Steve DeAngelo’s paternal responsibilities as “The Father of the Legal Cannabis Industry” – as Mayor Willie Brown Jr. famously christened him – are far from done, and in fact have entered a critical phase. To hear DeAngelo explain the situation, the process of creating a legal cannabis industry got off to a flawed start and needs to be corrected for the industry to not just fulfill its national and global promise, but to even function. I think DeAngelo would also agree that the legal cannabis industry is in fact the offspring of multitudes and generations of mothers and fathers, but he is unabashed about his role and responsibility in bringing the industry to its current state. During a lengthy conversation with CBE in June – as he spoke effusively from his car in Oakland during a pit-stop home to refresh from the road less traveled – the founder and/or cofounder of Harborside/Steep Hill/Arcview/Last Prisoner Project was finally unburdened from the weight of being a company official. He was free, and tangibly so, and aware of it. He also was on the call because there were things he wanted to say, and as always he did so in a way utterly unique to the man.
“I’m taking a little bit of a break from the road for the next several weeks to do some personal maintenance and catch up,” he said as we settled in. “I’ve been spending about 250 days on the road for the past few years. It’s really all about the road right now,” he added. “I’ll tell you a little bit more about it, but I’m planning a major shift in my life now to focus outside the country in Jamaica for the next several months.”
Will the shift remain cannabis related? “I dedicated myself to this plant when I was 13 years old,” he replied, “and I’m not going to stop until the last prisoner is free, and everybody who needs this plant in the world has access to it. Everything will always be cannabis related,” he reiterated. “I have always considered cannabis to be part of a family of visionary plants and substances, that she is mother nature’s most kind and gentle and forgiving plant teacher. There are many other plant teachers: ayahuasca and peyote and psilocybin have all been part of my journey. I didn’t feel like I could really speak as openly about that part of my path as I am able to today. When I was an operating officer of licensed cannabis companies, I didn’t tend to talk a lot about psychedelics, but that’s part of my path now, and it’s something that I’m embracing as more and more of my mission as well.”
I asked DeAngelo about an interview he had done about a year earlier in which he said his goal was to help build a cannabis industry that reflects the values the plant teaches, and also to repair the disparity gap in the industry. Was the shift he was speaking about a further expression of those things?
“Like every path, there have been twists and turns in this path,” he said. “Relative to a year ago, that was before New York really came onto my radar screen. And so, for the past year, I have spent a lot of time in New York, and out of that experience I became more specifically focused on the legacy part of the ESG equation. ESG is this big category where we’re essentially talking about building an ethical cannabis industry and making sure that it welcomes all kinds of people, especially people who have been disproportionately impacted by the war on cannabis. Within that subset, there are a couple of populations that are especially close to my heart, subsets that I come out of personally and where my closest relationships have been in my life. I also think they are the people who are most at risk and need help the most, and that’s prisoners, people who are still in prison on cannabis charges, and legacy cannabis operators, whether they’re legacy operators who have never gotten busted and locked up in prison, or they’re released prisoners who wish to participate in the legal cannabis market.
“Those are the folks that I’ve been looking at,” he added. “I have been spending a lot of time in New York working with and getting to know the legacy operators there, and one of the most dynamic and creative parts of the world of cannabis are the folks who service New York’s cannabis market. They’re really remarkable companies. Some people call them delivery services, but they’re actually much more than that, and they are in my view harbingers of what a truly national cannabis company is going to look like. One of the areas that these companies I’m talking about – companies like Happy Munkey, Buddy’s Bodega, and Excelsior and a bunch of other outstanding companies out of New York – what they’ve gotten really good at is managing an interstate supply chain. They are in touch with all the best West Coast growers, all the best West Coast breeders, and not just West Coast, but Maine and Oklahoma, anyplace in this country where there are people producing superior weed. The New York cannabis companies have sought them out, developed relationships with them, and then branded them. So, if you go to New York and you order from a delivery service, you’ll get your weed delivered in a beautifully branded package that not only has the strain name, but it has some kind of brand name that’s associated with it as well. Sometimes it’s a California brand that’s very well known, and sometimes it’s a New York brand that is not that well known, but there’s always a branding component to it, which in my opinion is way cleverer than what we see coming out of the corporate cannabis world.
