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In 2014, my dad moved from New Jersey to Colorado because he didn’t want to risk jail time over a joint anymore. Colorado had just become the first state to legalize adult-use cannabis, and once he left, he never looked back. No taste of legal East Coast cannabis.
At that point, I was in college in Florida studying political science and economics—using every research paper I could find to study cannabis market structure, regulatory frameworks, and tax policy. I had no idea I was actually preparing for what would become my career. I thought I was headed to law school. The plant had other plans.
I drove out to visit my dad and we checked out the first legal dispensaries together. He stayed in Colorado while I kept moving—eventually landing out West with a camera, documenting cannabis operations across Alaska, California, and Oregon. That documentation work turned into facility work. The facility work turned into management.
Years later, he came out to California to work on the farm while I was the GM. The guy who had to leave New Jersey to avoid jail was now harvesting thousands of plants legally in Trinity County. Looking back, that felt like the whole journey coming full circle.
It’s strange to think I’m writing this from the neighborhood where my dad used to live. Now I can walk three doors down from where I grew up and buy legal cannabis. Eleven years from fleeing the state for a joint, to his kid serving on the New Jersey Cannabusiness Association’s Cultivation Committee. I think he’d be proud. And definitely amused.
But after my first full year back in New Jersey, I keep asking the same question: Why is the East Coast making the same mistakes we already watched fail out West?
Getting Into the Rooms Where Markets Get Designed
I didn’t come back East to watch quietly. My goal for 2025 was to get into the rooms where cannabis markets are actually being built—and make sure operational reality gets heard before the blueprints are finalized.
Virginia: Preventing Market Capture Before Launch
In October, I presented to Virginia’s Joint Committee on Retail Cannabis on competitive market design. Virginia has a rare opportunity—they get to design an adult-use market with 24 states’ worth of evidence. The question is whether they’ll learn from failures in mature markets or repeat them.
I laid out the structural risks of limited-license models and proposed evidence-based guardrails: phased market launch prioritizing new Virginia operators, strict prohibitions on license stacking, and data-driven market reviews. I also authored Pillar 1 of the Virginia Cannabis Small Business Association’s legislative report to the Virginia Senate—Market Structure and Operational Timelines—translating the non-negotiables: how long it actually takes to build a compliant facility, the biological timeline from clone to consumer, and the capital requirements independent operators face.
New Jersey: Three Years In
Being invited to the NJCBA Cultivation Committee gave me a seat at the table in a market that’s finally hitting its stride. Three years in, New Jersey is no longer dominated by converted medical operators selling industrial mids. More high-quality products hit shelves in 2025 than in all previous years combined—because actual competition is finally reaching shelves. It can take 2-3 years to build a facility, which means first-round winners from 2022 are only now coming online.
Stockton University
I walked students through the 8-Question Reality Check—the diagnostic framework I use to evaluate whether a cannabis venture is operationally viable or speculative fantasy. Does your drying space match your harvest schedule? Does your staffing plan account for labor peaks? Does your budget include contingency for inevitable infrastructure failures? They invited me back for 2026.
What Keeps Showing Up
Across Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and DC, the same structural fault lines keep appearing.
States treating cannabis as a cash cow before there’s a cow to milk. Tax rates set like cannabis is a mature, stable industry when operations still need capital to survive the gauntlet between license issuance and doors open. Tax them like utilities before profitability and you guarantee independent operator failure.
“Licenses issued” celebrated as the success metric. Every press release brags about how many licenses a state handed out. That number means nothing if most never become operating businesses. The real question: how many made it through construction, passed inspection, survived their first harvest, and are still operating 18 months later?
Flower square footage obsession while bottlenecks hide in plain sight. Investor decks obsess over canopy and flower room automation. Meanwhile, the dry room is 50% undersized, veg space is an afterthought, and post-harvest has no dedicated infrastructure.
If You’re Still Reading
The craziest thing I heard this year came during a presentation to a veterans organization about cannabis. First question from the room: “So, what part of the plant do you smoke—the leaf?” That crystallized where we are. People with decision-making authority often have zero operational understanding of the plant, the process, or the business they’re regulating.
The best thing I heard came from the person who invited me to the NJCBA Cultivation Committee. We were talking through facility timelines and infrastructure bottlenecks. He paused and said: “Yeah, what I like to tell people is—did you ask the plant?”
That’s the shorthand for everything I do. Someone proposes a harvest timeline, a buildout schedule, a tax structure—did you ask the plant? Did you check if the biology, the square footage, the labor model actually supports what’s in the spreadsheet? This philosophy—operational reality over spreadsheet fantasy—is the core thesis of the book I’m writing: First, The Plant.
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The East Coast doesn’t have to repeat the West Coast’s mistakes. But only if we’re willing to learn from them. If you’re building a facility, deploying capital, or drafting policy and want to know whether the math actually works—let’s talk.