Grasslands Agency
September 16, 2024
This week on The Weedsmith, Grasslands delivers one last episode of the Father of the legal cannabis industry to reveal the identity of his inspiration. Steve DeAngelo, the founder of the Last Prisoner Project, finds this fellow founder of a prominent cannabis magazine very inspiring in how he made his vision real.The Weedsmith runs Wednesdays on Grasslands LinkedIn and Instagram pages.
Transcription:
Ricardo Baca:
Can you tell us about someone out there in this industry whose cannabis thought leadership is something you’ve witnessed and whose leadership you respect?
Steve DeAngelo:
You know this industry goes a long way back and leadership takes a lot of different forms.
One of the guys whose leadership I most respect and have tried to emulate in a lot of ways is a guy named Tom Forçade, who was the original founder of High Times Magazine. I admire Tom not so much for his interpersonal skills because he was a bristly kind of guy. But I admired him for his ability to look over to the other side of the mountain, to see what was coming, to envision it, to bring it back to other folks. To make that vision real.
I’ll never forget the first time I was in the Yippie commune in New York City on the Lower East Side on the Bowery, in 1974. And the first boxes of High Times Magazine showed up magically at our door. And we cracked them open and here was this glossy professionally designed, totally sharp depiction of cannabis that we had never seen before. It probably felt like it would feel to a kid who had never seen the Internet before, walking up to a computer and seeing the Internet.
It was just this amazing new world that nobody had ever envisioned was possible.
