The Changing, Prettier Face of Pot

Many want what Cowley has. In what was likely a worldwide first, a Marijuana Career Fair was held in Denver in mid-March. The job fair lasted all day, and for hours the line wound around the block.

Like the buyers of marijuana, the line for marijuana jobs was a broad slice of humanity. Young, tattooed bros in flat-brimmed hats stood next to sharp chaps in cashmere suits and hair gel.

Becky Popiel, a 2012 CU grad, wanted in on the ground floor of what she sees as the new gold rush, the new Silicon Valley, the new big pharma. “When Facebook started, no one really knew where it was going, now it’s worth billions and billions,” she said. “This is kind of like that. No one knows where this is gonna go, but it’s gonna have a big future. A really big future. I hope to see myself in that future.”

Others saw a marijuana job as their final, slim hope. Nederland’s Larry Lisco, 63, eats a lot of marijuana edibles. He believes they helped send his cancer into remission. “I have to pass a pee test to get a job, and there’s no way I can do that without losing my health,” he said. Even 7-Eleven clerks and ushers at Rockies games get drug tested. “Nobody will hire me except for this industry. I’ll do anything, I’ll sweep the floors of the grow house if they want me to. If I don’t get this, I’ll have to file for bankruptcy.”

That day, Larry Lisco found a lead on a job.

Jan Cole is owner of The Farm and Root Organic dispensaries and mother of two. Before she got into legal weed, Cole owned an upscale day spa in the chi-chi ski town of Telluride, a spa that gave Laura Linney and Daryl Hannah massages and facials.

Now, she is trying to do “day spa but for pot.” It seems to be a smart business model.

Cole just opened a new, sparkling, indoor marijuana grow house in Lafayette. Inside, under blinding white lights, are 2,000 plants, from Hell’s Angels to Purple Hawaiian. Even this grow house is more upscale than anything you’ve ever seen. There are framed pictures of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. The pot is all organic, natural. Soothing music plays for it.

Cole says that, since marijuana became more accepted, clients expect a higher quality product—especially in health-conscious Boulder. She wants to cater to those women, the ones who won’t take Advil, eat gluten or buy GMO, but will regularly light a plant on fire and inhale hot white smoke. Sixty-five-year-old women will come into her store and demand a specific strain. And Cole better have the strain, or they’ll find someone else who does.

In other words, Cole wants to be “the Whole Foods of cannabis,” as she said, “the Silver Oak of pot.”

But maybe pot won’t get us all rich. It would be nearly impossible for Colorado’s marijuana industry to live up to the expectations now being set for it. For four billion people to buy Colorado weed, they would all have to get on a plane and come here. But how many would even want to? How many will even cross the street? Some of the stigma still lingers like a cloud of smoke.

“Colorado is now known for its pot more than for its mountains,” former congressman Patrick J. Kennedy, son of Teddy, said in a statement. “And drug dealers are as prolific as ever. Is this a reputation anyone can be proud of?”

Some marijuana workers can’t tell their mothers what they do. Some mothers, on finding out for the first time that their sons smoke pot, tell them how disappointed they are. Some workers in grow operations duck out of frame when a reporter pulls out a camera. Not fearing the feds, fearing mom.

After pot became legal, Colorado “immediately became the butt of comedians on late-night TV,” Governor John Hickenlooper said on CNBC. “That kind of branding, where people say, ‘Oh, you guys are a bunch of stoners, that could be terrible for us.’ … Some employers are going to think twice” about doing business here.

This is also not a completely benign substance. You hear all kinds of stories.

A young woman named Heather Smyth had her grandma, Suzanne, in from Hawaii for a wedding. Smyth slipped her an edible, a banana-chocolate-walnut “Incredible.” And her grandma—as these wild, crazy, unpredictable septuagenarians are wont to do—ate it just before the ceremony. Well, the preacher was a real snooze, and sometime around that verse from First Corinthians the preacher mispronounced the bride’s name three or four times, and started telling out-of-place stories. Smyth suddenly heard her grandma burst out laughing in the pews. And she couldn’t stop. Her shoulders were heaving, her nose snorting. She jammed her fingers in her ears to keep from hearing the rest of the preacher’s strange stories.

This is not your mother’s marijuana. Sophisticated breeding by underground growers has increased the potency of many marijuana strains by five, ten or twenty times. The other night in Denver I watched as a man, about 70, put a lighter to a bowl of weed and inhaled deeply, fully, as though he was trying to siphon all the gasoline out of a Winnebago. Then he loaded up another bowl. While a small and semi-stunned crowd watched, he smoked roughly enough weed to blaze up an entire touring funk band. This dude, thought bystanders, knew how to party. It wasn’t long before he was as wobbly on his feet as a late-stage Jenga tower. It wasn’t long before I saw him being held up by some younger men, bent over a trashcan. This time, he wasn’t inhaling, and his dinner was going in the opposite direction dinners normally go.