“I look at corporate cannabis marketing and.. I mean, if I see one more airbrushed white couple on a bicycle at the beach in Malibu with their vape pens in their hands at sunset, I think I’m going to puke,” he added. “There’s this one package that’s done by a brand called the Cuchifrito Brothers – and just the name sounds cool and distinctive and memorable and groovy – but then they put out this package that has a picture of a Dominican grandmother who’s got her hair up in curlers with a bandana over top of her curlers, she’s got an apron on, she’s stirring a great big pot of stew, and she’s got a fat joint hanging out of her lip. And the way that she’s standing and the look on her face is so real and so funny and so endearing, it can only have been created by somebody who grew up in that kitchen, who was her grandson or granddaughter. It has this ring of authenticity and humor and sparkle to it, and it’s emblematic of what they’ve done so people will think of them as delivery companies, but they are really people that have surveyed the entire supply of cannabis nationwide, selected the best suppliers, branded those suppliers, introduced those new products to the most competitive cannabis marketplace in the world, and developed traction with their cannabis.”
And tapping into legacy growers? “Absolutely, it’s all legacy, because there is no licensed cultivation supply chain in New York,” said DeAngelo. “It does not exist yet, and here’s the thing about New York, which makes it really interesting. My money line there was that these New York companies that are called delivery companies are really the true lions of the cannabis industry. And you have this very interesting situation, because for my entire career – 50 years I’ve been selling weed – if you have a load of superior quality cannabis, whether you grew it in this country or you imported it from somewhere else, you take it to New York because you got a higher dollar and a quicker turn than you will anywhere else. New York is the only place in the world where I could land with 1000 pounds of weed, drop off the first 100, and before I got across town to the second 100 drop-off, the guy I dropped the first 100 to would be calling me back to re-up. That’s the kind of place New York was and still is. Consequently, New Yorkers have become used to the very best cannabis in the world, and because it’s a very competitive place, they get it at fairly reasonable market prices. They’re not paying $95 an eighth for the best weed in the world, they’re paying $60 or $55 an eighth, pretty reasonable prices that they’re not paying taxes on top of.
“So, that entire supply chain is legacy, except that in the past two to three years what’s happened is these companies have started featuring products from California, and nationally known brands. I’m not going to mention any of them, but if you check the ten most popular nationwide brands I guarantee you that at least half of them will be available in the New York market. I thought they were counterfeit, but they are not counterfeit. In fact, what’s going on is that the crisis in California has become so severe that you have most of the licensed cannabis companies in the state diverting cannabis to the underground market outside of the state. It’s the only way that they can survive.”
DeAngelo described how operators skirt the law using so-called “burner licenses.” “I don’t know all of the ways this works, but I’ll give you one example,” he said. “You have a distribution company which purchases cannabis and tests that cannabis, which is the responsibility of the distribution company, and finds that say half of that cannabis is contaminated and has to be destroyed. They have the bad quantity of cannabis destroyed, and they provide documentation to the state regulators that it’s been destroyed, which takes them out of the track-and-trace system.
But the 50 or 100 pounds or whatever it was that was destroyed was actually hemp that they bought from somewhere else, and that’s what got destroyed. The good weed was sent to New York, where it can be sold for $2000 or $3,000 versus $600 on the California market. That’s just one way it happens.”
The Bold and the Radical
I wanted to know if there was a lesson in what he was saying, for the largest companies, the MSOs, if there was any overlap between what they were doing and what was needed. “I’m not sure it does overlap and I’m going to lay out some really bold and radical thinking for you,” he responded, adding quickly, “It’s thinking I’m still in the process of developing, so this is really super fresh for me. I think that when we take a look at what’s happened since 2018 in California and in Canada, both of which moved towards adult-use cannabis roughly at the same time, that we have a good indication of what happens when you marry large corporate scale with cannabis.
