they would be protesting?” Because he had mistaken the cannabis leaf for the maple leaf.

Alex Halperin (15:37):
So, was this when Reagan was president elect?

Dan Herer (15:40):
Yes. So, he says, “Well, can’t we do anything about it?” And he says, “No, we can’t. We took them to court, and they won. They have the right to be there.” And Ronald Reagan overheard to have said, “Well, I’m going to be sworn in the next few weeks. Let me see what I can do.” So, a bit of time goes by, we’re still raising a bit of heck out there on the lawn. And one night the LA police department comes up to my father and a few other protestors and says, “You’re under arrest.” And my father was like, “For what?” And he said, “You’re in violation of the Sedition Act. And my father being a military MP, understood what that was. And basically, it means in times of war, you cannot be on federal property after dark. And they were registering voters and getting signatures. He says, “Well, we’re not at war.” And the police officer poked my father in the chest and said, “We’re at war with you.” And my father was arrested. The encampment on the federal building disbanded. And my father spent the next few years appealing his $5 fine for violation of this Act because they knew that it was a bullshit thing. And so, they gave everybody a $5 fine. And if they pleaded guilty and paid the five bucks, they can go home, they’ll do whatever. My father being a very principled guy, says basically, “Fuck you. And the horse you are riding on, I’m not paying this. I’m an American citizen. This is my right to register voters and peacefully protest.” And the federal judge didn’t see so, so after a couple of years of fighting, my father was sentenced to federal prison for registering voters to vote. It was the first time in almost 15 years that he had time to himself. So, he asked us to send them some writing equipment, some paper and pencil so he could write while he was incarcerated. While he was in there, he started outlining what would become “The Emperor Wears No Clothes.”

Dan Herer (17:56):
How long was he locked up for?

Dan Herer (17:58):
Remarkably. Only about 15 days.

Alex Halperin (18:02):
And then, were there different editions of the book? It came up smaller than we know, right?

Speaker 5 (18:06):
Well, right. Because he updated it every time that he reprinted it. So, when it first came out, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” was actually printed on newspaper. The second one was a black and white copy that said, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Everything You Should Have Learned in School, But Didn’t.” Every time that he updated the book, he added new information, reedited it, revalidated all of its information and made sure that what was being said in the book was documented improvable and unwavering and that it became a document that, over every year or every few years of its printing and sold into the public, that people gravitated to this book because for the first time it gave people an understanding of the things that they believe but couldn’t prove.

Alex Halperin (19:02):
I mean, I don’t remember if it was ever formally published, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

Dan Herer (19:06):
It was never formally published.

Donnell Alexander (19:09):
Explain that.

Dan Herer (19:11):
Yeah. Well, my father was self-published, so it was like, “Hey, you know, we got enough money to print 10,000 copies.” And they print them all up and we’d have a million boxes in the garage and he would sell them, box by box to the different head shops in town, smoke shops, even libraries started picking them up initially but not schools and things like that. But in this community, once it got out, the community really embraced this book and it gave people for the first time a way to find their voice and stand up in their communities and demand access to this plant. And everywhere that there was opposition to cannabis, my father would go and work with the people in Alaska or Oregon or Washington or Colorado or anywhere in this country, if they were fighting for cannabis my father was there. And he brought his information, he brought his voice and he was the pied piper in a way, he was the one that people followed. And then there were ones that followed him and became leaders in their own community, and they stood up and they took the mantle and they kept pushing and they kept educating. And this book was the go-to if you’re going to fight about cannabis, if you’re going to understand about what it is, what it can be, then this book was it. And it became incredibly well-read and incredibly well shared.

Donnell Alexander (20:49):
Can you take a moment to tell us about this new edition? What edition is it, and why does this moment necessitate it?

Dan Herer (20:56):
So, “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” is in a sense, the definitive history book of cannabis and hemp. It talks about hemp as one of the factors in the creation of this country. It was so important to this country in order to stand aside and apart from Europe in order to give us our independence. It was so crucial to this country because it created everything from our paint, our varnish, our glues, our books, our flags, our Bibles. When you look at history and you go back and you’re sitting in your fifth-grade class and you’re talking about canvas covered wagons coming West, those were cannabis covered wagons coming West. And if they were canvas sails that powered the ships from Europe to the new country, then those were cannabis sails. And the sealants for those ships were made from a substance which is an extract of the cannabis plant that’s sticky and saltwater impervious. So the ships wouldn’t leak. The reason it’s so necessary is because there’s now an entire generation that is growing up with access to cannabis and hemp, but really don’t understand it other than it could be used for making products, for making cannabis, making cannabis extracts and other products. But they don’t understand how it’s gotten here. Why is it that they have access to this? Why is it available now? Why are so many people around the world gravitating toward hemp and cannabis for social economics? Why are they making companies? And if you don’t understand the history of cannabis, if you don’t understand the history of the things that we knew that it could be, and now the things that it is, then you’re really fighting a very uphill battle. And it’s a hard-enough battle as it is. When you talk about, re-educating somebody from a mindset of everything that they had learned through 12 years of 12 years of institutional learning, it’s hard to go back and go, “My school lied to me. The government lied to me.” It’s hard to admit that to yourself because we all think that we’re smart. We all think that there’s no way we could be duped. I would see right through that. But when the vernacular and the narrative for what this plant has been for the last 80 years is part of our parents, our grandparents, and even right now it’s continued to be demonized. And this book removes in a sense those clothes, it strips it bare and says this is the truth. And we need to know the truth today more than ever. We have an economy that can be built from cannabis and hemp that will literally affect every manufacturing, production, product anywhere in the world, paper, plastic, fiber, fuel, medicine, things that we touch every single day can all be made better, nontoxic, biodegradable, renewable, all from this one plant. And this book continues to tell that story.

