Four Chicago-connected cannabis CEOs see federal dominoes falling. Investors have heard this song before. Consumers barely know the band is playing. Ben Kovler gave investors his version of Jack Straw this week: “We built the company to stand on its own without waiting for federal reform.… The first domino
Grown In, revisited—and an invitation to help us work through the November 12 cannabis collision on October 8. “Walk in the sunshine.” Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow released the song on Ace in 1972. Its larger point is that consequential movements are built from countless small motions—some
Señorita at Lollapalooza is further proof that consumers like drinking their weed—even if lawmakers cannot decide whether to keep it legal Señorita, the hemp-derived THC beverage brand owned by the Kovler family’s RYTHM, has landed a very Chicago contract: Official THC Beverage Partner of Lollapalooza. For the
From eMileHigh to Grown In, the plant-medicine argument finally finds the room Twenty-five years ago, I smoked pot on University Hill and published a Colorado tech ezine while working around the edges of a young Jared Polis’ world. Today, from the same corner, cannabis, hemp, psychedelics, pharma, state
J.B. Pritzker is Chicago’s accidental Bud Boss. Who inherits the baton?
The Founders were not pure. Neither is the cannabis industry. That may be exactly why a plural room — contradictions, egos, incentives and all — is necessary now. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were not saints. This is important to remember before the 250th birthday party gets too polite. They
Frank Costanza was right. Not just about the pole. Not just about the tinsel. Not just about the sacred obligation to tell your family exactly how they have disappointed you over the past year. He was right about the structure. Every functioning family under a big enough tent eventually needs
There is a line in Chicago civic life, cannabis life, media life, and maybe actual life where certainty becomes suspect. David Mamet knew this. Jim Belushi knows this. Anyone who has spent five minutes in Illinois cannabis knows this. The facts are present. The people are recognizable. The room is
Missouri is the kind of place where America tells on itself. It is red, Christian, libertarian, transactional, musical, river-bent, baseball-haunted, suspicious of government, fond of rules when the rules belong to somebody else, and perfectly capable of legalizing weed while still pretending it is shocked to find joints
I. The Desk Where the Boom Becomes Policy There is a desk somewhere in Springfield that deserves its own oral history. Call it J.B. Pritzker’s desk if you want. Call it the table where Illinois decided cannabis was not just a product category, but a test of state
What we learned from the first Midwest Cannabis Forum There is a Robin Hood problem in cannabis. Actually, there are several. There is Robinhood, the trading platform, where cannabis investors can view certain cannabis-related securities and ETFs, including names like the Roundhill Cannabis ETF and AdvisorShares Pure US Cannabis
Cannabis has finally reached the stage of American capitalism where everyone believes they are simultaneously getting rich and getting screwed. Which, honestly, may be the clearest signal yet that the industry is becoming real. The publicly traded multistate operators feel squeezed because they spent the last five years building billion-