Freakonomics Radio - 609. What Does It Take to Run a Cannabis Farm?

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Chris Weld worked for years in emergency rooms, then ditched that career and bought an old farm in Massachusetts. He set up a distillery and started making prize-winning spirits. When cannabis was legalized, he jumped into that too — and the first few years were lucrative. But now? It turns out that growing, processing, and selling weed is more complicated than it looks. He gave us the grand tour.  (Part three of a four-part series.) SOURCES:Chris Bennett, operations manager at Berkshire Mountain Distillers.Luca Boldrini, head of cultivation at The Pass.Yasmin Hurd, director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai.Chris Weld, founder and owner of Berkshire Mountain Distillers. RESOURCES:"As America’s Marijuana Use Grows, So Do the Harms," by Megan Twohey, Danielle Ivory, and Carson Kessler (The New York Times, 2024)."Evaluation of Dispensaries’ Cannabis Flowers for Accuracy of Labeling of Cannabinoids Content," by Mona M. Geweda, Chandrani G. Majumdar, Mahmoud A. ElSohly, et al. (Journal of Cannabis Research, 2024)."The Complicated, Risky — but Potentially Lucrative — Business of Selling Cannabis," by James R. Hagerty (The Wall Street Journal, 2023)."Marijuana Content Labels Can’t Be Trusted," by Shira Schoenberg (CommonWealth Beacon, 2022)."Growing Cannabis Indoors Produces a Lot of Greenhouse Gases — Just How Much Depends on Where It’s Grown," by Jason Quinn and Hailey Summers (The Conversation, 2021)."Blood and Urinary Metal Levels Among Exclusive Marijuana Users in NHANES (2005-2018)," by Katlyn E. McGraw, Anne E, Nigra, Tiffany R. Sanchez, et al. (Environmental Health Perspectives, 2018)."The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannabis Production," by Evan Mills (Energy Policy, 2012). EXTRAS:"Cannabis Is Booming, So Why Isn’t Anyone Getting Rich?" by Freakonomics Radio (2024)."Is America Switching From Booze to Weed?" by Freakonomics Radio (2024).

Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. Before we start today's episode, I have something to tell you. We are doing two live Freakonomics radio shows on January 3rd in San Francisco and on February 13th in Los Angeles. If you have never seen Freakonomics Radio Live, it's a lot like this show, but, you know, live with great guests and it's usually a lot of fun. So I would love you to join us in San Francisco and or Los Angeles early next year. Get your tickets now at freakonomics.com slash live shows. That's one word for the LA show. There's a special promo code you can use to buy tickets early, but you have to move very fast. The promo code is freak radio, one word, all caps. Okay, so Freakonomics Radio Live in San Francisco on Friday, January 3rd, and in Los Angeles on Thursday,

February 13th. Tickets at freakonomics.com slash live shows. I hope to see you there. And here now is today's episode. And here now is today's episode. So I was asked to be part of a panel that went to a retirement center to talk about cannabis because a lot of those people are what we call canicurious. My discussion was sort of how it works, generally what it does to the body, some of the claims that are made around cannabis in medicine, and then how to dose low and slow. I said, listen, it's been, what, 80 years you haven't tried it before, don't try one gummy the first night. Do a quarter of a gummy. You can afford to take a week to find out if it works. That is Chris Weld. He is a cannabis farmer in Western Massachusetts. In case you hadn't noticed, cannabis is in a very different place than it was even just a decade ago.

This is our third episode in a four-part series called Is America Switching from Booze to Weed? If you missed the first two, here's a recap. In part one, we compared the harms of cannabis and alcohol. If somebody came up to me today and said, we'll make a deal with you, you can replace all alcohol use with cannabis use. I would immediately agree to that deal. To be fair, there's been much more research

into the harms of alcohol than the harms of cannabis. That's partly because cannabis, even though it is now legal in most U.S. states, is still illegal on the federal level. And this creates a lot of knock-on effects. That's what we looked at in part two of this series. The entirety of the cannabis market is filled with an amazing number of contradictions. Everyone we talked to for that episode, researchers and regulators and industry insiders, they all described a cannabis economy that's in a state of chaos.

