It’s like that movie Sliding Doors if Gwyneth Paltrow was the world’s biggest marijuana market and that train was some other voter initiative. 

With the promise of billions on the horizon, there’s been an influx of tech money and minds into the cannabis industry, but Silicon Valley’s influence doesn’t stop at the bottom line. Can tech disrupt weed and does it need to?

California opened the floodgates with legalization. Post-prohibition, pot is popping up everywhere: Yoga studios? Check. Nail salons? Yup. Japanese bathhouses? Mhmm. Your grandma’s nightstand? Look, that’s between you and Nana.

This is the home of Murder Mountain, where drug cartels hide beneath the forest’s canopy. It’s also home to a long tradition of family growers and (if all goes according to plan) the next big thing in California tourism.

There may be a lot of cash changing hands in the cannabis industry but it isn’t the growers or manufacturers making bank. Weed people like to joke that the only people making money in the Green Rush are the lawyers.

 In Oakland, social justice in the legal weed industry is a game of chance and some believe the cards are stacked against the very people the city’s equity program was built to serve. 

For the last two years, Tracy Ryan, Wayne Justmann, and other activists and organizers have railed against the state’s treatment of medical marijuana patients. In October, nearly three years after California voted to legalize, Governor Gavin Newsom gave new life to Compassionate Care when he signed Senate Bill 34. The donation of medical marijuana to the terminally ill is now legal and tax exempt. But is the spirit of compassion still alive?

In the new world of weed only the strong survive and Matt Shotwell, the merchant marine turned reality TV star with a 28-toed cat and a gold chrome tour bus, isn’t giving up yet.

Corporate oversight? Accountability? Ethics? When California flipped the switch on legal weed, cannabis businesses found themselves grappling with issues largely foreign to the illicit market.

As Lori Ajax worked around the clock to hire staff, create guidelines, and make sense of the illicit market, Steve DeAngelo, the so-called “father of the legal cannabis industry” and founder of Harborside, one of the state’s biggest marijuana dispensaries, was getting ready for his victory lap. But things didn’t exactly go according to plan.