Las Vegas, MJ Biz

I spent last week in Vegas recording a podcast with Cultivated (Jeremy and Jay) to extend Gotham’s collaboration with them and announce The Highrise, a series of salons, with one starting in January and the second in October.

MJ Biz, the largest conference in the cannabis business that Emerald purchased in 2022, to add to their roster of 142 conferences and 16 media events. In all fairness, this was my first time at MJ Biz, so I have no idea what it was like in its heyday, but the actual conference felt similar to the end of Meckler, who was a pioneer in the internet conference biz. The events became staid. These days, it is all about profit so I want to know what the ROI was on the conference hall booths.

Large players in the industry put on other events, be it a party or a brunch, where people can meet and greet. There are, of course, a few big crazy parties; after all, it is Las Vegas.

Besides the fact that Las Vegas is a complete assault on your senses and feels incredibly empty (as confirmed by Uber drivers), it is also expensive, and nobody in this industry is profitable. I walked away from the event realizing that the key to shifting this industry forward is to reschedule cannabis and pursue federal legalization. Still, I fear the sector becomes a private equity play, where the patience to reach profitability goes only so far.

The next six months will be very telling once the cannabis companies publicly traded on the Canadian stock market have debt due in the first quarter of next year. The debt is mainly due to federal tax liabilities under 280E. These are not tech businesses; they do not have the reach that tech businesses can have, making the back-end technologies of this industry have a limited customer base unless they create products that can sell to more people. At the end of the day, the publicly traded companies are all mostly heavily regulated CPG businesses that are not making money.

I hope we are starting to see our government wake up to the reality of the importance of embracing this nascent industry emerging around the globe.