Three quarters of all licensed operators are losing money. So today on Freakonomics Radio, in part three, what does it take to navigate that chaos? We go on a field trip to Chris Weld's farm to see if being a cannabis businessman is worth the hassle. I'm a very stubborn person, so I've not given up on cannabis. It's just been a wild ride. Let's take that ride together. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner. Chris Weld lives and works in Sheffield, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains. He grew up one state over in New York, about 50 miles north of Manhattan.

I grew up on a great piece of property within Apple Orchard. My father was a big environmentalist, biologist, and wonderful outdoorsman. So I got exposed to gardening at an early age and spent a lot of time outside. Well, he was not a great student, but he did have what you might call moxie. In eighth grade, I decided that it would become very cool if my science project was to make a still. When my mother, who was game for most things, was on board, and then somehow found out that it was a federal offense to distill alcohol.

What were you going to make? Probably bourbon. My mother was a bourbon drinker. Okay. So you did not get to make the still for your science project? I did not. I made a volcano, which was a huge disappointment. After a while, Weld started volunteering on the local ambulance squad, and he loved it. So I went to a PA program at Albany Med, and then got a master's in emergency medicine and worked in inner city ERs, mostly California.

Lived with my wife out there and kids. She's an architect. We had a design build company and love working with my hands. And then moved to the Berkshires 20 years ago. We found this great property, derelict orchard, a few hundred trees. It had a historic spring on it. They'd built a hotel there in the 1880s.

The spring waters were touted as being the finest in the country. So a great historic spring and a bunch of apples, and I was tired of working in the ER. And you said, there's no way I'm going to pass up a chance to finally build my still. You got to jump in feet first. And what were you making at first? Were you making apple-based alcoholic beverages? Correct. Brandy's, Calvados if you're in Europe, and then very quickly learned I would never make a living selling Calvados. So I had an incredible consultant come up, a Jamaican guy, helped me make rum and gin

and vodka. So, those are the three we launched with. Weld's company is called Berkshire Mountain Distillers, and today they make more than a dozen spirits. Some of them have won awards. When cannabis was legalized in Massachusetts in 2016, Weld decided to jump into that too, feet first. And now he runs a vertically integrated cannabis farm

and dispensary called The Pass. I asked where the name comes from. A bunch of different things. Mountain Pass since we're in the hills, the mountains. The Hall Pass of now cannabis is legal, passing from one state of mind to another, past the joint. In part one of this series, we heard from some customers at the pass. It was a Monday morning and there were a lot of customers.

I asked Weld which of his businesses is bigger, cannabis or alcohol. Cannabis is bigger. Yeah. And the cannabis was bigger from the get-go. Do a quick walk through? Yeah, let's do it. The farm has three separate growing areas, an outdoor field, a greenhouse, and a warehouse where all the elements, temperature, light, and moisture are precisely controlled. That's our first stop.

So this is our grow building. This is Luca, who's our head grower here. Nice to meet you guys. What do you do? What's your job? I'm the head of cultivation here at the PASS. What's your background training wise and whatnot? Just was been cultivating cannabis a long time,

about 15 years now. How does it compare to other crops? I don't know. I don't have a ton of experience cultivating other crops. I have a feeling we take more care when cultivating cannabis because it fetches a higher price per pound. So we can put a little bit more technology and a little bit more care into it.

What kind of technology and effort? We use more light than in other crops. You can really tell the difference between indoor grown cannabis, greenhouse and outdoor. So indoor grown is more quality control. I assume it's much more expensive. More expensive. It's definitely going to be more consistent because you can keep temperature and humidity exactly how you want it. All the processes can be repeated. Whereas in the greenhouse and outdoor, you're a bit beholden to the weather.

