Norton Arbelez at RiverRock's headquarters. Photos by Michael McGrath
This article was originally published on VICE Colombia.
Norton Arbelez is used to getting calls from journalists. The 35-year-old is both the founder and manager of RiverRock, one of Colorado's largest marijuana companies, and the founder of Medical Marijuana Industry Group (MMIG)a cannabis entrepreneurs' association that has helped to construct the regulatory framework for the production, sales, and consumption of the plant for medicinal purposes.
He's a natural subject for articles about Colorado's legal pot industrya clean-cut former lawyer miles away from any stoner stereotypes, seemingly always happy to grant the press access to his world. He's driven reporters in his own car to visit his Denver dispensary, plantations, and processing plants, where over 100 of his employees work. He's a businessman, a politician, and an activist who has influenced regulations and navigated through them to turn a profit.
"This is not only my businessit's my passion, my intellectual calling," Arbelez explained to me during a recent Skype conversation. I was calling him because I wanted to understand both his business and the regulatory framework it operates under. The world has been watching the Colorado experiment in legalizationwhich involves allocating marijuana tax revenue to schoolsand several American states have followed in its footsteps. After sending some of its bureaucrats to Colorado, Uruguay also legalized the production and consumption of the plant in 2013.
In the course of one conversation, Arbelez can reference Raphael Mechoulaman Israeli pioneer in medicinal marijuana researchand switch to the racist origins of the banning of marijuana in the US. "Mexicans and African Americans were the ones who used cannabis," he said. "It's obvious that its prohibition had to do with racial bias."
Arbelez was born in California. While growing up, his Columbian parents encouraged him to maintain two things above all: a dedication to his studies and his " paisa wit"a way of being "flexible, easygoing, and creative," a common trait in parts of Colombia.
Like with most Colombian families, marijuana was a taboo in the Arbelez household. "Being called a 'pothead' was almost an insult," he told me. He maintained that perception of the drug being bad, dirty, and criminal throughout his college years. That changed when a car accident left him with an unbearable sharp pain in his spine, caused by an injury to two of his vertebrae. One of his friends who had been through a similar accident had become addicted to painkillers, and Arbelez didn't want to follow his example. He decided to buy some weed from a dealer, and the effect was immediate and revealing: Arbelez's prejudices against the plant dissipated, and he discovered its potential to help people in pain.
Four years later, after a job as a medical lawyer, Arbelez decided to try his luck in Colorado with a partner, John Kocer. "We knew the medical practice, and we wanted to help people," Arbelez said. "So we saw this as an opportunity."
"If we had started promoting recreational marijuana, we would have gotten the federal government pissed off, and it would have shut the whole thing down."
At the time, Coloradan patients with prescriptions could possess up to two ounces of marijuana at a time and have up to three flowering pot plants. That was thanks to Amendment 20, which was approved by voters in 2000.
To Arbelez, this opportunity was also a very uncertain scenario. "I got to Colorado with $800," he told me. "Back then, in the middle of an economic crisis, there were three kinds of marijuana cultivators in the business. There were the hippiesor people who had homegrown it for a long timethere were criminals, and there was uspeople who generally came from other industries that had collapsed at that time, such as real estate."
Arbelez and Kocer eked out a somewhat tenuous existence with their new company RiverRock, at one point even living in their medical marijuana clinic. Then they began to worry that there wasn't enough in the way of a regulatory frameworkit was impossible to control the illegal recreational market, and "under those circumstances, the federal government was going to come and shuts us all down," Arbelez said. The solution that the two partners and other weed-industry professionals came up with was to take it upon themselves to keep their business clean. "Along with the entrepreneurs, lawyers, and lobbyists that were part of Medical Marijuana Industry Group, we designed a clear and accountable system. A bureaucracy that controlled the field and kept the industry from becoming criminal," he said.
In order to achieve that, Arbelez studied the institutional ...
