If you were looking to smoke some pot in New York this week, the Cannabis World Congress and Business Exposition was the last place you would want to be.
Located in a downstairs corner of the Javits Center (a book convention took up the main pavilion), the sixth annual CWCBE promised attendees a host of seminars and exhibitions. For a $50 entry fee, one could peruse booths of vendors selling CBD dog treats, appetite-suppressing hemp, or “bliss”-inducing gummies.
One thing not welcome, as made clear on the trade show’s website and program: the mind-altering ingredient in cannabis, THC, was “strictly prohibited at the event.” To that end, a “Cannabis Vending Machine” on display spat out only empty shot glasses.
ADVERTISEMENT
One half-joke among guests included a sophomoric inquiry best saved for Richard Linklater scripts: “Hey, do you know where I can find some weed around here?”
The answer: around the corner on 11th Avenue, where a small army of boomers dressed in tie-dye shirts played a game of pickup frisbee, annoying the “book nerds” from the adjacent conference trying to use the sidewalk. Nearby, a publicist whose business card read, “Sex, Drugs, and PR” attempted to woo reporters with a pre-roll.
Inside the center, the crowd skewed decidedly more business casual. Boomers in tie-dye were heartily outnumbered by backpack-toting venture capitalists in Cole Haan loafers and pastel button-ups. Attendees lined up outside of conference rooms to watch PowerPoints about weed.
The $10.4 billion legal cannabis industry has enticed the same kind of Wall Street financier who 30 years ago might have been played by a coke-snorting Michael Douglas.
Though CWCBE hosted a very tiny handful of social justice organizations like WomenGrow and Minorities for Medical Marijuana, the Javits Center embodied more of a backslapping boys’ club. Venture capitalists roamed a site that did not smell of pot smoke, but reeked of Versace Pour Homme.
When this writer asked one yuppie for an interview, he responded, “Only if I get your number first.” (A pickup line one presumably must be very high to appreciate.)
“If all the rock stars die at 27, then at 37 everyone gets into cannabis,” Brian McGrann, a consultant in from Philadelphia, told The Daily Beast. “Maybe they’re all having a mid-career crisis. If you’re going to reinvent yourself, this is the industry you choose.”
Degelis Tufts is the CEO of Tribe Tokes, which sells prettified vapes and CBD cartridges. She has attended similar trade shows for the past three years.
“This year, there are a lot more people who are not traditional smokers,” she said. “That’s the ecosystem now—lawyers, digital marketers. I had someone come into our showroom who was interested in investing who told me, ‘I don’t touch the stuff. I’m just looking to make money.’” (Tufts added that her company would “never take money from someone like that.”)
Splashy, well-attended booths included hemp-infused spaghetti, bourbon, and CBD slushies. Other exhibitors repped less sexy, but still essential, businesses.
Hemp-infused whiskey from Connecticut-based SoNo 1420.
The law practice Kaufman & Associates represents cannabis entrepreneurs navigating pesky logistics like securing financing and licenses. Contempo Specialty Packaging touted its new, child-proof storage box. The payment platform Alt Thirty Six, a cashless app for cannabis businesses, also sent representatives. (E-commerce companies that sell THC or CBD products are often turned down by more traditional options like Square, PayPal, or Venmo.)
Rick Weissman, founder of High Falls Hemp, a farm based out of New Paltz, New York, poses with a CBD bud.
Alaina DemopoulosDean Crutchfield works as the Chief Business Officer for Omē Wellness, a 23andMe-style DNA test that suggests specific weed strands based on genetic profiles.
Curious potheads with $129 to spare can conduct at-home cheek swabs and send the sample to a lab in California. Within two weeks, they'll learn whether their genetic tendency for anxiety or family history of Alzheimer's plays well with a specific indica or sativa. (And hopefully not discover dark family secrets about their true parentage.)
Though a doctor signs off on every Omē report, Crutchfield is quick to clarify that test results are suggestions rather than any concrete diagnosis.
“We're not saying you've got a problem, we're saying you've got a predisposition,” he said. “We're very confident that you could have these problems, but recommending that you seek medical help would be overstepping the mark in terms of ethics.”
Last year, 23andMe garnered criticism for announcing that it would sell customers' genetic data to the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. Though Omē reps refuse to go the same route, the company will use reports to conduct internal research—unless customers check an online box requesting the lab destroys their tests.
Bloomberg recently listed Brendan Kennedy, the CEO of Canadian medical marijuana company Tilray, as the second-highest paid CEO after Elon Musk. Some CWCBE guests cited his $256 million salary as a motivation to enter the field.
“I’m here to investigate opportunities,” Jeff Soule, 40, said. “[But] I do see big business as a threat. The know they can strangle the little guy—are alcohol and tobacco companies going to penetrate the industry? Will cotton come for hemp? If they want to, they can.”
A cannabis vending machine, minus the cannabis.
Alaina DemopoulosThomas J. Fuccello founded DabbinDoge, a CBD dog biscuit company, out of his home in Morristown, New Jersey three years ago.
“My pitbull, Bally, was suffering from anxiety—I could hear her crying from outside the sliding door,” he said. “I use CBD for my anxiety, so I started giving it to her.” He first used a tincture to apply the liquid on her tongue, but Bally didn’t like the dropper going in her mouth.
Fuccello, an amateur chef, began concocting homemade treats, infusing coconut oil with 1000 or 2000 milligrams of CBD. Now, DabbinDoge sells packs of 30 snacks for $45.
“I used to work for a sewer and drain company—it was literally a crappy job,” Fuccello quipped. “This is a big step up, from snaking sewer lines to having my own business.”
One New Yorker, a boomer who gave his name as “Ricky Ray,” has smoked weed since age 15. After a cancer diagnosis compelled him to quit smoking, Ray began making his own tinctures.
“Now I love that I can just buy all these edibles,” he said. “I can make it just as easy, but an industry has finally been created to satisfy people.”
Vangst, a recruiting company, serves as an employment agency for cannabis companies.
“We want to provide companies with quality candidates, versus someone who doesn’t understand that this is a real job outside of stoner culture,” Daniel Barzottini, the company’s business development manager, said.
He added that Vangst recently hired a a full-time employee dedicated to advancing “social equity” in cannabis. “We want to find those individuals who might have been affected by the war on drugs and give them an avenue to enter this industry in a fair way,” he said.
McGrann, the consultant, shook his head when asked if he thought the expo scene looked homogenous. “It’s definitely a broad cross section of people at this point,” he said. “There are suits and T-shirts.”
Nadir Pearson, a recent Brown graduate and activist who will appear on a Sunday panel at CWCBE about cannabis in academia, spoke passionately about navigating the field as a young black man.
“To be frank, yes, it is tricky,” Pearson said. “The racial history of cannabis is almost double that of any other industry. There are people sitting in jail for smoking weed, and that's the big looming thing, while people are basking in the sun, smoking in other states.”
He added, “I come from a privileged background of going to an Ivy League university. That is a big way to combat the stigma, too. I just graduated—that's crazy.”
The recent graduate then put his head in his hands and began to cry, overcome with the enormity of his achievement.
“Goddamn,” he apologized. “This is just because I'm high.”