There's more environmental stress, which can be a good thing, but indoors we tend to control the stress consciously rather than we happen to not be in the right temperature or humidity range today. The indoor grow house has two big rooms and we head into one of them. As you open the door, you're hit with a bright warm wave of amber light

and a very fragrant aroma. It reminds me of something I once grew just for fun, hops. Very closely related to hops. Oh it is. Cannabis and yeah, they're the closest plants. I didn't know that. The plants in the grow house are about four feet tall and raised up on rolling benches.

There's a step ladder there. So I climb up to look down over the top of the plants. It is like looking down on a scale model of a forest bathed in golden light. So if you look at these different plants, you can see the fan leaves, the bigger leaves, chlorophyll. Then these little ones are called sugar leaves,

and then you can see all these little tricones, the little pedunculated dew drops, little shiny things on stalks. That's where most of the THC is kept in those little glistening things there. This is how many square feet? It's 656 of canopy. The way we measure canopy is just

the benches that the plants are on. Irrigation is coming in how and where? We hand water this room. Oh really? Why? Yep. More attention to detail, things dry back unevenly when you dripper them and this way we can water

everything uniquely. And how many different strains or varieties are in this room? Three in this room. Are you at all concerned about cross-pollination or is that not happening? Every plant in this facility is a female plant. The male plants have no THC and they will pollinate a female plant, and then instead of spending that energy developing bigger buds,

and those buds are associated with THC, the female plant would spend that energy making seeds. So you end up with, you know, the dirt weed of the 80s that isn't that strong because a lot of the energy went into seed production. What do you call a male cultivar? Just a male? A rooster? Bad luck is what you call it.

Down the hall from the grow house is the greenhouse. So the greenhouse, you know, New England's tough to control humidity. We don't really control temperature except with fans and venting, but we get natural light. So maybe our cost is 55 to 60% of what it is indoor growing versus outdoors, which is a third to a quarter of indoor growing. And what do you do here in the winter? Typically we've been growing year round and heating it.

This year, there's a glut on the market. People have been pulling up stakes and moving out of town. There's too much canopy. So people are selling cannabis at cost or at times below cost. Now, can you buy it? We can, but we'd rather sell our own cannabis. But if you could get it for a cent on the dollar, would it be worth it? It's not always the best cannabis, but it is still flooding the market. So there's got to be a shakeout. There's just too much canopy right now. So we're at the point where we're gonna let this sit fallow

for a couple months, sell through what we have, and then replant. What's it cost you to heat it in the winter? It's probably a couple grand a month. So what's your typical monthly electricity bill all in? Everything all totals, 15K maybe. One criticism of the cannabis industry is that it uses a lot of electricity.

To be fair, many things use a lot of electricity. Hospitals, for instance, but we tend to hear more about energy consumption when a new industry emerges, particularly a controversial one like cannabis or crypto or AI. Some researchers have suggested that moving weed production from indoor facilities to greenhouses and the great outdoors would help shrink the carbon footprint of the cannabis industry. But the great outdoors isn't always so great. Chris Weld walks us out of the greenhouse and over to his outdoor grow field. So this is outdoor flower. These fan leaves are starting to turn yellow, so they're not really

doing anything for the plant. We'll come through soon and defoliate a bunch of this that'll help with the airflow through the plant, help with powdery mildew or botrytis or anything. Jared And is that an indicator of a problem when they yellow? Pete No, they all do that. They're just getting older. But if you look at these plants, this one, the bud structure is beautiful. It's stacking up. This will form a very nice top cola on this. All these side colas are actually looking pretty good.

And then you look at this one here. We don't have that many of. Meaning it's way behind the brothers. Way behind. Yeah, why is that? Just a different cultivar. I'm not sure which one this is, but it's not one I would probably grow again outside

because I'm not sure it one this is, but it's not one I would probably grow again outside because I'm not sure it's going to finish in time. In a perfect cannabis world, you might not even try to grow cannabis in a place like Massachusetts. You might just import it from the parts of California where it grows so well. That's what we do with almonds and lettuce and blackberries. But remember, cannabis is still illegal in the eyes of the federal government, which means it can't be sold across state lines.

