Navigating the waters: A cannabis professional looks at 42...

Back in November of 2017, I resigned from my Quality Assurance position at the largest registered Medical Marijuana cultivation & processing organization (RO) in the New York State MMJ program. It was a move that initially came as a surprise to colleagues and family alike, but after some explaining and rationalizing, I immediately had their buy-in and support. The impetus for my resignation was two pronged really. Back in June my father had passed away rather unexpectedly and my siblings and I were thrust into the surreal world of posthumous preparations, consolations and all of the seemingly meaningless and distracting pomp and circumstance that surrounded it. All the while, all three of us were working hard to ‘stay strong’ and keep Mom on the rails and I was also working hard to keep up the with the forward momentum we’d gained at work. For the months that followed I did my best to keep up with the category 5 flow, but there were many times I felt very much a piling in that raging river with everything just pounding against me as it rushed by. I found it almost offensive at times at how I just couldn’t afford to slow down and at how fast everything kept moving when all I needed was a moment of being stationary. I needed a static moment of true isolation to perform a full audit of what had happened and be with my grief. 

I took that moment in November just prior to the holidays when I knew that my family and I would need it most, and while I didn’t necessarily have a ‘plan B’ for employment, I felt I had a unique enough experience and skill-set to make the attempt to venture out on my own and start a medical cannabis consultancy aimed at helping other medical cannabis startups. I’m now in the incipient stages of making that happen and as anyone who is also in the process of ‘making it happen’ or has already established themselves as a consultant can tell you, it is certainly an exercise in patience and resolve that can make or break one’s character. I loved my job and I loved the role I played in getting the company, and the program in NY, off the dock and out into open waters and so with that, I’d like to share a little relevant history and provide some perspective.

 I’ll never forget my first day at the new job on that cold January morning. As I walked up the snowy steps of the pressure-treated deck and opened the door of the construction trailer (being used as our temporary processing and testing facility), the first thing that struck me was the smell of concentrated cannabis followed by the surrealism of what I was actually being tasked, and paid to do. I started with the company at the advent of the NY MMJ program in early 2016 and was the second operations person hired to help form the (then) two-man NY operations team. The days and months that followed were equally intense and filled with purpose and for the next 8 months, we worked out of that 400 square-foot construction trailer designing our processes, sussing out formulations and developing our testing methods. I had to wear many hats and was challenged and called upon to utilize the sum total of my professional and personal experiences everyday. My teammate (and manager) would often say it was analogous to being “dropped off on the moon”. There we were at the genesis of this new industry in a new state run program during this social and medical paradigm shift. With some raw materials, a modest equipment list, and our past pharmaceutical industry experience as our guides, we set off to do what we were hired to do, get this thing off the dock. While cannabis cultivation & processing was certainly nothing new, it was very much new to us in New York and was required to exist and function within a newly conceived regulatory framework that in and of itself proved challenging at times. While sussing out our processes and navigating the new regulatory waters, we also helped design, and (on some days literally) helped build what would become a state-of-the-art 140 square-foot cannabis cultivation, processing and testing facility. Once we moved into our newly completed facility, we started hiring and training staff and I transitioned to a more focused Quality Assurance role trading in my eclectic collection of hats for a more ‘tailored’ one, and over the course of 24 months, our humble two-man crew had consistently grown to 40+ employees. We accomplished what we were hired to do. Like maritime pilots, we had successfully navigated the ship from the dock, through the strait and out to open waters.

Once settled into my new QA role, I began focusing on improving our quality systems and streamlining day-to-day QA tasks rather than being involved in every aspect of the day-to-day minutia. While these tasks required some energy and creativity, I quickly realized that something was missing for me. I missed the excitement of the startup and the manic energy, creativity and multidisciplinary skills that were once required of me. I realized that I loved and truly excelled in that startup environment and that I had the constitution for that phase of an operation and not for the structured role and relatively calm waters I had found myself in post-facto. I had traded my eclectic collection of hats for a desk and an ergonomic chair and found that I wanted my hats back. Upon this realization, coupled with the loss of my Father and my need to just be with that loss for a moment, I decided it was time to leave.

 I now find myself navigating my own uncharted waters in a (still relatively new) industry that is experiencing unprecedented growth and that seems to have no shortage of ‘experts’ on any given subject within the industry. The fact of the matter remains that while there is certainly a cumulative amount of experience and varying degrees of expertise within the industry, the lack of any real standardization (federal or consensus), the rapidly changing market and the patchwork of state-by-state regulations & requirements make this industry still very much a ‘level playing field’ in many respects in that we’re all really new at this by default. We in the industry are the ones laying the road down brick-by-brick as we move forward along it. With the exception of (maybe) the internet boom, I cannot recall anything like it within my lifetime, and so in that respect, we are truly the masters of our own destiny in what this industry will become, how it will function and how it will ultimately serve mankind. Thus it is my belief that we must all be good stewards of the industry now and going forward with not only the financial, but the ethical and philosophical longview in mind. We have the unprecedented opportunity to create something great from the ground up. We have the opportunity to (quite literally) create and shape the science, policy and public opinion surrounding cannabis. We have the opportunity to do this thing right or to do this thing wrong and the world will be watching us the entire time. I’ve been a proponent of the cannabis plant and all of its potential uses for a long time and I am truly fortunate and resolved to be a part of and to the best of my ability, contribute to this movement. 

The rapid commoditization of cannabis and everything within the industry itself is seemingly unavoidable, but I do believe it can be done without destroying the very impetus or soul that started the movement in the first place lest we forget that the whole point of this was to serve mankind in its entirety in granting access to and coming to a better scientific understanding of this therapeutically amazing plant. I will continue to navigate my own waters with this new venture with an open mind and open heart, using my experience and judgement as my compass and will continue to do my best to be a good steward of cannabis and the industry in helping pilot my clients through the waters and ‘do this thing right’. We’ve got one real chance at this and with that, I hope all of us in the industry recognize that, embrace their role in this unprecedented time in history and rise to the occasion.