“The figures from Canada, where we have national figures – and we don’t have figures like this that are tracked in the United States right now, and I don’t know that they would be as extreme, but it gives you an indication – but in Canada, since 2018, only 20 percent of the cannabis that has been grown by licensed producers has been sold to consumers. 80 percent of it has had to be destroyed or is currently being warehoused because consumers will not buy it because the quality is so low. And as you know, the longer it sits there, the less likely it is that anybody is ever going to buy it. So, basically, 80 percent of the weed they’ve grown since 2018 is unsalable, and that has resulted in a cumulative loss to investors of 11 billion Canadian dollars.
“So, what have we seen,” he continued. “We’ve seen that what happened in Canada is you took this plant – which has been grown very successfully at small scale forever – and once it was married with large scale – what we were calling efficient-scale production – it wasn’t as efficient as everybody thought. I was one of the people who bought into this idea in 2018 that we could apply modern scaled-up agricultural technologies to cannabis and get really top-quality product and that we’d be able to cut the price of cannabis in half, and that It would be a really good thing for cannabis consumers. For me, wearing my Harborside hat, serving medical cannabis patients who could not afford the medicine their doctors had recommended to them, that idea of efficient scale production was very attractive, and I bought into it.
“But we have to be real about our choices and where they lead,” he added, “and now when I look at the consequences of the choice that the industry made in Canada and in California, to go from artisan-scale production to large corporate scale production, it doesn’t work. What we found out is that every time you put this plant into really large grows, it doesn’t perform that well, and I think that it’s in the nature of the plant. Every really good grower that I talk to, if you really back them up against the wall and you say, ‘Look, dude, if you really want to grow the very best weed that you can grow, and you’ve got like one or two helpers, what’s the biggest footprint that you can grow?’ Almost always, at the end of the day, they come out at 5000 square feet, and I think what we’re learning is that there’s around a 5000-square-foot limit to growing the best cannabis. The plant is saying to us that she doesn’t want to be grown in large scale. That’s what the figures from Canada are telling us. That’s what the situation in California is telling us, where you have a legal industry which is this corporate at-scale production, and a legacy industry that’s done at artisan-scale production.
“When we think about scale in geometric terms, I think about pyramids, because the essence of scale is that you have a small number of humans organizing the activities of a larger number of humans,” he concluded. “That’s a pyramid, and I think the plant is saying to us, ‘Don’t put me in a pyramid. I’m not going to reach my full potential in the pyramid. There’ll be a whole range of unanticipated problems if you put me into a pyramid.’ And beyond that, because she’s a plant, she doesn’t speak in literal words. She speaks in poetry, and she speaks in metaphor, so you have to be open to what she’s saying in a symbolic way. But if we do that, I think that what we see is that she’s saying something else that’s maybe even more important. She’s saying, ‘I did not come here to help you build pyramids. I came here to help you flatten pyramids, dismantle pyramids. I did not come here to help you concentrate wealth, to create intergenerational wealth. I came here to help you spread wealth. I didn’t come here to narrow the range of opportunity for people. I came here to help you broaden the range of opportunity for people. Do not put me in half-a-million or million square-foot grow rooms; put me in 500 or 5,000 square-foot grow rooms. I’ll be much happier.’ So, I think that that’s the lesson, the macro lesson for me that has come out of the last five years, and it’s a painful lesson for me, because I bought into that idea of scale.”
This vision of what the industry should look like may be music to the ears of legacy operators and consumers, but it seemed at such odds with the commoditization of cannabis, which so many producers of products take for granted. I asked DeAngelo about the mindset of so many people who liken the cannabis industry to, say, the development of the alcohol industry.
“It is 100 percent the wrong mindset when it comes to cannabis,” he stated unequivocally. “This plant did not come to us so that we could push her into the standard corporate mold and reinforce what’s already here. She came to us to help us break the standard corporate mold and build something new. So, what does that something new look like? Imagine a cannabis industry where there was a 5000-square-foot cap on canopies. A single licensee cannot grow more than 5000-square-feet, period, and you can’t have more than one cultivation license, period. It’s ironclad. Then you allow those licensees to do anything that they want with their cannabis and to sell it directly to consumers.
