How Green Flowers got universities to adopt cannabis educational programs
What I learned is that once you get a few people on board, schools are like sheep. They end up following the pack. And so, we knew that if we could get a few of these over the line, it should create this “domino effect.”So, we started in 2017, got laughed out of every room all the way until 2019. Years of approaching schools and going through this process and […] we got really close with one school, and then the president, at signature, killed it.
It was heartbreaking, especially being our first one. Months of diligence and then, yeah, killed literally at the last possible second that we thought [it] was going to signature. And then, finally, in 2019, one of our investors—I don’t know if he was on the board or just really close to the board at Florida Atlantic University in Florida—personally vouches for us, and they say, “Oh sure. What the hell, We’ll give it a try.”
On the Ganjier Program
It’s really tricky. Although the instructors are truly the most experienced cannabis people on earth, there’s not a large group of people that have been doing this for 10 [or]20 years in the legacy space or in [the] Prop 215 environment in California who have also transitioned to being such major players in legal space.
That’s the thing:[…] you have to hold both things in cannabis. You must hold the love, the culture, and the legacy—all that stuff. And the fact that we’re in a newly regulated legal market? That’s a totally different environment.
So, these 18 people are coming from that legacy background but participating in this space. Swami Chaitanya is one of the judges who’s been judging the Emerald Cup for 18 years, and he’s the one doing the assessments. You can challenge Swami’s assessments—you can—but who’s more qualified than him?
Max Simon, CEO at Green Flower
On the power of the cannabis plant
All these last 80 years of stigma and [the] war on drugs and all this other stuff, and then today, some scientists walked in and discovered this plant and then brought it to the lab and started researching it—should be celebrated as the single greatest medical discovery of the 21st century.
So, you’re telling me this plant helps me sleep, helps me relax, helps me be creative, helps me connect to spirituality, can have measurable effects on cancer, can have measurable effects on depression, measurable effects on anxiety,measurable effects on spasticity, measurable effects on epilepsy? You really start to go down [the list, and]you realize it’s […] one of the most incredible plants that exists on planet Earth.
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