There is a room I keep finding myself in, and you have probably been in it too. It is any of the mixers and conference workshops that have sprung up around Minnesota's cannabis industry over the last couple of years. Look around and you will see something you will not see anywhere else in American business.

I should tell you where I stand, because I am an outsider in that room myself. I started a show called Full Spectrum Cannabis to learn about an industry I found fascinating and knew very little about. I wanted my kids to grow up in a world where marijuana was legal and I didn’t want to feed them bad information. My mom consumes now, because she finally can and it helps her arthritis and it lets her sleep. It has taken a lot of conversations to understand what I was actually looking at.

By the window are the couple who spent twenty-five years in the corporate world, wearing badges and worrying about their 401k, until they'd had enough and built something of their own. Across the room are the ones who were in this long before it was legal, who sold when selling could cost you your freedom, not just your license. They carry with them knowledge you cannot get from a case study.

And here they all are, running businesses side by side. Nurses and scientists and engineers and former felons and entrepreneurs of every stripe, sorting through one highly regulated, still federally questionable industry together. The banks are finally getting in. The states are in. Everyone is figuring it out at the same time, in real time, which almost never happens in a mature industry and happens here every day.

The wine-and-whiskey crowd is mostly not in that room, and when they pass they look down their noses a little. The old stoner tropes die hard. Never mind that these people will employ their neighbors and get taxed at a rate almost no other legal business would tolerate. They belong, and I believe many of them will succeed.

Sam Devine is a Minneapolis producer and founder. He hosts Full Spectrum Cannabis and produces podcasts and videos through Devine Media. He is also the founder of Tofte, which helps Minnesota cannabis operators reach and hold compliance by drafting from their own documents.

Learn more at devinemediamn.com and gettofte.com.

I have been around regulated industries, and I have never seen one like this. Elsewhere the rules were settled generations ago and everyone inherited them. Here they are written and rewritten almost in real time. A form gets revised and the version you studied is suddenly wrong. A local jurisdiction adds a requirement nobody saw coming. More than a few operators will quietly tell you they got taken advantage of during an earlier licensing round and are bracing not to let it happen again. That worry shapes how people spend and who they trust when the ground keeps moving.

Somewhere along the way it became fashionable to warn these people off AI. “Don't use it for your SOPs.” “Don't let it near your Final Plan of Record.” “That's like cheating on your homework.” It gets said with a straight face, usually by someone who wants to sell you the alternative.

But businesses reach for whatever efficiency they can find, and that now includes AI. The banks moving into this industry use it. The hospitals these operators sell wellness products alongside use it. The agencies writing and enforcing the regulations are rolling it out too. Everyone with scale is being handed these tools. The one group getting warned off is the group that could use the help most and can least afford the consultant who bills by the hour.

I won't tell you the technology is harmless. Used carelessly it hands you confident answers that are simply wrong, and in a filing a regulator will read, an invented detail is worse than nothing. Most people only ever use these tools straight out of a chat window, and they don't know why the thing wanders off or makes things up. I like to say that they are like the smartest 5 year old you will ever meet, cheerfully wrong and gleefully unaware, but smart!

But point it at a specific set of documents, make it show where every line came from, and make it flag what your own paperwork does not cover, and it stops wandering. We want help reading the regulations. We want help judging what we have written. What we cannot do is hand off responsibility for the result. At the end of it, the output is ours.

Think of a calculator. It cannot know what you are trying to figure out. It is useful precisely because a human sits above it deciding what matters. This generation of tools is no different when it is built right. A tool built the right way is not guessing from everything it has ever seen. It is reading the documents you handed it and nothing else, and it says so when they come up short. That is the difference between a clean-looking answer and one you would sign your name beneath

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The caricature does these people no favors. The person sweating a Final Plan of Record at midnight is not a slacker cutting corners. She is a nurse who spent fifteen years reading charts and now reads statutes with the same care. He is an engineer who ran a line at a plant and now runs a cultivation room by the numbers. They know their strengths and now want to build something legitimate, in daylight, taxed to the hilt, with their name on the license. They are not looking to cheat. They are looking to do it right without going broke paying someone to retype what their own documents already say.

So the next time someone tells you that using modern tools is cheating, remind them that their bank already uses them, their doctor already uses them, and the agency writing their rules already uses them. The people in that strange, wonderful room are not asking for a shortcut. They are asking for the same footing everyone else already has. They have earned it and they will get there.

I wrote this article, though I followed some of the editing advice of the AI writing assistants available to me. You probably wouldn't want to read it otherwise, what with all my run-on sentences and points that never quite get made. But the words and the thoughts are mine, and I think you can read that too.

by Sam Devine

Say hello anytime: [email protected].

Minnesota Cannabis College is a Twin Cities-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law. EIN 86-2319307.

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