Living the Dream – Part I
January 1, 2014 Denver Colorado
House of Cards
3D Dispensary – Denver, Colorado – January 1, 2014
I woke up early, put on my jacket, and sat on the couch. I looked at my joint of Flo sitting in the ashtray that I would prepare for every day off. I stared at it, but the thought of bailing on the experience of January 1, 2014, wasn’t worth the risk of figuring out the hard way that this batch leaned more toward Blueberry.
I was in my apartment in Aurora, about 2 miles from where the kid dressed up like the Joker two years before and shot up the Regal. The night before, I worked the evening shift as a budtender at Kind Love. I was making $10/hr for the first three months. They forgot to take me from training to regular wages, and I didn’t even care. I didn’t ask them how much it paid even after being hired because I knew I was jumping in once I put my foot in the elevator door. From day one, I told them I wanted to write their operations manuals and train their team.
I think I also asked to be there on the final night of 2013. I served the last medical patient that left, and I said to them, “Tomorrow, this is going to be legal for everyone.” I tried not to cry because that brand had me feeling everything, and I had been through some shit to get to that point.
It’s still the best cannabis retail atmosphere I’ve ever experienced.
It’s still simultaneously the best and worst thing that has ever happened to me.
Another guy who I worked next to as a tender was given the opportunity to be the “first person to purchase legal cannabis in the US.”
Sean Azzariti – Courtesy Westword Magazine
The company had just acquired funding to expand, and we were all on the ground floor. Literally anything was possible in 2014. It would be many months until the company “went rec,” and at that moment, I’d have no idea that I, a quiet budtender and technical writer who was marginally tolerated in a sea of narcissistic high-end cannabis scenesters, was the person who would essentially make that happen. So, I jumped in my 2005 PT Cruiser that I grabbed the year before at 90,000 miles and 28% APR and took off for Brighton Blvd!
I took the day off on January 1, 2014, to sit back and enjoy it. But I couldn’t sleep the night before. I didn’t need any cannabis. Weed was the one thing I didn’t require at that point in my life. I just wanted to be there. I parked at 3D and went to the back of a very long line, but it was moving quickly. I tried not to cry in the line. A couple of people bailed, so I moved up a few steps. The guy in front of me looked back at no one in particular and said, “I spent 5 years of my life in prison for this plant”, and someone said behind me, “I’ve been fighting for 50 years to stand in this line”. I imagine half the line had a medical card. Tears ran down my face, but I didn’t say anything.
After a while, I remembered I wasn’t there to buy anything. I went on my phone and found the address to one of only a few dispensaries that had pulled their shit together fast enough to open on January 1st. It was somewhere in Northglenn, and the facility was massive.
They had one of those inflatable dancing things, but it looked like half the air stopped circulating. I was recording the line when I came across a sign that told me not to record. There was an abundance of security guards hired to handle the situation that day, as if we were selling and drinking beer for the first time.
I wandered through the line with my iPhone, scanning what I knew to be the most historical moment I’d ever experienced in my life – The day we legalized weed in the US.
I walked right up to one of the guards. He said, “What’s going on?” apprehensively. With tears of awe in my eyes, I said, “I never thought I would get to see this day, and it’s really happening.” I was wearing my occupational badge, so he may have thought I was working there, but he shook his head up and down and smiled, and I continued to record everything. I tried not to show any faces, but no one ducked or turned their backs. No one there was thinking about what we couldn’t do.
At the beginning of 2014, the ultimate underlying tone was that none of us, including the State of Colorado, knew if this experiment would work. We implemented strict regulations for everything. From a distance, a regulatory framework looks like the government lining people up to fail, but really, they’re just trying to prevent themselves from failing.
The people who had a good business model knew they were standing in their long line, single file down a plank, and were under tremendous pressure not to fuck any of this up. The uncertainty was just as tangible as our pride. Almost everyone was self-funded.
Grabbed a property and a license when the game had just started. They signed all the paperwork, took all the background checks, and macheted through the red tape. Marketing and advertising locally because traditional social media was not an option. They placed their finger directly on the pulse and aligned with brands that matched their caliber—hired people who cared and made them a part of a community—mastered their shotgun cultivation/manufacturing + dispensary marriage. Remember that the original vertically integrated companies in Colorado that formed at the time were done so out of necessity. By this year, many of these people hated each other, which was obvious.
Why do you think they did all of that? Why would anyone do any of this? It’s because they fucking loved the plant, or they were starting to realize they made a terrible mistake…or it was a combination of the two. Greed on a devastating level actually didn’t arrive until mid 2014, after everyone started pulling things together and decided they could not scale their model without help. I never once worked for a vertically integrated company making a ton of money. They were happy or worried, but no one was ever content. No one was organized, even the “big” companies who owned multiple stores.
The Kind Love Days
I had worked for some of the most promising as well as some of the biggest shitshows in plant-touching Denver. No one was ready, but I was prepared to make Kind Love ready. I would do it with all my heart and for all the right reasons. I felt like I had been training for that moment for my entire career. I just needed someone to aim my death ray at whatever was needed, and I trusted the owners. They were good people who made poor choices and didn’t know what they were getting into. I don’t think any of us did. At the time, I vacillated between seeing them as idiots who mismanaged my talent and then dropping the ball on a craft model that had a chance of becoming one of the most influential dispensaries in the country and being human beings who were about to have their dream grabbed out of their hands. It was our dream.
I was a powerhouse at 29. I could have built a pyramid alone. That year, I picked the right people and felt like I was on the right rollercoaster. David told me he hired me because I had nothing to lose and everything to prove. Being neurodivergent, it was difficult for me to excel at retail, so I would write SOPs for the company while I was on my shift, a gentle reminder to management that I didn’t want to be a 30-year-old budtender. I loved the plant and came to Colorado to regulate and tax. I felt it was my civic duty to utilize the privilege of accessing an occupational license at a time when there were limited opportunities for people like myself who were involved in the culture before regulation and risked freedom in the name of change. Each place I worked for taught me something about myself and the game. This is a historical document, and I will talk about all of you. Don’t worry, I’ll be as nice to you as you were to me.
Me in 2014
In July of 2014, I started to write a journal about my first-hand encounter with the dawn of legalization. The year that I went from being a budtender to a COO with nothing more than experience and passion. I needed money, and I didn’t know how long I was going to last, but I also didn’t give a fuck about money. That’s probably how everything became twisted. Because my entries start later in 2014 I’ll spend some time talking about the beginning of this ride. I continued to write the journal for years, but this will be the first time I publish any of it. The original journal has never been edited and will be released in the exact form I wrote it in. There are some typos I’ve wanted to change for a decade, so take that as a reminder that you can ignore anything.
Northglenn CO January 1 2014
