Last month, at White Box, a gallery in Chelsea, Scott Dittman, a linebacker of a guy, aged forty-four, his face sun-glistened from living in mile-high Denver, arrived one J-stop north of Wall Street to sell his business—a better way to grow Cannabis sativa indoors.
It was the first day of the East Coast Seminar for Cannabis Investors, hosted by the trade magazine Medical Marijuana Business Daily, whose calculations put the value of the “cannabis space” at around six billion dollars by 2018. In an introduction, the Daily’s editor, Chris Walsh, said he noted a key shift in the demographic of attendees. “Three years ago, you couldn’t find a business suit or a tie. Or even a shirt.”
Troy Dayton, a baby-faced thirty-six-year old with receding hair, was the first speaker. Before the quiet crowd, he extolled the tech-utopian promise of cannabis as “the next great American industry.” Dayton, the CEO of the San Francisco investment firm ArcView Group, the day’s sponsor, pairs start-ups with angel investors. (ArcView’s logo curiously resembles that of Netscape Navigator, circa 1999.) His message: The flood of investments would usher in a tech boom rivaling the Apollo-era Space Race. “For the development of plant science, it’s like going to the moon.” The example he gave: astronaut ice cream.
An older gentleman in the back of the gallery had a question. When did Dayton expected Fortune 500 companies to start investing? “Federal law needs to change,” he said.
Legalization—currently in eighteen states and Washington D.C.—fueled speculation of untold riches. Uptoke, a portable vaporizer company, had a $5 million valuation. A company called Royght made the Halo, which instantly transformed a Starbucks’ Venti-sized paper cup into a mobile “water pipe” (another way of saying bong). Leafly, a mobile app, showcased reviews of dispensaries and strains à la Yelp; MJ Freeway sold point-of-sale software, like you might find at a restaurant; Apeks and Eden Labs couldn’t meet the growing demand for supercritical CO2 extractors, an expresso machine, of sorts, for dispensing honey-like hash oil. A former NBC executive named Mike Schreibman planned to use such extractions to make custom nutraceutical blends; 421 Patch, he said, would be like the next Pepsi-Co.
No one I spoke with mentioned pharmaceutical development, perhaps aware that clinical trials take time and, in that time, a new President or an existing attorney general could change his or her mind. (What little Food and Drug Administration-approved cannabinoid drug development exists—that is, Cesamet and Marinol—was at least two decades old. Others wondered if rumors about suitcases full of cash were apocryphal. One Colorado grower emailed me, saying, “If there is money pouring into cannabis research or hemp research, nobody is talking about it out loud.”)
Many of the speakers and investors called the space “idiosyncratic,” and I wondered if this term was really just a polite way of explaining drug products that took stoner-like profundities to commercial extremes? In truth, the cannabis-fueled Space Race was something of a model rocket test flight?
That afternoon, I found Dittman handing out business cards in the basement and drinking a Blue Moon beer. His story went something like this: He was building homes in Colorado in 2009 when the bottom dropped out, so a realtor friend of his, who later turned out to be (his words) “a shithead,” coaxed him into capitalizing on the next big boom: Medical marijuana. Along with just about everyone else in Denver, the two rented a massive warehouse and filled it with thousands of plants. Soon enough, though, their farm was covered in mites and molds and hermaphroditic plants. “Everyone had crop failure,” he told me.
Dittman made the best of it. He turned used forty-two-foot shipping containers into sort of cubicles to subdivide climate-controlled grow rooms he calls PharmPods.
Before Colorado, he said, no government had ever issued permits to legally and commercially grow marijuana indoors. Even the Dutch had a policy of don’t ask, don’t tell when it came to small-scale cultivation. “Just imagine,” he said, “ten years or twenty years of crop research.” Dittman had moved his business to the East Coast in the hopes of chasing an untapped market. PharmPods, his brochures said, were a revolution in organic farming. They also fed the dueling demands of year-round lettuce and cannabis growers. For now, the scientific renaissance had a modest reality.
Outside the gallery that day, a man in sunglasses flashed me a toothy smile. His name badge said “Vaporware” the first time I read it. Later, I realized he was probably selling vaporizers. In some respects, it felt like an honest mistake. That afternoon, the cobblestone street reflected the bright afternoon sun. The air smelled faintly of skunk.
Unpublished. Special thanks to MB for commissioning.