Pubdate: Sun, 28 Apr 2019
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2019 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Conor Dougherty

CANNABIS INDUSTRY PRODUCES SWEET FRUIT: JOBS

SAN FRANCISCO - David Dancer is a 48-year-old marketing executive who
has worked for big brands like Charles Schwab and Teleflora. A year
ago, he got a call from a recruiter for a different kind of company:
MedMen, a cannabis retailer that has been called "the Apple Store of
weed." The opening was for a chief marketing officer. He took it.

One of Mr. Dancer's early projects was a slick two-minute video by the
director Spike Jonze that begins with an anecdote about George
Washington as a hemp grower, a staple of dorm-room conversation. It
concludes with a suburban couple coming home with a bright red bag of
legally purchased pot, symbolizing "the new normal" - an ending that,
like his own career twist, seemed improbable not long ago.

"It can and should be a part of anyone's everyday life," Mr. Dancer
said in a recent interview, sounding very much like a man who has been
hired to do marketing.

Although cannabis remains illegal on the federal level, 33 states now
allow its sale at least for medical purposes. Ten of them, including
California, have legalized recreational use. And as new markets open
and capital continues to flood in, the cannabis industry has become,
by some measures, one of the country's fastest-growing job sectors.

The jobs range from hourly work at farms and stores to executive
positions. They also span the country. Columbia Care, a medical
cannabis company that is based in New York and has 500 employees, has
indoor farms and manufacturing plants in Massachusetts, Delaware,
Florida, Illinois, Arizona and the District of Columbia.

It's hard to know exactly how many jobs there are in the legal
cannabis business. The United States Labor Department collects data
from cannabis farms and retailers, but does not provide figures for
the industry. Still, listings for cannabis-related positions have
rocketed to the top echelon of the fastest-growing-job categories on
sites like Indeed and ZipRecruiter.

Julia Pollak, a labor economist at ZipRecruiter, said the company's
data put the number of cannabis jobs nationwide at 200,000 to 300,000.
Most of those jobs are on the lower end of the pay scale, consisting
of rote agricultural work like plant trimming ($10 to $15 an hour) and
"budtenders" (about $25,000 a year), who help customers decide what
kind of cannabis they want and then weigh and bag it.

But as the industry expands, there has also been a strong demand for
better-paid positions like chemists, software engineers, and nurses
who consult with patients about using cannabis for anxiety and other
medical conditions.

"The early signs are that this will grow rapidly," Ms. Pollak
said.

A few years ago, navigating the marijuana industry felt like a journey
to the fringes of legitimacy. Cannabis-prescribing doctors set up shop
in strip malls and record stores, or consulted with patients over
brief video chats. Dispensaries were often in barred storefronts, and
their employees had to engage in the charade of scolding their
prescription-bearing customers if they talked about sharing purchases
with friends.

Now cannabis dispensaries occupy brightly lit spaces on prime retail
strips that have showcase buds in glass cases and tinctures in small
squeezer bottles, along with $80 pot lotions and $20 bars of pot soap.
Six months ago, Canada became the first major world economy to
legalize recreational marijuana use, and several dozen cannabis stocks
- many for companies that are American in all but name but unable to
list in the United States - now trade on the Canadian Securities Exchange.

Vivien Azer, a managing director at Cowen in New York, became the
first major Wall Street analyst to follow the cannabis industry in
2016. She has since been joined by competitors at Jefferies and Piper
Jaffray, and cannabis companies now attend investor events alongside
big consumer products companies like Kellogg, Coca-Cola and Procter &
Gamble. Ms. Azer projects that the legal United States cannabis market
will grow to $80 billion by 2030, a forecast that assumes federal
legalization.

Ms. Azer tracked alcohol and tobacco companies, and cannabis seemed a
natural extension. "I'm just talking about them as stocks like any
other stock that I cover," she said.

For investors, it's a two-pronged thesis. The first is that many
people like recreational use. The second is that as cannabis becomes
more widely used, in particular the strains rich in cannabidiol, or
CBD, it is increasingly a therapeutic remedy that people substitute
for pain pills, sleep aids and other pharmaceuticals. Subscribe to
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The pioneers who brought the industry out of the shadows are being
joined by professional managers and executives - "talent," in
corporate speak - who have had careers in other industries. For
upper-level managers and executives, companies say they prefer
candidates with a background in highly regulated industries like
alcohol or pharmaceuticals.

Steve DeAngelo's website calls him the "Father of the Cannabis
Industry" and has a picture of him, smiling, in what pot enthusiasts
know as his trademark look of a blue fedora atop graying Willie Nelson
braids that rest on the shoulders of his jacket. And there he was in
the same get-up on a recent Friday afternoon, standing by a pair of
A.T.M.s watching the long line of customers waiting to buy cannabis at
Harborside, a cannabis dispensary and farming company that he and a
partner founded in 2006 in Oakland, Calif.

Mr. DeAngelo was there to introduce Menna Tesfatsion, his company's
new chief operating officer. Whereas Mr. DeAngelo's background
includes a history of radical politics, interviews in High Times and
an arrest for marijuana possession, Mr. Tesfatsion is a lawyer who
worked in real estate and property development before getting into the
cannabis industry.

"It's a generational opportunity," said Mr. Tesfatsion, who was
wearing a vest, as Bay Area executives do. "We're just beginning to
scale."

Mr. DeAngelo said the ability to attract professional managers would
go a long way toward determining how well cannabis companies did from
here.

"We're the world's best experts in cannabis," he said of the early
entrepreneurs. "But we didn't have much opportunity to learn
mainstream business skill sets like finance and compliance and
marketing and real estate."

Eager to shake the image of being high-end drug dealers, cannabis
companies have become hypersensitive to anything that sounds
unprofessional - hence the insistence on calling the substance
cannabis instead of pot, weed or marijuana. Buds are "flower." Hash is
"extract." Stoners are "high per-capita consumption consumers."

Bryan Passman, a longtime executive search consultant in Miami,
recently started a cannabis-centric recruiting firm. It was originally
called The Grass Is Greener Global (The GIGG), but he changed it to
Hunter & Esquire because clients told him that they'd prefer he had a
more professional-sounding name.

Mr. Passman advises interviewees that if they want to let a
prospective cannabis employer know that they partake in the company's
product, they should avoid saying, "I like to smoke pot," and instead
try something like "I have a relationship with the plant."

The idea, he said, is to be "purposefully subtle."

Jobs in the industry come with a few caveats. Because cannabis is still 
illegal from the federal perspective, noncitizens should probably stay 
away for now, lest they risk their immigration status, Mr. Passman 
advises. If you're collecting a federal pension, you should consult a 
financial adviser to see if it's at risk. Also: Be realistic about the 
stigma you might face from employers in other industries.

After a decade in pharmaceutical marketing at companies including
Gilead Sciences, Julie Raque recently became the vice president for
marketing at Cannabistry Labs, a cannabis research and testing company
in Chicago. She was intrigued by the industry and eager to join a
start-up, but had to take a pay cut in exchange for company stock -
and to accept that her decision might be a one-way door.

"I highly doubt companies would want to hire me back," she said. "I
knew I was about to do something big, and since then I've not looked
back, because I'm having so much fun."