Living the Dream: Serge Chistov

The great thing about being on the ground floor of a relatively young industry like cannabis is the fact that you can build something that doesn’t exist yet. It’s not easy to find untapped markets, but there is a lot of opportunity to be had in marijuana-based products.

At Honest Marijuana Co., our first commitment has been to quality. Our customers are educated in terms of both quality and taste, and they are discerning. They are looking for more than just a high. They want clean, organic products that are grown and manufactured sustainably and with limited impact to the environment.

Having established strong organic practices for growing, as well as sustainable manufacturing and packaging, it was time to look for our next opportunity and that came in the form of an opportunity to expand into an area you might not expect: Africa.

Federal legalization in the United States is still on the horizon, but there will be many regulatory hurdles in trying to work across state lines. Meanwhile, expansion into Africa, including the leveraging of existing supply chains, means access to another huge market: Europe. Uganda is already shipping medical marijuana to Germany legally in a non-commercial government venture. And other countries, like Tanzania, are watching this happen and seeing the potential in both tax revenues and job creation.

Specifically, we are working with the first chain of medical clinics in Tanzania, aptly named “Your Local Clinic.” The goal is to enable practitioners and pharmacists throughout the country to prescribe medical marijuana that is locally grown to our exacting standards. The climate is perfectly suited to growing cannabis 12 months of the year and, unlike most of the U.S., the land has not been destroyed by pesticide use. Our goal is to work with growers, to follow basic principles of living soil and supply the plant with what it needs. The soils there are still virgin, and while they will benefit from more technology for irrigation, it will be 30 years before pesticides become common.

Bottom line? It’s a yet-untapped market for legal medical — and eventually recreational — marijuana, with clear sight lines to the European market. And this is only the beginning of the potential expansion opportunities overseas.