“What does that sales process look like,” he continued. “It can look like two different things. One, you can have a geographic village. So, imagine you have 20, 25, or 100 shops that are all growing a small artisan-level canopy of amazing cannabis. One shop is turning it into hand-rubbed hash; one shop is making live resin; one shop is rolling cannabis cigars; another shop is specializing in beautiful raw flower. And you’ve got 50 or 100 of these different specialty shops in one location, and consumers can come and spend a day going from shop to shop to shop picking from a selection of artisan-quality cannabis. And because they are buying directly from the growers, they’re getting a great price and a great value. From the grower’s point of view, they’re maximizing their margin because they’re selling directly to the end-user. So, who loses? The MSOs lose, the distributors lose, all that stuff in the middle that does not add any value to the transaction, all those people lose. But the consumers win, and the growers win, and the two essential parts of the supply chain are served very well by that model, but it only works in certain places at certain times. It could be a beautiful experience, and you could surround it with consumption clubs and music lounges and hotels, and you could build these things and they’d be phenomenal, but not really practical on a mass-economy scale.
“However,” he continued, “we have got this very interesting platform in the world today called Etsy, and Etsy has been designed to facilitate transactions directly between artisan producers and consumers. It’s a tremendously successful platform, I use it myself, and the artists and producers each have their own shop on Etsy. It doesn’t cost them anything to put that shop up, it’s simple and not fancy, but many of them do very, very well with it, because they produce really good products at really good prices, and consumers go in there and they figure it out. Now, Etsy is fulfilled mainly at this time with common carriers, so that’s FedEx or UPS, and you can’t quite do that with cannabis yet. But one day, you will be able to do that with cannabis, and that’s the direction that we should be going. We don’t need 100 half-million or million square-foot grow rooms. We need thousands and thousands of 5000 square-foot producers. We don’t need 20 MSOs who are going to concentrate all of this opportunity and all of this wealth. We need thousands and thousands of artisan producers. Why then, when we have technology like Etsy available to us that services the two essential parts of the supply chain so effectively, would we ever try to push cannabis into the standard corporate model?”
How could such a dramatic change take place at this point in the development of a legal industry? “That future only comes if we demand it,” said DeAngelo. “The whole cannabis community needs to rise up and demand it. We may need to pass another initiative in California or in other states to make this business model viable. I don’t know. Like I said, this is brand new fresh thinking for me, but there’s zero doubt in my mind that this is the way that it should go. It’s taken me a while to understand the lessons of the last five years and distill them into what I think is a viable business model. But this is now where I’m at with it. I’ve been carrying this idea around for about six months, and I’ve been afraid to take it to money guys, because I’m afraid they’ll steal it from me. So, I’ve decided I’m going to put it out in the world. I’m going to talk to people like you about it, I’m going to articulate it, I’m going to put it out there, and I’m going to trust in my community, and I’m going to trust in the plant, and trust that together we put this vibration out there and start imagining that this is the future that we want for cannabis. We will make it real all together.”
Talking to the Regulators
I noted that DeAngelo had attended a recent meeting put on by CANNRA, the trade association for cannabis regulators, and asked if he had raised these issues there, assuming a meeting with regulators would be relevant to this discussion. “I think it’s relevant in a couple of ways,” agreed DeAngelo. “First, what I tried to explain to the regulators was that no matter what position you are in in the industry – whether you’re an MSO, an investor, a tax collector, a regulator, or whether you’re a legacy grower or legacy retailer – it really doesn’t matter. We all have the same interest, which is to create one single unified legal market that works for everybody.
“How do we do that,” he continued. “Let’s think about this from a logical point of view, because there is already an existing cannabis market everywhere in the world. You have two alternatives when you legalize cannabis, only two choices. Cannabis is legal now. You can either service the existing market first and then license people from outside the existing market, or you can ignore the existing market and attempt to license new people on top of it. In California, they were going to eliminate the black market, that was what they were talking about, but it didn’t work, and the reason it didn’t work is that the cost of doing business as a licensed and regulated business, even if the taxes are not exorbitant, are still going to be higher than the cost of doing business as a legacy operator.
