Pot industry is on edge as it braces for possible crackdown
WASHINGTON — Marijuana mogul Seibo Shen is accustomed to fighting — but it is usually on the jiujitsu mat, where the undefeated 40-yearold prefers to engage completely baked.
“You know that movie ‘Drunken Master’?” he said, nodding to the cult film about a martial arts master whose secret weapon is inebriation. “It’s like that. I like to consume so much before a competition that they are literally walking me onto the mat.”
Shen, founder of a thriving startup that hawks luxury vaporizers at $450 a pop, might want to stock up for an impending match that could prove epic. His opponent? President Donald Trump’s Justice Department.
Shen is among the swiftly growing ranks of marijuana entrepreneurs who could be headed for a showdown with the federal government.
The election of Trump has shocked the marijuana industry into a state of high alert at a time it had planned to be gliding into unbridled growth. Trump’s newly confirmed attorney general, former Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, is a longtime field lieutenant in the war on drugs with unabashed hostility toward pot. It was only 10 months ago that Sessions was scolding from the dais of a Senate hearing room that the drug is dangerous, not funny and that “good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
Now he is poised to set the direction on national drug enforcement policy at the same time that eight states have legalized recreational use of the drug. Some 60 million Americans are living in states where voters have opted to allow any adult to be able to purchase marijuana.
Business leaders like Shen are betting the rapid maturity of the cannabis industry has made it too big to jail. Even before new laws took effect permitting the recreational use of pot in the massive markets of California and Massachusetts, the legitimate pot business had dwarfed its 2011 size, when the Drug Enforcement Administration was still aggressively raiding medical marijuana vendors operating legally under state laws. Since then, former President Barack Obama’s Justice Department decreed that states should have freedom to pursue their own policies, and the legalization train seemed to have left the station.
But those who have been in the business since the early days of medical marijuana caution the legions of newcomers that federal busts and seizures could quickly make a comeback. Sessions very deliberately left that option open during his confirmation hearing.
“There are people in this administration who will crush this industry if they see the opportunity,” said Steve DeAngelo, who is considered a guru among pot entrepreneurs. DeAngelo, owner of the bustling Harborside Health Center dispensary in Oakland, was among the first in the industry and he has experienced it all: surprise raids from armed federal agents, unending lawsuits, getting locked in a jail cell. “I don’t think people who don’t have firsthand experience with the irrationality of federal intervention understand what a threat we are facing.”
But it’s hard to see much anxiety watching the comings and goings inside DeAngelo’s dispensary, which these days looks more like a Whole Foods than the shady corner bodegas such operations long resembled. Wellmannered hipsters with encyclopedic knowledge of bud patiently serve customers as sommeliers might, explaining the intricacies of abundant varietals of reefer available to be consumed in everevolving ways. On one side of the room is an enticing display of pot-laced baked goods, and opposite that is the kind of fancy kiosk in which artisan granola bars or yogurt cups might be hawked in a high-end grocery; the millennials manning this one are pitching elegantly packaged microdoses of pot injected into dried blueberries and other goodies.