Popular Marijuana Company Goes Public

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


This week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has been on a tear, but it’s nothing compared to the recent highs achieved by an obscure stock known as General Cannabis (ticker symbol: CANA). Since word leaked out in September that the company was acquiring the popular Yelp-for-pot site WeedMaps.com, the value of its shares has skyrocketed 300 percent. Last week General Cannabis officially finalized the purchase, making WeedMaps the latest and most brazen marijuana business to go public.

Founded in 2008 by a University of California computer science graduate, Justin Hartfield, WeedMaps allows users to search for medical marijuana dispensaries in their area, compare prices, and post reviews. Its 50,000 paying users in September grossed the site $400,000, according to David Downs of the East Bay Express, who explains:

Most people use the site for free, but like Craigslist or Yelp, Weedmaps charges dispensary owners for prime placement, review rebuttals, and advertising. User payments became so torrential, credit card processors assumed fraud. Weedmaps had to create its own merchant-processing account to deal with payments, and spin-off “Cannapay” now does billing for two-dozen other businesses. It may become a credit union. Weedmaps’ free iPhone app also gets 700 to 800 new downloads a day and has been downloaded over a half a million times.

Beyond its popularity, though, what makes WeedMaps controversial are the other websites run by the company, some of which can’t claim to be solely for semi-legal medical marijuana users. And that doesn’t make everyone in the medical pot world happy, Downs notes:

Some perceive Hartfield’s young, bold approach as a threat to hard-won patient rights. Weedmaps sites like weedporn.com and weedorskin.com don’t exactly legitimize medical use. Arizona medical marijuana campaign manager Andrew Myers notes that national support for medical marijuana has peaked and begun to erode, even as full legalization’s supporters grow.

As the marijuana industry gradually goes mainstream, you can expect to see a lot more of these types of conflicts. In the next issue of the print magazine I profile the founders of WeGrow, a vertically-integrated pot company that aims to be the nation’s first “marijuana superstore.” They too plan to go public, and if and when that happens, it will make WeedMaps look positively tame.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate