This article originally ran in the December 2016 issue of AVN magazine. Click here for a link to the digital edition.
Pictured above: Veronica Rodriguez, Jenna Sativa and Misty Stone. To see more photos from Jay Allan's shoot for the December 2016 cover, click here.
The late, somewhat lamented Neo-American Church, one of the earliest “churches” to use LSD and marijuana as its sacraments, based its philosophy on something called “synchronicity”: the idea that all things are connected, so it shouldn’t be surprising when, “by coincidence,” something happens in your life that mirrors something you’ve been thinking about.
Hence, it must be synchronistic that the day we were wrapping up production on this issue about the many similarities and crossovers between the adult entertainment business and the fast-growing marijuana industry, we got this ad in our inbox:
Titled “The $50 Marijuana Investment Jackpot,” it begins, “Like it or not, marijuana legalization is sweeping the country. … On Election Day, California, Nevada and Massachusetts all roundly voted to legalize recreational marijuana use. And that means that very soon dozens of tiny marijuana firms could skyrocket by 100%, 300%, 500% or higher. This is your chance to turn a single $50 bill… into an absolute fortune. But you need to get in ASAP! According to CNBC, ‘Now is the right time to bet big on marijuana ... [as] the industry is poised to be gigantic.’ And Forbes is touting that ‘hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring in…’ Click here for full details on how to stake your claim!”
The capper? That ad from Agora Financial was sent out by Breitbart News, the ultra-conservative alt-right website whose former Chairman is now President-Elect Donald Trump’s top political advisor!
Fact is, it was almost inevitable that marijuana would become legal, because as Lenny Bruce pointed out in the early ’60s, “Pot will be legal in ten years. Why? Because in this audience probably every other one of you knows a law student who smokes pot, who will become a senator, who will legalize it to protect himself.”
Okay; so Bruce’s prediction was a little off (see “The Roots of Pot Prohibition” on page 51), but the Breitbart ad is right: the pot business is about to flourish.
“This is a very exciting time for this burgeoning industry, with nine states having some sort of marijuana initiative on the ballot this year,” noted Theresa Flynt, formerly of LFP Publications and now vice president of business development for marijuana-based start-up Pineapple Express. “We are especially excited about Prop 64, which would legalize recreational marijuana in California, effectively doubling the size of the industry, and generating a projected one billion dollars a year in additional tax revenue, which the state desperately needs.”
And Flynt knows what she’s talking about: Pineapple Express already has a “canna-business park in Desert Hot Springs, the website THC.com (named for the psychoactive chemical in pot), and one dispensary in Illinois, where marijuana is only legal for medical purposes, but with many more to come.
But the mere fact that Larry Flynt’s daughter has become involved in the marijuana business, and that dad himself is reportedly investing in it, is telling in itself, though not as odd as some might think. Pot and porn share a strange history, both socially and legally—and hell, they both even have their own trade magazines!
“I know personally, I would say, off the top of my head, at least 40 people in the adult industry who are involved, in one way or another, in the cannabis business,” said sociologist Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals. “I couldn’t give you an exact number, but there’s lot of people who are doing the marketing crossovers; talking about performers who have strains. There are everything from porn performers to cam models whose entire personas are based around cannabis. There are people who have moved into marketing, people who are doing different kinds of media, people who are legal experts who are starting to move into cannabis law, people who are doing SEO—I mean there’s anything and everything all the way down to the most crowning jewel example: those who have moved from adult into venture capitalism. I believe that’s what Pineapple Express is.”
Tibbals also explained some of the differences regarding what marijuana products can legally be sold, which vary from state to state. The biggest distinction is between products whose active ingredient is largely cannabidiol (CBD), which offers many of marijuana’s medicinal effects but without the high produced by the plant’s other active chemical, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), and depending on the laws of a particular state, dispensaries may only be allowed to stock CBD products with little THC (apparently it can’t be eliminated altogether), while others allow greater THC content.
One of the more prominent crossover adult “pot-trepreneurs” is Bo Kenney, who owns a chain of adult retail stores in Virginia, as well as LGI Distributors, based in Manassas. A 40-year adult industry veteran, he was also the head of SexZ Pictures, which won several awards for productions helmed by Eli Cross—and now he’s the owner/operator of the King Weedy Cannabis Collective, which sells equipment that aids in the cultivation and extraction of cannabis products.