So if Chris Weld wants to sell cannabis in Massachusetts, he has to grow his cannabis in Massachusetts. Until or unless federal law changes, each state is responsible for its own supply. This kind of forced commercial self-sufficiency is an example of what economists call autarky. And they don't like autarky. It is the very opposite of free trade. They say autarky slows growth

and reduces options for consumers and raises prices. But for now, this is the system that Chris Weld operates in, which means he not only cultivates his own raw material, but also readies it for sale and then sells it. That readying for sale can be simple, like operating a big joint rolling machine, or, as we will hear after the break, it can be a bit more involved.

Whoa, okay, now I feel like we're in Breaking Bad. I'm Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. Chris Weld has been showing us around his cannabis farm in Sheffield, Massachusetts. The farm is attached to his retail store, The Pass. He sells products from his farm as well as other farms and processors. I asked him which formats are most popular.

So close to half the consumption is still flour. Whether it's by a pipe, a bong, a joint, it's mostly flour consumption. It's 50-51% plus or minus. Edibles are super popular. Drinks, beverages are pretty significant. What's in the refrigerated case there? That's your lunch. Those are all concentrates. It's wax, it's butter, it's shatter, it's diamonds and sauce. Sorry, I don't follow. Okay, here's my sophomoric analogy.

So you understand how maple syrup's made, right? You tap a tree, you get sap out, you boil it down 43-ish to one, and you get syrup. And you can take that syrup and you continue to boil that down. And if you boil it down enough, you get into like a sugar, right? So soft maple candy. And if you boil it, you can get very hard maple candy, right? So with weed, the flowers kind of the sap out of the tree to me. You can boil it down and end up with a concentrate that will go into a vape pen.

You can clean that up and concentrate it even more, and you get into these concentrate forms like shatter and wax. And there are different stages, but they may be in the low 90% THC. Cannabis today is much stronger than it used to be for a couple reasons. Better breeding and cultivating techniques have increased the amount of THC in a given plant, and like Chris Weld said, some cannabis products are processed in a way that greatly intensifies the dose. Even in the legal cannabis world, the dose information on a package is rarely as clear as what you'd expect to see on something like a bottle of aspirin, and it's not always accurate.

When Weld talks to customers who aren't familiar with modern cannabis, he advises them to start with low doses. When the store first opened, people would come in and they'd talk to our bud tenders and the bud tender would get the response, listen whipper snapper, I was smoking that s*** since before you were born. But cannabis today is different. And this is deeply concerning to some public health officials and researchers,

including Yasmin Herd. She is a neuroscientist and addiction specialist at the Mount Sinai Health System in New York. The majority of products that are out there today, no one has studied. You have wax and dabbing and shatter that gives nearly 90% THC. There is no cannabis plant that had 90% THC. The modification of cannabis, the hundreds of products

that the people who are making them have no clue about. If people want to consume recreationally, fine, but they don't even realize that they are being manipulated with very high concentrations of THC. Herd argues that cannabis legalization has happened too fast, and that scientists and state health regulators haven't had the time or the resources to assess long-term harms or to prohibit certain formats of the drug. There are also big questions about the addictive nature of cannabis. And some physicians are reporting patients with serious physical and mental health effects, especially younger users. Here's Chris Weld again.

There are some evidence that if you start consuming at a younger age, it can actually rewire how your brain works. There's some literature that shows that if you're younger and you smoke a lot of weed, you may be more prone to depression. Whereas if you're older and smoke weed, it may help with depression. And so it's everything in moderation. But if you're young, cannabis probably isn't the best thing to smoke. Weld's overall view of cannabis was informed by his experience as a physician's assistant in hospital emergency rooms.

It is interesting. You know, I spent 17 years working in inner city ERs and every day there's a large percentage of cases that were alcohol related. So people get drunk, they shoot people, they get run over by a drunk driver, they shoot themselves all day every day. I don't think I ever had somebody say, hey dude, I got so stoned and got in a fight. Can you sew me up? It just didn't happen.