“So, if you do not give the legacy operators a role in the license system and a stake in supporting the license system, they will just stay outside the license system, unburdened with taxes and unburdened with regulatory costs, and they will out compete the license system,” he added. “And this is exactly what’s happened in California, where 80 percent of cannabis sales are outside the license system. The only people who buy weed in legal dispensaries in California are tourists, people who are so rich they don’t care how much money they spent, or people who are so dumb they can’t figure out how to buy weed from their next-door neighbors at half the price they would pay in the dispensary.”
So, what was your message to the regulators? “I’m explaining to them, ‘Look, it doesn’t matter who you are but that you have an interest in this unified market,” he said. “Let’s look at it from different stakeholders’ point of view. Taxes. Well, a tax collector is going to be a lot happier if on average they’re capturing 100 percent of the cannabis market even it’s being taxed at half the rate rather than taxing 20 percent of the market and only getting a small slice of the taxes. Public safety. When we start thinking about testing cannabis, making sure it isn’t contaminated, about protecting people from the vagaries of the unregulated retail marketplace, it’s in everybody’s interest to protect consumers. But we have this situation right now where only 20 percent of the market in California is being regulated, so only 20 percent of the cannabis is being tested. People are still at risk for all the things that we were worried about when we started pushing for testing cannabis in California.
“Now let’s look at it from the point of view of the MSOs, which arguably would have the most to lose from this type of arrangement,” he continued. “‘So, Mr. MSO, would you rather wait 18 months or two years and be able to participate in a cannabis market that captures 100 percent of cannabis sales, or would you rather be able to participate in the beginning knowing that that market is only going to top out at 20 percent of cannabis sales, and that you will have created an enduring legacy competitors’ sector that you will never get rid of.’ It doesn’t make sense even for the MSOs to do it this way. It just doesn’t.”
But what about the regulator’s point of view. DeAngelo paused before answering. “It’s going to take a big shift in attitude on the part of regulators, and unfortunately, what I mostly saw in the room at CANNRA was regulators who still view legacy operators as criminals, as people who should not be rewarded for breaking the rules, as unreliable partners, as people who should be excluded from the industry rather than welcomed into the industry. There was a distinct minority of people there who absolutely understand the importance of welcoming legacy and were very supportive of the message I gave to them, but by and large the responses that I got were more skeptical than embracing. Look, for better or worse, we’re all captive of whatever our life experience is, and most people who have risen up to be high enough in a regulatory agency to have attended that conference have spent 20 or 30 years of their lives understanding rules, obeying rules, enforcing rules. They come out of a culture that is built around respect and understanding for rules.
“Then you have the legacy community, which wouldn’t exist if that had been our attitude,” he added. “Our cultural awareness is different in that we tend to disrespect rules, because they’ve operated in a way that in our life experience creates injustice rather than justice. And so, you have a group of regulators with a very rule-bound culture engaging with a legacy community that’s very skeptical of rules, and that makes it a difficult relationship. But I am hopeful that we can build bridges, and that we do what the plant teaches us to do. It’s always tempting when you’re dealing with people in the cannabis issue who have attitudes that seem archaic to want to lose your patience with them, to really get angry. And what the plant teaches us is that we need to take a breath at those times, and we need to try and find a way to communicate with those folks in a language that they can understand. And that’s what I’m really trying to do. That’s why I went to CANNRA, because I really do believe that it’s in the interest of everybody to build the kind of industry that I was talking about.
“I mean, just think about what would happen if instead of having this race like in Florida – where there’s 10 or 20 licenses and so there are 10 or 20 big, powerful companies that control all of this opportunity – that Florida became the state where anybody from the country could come to open up a 5000 square-foot grow, and they could sell directly to consumers. Man, what an economic boon that would create. People from all over would come, they would be buying property, they would build the property out, they would put up grow rooms, they would engage to do that work with local contractors, local architects, local landlords. There would be all of this beneficial local economic activity that would be going on. How long has it been in this country since we had an economic sector that was particularly designed for small operators, for small businesspeople?
