Written by Riley Hutchings
Last year, Colorado sold over 996 million dollars worth of legal marijuana. “Cannabis is a commodity product. It’s like coffee,” said Colorado College Professor and dispensary owner Jim Parco.
As the industry has grown, the number of marijuana companies has continued to rise. Right now, Colorado is seeing a huge growth in farmers, brand name companies, and dispensaries. Parco’s “Mesa Organics” is a great example.
After being impartial to marijuana use most of his life, Parco became interested in the business side of retail weed three years ago during his sabbatical. His and his wife’s dispensary opened seven months ago in Pueblo County, where there are 200+ licensed marijuana businesses.
Unlike many dispensaries, they only sell the marijuana they grow themselves on their “Purple Bees” farm, and they have a target audience of 40 to 80-year-olds, rather than targeting younger buyers. Uniquely, Parco’s business focuses greatly on the environmental side of growing weed. He uses recycled glass for soil and LED lights instead of the energy-sucking lights many others still use.
Veritas Cannabis is another marijuana company that jumped on the weed bandwagon two years ago and is a pioneer in high-quality branded weed. As of now, Veritas Cannabis products are sold in 10 percent of dispensaries. Toby Ripsom founded the company after marijuana helped soften his father’s battle with cancer. In fact, Ripsom used his dad’s life insurance money to start his first growing operation, and eventually his own brand name weed. Ripsom’s entrepreneurial approach is not uncommon. Today, Parco said, dozens of new brands of marijuana are created each week.
Ripsom takes great pride in the quality of his marijuana. An avid weed-lover himself, the favorite of his nine strands is called “Tora Bora.” He challenges people to a “taste-test” between his weed and that from other growers, and said the difference is clear.
After hearing of the quality bud Veritas Cannabis strives to produce, Parco responded “Cannabis is cannabis.” He argued that the marijuana sold in dispensaries is so regulated that it is always of high quality.
Ripsom has definitely found the regulation to be thorough, saying that every grower’s weed has to be tested by a third party lab, which cannot profit from the marijuana sales. In reality, he said, most experts can tell just by looking at a bud how high quality it is. At Veritas Cannabis, that is actually the last step of the process. According to Ripsom, their high levels of quality control make their costs to be three to four times as much as their legal competitors.
In addition to regulation cost, marijuana producers have high energy bills and legal expenses for licensing. As of March, the state issued over 2,500 marijuana business licenses. Legal matters are especially hard when starting a new brand. For example, Veritas Cannabis spent five months just getting the license to brand the nine strands of marijuana they currently have.
Now that they are established, Veritas Cannabis and many other brands are taking off. Right now the company is working on tripling the size of their warehouse near Denver International Airport. Ripsom said that the market is growing exponentially.
Marijuana legalization has benefited the state of Colorado in a few different ways. Marijuana sales have generated $135 million in taxes in 2015 alone. In just the two years between 2012 and 2014, marijuana-related arrests were down 75 percent, according to Denver statistics.
Though arrest rates are down, marijuana use did increase 10 percent between 2006 and 2014, and the perception of weed risk for the average Colorado citizen went down 10.1 percent in the same time frame. Ripsom is also concerned that “it is an opportunist industry for criminals” with all of the drugs and money sitting around.
Regardless, he described the industry as “respectful,” and is proud to be writing the rules for future weed-lovers to come.