And when you look at toxicity, do you know the term LD50? Have you ever heard that? No. It's lethal dose 50. So it's 50% of the people who take that dose will die. And so if you're comparing cannabis and alcohol, for instance, it's very easy to kill mice with alcohol, but not so easy with cannabis. And the LD50 for a 130-ish pound person is 10 to 15 drinks an hour, which if you were to chug a frat hazing, chug a pint of booze,

50% of the time you might die from that. Versus joints, it's about 20,000 joints. But joints are just made from the flour, straight off the cannabis plant. The concern from a public health perspective is the scarcity of research on concentrates. From a business perspective, the concentrates make a lot of sense. They fetch a high price because of their potency, they're cheaper to store, and they take up less space.

Weld offered to show us his processing plant where they turn raw cannabis into finished products. So we took a drive just a couple miles and we parked outside a low slung cinder block building. It used to be a plastic extrusion plant. So we have a gummy room, a cure room for the gummies. How long do gummies need to cure for? Just a few days after they're made. This area here is set aside for a beverage thing at some point. What do you mean at some point you're not making? We don't have a beverage right now. Ooh, big bags of weed.

Smells good, doesn't it? Wow. Yeah. Why did we wait so long to come to this room? This is all your grow, correct? This is all our grow. So this is a bin of... Good morning. Good morning.

How many pre-rolls are in this bin? About 2,000. About 2,000. We just finished up making our batch of pre-rolls in here, and then now they're going to bag up some flour into eights. I have to say, Chris, this does not feel at all like a criminal enterprise. This feels like so blessedly boring.

We had a wish list for a gear here, and one of them was a big pre-roll machine, and it made enough to sell $70 million worth of pre-rolls in a year, and like, you know. Just no demand. Yeah, maybe we're at $4 million worth of pre-rolls in a year. And like, you know. Just no demand. Yeah, maybe we're at $4 million worth of pre-rolls in a year. We couldn't justify it. I've never been in a cigarette factory.

How are they made? There were some cannabis companies that started with the cigarette machine rollers to make joints that look like cigarettes. And I haven't, Chris, have you seen them on the market anymore? Yes. That's Chris Bennett.

He is an operations manager who's been with-weld since the beginning. Do you want to talk about your tolerance? I can eat 1,000 milligrams. Seriously? Yeah. Yeah. But then there's people like, and it doesn't go by size

or anything, it's just how your liver processes it. So you could have somebody 350 pounds that eats like a half of what, two grams, you know, and nicked around their butt. Pete Slauson So, what's the effect on you then? Jared Slauson A thousand? I'm on the couch. Pete Slauson What's the effect of a hundred? What's the effect of a hundred? Jared Slauson A hundred? I don't, I don't really feel it. Pete Slauson Oh, my God. How do you get high?

Jared Slauson It's expensive. Pete Slauson Now, we get swiped through a heavy locked door. Whoa, okay, now I feel like we're in Breaking Bad. And what's this room called? Extraction Lab. This is where they make those high THC concentrates and rosins. So when we get the flour from cultivation, it's not trimmed. We'll run it through these two machines and it'll trim it up nice so our trimmers don't have to really do a lot of work. Next to the trimmer is a machine that makes the rosin by applying heat and pressure to the cannabis clippings. And next to that is a big jar of syrupy looking cannabis rosin. Weld opens the jar.

It's a little potent. It's chirpy. Oh, wow. So what does this become? It's going to carts, live rosin carts. So these are the carts that, you know, for the distillate pens or the rosin pens, they have a reservoir. You heat the solution, the oil, the rosin, and then you just have an injector and it fills each one and then they get capped and they go in a box.

And they get consumed how? Smoke. What's happening now with cannabis, several years into legalization, is a lot like what happened with alcohol over time. As new technologies arrived, it got more potent. We started with beer, which is just soupy fermented grains. The invention of pottery allowed for the creation and transport of wine, and the invention of distillation led to the creation of whiskeys and other spirits, each time with a higher concentration of alcohol. If you are alarmed by the

fact that highly concentrated THC products are legal, you should probably also be alarmed at how easy it is to buy a highly concentrated bottle of alcohol, like vodka or whiskey or rum. I asked Chris Weld how he thinks about the addictive nature of cannabis versus alcohol. Yeah, I would say probably a little bit worse on the alcohol side. Got it. But here's what I'm trying to get at. And there may be no good answer or any answer for this at all.

