Issue XII
The rest of my conversation with Ricky Williams, The DEA takes an L, and colonialism rears its ugly head in Bermuda
Welcome to the 12th edition of Burn After Reading! This is my newsletter on cannabis (and other things). You can check out last week’s issue here.
In case you missed it, I had the chance to sit down with football/cannabis legend Ricky Williams for this week’s column. Check it out!
I spoke with Ricky for over a half hour, and I didn’t want to leave all this great content on the cutting room floor. So here’s a bunch of bonus content from my conversation with Ricky.
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Recent stats show that the amount of minorities and women in executive positions in the cannabis industry is declining as the industry grows. As I'm sure you noticed at a lot of cannabis industry conferences, they can be a sea of white, male faces. How do you think we can build a more inclusive industry?
Ricky: That’s a great question. I had the same feeling at an event in Massachusetts, there were a couple of us [people of color], and I kind of looked around and was like “wow, we really do feel out of place.”
Part of what Highsman is doing is putting the word out there that there’s tons of opportunities in this space. Communities of color have been the communities most impacted by the War on Drugs, so I think there’s a lot of scar tissue, where these communities don’t trust going into legal cannabis.
You see a lot of states that are really taking the initiative and giving people who have been negatively affected by the War on Drugs preference in getting into the industry. I think everyone just had to be mindful of it, and not just talk about it, but do things to support it.
You make a weekly appearance on The Dan Lebatard Show with Stugotz. Dan formerly worked at ESPN and the Miami Herald where he covered your career, and recently left ESPN to start his own media company. During your appearances, you talk about cannabis, life, death, dreams, astrology, and occasionally...football. How would you describe Dan's role in your life, and did you ever imagine you'd both be running your own businesses?
Ricky: I consider Dan to be one of my best friends in the world, and a mentor. So much of me being confident and saying the crazy shit that comes out of my mouth is because Dan encouraged me to be myself. Even when it was unpopular and it would get flak, he took me to task and would say “you want to be authentic? Here’s your chance.”
I think because of him, I’ve been able to be myself. And now I feel like I’m pushing back on Dan to be more himself. He’s brilliant and he’s got a lot of great ideas, so it’s been really fun to see him go out on his own and spread his wings.
You’ve done a lot of international travel, so I was wondering: Do you have any cool stories involving cannabis from your travels overseas?
Ricky: I was in Fiji, right after I retired [from the NFL]. A friend of mine was traveling to Fiji and Samoa, and I wasn’t the most popular person in America at the time, so I was like “hey, let me come with you.”
So we land, and we have to take a bus five hours across the island to where we’re staying. From what I can tell, no one in Fiji knows who I am. A guy gets on the bus with a big tupperware container of rice. He was friendly, and we got to talking, he even shared his rice with us. I don’t know how cannabis came up, I think he asked us if we smoke.
We said yes, and he said his cousin grows cannabis, and we could go pick some up. We get there, and his cousin comes in a Jeep to get us. We drive about 15 minutes away to this place with a hill. His cousin gets out and runs up the hill, and he comes back with this big ass [cannabis] cola. It was like 18 inches long, I had never seen anything like that before. It was like $50 for an ounce.
We went back and smoked. I remember taking that ounce and putting it into little film containers. I put it in my bag, and I forgot it was in there.
A couple weeks later, I was traveling across Australia on a Greyhound. We pulled over for a stop, and I was reaching into my bag and I was like “oh shit!” [laughs]
So I had a nice, relaxing stop on the Greyhound.
Unlike a lot of celebrities who are jumping into the industry, people actually associate you with cannabis before you turned it into a business. I imagine there were a lot of people in the industry who were interested in working with you. What was the vision behind Highsman?
Ricky: Times are changing, but with most celebrities being associated with cannabis in the past, it wasn’t a positive thing. For me, it wasn’t a positive thing either, but I was determined to work to make it a positive thing. That really underlies everything about Highsman. At one point, I thought my life was over because I failed another NFL drug test, but then I made the decision that I would be the one who would decide the quality of my life. I started leaning into the things that made me happy, and one of those things was cannabis.
I take pride in being an inspirational person. I found when I was on the football field — and I was a good football player — but rarely did people come up to me and say “It was 4th and one, and I was inspired by watching you play football to run that linebacker over.”
It was just entertainment. I find what I’ve been able to do with cannabis is that people are more inspired to be themselves. To me, that’s much better than the achievements I’ve accomplished on the football field.
What’s next for Highsman? What are you looking forward to in the next few years, and where do you see this company going?
Ricky: Creating experiences. We’re a cannabis lifestyle brand, and to put our stake in the ground we’re going to start with flower and creating products.
But really the bigger vision is creating experiences that bring sports and cannabis together. So we’re doing pop-ups — we call them “Highsman Houses” — around sporting events where people can come and relax. Hopefully that leads to consumption lounges, I think in the future those are going to overtake sports bars.
