It's difficult to describe the exuberance that pervades a new industry, particularly one that involves the cachet of a newly legalized drug like marijuana. Of the two dozen or so people I spoke with in the business, every last one of them was convinced that they were on the road to riches.
Over and over again, these eager entrepreneurs made analogies to the Gold Rush of the 1860s, which originally populated much of the region, and to the growth of the Internet. "The only thing that even comes close to this," a penny stock operator with designs on the industry told me, "is the craze leading up to the dot-com bubble."
(I disagree this sector is not a technology software companies like comparing oranges with grapes)
The exuberance stems from one thing: money. It costs the best operations no more than $800 to grow a pound of marijuana that can then be sold through their own retail stores for upwards of $3,000 a pound -- dispensaries in Colorado must grow at least 70% of what they sell.
That translates into more than $7 million in profit before taxes for a 20,000-square-foot cultivation facility like the one I visited last month for research on this three-part series (for the first two articles.
"The genie is out of the bottle," Roberto Lopesino of Advanced Cannabis Solutions told me earlier in the week, before legal selling began. And by the looks of it, he was right.
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