by David Schmader
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JOE DOLCE is the former editor of Details magazine and the author of Brave New Weed, an expansively researched new book that finds the author trekking from Amsterdam to Israel to Colorado to craft an up-to-the-minute portrait of the past and future of cannabis. Six days after a spasmodically sentient diarrhea sculpture was elected president of the United States, Dolce was in Las Vegas to deliver the keynote address at the Arcview Summit, a gathering of ambitious, seriously moneyed cannabis entrepreneurs. “The mood of the crowd, which was not filled with Trump supporters, was positively giddy,” wrote Dolce in a Facebook post, noting the eight states that approved or expanded access to legal cannabis on Election Day. “But is the promise of cannabis, the only next great American boom on the horizon, so intoxicating that their optimism is leading them to believe that this infant industry is too big to be shut down?”
Mike Force
JOE DOLCE is the former editor of Details magazine and the author of Brave New Weed, an expansively researched new book that finds the author trekking from Amsterdam to Israel to Colorado to craft an up-to-the-minute portrait of the past and future of cannabis. Six days after a spasmodically sentient diarrhea sculpture was elected president of the United States, Dolce was in Las Vegas to deliver the keynote address at the Arcview Summit, a gathering of ambitious, seriously moneyed cannabis entrepreneurs. “The mood of the crowd, which was not filled with Trump supporters, was positively giddy,” wrote Dolce in a Facebook post, noting the eight states that approved or expanded access to legal cannabis on Election Day. “But is the promise of cannabis, the only next great American boom on the horizon, so intoxicating that their optimism is leading them to believe that this infant industry is too big to be shut down?”
What followed was a long and bracing post in which Dolce held forth on the iffiness of a multi-billion-dollar industry built entirely on the judicious kindness of a liberal president who found it in his heart to look the other way as Colorado, Washington, Alaska, and Oregon legalized a substance that remains federal contraband. With Obama out and Trump in, is a reversal of fortune for cannabis pending?