I find when I’m watching sports and I smoke, I’m not so much paying attention to the external stuff as I am appreciating the details and the quality of the performance. Something that’s been in my heart as an athlete and now as a creator of this brand is that I have the ability to push this message out to the world, so that’s what I’m doing.
Is there anything you want Massachusetts consumers to know when Highsman hits shelves in the state?
Ricky: It’s important for us to be different. It’s a brand, but we’re really building a community, so we want interaction and feedback. Tell us what you like, what you don’t, and what you want.
At the end of the day, what brought me into the industry was advocacy, and I feel like I’m advocating for people who love cannabis.
A lot of people seem to think colonialism is dead, but recent news from Bermuda begs the differ.
This week, the UK government announced that they were blocking the assent of a cannabis legalization bill that was passed by territory’s legislature, claiming it violated international drug treaties.
As Bermuda is still a colony of the UK, the country has the authority to block any legislation that it deems unacceptable, although it has rarely exercised this ability in recent years.
This news comes on the heels of the recent election of a new Conservative prime minster, Liz Truss, although it’s unclear if this decision was made by her administration or the previous one. Check out Marijuana Moment for the full story.
A special shout out to Students for Sensible Drug Policy for pulling off a big victory against the Drug Enforcement Agency last month. The Agency rescinded a proposal to add two phenethylamine hallucinogens to Schedule I of the Contolled Substances Act after SSDP filed a motion to request a hearing regarding the matter.
The psychedelic science talk is a bit over my head, so I’ll let Anousheh Bakhti-Suroosh, a Neurosciences PhD student at the University of California San Diego and SSDP member, explain:
“We are living through an unprecedented explosion of clinical and basic research into psychedelics – an understandable result of the growing evidence demonstrating their transdiagnostic therapeutic applications. This is not the time to reinforce the unscientific and irrational scheduling system for psychedelics, or any drugs for that matter. Antiquated drug policies grounded in unjustified fear and panic disproportionately burden the most vulnerable among us and impede scientific discovery.
As a researcher in a systems neuroscience lab at the Salk Institute, unencumbered access to well-validated and inexpensive compounds targeting the 5HT2A receptor is critical for my research investigating the impact of psychedelics on emotion, cognition, and social behavior. The DEA’s decision to withdraw the scheduling of DOI and DOC is an important victory for scientists, drug policy reform advocates, and the millions of individuals living with mental health issues who may benefit from our research.
Even if you agree with the agency’s mission to enforce drug prohibition, an objective analysis of their work would reveal that the DEA is a complete shitshow that has failed to make any progress in reducing drug abuse. They accomplish nothing that the FBI and customs isn’t already capable of doing, and their multi-billion dollar budget would be better spent on just about anything else.
As a bloated government agency that consistently commits human rights violations, the DEA’s behavior should infuriate both the right and left sides of the aisles, and a bi-partisan movement to abolish the agency can’t come soon enough.
But at the very least, we should leave decisions of what drugs are scheduled under the CSA to scientists, not desk cops.
The Cannabis Career Institute is hosting two all-day cannabis seminars on October 7th-8th in Rhode Island. More details here if you’re interested.
Some quick hits:
Wu administration backs effort to streamline marijuana licensing in Boston (Dan Adams/Boston Globe)
Senate Marijuana Banking Sponsor Gives Details About Forthcoming ‘SAFE Plus’ Reform Package (Kyle Jaeger/Marijuana Moment)
Jamaica’s Fair Trade Commission recommends government funding for small cannabis farmers (Andrew Laidley/Jamaica Observer)
Hexo’s deal with Mike Tyson cannabis brand gets thumbs-down from Quebec, Alberta (Matt Lamers/MJBizDaily)
Rival cannabis trade associations NCIA, USCC underscore industry rift (Bart Schaneman/MJBizDaily)
Real-estate entrepreneurs seek to benefit from CCC Social Equity Program with Oxford cannabis business (Timothy Doyle/Worcester Business Journal)
Upcoming New England/virtual cannabis events.
9/14: The Business of Cannabis: CT Cannabis Conference & Expo
8:00AM-5:00PM. Plantsville, CT. $49.
9/14: OCP Statewide Listening Tour - Hancock County Stop
6PM. City Hall, Ellsworth, ME.
Welcome Distraction of the Week: Sometimes, you just need some entertainment that allows you to just shut your brain off. For me, nothing deactivates my cerebral cortex quite like Holey Moley.
Described as an extreme mini golf competition, Holey Moley is basically Wipeout with the occasional putt thrown in. One season, they had a hole that involved contestants on fire, but sadly that’s been phased out of the newest season. Still, if you’re looking for a distraction that requires absolutely no cognitive effort on your end, this is the show for you.
Holey Moley airs on ABC and is also available on Hulu.
Cat picture of the week: This week it’s Stepan, a cat that has captured the internet’s attention for years with his calm, zen-like demeanor. Let’s take a look:
Perfection.