Alex Halperin (24:19):
Can you tell us a bit about what he was like to be around?

Dan Herer (24:24):
He was a really good soul.

Donnell Alexander (24:26):
That sounds like a qualifier.

Dan Herer (24:28):
Well, anybody who’s as passionate as my father, has lines that they won’t cross, there are things that are just true and right. And that’s what my father believed in. And sometimes he was very hard because he was unmovable. He knew what he was talking about. And if somebody stood up against them, he would educate them into humbleness because the information that he had was so overwhelming and so powerful that he would turn adversaries into advocates. But growing up with my father, he was super loving. He was very tough, but he was always fair. But he was unyielding when it came time to go out, when I was 18 or when I was 22 or 24 or any year that followed me having to collect signatures from my family or my friends, we were part of Jack’s Reefer Raiders. We were the ones that were out on the streets collecting signatures. And he made sure that we did our jobs and he made sure that everybody else did their jobs because the importance of what we were doing and what we’re doing now, and that is changing the world, is not something that comes easy, cheap, and is not forgiving to those who fall short.

Donnell Alexander (25:58):
Who was Captain Ed Adair? Why was he important?

Dan Herer (26:02):
Captain Ed, mentor of my father. My father would not have been the man that he was or became without the love and friendship of Captain Ed Adair. Captain Ed Adair opened up one of the very first head shops anywhere in this country in Van Nuys, California.

Donnell Alexander (26:29):
What year would that be?

Dan Herer (26:31):
This would’ve been 1972, ’71, ‘72. And my father met him inside his head shop and my father walked in wearing his polyester jacket and his big sharp collared shirt and walked in and said, “Hey, I’m selling this little book that I wrote.” And this book was called “Grass.” It was the great revolutionary American standard system of how to understand the grading of your pot back then. When he showed it to him, the guy goes, “You wrote this book?” Because he looked at my father and my father looks super straight yuppie kind of guy. Captain Ed was long hair, 2-foot-long beard, thin, tall standing there and his head shop next to a black light room where all these posters glowed. And he’s like, “Are you sure you wrote this book?” And my dad’s like, “Yeah, I wrote this book.” And you know, from that initial meeting they just became fast friends because I would think that Ed probably had never met anybody as determined as my father and my father admired the fact that Ed had been able to live his life and do the things that he was doing, especially in an era where people were still being arrested and beaten just for smoking marijuana back in the day. And they became fast friends and they were up until sadly, the very last day of Ed’s life in 1991 when he passed from cancer. But they were each other’s rock for a long time. Ed supported him on his quest to change the world and never backed down from that.

Donnell Alexander (28:25):
Did he have a say in what strain would be named after him? Do you think he would approve of Jack Hear that we smoke?

Dan Herer (28:32):
Well he was there.

Donnell Alexander (28:33):
What was that day like?

Dan Herer (28:35):
I unfortunately wasn’t there, but there are a few of my friends that were. It was humbling for my father at the time. Of course, he was also supposed to be paid for it, but some of those cannabis deals go, it wasn’t fulfilled and still isn’t to this day.

Donnell Alexander (28:57):
That’s a bummer, super bummer. I’m not buying any more Jack Herer.

Dan Herer (29:00):
Well, you can if it comes from me, it’s called “The Original Jack Herer.”

Donnell Alexander (29:04):
That’s a transition. I love that. Go on.

Dan Herer (29:09):
Well, okay. Going back to the naming of the strain. So, my dad’s book had influenced one of the creators, I should say the creator of this genetic and his book so influenced him that he asked if he could name this flour after him. And that went on to become a very well recognized flour during, the Proposition 215 days where people were looking for medicine. Jack had gotten so much notoriety for being named a strain that people were just looking for and looking to it. And it was a pretty special strain and it still is. And people just gravitated to it. It had a smell and a taste that is very singular in most parts. Now there are so many variations of it but Jack was, is a really beautiful smoke. The person that created it actually went on to create a hemp business. That business now today does business with Mercedes-Benz. So, Mercedes-Benz, since 2009 have been making, hemp parts for their cars made from the person that my father influenced with his book.

Alex Halperin (30:26):
What part of the car?