“The business trend that you see everywhere is small operators getting gobbled up by bigger operators, and we have this amazing opportunity with cannabis to do something different,” he said. “The plant herself is telling us to do this. She’s saying, ‘Take me out of the pyramid. Do not put me in that pyramid.’ So, I’m hoping that we can get the regulators to understand that it will be beneficial to the citizens that they serve to spread this economic opportunity more broadly, and it will be beneficial to cannabis consumers to get a better product at a lower price. And my belief is that when consumers get better cannabis products at a lower price, they consume more cannabis, and a world that consumes more cannabis is a better world.”
Had DeAngelo been able to influence the MSOs with his message, and did they not have a role to play? “I think there is a role for some of the MSOs to get ahead of the curve and understand what the plant is teaching,” he said, “and I’d be happy to work with them and I am in the process of reaching out to them. I give them the same message that I’m giving you because that’s how I move through the world, and the message is really simple. The cannabis plant is not going to operate at this large scale, and as long as we keep on trying to force it into that standard mold, none of us are going to be successful. So, what the MSOs need to do is understand that we need to produce cannabis at artisan scale, and how can they use the competencies that they bring to the table in terms of acquiring licenses, acquiring real estate, administering large-scale organizations, or doing national and statewide marketing? How can they bring those competencies to the table because we will still need them, and legacy operators don’t have them?
“I talked to you about that geographic village,” he added. “That’s an amazing opportunity for a visionary far- thinking CEO of an MSO to partner up with me and help me build that geographic village. There’s going to be a lot of money made to whoever acquires that property, whoever builds out those spaces and makes those spaces available to the legacy companies, and who then surrounds those legacy operators who are going to bring in a stream of dollars with restaurants, clubs, and shops. Let them take their competencies in starting businesses and administering businesses, and in getting regulations passed, and put all of them at the service of a more broad-based cannabis industry. We still need what they have to offer, we just need them to offer it in a way that supports the existing industry instead of trying to eliminate it.”
The Devil in 280E
How, I asked DeAngelo, are legacy operators supposed to make it to the future with onerous burdens like 280E making it all but impossible to operate a profitable business? “280E is and continues to be a knife at the throat of the industry,” he responded. “As long as I was in a position to be able to do so, I aggressively fought to defeat it. My life has changed, and I am no longer in a position to be the leader of that fight, but as long as 280E exists and is enforced, it’s going to greatly impact the growth of the industry. It already has, and let’s be clear about something. The interpretation of 280E is not set in law. The decision to apply 280E to legal cannabis companies is opposed by Representative Pete Stark of California, the original author of 280E, which was originally developed to deal with illegal cocaine dealers who don’t even file tax returns, not legal cannabis companies that filed tax returns regularly. And so, it’s just an administrative decision on the part of the IRS.
“That decision could be reversed in one minute,” he added. “All Biden needs to do is pick up the phone and talk to the administrator of the IRS and tell him to change his mind, that the original sponsor of 280E says that it was never intended to apply to cannabis and stop applying it to cannabis. This madness could stop tomorrow, just like the issue of cannabis in the Controlled Substances Act could stop tomorrow. The administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration has the power to entirely remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act; he has the administrative authority to do that under the act itself! All that has to happen is for Biden to pick up the telephone and tell him to do it.
“This is the other thing that I am really focused on between now and the midterms,” continued DeAngelo, now worked up. “Joe Biden made a bunch of promises to the cannabis community and a bunch of us voted for him. I didn’t, but a bunch of other people voted for Biden as a result, and he has not kept one of those promises. I don’t know whether you caught this latest thing, but he cared so little about Brittney Griner that on her anniversary, when she was teed-up to receive a phone call from her wife and all that had to happen was somebody at the U.S. Embassy needed to transfer the call from the embassy to the prison, it was a Saturday, and the embassy was too busy. They couldn’t be bothered to have somebody come in on a Saturday to make that happen. Are you kidding me? If that was anybody other than a gay person of color who had been arrested on cannabis charges, they would have done something, they would have made that happen, and he makes this pledge on a nationally televised presidential debate and says that nobody should be in prison on cannabis charges. Well, I’m sorry, but there are 10,000 federal prisoners incarcerated today on cannabis charges, and Joe Biden has only released five of them since he came into office. In my opinion, I don’t think any cannabis voter should vote for Joe Biden or any other Democrat until they start releasing our prisoners. I’m certainly not going to.”
