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.