“King Weedy ... is an organization whose mission is to promote the economic welfare of its members by providing a medium to create a safe consistent and reliable source of quality free cannabis for the personal use of its members,” the King Weedy Collective member agreement states. “As a collective member I understand that any money paid to the collective is for items (glass pipes & vape kits) that the collective sells is for those items only. I also fully understand that any free cannabis products I receive from the collective are strictly a free gift to me from the collective.”
With 374 web pages devoted to such items as “grow rooms,” hydroponics systems, lighting, soil, dehumidifiers, nutrients, and animal, insect and mold control, King Weedy is certainly one of the major players in the cannabis game—but plenty of other adult industry members are also in the pot business in one way or another—and some are ways the average person would find surprising.
Take, for instance, Joy King, the Wicked Pictures VP who’s credited with having been the force behind then-contract star Jenna Jameson’s rise to fame, but who resigned her position about two years ago to become a spiritual healer.
“I still consult for Wicked, which is great; I appreciate that, and the healing work was wonderful and fed my soul but it didn’t feed my bills,” King told AVN, “so I started looking into cannabis, first for my healing clients and then met some people just like in crazy coincidences, and ended up meeting these guys and they said, ‘Hey, we’re working on this project and we’d love to get you involved.’ That’s how it started, and that was a year and a half ago.”
What King is referring to is a web start-up called The Nug Nation, which so far has posted several stop-motion animation videos on YouTube featuring marijuana buds brought to life by adding facial features and hair, not unlike the Mr. Potato Head toy many played with as children, and putting them in created environments like grocery stores, bathrooms and even the presidential debate stage.
At present, King hopes to interest dispensaries, edibles manufacturers and other pot-related businesses in sponsoring the videos—and though her animators don’t actually use pot, they’re considering creating an edibles line themselves, using The Nug Nation characters as advertising. She also revealed that Fox’s Adult Swim programming block has shown interest in airing a Nug Nation animation show.
Another adult industry refugee-turned-entrepreneur is Mike Savage, who spent 24 years with adult distributor IVD, mostly as the company’s general manager, and who now provides products that aid in cannabis-related industries.
“I’m in the specialty compressed gas business,” Savage explained. “The three main items I sell are nitrous oxide, CO2 and butane, and the butane is obviously used for lighter refills, and I sell to cooks and chefs that they use to sear tuna and make crème brulee and stuff like that, and we also sell to cigar shops, but the butane is also used in weed extraction, so I’m dealing with hydroponics stores and I’m dealing with growers and I’m dealing with all the major distributors and smoke shops across the country that people are using the butane for extraction. I’m based out of Florida now, but have a warehouse in San Francisco, and there’s 20-some states where it’s legal for medical, and all of them could be my customers. What we’re really excited about is that we’re getting lined up with people that are concentrating more on CBD, and all the tremendous impact that CBD can have in the world. It’s a good business, it’s an interesting business.”
It should be pointed out that, just like porn, being in the marijuana business in any way can have its legal difficulties, even in states that have legalized the material to some degree.
“Many of the hurdles that the adult industry has overcome in the past few decades are now hurdles for the marijuana industry: ‘do not ship’ zip codes for paraphernalia; no crossing state lines; age requirements; zoning; regulations; credit card processing; bank acceptance; etc.,” noted Theresa Flynt. “All of which just takes some time and as each state legalizes, we just get closer to the end game of it becoming federally legal. The laws just need to be established same as it was with alcohol after the prohibition.”
At least one attorney who serves the adult community who has helped some get up to speed in a marijuana-related business is Karen Tynan, one of the primary “legal eagles” who helped fight Prop 60.
“I have a few clients that have dispensaries and have other interests in the Northern California cannabis business, and based on the passage of the proposition, they’re very excited to be able to expand into recreational consumption,” said the Healdsburg-based attorney. “About a year, year and a half ago, we had a group of performers that we arranged to have strains for, like Layla Price, Skin Diamond, all that, and their strains are very high end, organic and I think that’s going to keep expanding in the industry; I think that with marijuana’s acceptance into the marketplace, we’re going to see even more adult performers with their own strains, with their own oils, with their own creams and with their own lubes.”
One of Tynan’s current clients is Emerald Triangle Girls, an online XXX production company that’s about to branch out into the dispensary business. Their motto? “Hot Girls! Hot Sex! Good Bud!”
Tynan warned that one of the pitfalls adult industry members thinking of making a move into pot must watch for is that they have to make sure they’re with “legitimate, licensed businesses,” and they should take care to protect “their trademark, their name, your association with the strain, and make sure you’re associated with dispensaries that are properly regulated and licensed.”