But like the whole idea of this series is that alcohol has been around forever and the harms are known and they're substantial. Weed might be a replacement for a lot of the uses of alcohol, for mood, for creativity, et cetera, et cetera. But the downsides of weed seem to be less. On the other hand, if it's continued to be treated as this kind of separate and more dangerous and scarier substance, that'll probably never happen.

Except if you look at the last five years, it's changed the stigmas going, the data on how catastrophic everyone thought it would be hasn't really come to show that it has been. So I think that the societal acceptance of cannabis is still growing. Coming up after the break, is societal acceptance growing fast enough to fix the economics? It's been tough and it's been tough across the board. I'm Stephen Dubner.

This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. The state of Massachusetts legalized recreational marijuana in 2016 with the first retail sales in 2018. Chris Weld got into the business early on. It was Gold Rush Day's mentality. This is going to be the best thing since sliced bread. Jumping in at that point made sense, and it made sense to a ton of people.

So you look at these people that ran MSOs, multi-state operators that threw a lot of cash into it. We had an incredibly great first couple of years, wonderful trajectory. Things are looking fantastic and the wheels kind of fell off in the whole Massachusetts market I would say. What's happened recently is that there's a glut, there's just too much cannabis out there. And so, all these people who have spent a lot of money growing cannabis are sitting on it. Are you profitable yet? We've been profitable, we've vacillated, we had some issues last year with a cultivation

mishap that was not our fault. What was that? Was it like God's fault, like weather? Oh, I wouldn't say, yeah, that's a big topic, God our fault. What was that? Was it like God's fault, like weather? Oh, I wouldn't say. Yeah, that's a big topic, God's fault. So it was drift from neighbors spraying for mosquitoes. Oh, boy. Wiped out a whole crop.

Holy cow. How did you learn slash discover slash determine that your crop had been contaminated. So this is a great argument for legal versus black market cannabis. I was at the gas station a couple of months ago and these two young men were in an Audi pumping gas and I was pumping gas and I looked over and the guy in the front passenger seat had a big bag of weed, little buds. And I looked at him and I said, Hey, you know, just to be cool, you probably want to keep that in the trunk.

And he said, thank you, sir, which I took offense to the sir bit. And I said, and by the way, you can buy much better looking weed than that down at the pass, which is, you know, the cannabis shop I have down the road. And he said, yeah, man, but the taxes kill us. So we spent $287,000 last year on testing. Wow. So to answer your question, we send off cannabis to one of several state sanctioned labs

and they test for heavy metals, they test for yeast and mold, they test for pesticides. It's a pretty in-depth panel that they do. We mentioned earlier in this series that the cannabis plant is what's called a bioaccumulator. That means it's especially good at absorbing minerals from the soil and air and water. In fact, cannabis has been used

to remediate contaminated sites. But if you are growing cannabis for human consumption, that absorbency can be a problem. One recent medical study found that cannabis users have higher levels of lead and cadmium in their blood than non-users. Here again is Yasmin Hurd from Mount Sinai. People don't realize that cannabis is a plant that actually holds onto metals. It's like hyper sucking of metals. States should, for safety, they should look at metal content,

the same thing with pesticides and mold. So when they have looked at products in some research done where they've taken products randomly, they see, for example, that even the content of what's supposed to be in those products do not match what's on the label. When you look at these state bodies that regulate and approve, whether it's a state health department or some other regulatory body, are there typically scientists on those bodies?

I can't answer that, unfortunately, for every state. I think that there are states that really do try to have scientists, but you will have these third-party companies that are supposed to verify whether or not they meet all these safety standards. And some of these companies, they will sign anything. So these are the things that the states really need to clamp down on. Everyone wants to make money, but this is a huge issue. And Chris Weld again.