Dan Herer (30:27):
The door panels, dash parts. There’s about a hundred different parts that are made from cannabis fiber or other byproducts of it. And they are now starting to go into bioplastics in the cars. So BMW has been using hemp fiber since 2002 and Mercedes since 2009, BMW Bugatti, Range Rover, Audi, you’ll probably know like the iCars that are now available from BMW, the dashes and panels and those cars are made from hemp besides Henry Ford in 1941 building a hemp composite car or partially hemp composite car, we’ve continued to utilize this plant and work with it to where it can be a product that replaces many of the products today that are damaging our planet.

Donnell Alexander (31:26):
Dan, where can people find your father’s book and where can they find your father’s weed?

Dan Herer (31:34):
Okay, so the book is available on Amazon for the eBook. There’s lots of The Emperor Wears No Clothes on Amazon, just to let you all know, but you want to go to the eBook edition and not a previous released edition because those are quite a bit more expensive. But the eBook is $9.99 and it’s also interactive, which is amazing. So as you’re reading the interactive book and you’re reading through and you’re finding out who my father was, you can actually click on a hyperlink and it’ll take you to a 58 minute video of a documentary on who my father was and what had happened and what created a lot of what’s happening today. And then you can go to other parts of the book that’s talking about the military and click on links that also take you right to videos that were the government talking positively about cannabis and how it’s been one of these most remarkable plants for 5,000 years. It’s extraordinary the amount of interaction that you get with this book now because as you’re reading about, you’re also seeing the future, but it’s a great way to experience it.

Donnell Alexander (32:42):
And your pot is it online?

Dan Herer (32:45):
So, the cannabis is not available online. It is only available at the local dispensary’s here in town.

Donnell Alexander (32:52):
You know what I meant with “is there a website?” I know the law.

Dan Herer (32:57):
Yeah. buddy. So, you can go to Jack Herer brand on Instagram.

Donnell Alexander (33:05):
That’s cool. Anything else you want to let people know before we split?

Dan Herer (33:09):
Be kind to one another. You know, this cannabis industry is a great place to be. Just keep thinking about cannabis as community and not commodity and treat each other well.

Donnell Alexander (33:22):
Appreciate that. Thanks for coming through.

Dan Herer (33:25):
Thank you, gentlemen. Have a great day.

Donnell Alexander (33:27):
That’s our show for this week. If you want to give us feedback go with hello@weedweek.net. But before we move on, we have Alex’s weekly social media nugget.

Alex Halperin (33:38):
All right. The tweet today comes from me @AlexHalperin. Here it is. It’s: “Here at @weedweeknews we’re hiring a star reporter.” That’s about it. We’ve got the job post up at journalismjobs.com. We’re looking for a reporter who’s going to do a great job covering the cannabis industry.

Donnell Alexander (33:58):
Jobs like this don’t come along that frequently. I just want to give people quick heads up. It’s not really a job about smoking a ton of weed. I do, but that’s my own personal issue. Rather it’s a lot of looking at federal records and stuff that’s happening at the state and local level. It’s a nuts and bolts work really fulfilling. I actually know a lot of great reporters who could probably do the job and I wish they could come out of the closet and take it even without them. I’m on Twitter, I know there are a lot of really quality reporters out there.

Alex Halperin (34:27):
You don’t need to smoke weed to get this job, although it probably wouldn’t hurt.

Donnell Alexander (34:34):
Right. We’ll accept people who do edibles and tinctures. You should probably smoke weed.

Alex Halperin (34:39):
You don’t need to use cannabis to get the job. It’s not a strain review job. But you know, there probably are some events. Someday we will have events again and there may be an awkward moment or so where a source might expect you to have a puff and you would have to turn it down, but that’s okay. That’s not what this job is about.

Donnell Alexander (34:59):
I’m going to let Alex speak for that cause, I think you’re at a disadvantage if you can’t take advantage of that situation as a reporter. It helps us move pot. Alex, don’t you agree?

Alex Halperin (35:10):
I think it would. Well we can put it this way. Look, I didn’t consume cannabis much or very rarely before I started writing about it. So, chances are I think that might happen to somebody if they’re not a cannabis user and we hire them. All right, so thanks so much for listening. New episodes of the podcast of course drop every Tuesday morning. Make sure you sign up for our weekly contest to win an autographed copy of the cannabis dictionary written by myself and called by Forbes One of the best books about weed you can enter by signing up for a free subscription to one of our newsletters, WeedWeek, WeedWeek Canada or WeedWeek California , at all www.weedweek.net.

Donnell Alexander (35:49):
And if you’re this deep into the episode, subscribe and review, or like us on Apple podcast, Overcast, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is you happen to be hearing us.

Alex Halperin (35:59):
I’m Alex Halperin.

Donnell Alexander (36:00):
I’m Donnell Alexander.

Alex Halperin (36:02):
Our show is produced by Donnie Alexander and engineered by Larry Buhl. Alicia Byer wrote our theme music. We’ll see you next week.

Donnell Alexander (36:09):
Later.