One adult businessman who’s gotten into pot-related distribution is Steve Stevens, son of the legendary Kirdy Stevens, creator of the famous Taboo series.
“I am involved as a distributor of CBDs, which come in pill form, liquid form, vape form and crystal form,” he told AVN. “When the adult business started diminishing pretty rapidly, I was looking for other avenues, and it just came up; not as CBDs, but as selling vapes with nicotine, which turned into vapes with THC, which then morphed into the CBD market.”
Stevens’ product is All Good Vape, and he admits that finding retailers to carry it reminds him of his dad’s experiences in trying to find adult retail outlets for VHS tapes.
“It’s actually very difficult,” he said. “You have to have sales reps that can go to the source and have an existing relationship to get your products in there, because there’s so many people competing now to get shelf space. It’s expanded in the last two years at least 200 percent.”
Right now, Stevens’ products are available mainly in the San Diego, L.A. and San Francisco areas, and though he still sells his dad’s movies, which he says are still bringing in some revenue, “compared to 2006, it’s not even a drop in the bucket.”
One of Stevens’ wholesalers is someone he worked with in adult, who prefers to be known only as Jon, who still distributes porn but has added Stevens’ All Good Vape to his repertoire.
“The wholesale side of [porn] has really taken a hit, so a lot of people got into novelties because you can’t download a dildo,” Jon noted. “A lot of people went into pills and other physical gigs, and I just wound up wandering over into the medical marijuana side, and it’s a physical good and it’s something that I was already familiar with and an industry that I’m already kind of familiar with, so it was a really easy transition. These two industries are very similar although this is more like how VHS was in the ‘80s than the current state of adult.”
Jon’s sales territory consists mainly of the “San Gabriel Valley, San Fernando Valley, downtown L.A., Hollywood and a little bit of the Inland Empire.”
And how does he do it? “Just like adult in the old days: You hit the streets and you knock on doors, and you have to go face-to-face, and then there’s the pop-up sessions, the secret sessions, big events, small events, and you do it all.”
Meanwhile, several adult performers have also created their own niche markets for marijuana-related products.
“About two years ago, I met my business partner Donna who’s based out of Santa Rosa, and she’s the owner of Natural Cannabis,” said actress Layla Price. “We met through a mutual friend and we talked and I liked the direction she’s going with her business, so I thought, okay, it’d be a great idea to partner up with her, and we discussed some ideas, like what I wanted. What I really like about her is, she’s open-minded and she asked me, ‘Okay, what is Layla Price’s go-to strain? Like what do you like?’ And we discussed that and we created some products like my best-selling strain Gorilla Glue, which people love, and here we are two years later and still going strong.”
So far, Price’s strain, as well as her blue raspberry lollipop edible and vape pen, are only available in the Bay Area locations, though she’s looking to expand.
“I’ve been smoking it for a very long time, and I love it, I enjoy it, I love it for recreational use but I also love it for medical use too. It helps me calm down, it relaxes me but also it’s enjoyable, it’s fun to smoke. I really love it, I think it’s great and I’m really happy Prop 64 passed because I think it’ll generate more sales because before, it was only for people who had a medical card but now it’s for like almost anybody. I mean, come on; it’s harmless and it’s for the greater good,” Price said.
The award-winning Jada Stevens is another popular actress who not only has her own devices to sell, she also works part-time at a local dispensary.
“Ever since I moved to California, I started getting into the cannabis community,” she stated. “There’s more uses for it, as far as, like, it’s used for chronic headaches, cancer patients, like younger kids that have medical problems, different things besides just getting high and being a stoner.”
Stevens sells a branded vaporizer manufactured by The Kind Pen, and recently, she added a bong that she co-created with the Silica Glass Company, plus she’s a spokesmodel for Raw Rolling Papers, all of which she promotes on her website, jada420.com—but most Sundays through Wednesdays, fans can find her working at a local co-op.
“Some days, I shoot a lot, so when it doesn’t affect my schedule, I work at the shop, so I’m very deeply involved with the cannabis community,” she said, adding, “It’s definitely good that Prop 64 passed so nobody can go to jail and be criminalized for it, but it will cause a lot of negative things also, like a higher price, and the quality will be less and the prices will be higher.”
