Don’t Call It ‘Pot’ in This Circle; It’s a Profession

OAKLAND, Calif. — Like hip-hop, health food and snowboarding, marijuana is going corporate.

As more and more states allow medical use of the drug, and California considers outright legalization, marijuana’s supporters are pushing hard to burnish the image of pot by franchising dispensaries and building brands; establishing consulting, lobbying and law firms; setting up trade shows and a seminar circuit; and constructing a range of other marijuana-related businesses.

Boosters say it is all part of a concerted effort to trade the drug’s trippy, hippie counterculture past for what they believe will inevitably be a more buttoned-up future.

“I don’t possess a Nehru jacket, I’ve never grown a goatee, I’ve never grown my hair past the nape of my neck,” Allen St. Pierre, the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws said. “And I don’t like patchouli.”

Steve DeAngelo, the president of CannBe — a marketing, lobbying and consulting firm here — will not even use the word “marijuana.” Calling it pejorative, he prefers the scientific term “cannabis.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/24pot.html?th&emc=th

I live in Texas so.... But I would for sure open a store with pipes, bongs, hookahs, homemade custom smoking apparati (which I have alot of experience doing, and they are always bad ass and very nice, work well too, and very imaginative), shirts, hats, stickers, decals, papers, blunt wraps, rolling machines everything that could be used with weed. I have another business idea that would go great withe its legalization that has nothing to do with weed but would be awesome. I won't release that yet but it is good. Imagine all the other businesses that would sprout up. It needs to happen, that would be a great profession.