Living the Dream: Danielle Rosellison

October is Fair Trade Month and I find myself asking over and over again: Do independent businesses — the mom-and-pops of the cannabis industry — even have a chance?

I have never worked so hard to sell cannabis (in the old days we would have just called it weed) in my life. It was once $40 an eighth with limited oversight. Now, growers are lucky if we get $16 an eighth, and that’s gross income! The last three and a half years have been, hands down, the most brutal roller coaster of my life.

I know the authors of Washington’s Initiative 502 worked hard to give the cottage industry a chance by making three different size tiers, an affordable $250 application fee and a $1,000 annual licensing fee. California has diligently tried to create a structure in which the legacy growers, the people who have supplied the majority of our nation’s cannabis for the last umpteen years, have an opportunity to survive. But it seems like no matter how hard the mom-and-pops try to follow the intent of the law, there is some big, bad corporation with their team of highly paid lawyers working to skirt the system.