Some of the stuff in Massachusetts is egregiously strict, I would say. I think there needs to be control, certainly. And I think everyone was so worried that there were going to be dire consequences with legalization that it got over-regulated. When I talked to my local chief of police, which I do quarterly and say, hey, how's it going? Any problems? He's like, I don't hear anything. We're not coming in to arrest people who are, you know, like drunk people in a fight. In general, I think it's a fairly benign drug. Massachusetts tends to be fairly strict on a lot of consumer-based things and

protective of individuals, which I think is great. And I think Massachusetts rolled out cannabis legalization in a little bit more of a controlled way than New York did. When we would go look at Groz in New York, their security system often would be a trail cam. You know, we had $160,000 security system with a million cameras that you can't hide your big toe in the corner of the room.

You can trust when you go to a legal canvas store, especially in Massachusetts, that you're not going to find stuff on it that you would if you go to some bodega in New York City. We talked about that New York situation earlier in the series. As Weld says, the legalized rollout in New York City especially has been chaotic with thousands of illegal shops that the city, for a variety of reasons, wouldn't shut down. That is starting to change, but there's a long way to go. I went into one of those stores last time in the city and I was just talking to the young woman at the counter.

I said, you know, I'm not a fed. Do you guys have issues with the law coming in here? And she said, yeah, we do. This is my first week. And two days ago, a team of 17 people came in and they took everything that was cannabis related, left nicotine. They asked for the keys to the vault, they went in the vault, and they slapped a big, you know, illegal sales in the store, do not visit, whatever sticker on the door. And that night the owner came in, pulled the sticker off and restocked

the shelves. Okay. You run an alcohol distillery as well as the cannabis farm. How do the regulations compare in Massachusetts? You've talked about how much tracking and testing and record keeping there is in cannabis. How about the alcohol operation? I have five sheets I fill out every month. It's all revenue driven, right? So it's all tax basis. They want to know how much you made,

how much got wasted in the process of bottling, how much you bottled, how much you sold, how many proof gallons you sold, so that the state gets their carve out for a tax on proof gallons, as does the FETs. But the cannabis thing is a bit over the top. So there's a system called metric that we use in mass, other states use it as well.

It's a seed to sale tracking program. And that tag follows that plant through harvest when it's dried and bucked and pulled off the plant and put into a bin. For every plant? Every plant. So when you get a visit from the Cannabis Control Commission, they'll go into your greenhouse and they'll pull up the metric file on the greenhouse and they'll say, you have 873 plants,

let's go find them. And then you go in there and they have an RFID scanner and they scan every plant and they say, You're short two plants or you have one plant extra. And then what do you do? Get fined? Jump through hoops. Normally you say like it got wasted, it died, and it wasn't entered in from the waste log. So we may have thousands and thousands of things and they'll say, hey, you're short three joints, find them. So if you were to take a step back and look at the business as an industry in Massachusetts and then across the country, how would you describe to someone who really doesn't know at all

the state of the industry right now? Yeah, it's been tough and it's been tough across the board. You look at Canadian stocks and some of those big ones. If you bought into them five years ago, you've got about 2% of your money left. A lot of them crashed and burned. A lot of the West Coast states did the same thing that we're doing. There is over-licensing, over-production, race to the bottom. It's not a stable market environment. And I think in those states, it's starting to stabilize. Massachusetts hopefully has hit the floor and we will start to stabilize

and people who are growing really good weed will do well and people who have great branding and good products will do well. After we toured Chris Weld's cannabis farm and retail store and processing plant, he offered to show us his original business, which is still going strong, Berkshire Mountain Distillers. Up front there is a retail shop with tasting tables set atop whiskey barrels.

In the back is the distilling operation. Big stainless steel tanks, many more barrels, copper tubing running high along the walls. You can smell the floral botanicals hanging from pipes overhead. So we just did Greylock gin, which is our flagship gin. So it's booze as a base and then juniper, coriander, angelica, oris, orange, cinnamon, and licorice. By now it's late afternoon on a Monday, and we are the only people in the place.