Some performers truly use the substance for its medicinal value. Take adult performer and former marijuana farmer Bobbi Dylan. “I use it for multiple medical purposes, but the main one for me is, I have seizures and I used to have them almost 24 hours a day three days a week,” she reported. “Common medication never worked for me; I wasn’t a candidate for brain surgery and I had doctors from all over the country and the world come to see me and study my case. I was living in New Jersey at the time, and they have medical [marijuana use] now but it’s very corrupted, and my doctors told me, ‘We wish we could give it to you but we can’t,’ so I had to leave everything, leave my family and I was a medical marijuana refugee and I still am.”
(Bobbi’s good news? “Starting when I was about 16. I worked with a couple of senators in New Jersey to get medical marijuana passed because I was the example; here’s me having seizures; I smoke—now no seizures.”)
In recent years, a few actresses have even incorporated their love of pot into their stage names, such as Karla Kush, Sativa Rose and Sensi Pearl (slang for the seedless marijuana known as sinsemilla)... and then there’s Jenna Indica, er, Sativa.
“I really wanted a pot-related name, and I was originally going between ‘Sativa’ and ‘Indica,’ and I really liked Jenna, and I thought Jenna Sativa sounded better,” she explained. “And I also love smoking sativa because it gives you energy and I can smoke it in the morning and still have a productive day, So I felt like Jenna Sativa totally matched me and it was my name.”
While Sativa doesn’t yet have a strain or device of her own, “What I do do right now is, I work at weed events, so companies will hire me to represent their brand, and I also have a large following on Instagram, so I post a lot of vines and things from the weed community. People send me infused bath balms or products for me to try, and the things that I do like, I recommend them to my friends and I share them amongst my followers, because I know a lot of my followers are stoners; a lot of them don’t even watch porn, but whenever I do post weed-related stuff, it always has great engagement, so I love doing things in the weed community, plus I’m a stoner too, obviously.”
And how has that worked out? “Oh, yeah, my fans love it, totally. People love watching girls smoking and taking baths. Pretty much, I’m just being myself; it’s my life on Instagram.”
Though federal legalization is likely years off, considering the upcoming Republican administration in Washington, the pot business is growing rapidly—so of course, it will need publications to track industry trends and inform readers of new technical and legal realities. One such magazine, and the only one with national distribution, is mg, a marijuana-centric trade magazine which takes its name from the abbreviation for the metric weight measure, “milligram,” used by most pot businesses, and founded by former AVN CEO and co-owner Darren Roberts, who’s now the CEO of Cann Media Group, the magazine’s publisher.
“My thinking about this [marijuana] business started back in about 1996 with Prop 215 in California, and being at AVN and running a B2B business, it was fascinating to me how that was going to play out, not just in California but in the rest of the nation,” Roberts told AVN. “And it was a long waiting period, just keeping an eye on what was happening, and I guess in 2012, you had Washington and Colorado that legalized recreationally, and then a couple of years later, when Alaska and Oregon came on board, that caught my attention, because I saw there was a trend happening. Now, supply and demand to retail outlets is what I had done for so many years, even before AVN, educating retailers on products and how to more effectively run their businesses. So really when Alaska and Oregon [legalized] in 2014, that’s when I really started putting a little bit of resources on this, and mapping the market, taking a look at how many dispensaries or wellness centers were up and functioning, and we started compiling data.”
The first issue of mg is cover-dated August 2015, and its editor in chief was and continues to be Tom Hymes, another AVN alum. The magazine covers news of the industry, profiles dispensaries and their owners, gives advice on store ambiance (“5 things you can do today to give your dispensary an authentic rock & roll vibe”), covers advances in pot-growing technology, growing niche markets like edibles, and pretty much anything related to the cannabis industry.
“We compiled data for close to a year before we published, and it was not quite as easy as I anticipated it to be, just because these businesses that you needed to reach, there’s no list available,” Roberts explained. “You could buy lists for where licenses are issued, but the majority of the market did not hold licenses, and especially when you started getting into grows, to really reach the people, that target market, you had to really hit the road and build relationships. ... It’s déjà vu for me, because it goes back to the adult business and the retail stores and the fact that you’re dealing in a volatile market, which is what I’d dealt with at AVN for at least 16 years, where people are on edge as far as sharing information.
“These markets, they’re not traditional markets,” he continued. “In any other industry, if you have manufacturing, you can acquire lists and you can mine the data and it’s pretty easy. I have a history of dealing in industries that are less open and dealing with legislation and different federal regulations and/or state regulations and/or community standards and so and so forth, so I think that made getting into this business a little bit easier for us, because my experience at AVN definitely gave us a lot of credibility at the beginning. When a lot of these companies found out where I’d come from, I think they were a little more comfortable because they understood that I understood, and they understood that I also understood what they had to risk by sharing information with me, so it’s been a few years of really just building relationships and earning the trust, because without real data and without people accepting you and willing to share their stories, you really don’t have much of anything.”
