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Chanel Lindsey said she first started using cannabis at the age of 17 to treat a cyst.
Lindsey said, “I just got drained and I remember having smoked and all the pain had gone away. I didn’t think much about it at that point because it was just a one-time thing with a cyst.”
But she said cysts run in Lindsay’s family. When she gave birth to her son two years later and developed an ovarian cyst after birth, she sought out marijuana for medical use. It was still illegal at the time, she said, and quality recreational marijuana was hard to find.
“Not all cannabis is made the same way. The stuff you get on the street is probably full of pesticides and not of good quality,” she said. “And I actually use this to treat my medical condition. So for me, it has become very important to have cannabis that I can trust and know that it has been grown organically.”
Lindsay, 39, has spent the past decade growing cannabis and testing different strains and forms to determine which is best for medicinal and recreational purposes. These efforts led her to lead a company in Boston that sells the country’s first all-in-one cannabis cooker — a kitchen appliance designed to energize and prepare cannabis for baking, melting, and steeping. She is one of the few black women to head a multi-billion dollar cannabis industry.
There has been rapid acceptance of marijuana in recent years, with many states legalizing its use. Recreational marijuana is legal for adults in 17 states and Washington, DC, and medical marijuana is legal in 36 states.
But as of 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, 81 percent of cannabis business owners or founders were white, 4 percent were black and 6 percent were Hispanic, according to Marijuana Business Daily. Lack of access to capital, systemic economic racism, and laws that prevent convicted criminals from joining the legal industry limit the possibility of participating in the booming economy.
Lindsay has watched the societal transformation and barriers to entry closely as a lawyer and business owner fighting for fairness in the industry, and as someone arrested on drug possession charges.
Lindsay was arrested in 2009 in Massachusetts after officers confiscated less than one ounce of marijuana, the police report said. At the time, cannabis was illegal in the state, but marijuana offenses of less than one ounce did not carry criminal penalties, so Lindsey did not serve any prison sentence.
“When I was arrested, my entire legal career flashed before my eyes,” said Lindsey, who attended Northeastern University School of Law and majored in business, employment and insurance before pursuing cannabis law full time.
“If I had been publicly brought to Stoughton County Court and summoned, I would have lost my job. I would have lost everything.” At the time, Lindsay worked as an attorney at Sugarman, Rogers, Barshak & Cohen, PC, a Boston firm.
Lindsey said she realized then that she wanted to change the stigma around marijuana use and reduce the personal and professional obstacles for people who wanted to use it but feared retaliation at work or arrest.
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“There was a lamp moment,” Lindsey said. “I was like, ‘How can I go about this? I am someone who uses cannabis for all of these reasons. And how can my professional life conflict with what happens in my personal life even though I have a great skill set in both? It wasn’t something I would give up on. It was really helping me.”
As more states move to legalize marijuana, Lindsay said laws often do not include deleting records or releasing people imprisoned for marijuana arrests, and there is no clear path for how to join the legal market.
When rationing happens, completely marginalized people are pushed to the side. Become a money game – there is a lot of money to be made here. The troops that made the money, Lindsay said, know how to go to town, to different states and carry out these operations. “And for us, it’s about making sure there is an actual path for people who were in the illicit market to become part of the real market. Because if that doesn’t happen, all it will do is continue to criminalize us and continue to have the same disparate effect while adding an incredible insult to injury in the same A time when others earn millions.”
Lindsay’s efforts to make the industry more equitable include working with a group of lawyers in 2015 to draft a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in Massachusetts. The measure was passed in 2016.
Adam Fine, partner at cannabis law firm Vicente Sederberg, worked with Lindsay on the ballot initiative.
“The marijuana arrests, incarcerations, and all the collateral consequences — Chanel really shined a light on this issue in a very effective way,” Fine said. “It was a huge effort, and she was very crucial in that effort. The insight she had on the law, the actual boots on the ground, speaking to the press, highlighting the various impacts that testing had, and the damage that it caused.”
The FX by Ardent, the all-in-one portable hemp kitchen
Lindsay Ardent launched in 2016. It sells two devices, NOVA and FX, that activate marijuana plants before soaking, cooking or baking. The company refers to the FX model as “Easy Bake Ardent.” Users can choose the strains or oils (THC, CBD, CBG, aromas, flavors) to include for whatever outcome they want, including menus, topicals or nutrients. In addition to hemp, the devices can also cook soups, pasta and pastries.
The company’s start-up capital came from Lindsey’s mother, who invested her retirement savings with nearly $200,000. Lindsay secured other investments and acquired Ardent for a total of $500,000.
But she said there were few outside investors.
“There were other companies I saw that actually get $6 million for a product idea that never made it to market. And I’m like, damn, can’t I get you guys to give me $100,000 to get it started?” Lindsey said. “It makes you build an incredibly rough business. I am no longer waiting for investors. We will run this company in a simple way, and we will be profitable from the start. My company has been profitable since year two.”
These devices have gained popularity as more states legalize marijuana and as the pandemic stays home, Lindsay said. She said the company has generated $15 million in revenue since its launch when cannabis was legal in just four states.
“The growth we’ve seen has certainly coincided with more countries coming online,” she said. “We go both ways — more rationing is circulating across the country as well as the idea of pandemic-friendly items. I’m here in my office now. I can make edible food from start to finish right here on my desk. A pandemic has stressed the need for that kind of privacy.” “.
Ardent is available in all 50 states, including states where recreational and medical marijuana is not yet legal.
Despite the project’s success, Lindsay says her priority is to bring more people from underrepresented groups into the multi-billion dollar cannabis industry.
She co-founded a nonprofit organization called Equal Opportunities Now to advance fair enforcement of existing and new laws. This year, local nonprofits and activists staged a boycott and social media campaign against members of the Commonwealth Dispensary Association — a trade group representing brick-and-mortar businesses — to advocate for a regulation aimed at bringing historically unrepresented minorities into the industry.
The regulation, implemented by the Cannabis Control Commission, Massachusetts’ marijuana management body, allows for an Uber Eats-style delivery service where drivers pick up product from businesses and deliver it to customers, and allows recreational marijuana dealers without storefronts to make deliveries. This delivery system is available exclusively to persons deprived of their rights for the first three years. The Commonwealth Dispensary Association sued to end the exclusivity, prompting at least 10 members to withdraw from the CDA within four days, according to the Boston Globe.
Resigning members include New England Treatment Access, the state’s largest marijuana company, and other well-known companies, such as In Good Health, Garden Remedies, Cultivate, Sira Naturals and Mayflower Medicinals. They said in statements that companies are defending property rights in the industry and cannot support an association that wants to limit it.
The Dispensary Association dropped the lawsuit on January 25: “It is in the best interests of the industry and our members to drop the lawsuit against the Cannabis Control Commission,” the association said in a statement at the time. “We all need to work together to achieve our many common goals, including increasing the participation of a diverse group of entrepreneurs in the industry.”
When it comes to the future of cannabis, Lindsay said, “key ingredient #1 is making sure that fairness is in the laws. This is very important because you can’t go on writing the law and then try to fight for a seat at the table.”
“And you can see, even when it was put into law, every year now, we’ve had to fight about every little bit of it to make sure it gets implemented,” she added. “So for now, what I do is continue to use my voice to show inequality within the industry.”
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