The cannabis store was much busier. On the other hand, here we didn't have to show ID like you do in legal cannabis shops. There aren't dozens of cameras tracking everyone's every move as required by state cannabis regulators. The bottles of gin and bourbon are just sitting there on the shelves, not stored in a vault the way cannabis is. And what's the economic picture from your distillery here? Is it an easy, healthy business without a lot of variables?

You kind of make money and you know you're going to make money versus the cannabis business where there's so many variables and changes and regs? The cannabis business is definitely more fluid and just hard to guess what's gonna happen. And I would say that in the 16 years I've been in operation here, the distilleries been pretty steady state. However, there's definitely been a shakeup in the way that spirits are distributed,

especially for smaller producers like myself. Shakeup meaning there's more consolidation and it makes it harder for smaller distrib like myself. Shake up meaning there's more consolidation and it makes it harder for smaller distributors? Correct. So the bigger suppliers distributors have coalesced. I think the top 10 do 80% of the business in the country or something. So the bigger volume suppliers dictate

what gets sold into who for the most part. If you had it to do over again, if you go back to four or five years ago when you started the cannabis company, if you had instead decided to, let's say, maybe even get the outside investors that you used for the cannabis company and instead just tried to expand this distillery,

you know, 5X or 10X, do you think that would have been a better move? From a financial standpoint, I think if I didn't get the outside investors and I spent the time on the distillery that I spent in the cannabis world, that would have been a better move. So do you regret getting into the cannabis industry? No, because I'm a half full kind of guy.

And by the way, I've not given up. I'm a very stubborn person, so I've not given up on the cannabis. It's just been a wild ride. I mean, it's a wild, wild west Gold Rush mentality. And it's been super fun too. I've learned a lot. I've worked with a bunch of great, interesting entrepreneurial type people.

The science behind the plants, pretty cool. I'm a huge gardener. I love growing stuff. Just to be part of an industry in its early days with something that was made illegal for the wrong reasons was, you know, I think looking back on that, it'll be something that'd be nice to have in your rear view. By the way, Chris Weld says he doesn't use cannabis.

Yeah, it was just never my, I love the smell of the plant. I love growing the plant. I'm just not a huge consumer. But he does drink. I drink my booze all the plant. I'm just not a huge consumer. But he does drink. I drink my booze all the time. I'm also 59, so it's not as much fun as it used to be. Before we leave the distillery, Weld encourages me and our crew to each take home a bottle, whatever we'd like. He is a very generous host. So we each walk out with a bottle, put them in the car, and then Weld says we should stop back at the pass, his cannabis shop. He tells us to wait outside.

He goes in, comes out five minutes later with a brown paper bag. There's something about being handed a brown paper bag full of weed in a parking lot. I know cannabis is legit now, but it doesn't really feel quite legit, at least compared to the distillery. If cannabis is ever going to substantially replace alcohol, that will have to change. I drove back to New York with my free weed in the paper bag. I still haven't cracked it open. Let me know if you want to drop by.

Maybe we'll try it together. That's probably not a great idea. But coming up next time on the show, in the final episode of this series, we will take a look at what it would take to change the reputation of legal cannabis. A President Harris is gonna sign a federal legalization bill. And what would happen then?

That process of consolidation and larger companies emerging will be greatly accelerated with national legalization. Or is there another model? Producers on small farms maybe have different regulatory requirements than someone who's trying to be the Amazon of weed. The future of the cannabis industry, that's next time. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else too.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app also at Freakonomics.com, where we publish transcripts and show notes. This episode was produced by Dalvin Abouwagie and Zach Lipinski. George Hicks was our field recordist in Massachusetts. Thanks, George. Our staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez,

Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippon, Jasmine Klinger, Jeremy Johnson, John Schnarres, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levy, Neil Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilly, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thank you for listening. Stones vs. The Beatles. Come on, don't get me started.

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