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everyone I met.
    What surprised me was that, although everyone in the upper-middle-class suburban social circle I hung out in had heard that medical marijuana was now legal, very few people had had much experience with it. They’d say the most ridiculous things when I brought it up.
    â€œI know it’s legal, but you can’t really buy it, can you?”
    â€œIt’s still against the law, though, isn’t it?”
    â€œI don’t care if it’s legal—it’s still wrong!”
    And on and on.
    I remember the first time my then wife confronted me about it. “What’s with this marijuana stuff?” she said.
    â€œIt’s going to be huge,” I said. “It’s an amazing opportunity. I am going to take some time and look into it.”
    â€œYou have children,” she reminded me. “You have a family. You need to get a job and bring home a paycheck!”
    She had grown up in a fairly conservative Colorado family. Sure, like a lot of people her age, she had smoked marijuana, but she didn’t like it, and that was that. Marijuana was wrong. It was something stoners, losers, and criminals did. She didn’t see why I found it intriguing. And she had a very different risk tolerance. My entrepreneurship had always made her uncomfortable. Being an entrepreneur in the weed business really made her uncomfortable.
    You don’t have time to be wasting on bullshit “opportunities,” she thought.
    We have five mouths to feed.
    We have an expensive lifestyle with a mortgage and a couple of cars to pay for.
    Chris, what you need right now is a good job.
    A real job.
    With a decent paycheck.
    You know—like the one you used to have.

    Apparently I used to be somebody. A contender. A mover. A shaker.
    Once I was the founder and CEO of a national real estate company. During the booming housing market, which lasted from 2002to 2008, I developed a novel way of financing pools of real estate. I had executed it only a couple of times before forming a company to do more, similar deals. You can only structure so many securities before you exhaust your exemptions with the Securities and Exchange Commission. If I wanted to keep using this method, I had to launch a public offering. I’d never done such a thing. I was thirty-eight years old at the time and a self-made millionaire.
    I’d spent the last six years building a real estate corporation initially devoted to increasing the value of residential real estate. As the housing market started heating up in the United States, my company began buying properties all over the country. The demand for housing was insatiable, and it seemed as if every investor and bank on the planet was throwing money at us.
    Our process was fairly simple. Basically, we’d assemble a group of, say, twenty investors, each of whom would buy one property. Each investor would then contribute the property in a tax-deferred exchange into a limited partnership. Then the pool of properties would be managed and eventually sold or exploited for their cash-flow potential. The owners of the limited partnership would then receive the benefit of the sale or the cash flow that stemmed from the rent we were charging our tenants. A structure like this allowed each investor to spread the risk over the entire pool of properties. This diversification of risk and normalization of return was the premise I’d built my business upon. And it had worked wonderfully—until it didn’t.
    Everything I’d done in the last six years was building up to that public offering, with a net asset value of $1 billion.
    My company stood to earn $17 million at offering alone and much more over time.
    And I, the humble servant to this paragon of American entrepreneurship, would be taking home a solid seven-figure payday to my loving wife and three adorable daughters.
    I made this happen.
    I had it coming to me.
    I had earned it.
    It was American capitalism at