How to Invest in Marijuana Stocks and the Pros and Cons of Putting Your Green in Green James Dennin - Money.Mic
go to original January 1, 2017

Marijuana is sold for recreational use in Denver. Legalization of pot has set off a "green rush" to invest among venture capitalists. (Brennan Linsley/AP)

Attention, weed enthusiasts: Have you heard of the "green rush"?



That's shorthand for the growing scramble among investors to profit from the an increasingly permissive attitude toward pot in the United States.

The rush began gaining serious momentum after the Justice Department issued a 2013 memo tacitly discouraging local officials from enforcing federal drug laws in states like Colorado and Washington, which had previously passed ballot measures legalizing recreational use of marijuana for adults.

Known as the Cole memo, it's still largely seen as the main "on the books" guideline from federal authorities as to which laws states with legal pot must actually enforce.

Since then, seven states have also legalized recreational marijuana use — California, Massachusetts and Nevada most recently.



That's prompted many to start getting into the industry — regardless of whether they live in a legal state.

As Steve DeAngelo — co-founder of The ArcView Group, one of legal pot's biggest investment groups — put it to Fusion, "You don't need to live in Colorado to make jars, you don't need to live there to make software."

Unfortunately for aspiring pot-trepreneurs, the recent election victory of President-elect Donald Trump has thrown a wrench in the industry's momentum.

Trump's pick for attorney general, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, is one of legal marijuana's most outspoken critics. In the 1980s, he went on record as saying he thought the KKK was "OK until I found out they smoked pot." More recently, he called efforts to spread legalization "a tragic mistake."

Michael Zaytsev, author of The Entrepreneur's Guide to Cannabis, told Mic in a phone interview that investing in the industry has gotten a lot riskier in the wake of Trump's win.

"A lot of the investors I know and speak with regularly are in a holding pattern; they're not putting any money in, they're kind of waiting," Zaytsev said. "It was known that under [President Barack] Obama, the DEA wasn't going to spend a lot of time locking up people for cannabis, especially in legal states."

Under Trump, those assurances aren't quite there.

Read the rest at Money.Mic

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!