I Went on a Tour of America's Biggest Legal Weed Factory

I Went on a Tour of America's Biggest Legal Weed Factory

Adam Bierman, the bullishly confident 36-year-old CEO of MedMenthe first American cannabis company to be valued at a billion dollarsthinks Donald Trump is very good for business.

This administration is the best weve had in a very long time for our cause, he told me last week as we spoke in a spotless white conference room inside his companys new $15 million marijuana factory, near Reno. This administration have said that theyre a champion of states rights. Theyre a champion of business. When people say, The last person in the world that would sign a marijuana bill into law would be Donald Trump, I dont think its that crazy. I think it makes perfect sense for him to be the person that would sign it.

What about Jeff Sessions, the famously anti-marijuana attorney general? What about the fact that its largely been Democrats, rather than the Republicans actually in control of the federal government, who have backed marijuana legalization?

Bierman waved all of that away.

In the United States, Congress makes the laws, he said. Whats important to remember is that in November 2016 we elected Donald Trump president of the United States. We also legalized marijuana in California, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts on the same day. That means the day after the election, congresspeople from those states showed up in DC representing constituents that voted to legalize marijuana. The real momentum has very little to do with the White House. It has everything to do with Congress.

Its true that support for marijuana legalization seems to be growing across the countrya recent Pew poll found that 61 percent of Americans support legalization. The Trump administration gave assurances last week that it will not go after states that have legalized marijuana, thanks to pressure from Colorados Republican Senator Cory Gardner. Democrats have signed on in droves to a bill from Cory Booker that would end weed prohibition, a show of support that it more likely that the party will tackle the issue should it take power. The same week that MedMens Nevada factory began production, former Speaker of the House John Boehner joined the board of Acreage Holdings, a cannabis-centric investment firmseven years after the Republican said that he was "unalterably opposed" to marijuana legalization.

If federal law does change within the next few years, MedMen will be ideally placed to profit. Bierman and co-founder Andrew Modlin started the company in 2010 after their PR agency, ModMan, was called in to build a website for a small weed shop. They couldnt believe how much money the business was bringing in, so they decided to scrape together $13,000 to start their own cannabis company. Eight years later the pair now runs 11 dispensaries that look like Apple stores in California, Nevada, and New Yorkwith a 12th due to open this Friday in Manhattan on Fifth Avenue. In the next few months MedMen set to become a publicly traded company in Canada, where federal legalization is on the way. Last month, Canadian investment firm Captor Capital Corp. announced it had bought 2.3 percent of the business for $23 million, valuing MedMen at a billion dollarswhich gives it the status of a "unicorn" company. It is already a major player in the national marijuana market, which took nearly $9 billion in sales last year and is predicted to hit $21 billion by 2021.

The cloning room. Photo by Ortal Dahan.

Now the company is opening what Bierman calls the most high-tech marijuana factory in the world here in Nevada. The site features a sterile tissue culture lab where plants are sliced up and multiplied, a purple-lit cloning room where weed grows in test tubes out of agar jelly, a $4,000 Futurola grinder capable of shredding three pounds of flower in two seconds, and a 26,000-square-foot Dutch-designed warehouse that will soon be home to 25,000 plants. Manufacturing manager Jeff Spinder says the factory will be capable of producing 10,000 pounds of marijuana every year.

MedMen are also currently building exact replicas of this factory in Desert Hot Springs, California, and Utica, New York. This isnt just a facility I'm touring, its the birth of Big Weed.

Companies like MedMen have an open field because existing giant corporations are reluctant to get involved until marijuana finally becomes legal at the federal level, said Troy Dayton, CEO of the Arcview Group, the largest investor group focused on the cannabis market. Part of the great strategy in companies like MedMen and others is that theyre getting a chance to take a crack at a multibillion-dollar market which is growing with a 27 percent compound annual growth rate before they have to compete with the big dogs, and as a result theyre becoming a big dog in their own right, Dayton told me.

Bierman agrees with this assessment, and says the current federal uncertainty is both an asset and a cause of anxiety. I feel like Ive got a race to run and, yeah, Im ten laps ahead of everybody else but the other guysthat in a moments notice could lace up their shoesare way faster than I am, he said. I have to keep running hard and fast and not take a break because I have to assume that at some point theyre going to let them come run.

Chris Walsh, the founding editor of industry journal Marijuana Business Daily, says that the reticence of big money to get involved wont last long. He pointed out to me that Constellation Brands (the $42 billion multinational that brings you Corona and Modelo) announced in October that it's bought a 9.9 percent stake in the $2 billion Canadian marijuana firm Canopy Growth. (There are unicorns north of the border too.)

The stigma is rapidly eroding, said Walsh. But its still there, especially if youre tied to a mainstream investment firm who might worry that its other clients would get upset, or that they might face some kind of ...

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