But Roberts didn’t just have problems with credibility within the cannabis industry; he also had to form ties with the mainstream sectors that would be dealing with that industry.
“The thing is, coming from AVN, I’m used to being associated with adult, and always being on the defensive. I mean, it’s been that way for my whole career, whether it’s dealing with banks or dealing with anybody outside the industry. Maybe it’s not so much that anymore, but certainly during my era, there always had to be foresight and thought put into how do you answer the question of what it is that you do, or what have you done, and as any of us who’ve spent any part of our career in adult, we’ve all run into that. I kind of came into this industry with a preconceived notion that it would be kind of the same thing: Can you use your career highlights to your advantage or are they going to look at that as, ‘Oh, you know, here’s the porn guy getting into our business,’ and it really could have gone either way, but for this business, just because of what they’re dealing with on a regulatory level, it’s been very advantageous for us because people, they get it, and you understand them and you have stories to tell and share.
“By the way, this industry is going through what the adult industry went through in the late ’80s,” he noted. “You have customers and friends that you’ve now built these relationships with, and a lot of people don’t understand it but there’s still raids, both state and federal raids happening all the time. You’ll pick up the phone to call a customer or to check in with them and you’ll get the news, oh, you know, their facility was raided, so I seem to have gone from a business with one type of raid right into a business with another type of raid. But having lived through it, I guess it gives you a sense of humility and understanding for what they’re going through, as opposed to running a traditional business where if somebody needs more time on their bill or they want to put off a story, you come into it with a little bit different approach and again, a little bit of understanding, and that goes a long way.”
But in some situations, Roberts’ connection to porn is a major asset.
“I run into people at the shows, some of whom will come up to me, ‘Oh, yeah, we were going to Internext for all those years and we used to do this on the website and now we’re making these vape pens,’” Roberts said.
One thing Roberts is sure of, and is planning for, is the fact that at some point, just like liquor after prohibition and porn after the Miller decision, the mainstream culture will embrace marijuana use and be looking for information about its ins and outs—and he wants mg to be their first stop.
“We started right about the right time, but we certainly came on before there were really a lot of mature companies who had either ad agencies or resources to put together ads, so we were coming in to a market not unlike what AVN came into back in the ’80s, which is interesting because that’s where all the growth is,” Roberts assessed. “It’s the exciting time. I mean, you’re working with companies that don’t have any idea how to market themselves and being able to consult with them and help them, not only marketing through us but however they want to market. You build those relationships. Every single magazine features an executive or somebody from the industry, and we do feature stories and so it’s something I see shared, and I hear stories from different levels of Sacramento or in Washington, and you’ll hear, ‘Oh, yeah, they got a copy of mg magazine’ because it’s the business magazine. We’re even sold in Barnes & Noble.”
Perhaps Roberts’ biggest coup, at least so far, will be the interview he got with Fiona Ma, the chair of the State Board of Equalization, for mg’s December issue.
“This will be her first really aggressive public thing that she’s done, the association with cannabis,” Roberts noted. “It’s a big deal for us; we’re the first company to do a story on her, as well as to have here on our cover so we’re really happy that she’s chosen us over all the other outlets to make this debut.”
So a California state official has actually come out in support of the cannabis industry?
“Well, yeah, she’s in favor because she gets to collect all the cash,” Roberts deadpanned. “She’s in charge of collecting, but it’s nice to have somebody like that who’s actually trying to take a proactive approach to the industry and really get out there to work with them rather than just be there kind of against them, so it’s been nice to work with her and hear her vision on how she sees the business growing at least in the state of California.”
Besides the print magazine, mg has its own website as well: mgretailer.com. As for the future, Roberts plans to launch a suite of medicinal products, and even plans to get into the events business on a B2B level, as well as doing educational conferences—and somehow, we can’t help but compare that plan to what happened with the adult video industry, where movie distributors evolved into movie producers, and an upstart magazine like AVN now runs adult’s biggest annual conventions, the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo and Internext, along with giving out “the Oscars of porn” at its awards show.
Somehow the phrase “déjà vu all over again” doesn’t even begin to describe what America can expect from this new but already thriving agricultural enterprise.
