It’s 2020 and there is a regulated cannabis market in the UK and I want to run a business in the emergent market. Big businesses, hedge funds, Monsanto, even the supermarket chains are heavily investing in cannabis, the talk is all about big brands and market share.

Sainsbury’s are in the process of putting together their “taste the difference” cannabis products on the shelves. Foolishly I think that as I don’t have a huge amount of capital and think that the best option for me is a small connoisseurs business catering for older more well off customers.

I want to sell charis from Himachal Pradesh, Red Lebanese, good quality Moroccan khiff, real Thai sticks not some grass grown in a green house in the Netherlands with a piece of string wrapped round. No bubble hash, no skunk, no dabs, no high THC low CBD prohibitionist rubbish just old fashioned good quality product. I think that being ‘authentic’ will be a key marketing tool for the business.

There are numerous small scale farmers from Morocco, India, Thailand, Jamaica, Afghanistan and many other places that I find that can provide at a fair price, high quality product from that hasn’t been produced with large volumes of pesticides on large scale plantations that are exploitative of poor labourers whose land has been appropriated for growing the cannabis they are now growing.

This is when my problems start. Corporate lobbyists have been hard at work “persuading“ the European Commission and the UK Government what form the market regulations around cannabis should have. The fear of this new market has played into the corporations hands rather than producing a market that limits the harm that could come from cannabis use the regulations support the market solely being in the hands of a small number of major corporations with barriers to entry to SMEs and little effective consumer protection aside an obsession about the relative strength of THC and CBD.

The import licenses are prohibitively expensive, the level of testing and the required level of conformity of a plant based product, make it incredibly hard to legal source from small suppliers and have led to a dominance of GM plants grown with high level of pesticides in large scale plantations which wreck environmental havoc in countries where many people are already hungry. The grass produced is off two strengths, prescribed by law and it tastes foul, the corporate response has been to include “flavourings”, Jamaican pineapple and “Marlon’s Mellow Mango Marijuana” being current best sellers in the supermarkets.

Cannabis users are starting to have unexplained health problems that didn’t occur before corporate involvement. Nobody is sure if it is the pesticides, the genetic modification or the flavourings but there are rumours that are dismissed as conspiracies, whilst bloggers accuse the corporations of cover up and suppressing the evidence.

Disappointed I begin to give up on my plan when a chance meeting with an investment banker at a dinner party opens up a new possibility. She is very taken with the idea of establishing a quality brand for cannabis and is prepared to raise investment from ‘angels’ to create a brand for rich people concerned about their health. The research I have done on small scale organic growers allows me to take the position as a buyer in the new corporation.

We open our first stores in London, New York and Los Angeles simultaneously with celebrity endorsements and coverage in magazines in like Tatler, Harpers Bazar and Town and Country. I am suddenly making a comfortable living whilst a generation of cannabis users on low and middle incomes are developing cancers due to the pesticides in the cannabis they have been smoking.