I asked what his takeaway was from recent FBI data about cannabis arrests rising in 2021. Even if most of those people are not incarcerated, don’t the ones that are just get added to the pool of people that need to be released, creating a never-ending cycle of arrest and release?
“It’s crazy, right,” said DeAngelo. “When we started The Last Prisoner Project in 2019, we estimated that there were 40,000 cannabis prisoners. It’s really hard to tell exactly how many there are because there are 50 different state systems, there are systems in the territories like Puerto Rico and Guam, there’s the federal system, and there’s the immigration system; so, all these different systems that have people incarcerated on various types of cannabis charges, but sometimes they’re in on other charges as well. They might have had cannabis and been in a car that was stolen that was pulled over. Is that a stolen car case or is it a cannabis case? So, there are those kinds of issues, but what we know for sure is that millions of people continue to be arrested on cannabis charges, and not one of them ever should be. These laws should never have been passed. There never was any reason for them, and it’s criminal that they’re still being prosecuted. So, we created an organization to release cannabis prisoners and have been fairly successful doing that. The problem is that they’re arresting and locking people up as fast as we can get them out.
“At the Last Prisoner Project, we do two main things,” he added. “First, we work on prisoner releases, both individual and mass releases. In states like Colorado, we’ve seen regulators release hundreds of people at once, and other times, we win one case at a time, like Richard Delisi and Michael Thompson. And that’s a big part of our work, getting individual prisoners out and telling their stories and making sure that the public knows what’s going on. The other part is enacting policies that will affect larger numbers of prisoners, and we’ve had some successes in that regard. We’ve been part of making sure that automatic expungement provisions have been in various laws. We just worked on getting a law for automatic expungement passed in California, so that’s important. You have to work on the individual cases and [bring attention] to them, and you also have to work on policies that are going to affect broader numbers of people.”
Jamaica Unbound
And now, DeAngelo is going to Jamaica as part of a shift incorporating everything we have been speaking about. “My whole career has been spent identifying little crevices of freedom, and the first crevice of freedom that I identified was in the 1970s in my hometown of Washington, DC, where during those years the maximum penalty that you could get for the sale of up to 50 pounds of weed was six months in jail,” he explained. “And so, for a nice long time, until they changed that law, there was a zone of freedom in DC that allowed me and my brother to sell a lot of weed and make a lot of money and do things like finance Initiative 59 in Washington, DC in 1998, which was our medical cannabis initiative that we won with 69 percent of the vote. But like most of these promises of freedom, they get closed off, and eventually the D.C. city council passed laws to increase those penalties, and it just got more dangerous.
“In other parts of my career,” he continued, “I’ve created communities at rainbow gatherings, I’ve created communities at yippie communes, and when I came out to California we made one of the largest communities I’ve ever created, which was the 350,000- person strong Harborside medical cannabis community. What I’ve always tried to do is look for places where there’s enough room for us to legally come together as a community, and to start figuring out how we can live by the lessons that the plant teaches us. Legalizing cannabis and building a cannabis industry are not really the things that we’re after. What we really want to do is create a new world, a better world for us all to live in, a world that lives by the lessons that the plant teaches us, and these things are just steps to get us there and to create those communities.
“What I see in Jamaica now is a really unique opportunity to create spaces and experiences in a very open way that celebrate and are centered around the use of visionary plants that give us an opportunity for the global cannabis tribe to come together to meet itself,” he added. “Because what we’ve seen happen in California and New York and across this country is now happening around the world. In Thailand, they just let out 7000 cannabis prisoners and gave free cannabis plants to millions of families across the country. I mean, this incredible thing is happening all around the world where cannabis is being welcomed back into society after centuries of being ostracized in many places. In Jamaica, the laws basically allow you to create communities and experiences where people can openly use cannabis and other visionary plants, so what I will be working on in Jamaica is creating those communities and those experiences. I have partners that I’m working with out of the indigenous Rastafari community there who have started embracing other psychedelic visionary plants, and we’re going to be offering experiences that feature visionary plants like ayahuasca and psilocybin along with cannabis.
