Big Weed Read Online Free PDF

success in dollars, not the joy of living. I had chased wealth and status, not happiness and love. I hardly recognized the man I’d been.
    And with that realization, a simple yet profound shift occurred inside me.
    I saw with utter clarity that money was meaningless. I already knew how to make it anytime I wanted. In my career, I had earned it, lost it, and earned it back again. If money was that easy to make and lose, money could not be the focus of my life. There were things far more rare and more precious than money. Those were the things I ought to cherish, because they would only come around once in a blue moon.
    Above all things, I wanted to be a loving and grateful husband and father.
    If I was going to start a new business, I wanted to be in harmony with myself. I had to feel integrity.
    I wanted to work with passion and purpose.
    I wanted to create something that I loved and wanted to share with the world.
    I wanted to be a good steward of my community.
    I wanted to foster good careers—with good longevity—for my employees.
    Money was nice, but if I had money without joy in all these areas of my life, then the money was worth much less. I might as well tossit out and start all over again—just as I had already done many times before.

    But as I say, my epiphany was not something I talked about openly with my wife, my friends, or my extended family. The bankruptcy had shaken up my wife. She was scared about our future. My getting a decent job and a decent paycheck was the only way she could see us moving forward. Such things represented stability to her.
    I didn’t want to give her more cause for alarm.
    But legal weed was looking more and more like a smart thing to do.
    I shared my thinking with people I trusted. One of them was a neighbor of mine I’ll call Mr. Pink. He was an accountant, but not just an accountant. A forensic accountant. The sort of person the FBI or district attorneys called in to investigate the books of people they’d arrested for financial crimes. The fact that he could apply his intellect to someone else’s illegal misdeeds and tell you exactly how it had been pulled off made him something of a badass in my eyes. On top of it, Mr. Pink is a great guy. Barrel chested and larger than life, he is memorable in a good way. Gregarious, engaging, and kind to children. We got along well; Mr. Pink knew money and opportunities when he saw them, and he liked what he was hearing about the legal marijuana trade.
    â€œHow much?” he’d say when I told him what people were earning.
    His wife would snap, “Don’t even think about it.”
    His wife was a lawyer, and she took the same view my wife did: It was insane to contemplate a career selling legal weed. Colorado’s law had been enacted on a whim, and it was liable to be repealed. And when it did, what would happen to all those people who had jumped into it feet first? They’d be rounded up and sent to jail. Or they’d lose their shirts.
    Drugs were drugs. People killed people over this stuff.
    Marijuana, in other words, was not a suitable business for a white, upper-middle-class guy from Denver.
    And as much as Mr. Pink and I would hear those words or glean the subtext from what our wives were saying, we couldn’t help dreaming about what a gold mine this was.
    â€œOh my God,” Mr. Pink would say on those occasions when we spoke about it. “We should totally do this! ”
    And his wife would say, “You’re crazy!”
    Mr. Pink was open to learning more. Maybe the laws really were on tenuous ground, but the only way to know was to start reading up on it. I was gearing up to educate myself the only way I knew how. I would start hanging out in as many dispensaries around town as possible. I would talk to customers. Talk to budtenders. Talk to owners like Jake. I would do my best to analyze their business models as well as I possibly could without getting too nosy. And I