Ganjapreneur, a website dedicated to cannabis business news and culture, has announced the third installment of their interview with Matt Brown, founder of cannabis tour agency My 420 Tours. This segment of the interview details Brown’s involvement in Colorado’s passage of Amendment 64, the bill which legalized cannabis for recreational consumption in the state, and what it was like working with politicians and medical marijuana entrepreneurs to establish rules for the state’s new market.
Brown was interviewed by Mitch Shenassa, a Ganjapreneur contributor who is also the founder of Incredibowl and the author of The Cannabis Aficionado’s Handbook. The interview was conducted in person and recorded as a podcast, and the recording is accompanied by a transcript on Ganjapreneur’s website. Their interview took place in Colorado, and in the background of the audio track, the sound of a marijuana water pipe (or “bong”) can be heard, as the pair passed it back and forth throughout their conversation.
One of the many topics discussed in this segment of Brown’s interview is the difficulty that was faced by politicians and entrepreneurs to achieve mutual understanding and compromise on key regulations affecting the new regulated industry. At one point, Brown explains how it was frequently came down to rhetoric when negotiations became difficult. One example Brown describes is how he used elementary economic principles to convince state lawmakers not to include burdensome requirements on legal cannabis businesses. “When it became clear that some form of what we would call vertical integration was going to be required, then that was the ace up my sleeve that I used and abused for the entire rest of the process. […] You cannot find an example of mandatory vertical integration in the United States.”
Over the course of the interview, Brown goes into detail about some of the key events and roles played by people involved, including himself. As someone who was intrinsically involved in the push for legalization, Brown also describes how he came to be successful in the industry as a business consultant. “I was here in Colorado, I was the only business consultant who put business out there. […] The way I see it, I was in the right place at the right time.”
The full interview is available on Ganjapreneur’s website, where they have announced that the next segment of Brown’s interview will be published in the near future. Ganjapreneur has also recently published a cannabis industry business directory for B2B services, as well as a job feed which aggregates the latest marijuana career openings from a variety of job boards around the web.
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