“But they’re going to be different,” he continued, explaining the difference between his retreats and others being held. “In Jamaica right now, you’ve got a lot of these publicly traded Canadian companies that are coming down, and they’re doing these psilocybin retreats that are very much focused on the idea of using psychedelics to heal trauma, and to deal with psychological and emotional wounds. We support that work, and we think that’s part of the work that needs to be done with psychedelics, but for me and for my partner, Firstman, we don’t think that psilocybin or any visionary plants should be put into a therapeutic ghetto, and that the realm of psychedelic experience should include culture and connection and celebration and resistance, and even revolution. Yes, there are times when you want to put on the eye-shades and go inside and look at yourself, but there are also times in the psychedelic experience when you want to take off the eye-shades and look at the world, and you want to see what the medicine has to teach us about the world.
“Most of the retreats that are being offered now,” he added, “have this idea that they’re going to take people who have been wounded by a broken system and have them experience a healing psychedelic experience, and then they’re going to reintegrate them back into the world that they came from, and a lot of the emphasis with these companies is on that integration process. But we don’t really believe in that integration process, and we’re not really interested in helping people learn how to better adjust to the broken world that we live in. We’re interested in bringing people together so that all of us together can figure out how to build a new world. We don’t want to get integrated back into our old roles. We want to be able to transform into new ones.”
I asked DeAngelo what his commitment to Jamaica will look like. “I’ll be moving down around September, and I’ll be there for at least a year, and maybe longer,” he said. “The idea is that we develop our standard operating procedures for these kinds of communities and experiences, but then we want to bring them around the world. The name of the company that’s going to be doing this is One Tribe, and the one tribe concept flows out of my experiences in 2019 when I was stuck in California basically for a decade or more fighting the federal government, building Harborside. and serving patients. In 2019, I got freed up because I didn’t have an operating role in Harborside anymore, so I was able to travel. And what I found was that no matter where I went in the world – and I went to four continents, dozens of countries all over the place – it didn’t matter what people’s economic level was, or their race, or their religion, or the language that they spoke, or the role that they played in the world, or whether they are a mother or a father, or whatever they were; if they were cannabis people who really loved this plant, we all got along with each other and meshed with each other in this really incredibly easy way.
“And I started thinking about that and trying to understand how such radically different people could mesh with each other so easily,” he added. “And what I realized is that this relationship with cannabis is a very, very intimate relationship that affects us deeply and profoundly. And no matter where we come from we’ve all had the same experiences with this plant. There is a very consistent set of experiences and those experiences have taught us a set of lessons. And these are consistent lessons no matter where you are, no matter who you are, and out of these lessons we have developed a shared value system. So, it doesn’t matter where cannabis people are in the world, we value creativity over conformity, we value individual freedom over any kind of systemic authority, we value nature over industry, and we value kindness over violence and meanness. We believe in including everybody, that everybody has value in the world, and the only thing that really offends us is violence and intolerance.
“This is who we are everywhere, and so how powerful is it,” he asked rhetorically. “Well, the UN says there are about 270 million regular cannabis consumers in the world, and they have to be under-counting by a factor of three or four at least. Say there are a billion of us worldwide. Collectively, we are as large or larger than all but the largest nations on this planet, and we are bound together by a common value system, and our population bridges all of the boundaries, all the borders that usually separate human beings. We have the ability to reach across every single one of them with this powerful shared value system. So, what happens when we learn how to recognize each other, when we learn how to recognize the shared value system, when we learn how to talk to each other, and one day when we learn how to move as one? What kind of impact can we make on the planet when this tribe recognizes itself and learns how to move as one, all one billion of us?”
What an amazing trip DeAngelo had taken me on just during this conversation. Before we ended the call, I could not help but remark on the singular arc of his journey from before Harborside to now, and how it continues on with a sense of inevitability, like a story that was always going to be told.
“We’ve got to keep blazing like a comet,” he said with a laugh. ‘One day I’ll twinkle out, but until then I’ll just keep going.”
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