And to McNulty’s bosses, it was. They vetoed his deal. The kid had egg on his face. “I had my tail between my legs, but that was it. I was thirty years old. No one fucking cared what I thought.”
But Linton could see how the right audience got the picture. Even though MMCAP was out, McNulty was in, and he personally invested $50,000, half of all the money he had. One hundred million dollars was on the line. Weed could be big. So Linton kept raising money, phone call by phone call, closed door after closed door, until money — sometimes $1 million, sometimes $50,000 — started to trickle into his start-up. Just after Christmas, Linton spent $5 million and bought a closed-down Hershey factory in Smiths Falls, Ontario, to convert into the largest indoor cannabis grow op in the world. The address was 1 Hershey Drive.
“We bought that factory on December 28, 2013,” Linton says. “If we didn’t close another round of financing, we didn’t have enough cash to start work on January 1.”
Mark Zekulin was originally pitched to join Linton in parking and had his own business ideas — LED Christmas lights. Zekulin, then thirty-three, was a baby-faced trade lawyer who, in 2012, had grown bored with his work and was casting about for change. Something disruptive. Over a beer in Ottawa, Linton and Zekulin discussed the future. At first Zekulin wasn’t sold: “God, am I wasting my time?” However, the idea stayed in his mind after the meeting. Patients would buy from the companies directly. Pharmacies wouldn’t sell pot, so the companies would have to package and deliver each product, each gram. You could be vertically integrated selling marijuana. You took all the profit. Like Rifici, like McSalty, Zekulin got hung up on Linton’s marijuana idea. He sums up his recollection in two words: “Holy fuck.”
He told Linton, “Fuck parking meters — let’s talk about this weed thing.”
This weed thing grew as Linton perfected his investor roadshow and adapted a singular metric for evaluating the value of his business: yield capacity. There had never been a legal marijuana company beyond PPS. So how much could one of these be worth? Linton did the accounting. A gram cost $10 for a medical patient to purchase and could be produced for $3; Canadians annually spent $15 billion on prescribed drugs; and in 2015, 20 percent of Canadians said they’d smoked marijuana in the past year. So all Tweed had to do was corner a small percentage of both of those markets to be huge. Really, really huge. Yield capacity, accepted over time as the evaluating metric for a company’s worth, would drive cannabis businesses to race to own acreage. Yield capacity meant the more space you owned, the more weed you could grow and the more your company was worth. The licensed producers would grow in acreage before they learned how to grow weed. But that wouldn’t affect a company’s stock price. Not yet. And investment bankers and hedge funds, places that nobody ever heard of, would begin to see things Bruce Linton’s way. Pocketbooks began to open.
At Hydropothecary, Quebec’s cannabis juggernaut-in-waiting, Sébastien St-Louis wanted in. He was on the phone everyday with Health Canada to check on the status of his production licence as he watched Linton draw capital to his company. He was experiencing bureaucratic difficulties straight out of Kafka. Not one of the Blessed 13, he was stuck in a queue for obtaining a medical licence, and there was no way to know where in the queue he stood. “It was a nightmare building this thing,” says St-Louis, who I interviewed over the course of two crazy days in the fall of 2021. St-Louis, in starting his company, took out a $35,000 line of credit and raised money from every single one of his friends and family members. Following Health Canada’s regulations, he plunked down $1.1 million to convert a farm in Quebec into a cannabis grow op before he could apply for a licence. The perimeter had to have cameras recording every angle twenty-four hours a day. He needed indoor and outdoor motion detection alarms. Buying and retrofitting the vault behind a seven-thousand-pound door cost $100,000. Sébastien, a Bay Street virgin in an Under Armour T-shirt who had never tried marijuana, did all these things. And two and a half years passed before he even knew if he’d be approved to sell medical-grade weed. He read about Linton in the paper, and the then twenty-nine-year-old was undeterred. “I missed the dot-com boom. This, I was not going to miss.”
On May 26, 2015, Hydropothecary finally received their licence. They were number seventeen. “I saw the legal medical marijuana business as an industry, not as big as it would become. I thought a billion dollars,” he says. He mapped out what he saw for the future of his company. “I wanted to build a cash flow business, not take it public, just build this nice $10 or $20 million business and build it small, run it privately, and generate a ton of cash. I knew marijuana was a cash business and knew marijuana would evolve.”
For Linton, evolution wouldn’t wait. Just like with those plant materials, whatever they were, from Kelowna, Linton found in cannabis a dog he could run. Unorthodox methods were rewarded in an industry making its rules in real time. Lightning in a bottle, the scale of these first medical weed companies began to grow, fast. It had already been established through the millennia that people liked to smoke weed. And now they could. Legally. For their health.
At Mettrum, Fencott and Haines had five thousand patients by the end of 2015. They had a 60,000-square-foot production facility forecasted to annually produce 3,500 kilograms of weed. Based on their operating metrics and their funded-capacity math — the accepted formula of the time, which equated greenhouse capacity with a potential crop yield and could forecast a revenue figure — the cannabis represented $60 million in sales, plus more with the potential for extracts. Press was coming around on these companies, and that attracted patients and further investments alike. It was momentum for a nascent industry, and Linton introduced a threshold to his PR team: a cannabis story would be incomplete if it didn’t include Tweed.
Meanwhile, as the business story took hold and the original hippie cannabis activists grew more irate — the hatred for PPS now finding a focus in Bruce Linton — there was a parallel reduction in stigma. Whether or not a broken-down chocolate factory in Smiths Falls was a good place to grow marijuana didn’t matter. The Hershey factory made pot, and Linton, seem cute. Not criminal. Certainly not dangerous. Approachable. “Hi,” read a button Linton wore pinned to his blazer over his Tweed shirt — from Terry Parker to a Hershey’s Kiss. The attention taught Linton a lesson in publicity and the public markets. A bad deal can be reframed, or even turned into a good deal, because even if you lost money or your idea didn’t work, the attention could boost your stock. Making a name for yourself was valuable when introducing a stigmatized market to the skeptical world.
There was very little to differentiate one medical marijuana company from another. By government design, the industry was not built to create successful businesses. It was designed to take crime out of cannabis and get safe products away from minors and onto legal shelves. Bedrocan, Mettrum, and all the other marijuana companies weren’t allowed to advertise their existence, and the Canadian Medical Association still wouldn’t endorse pot as a medicine. Despite Linton’s efforts, it was entirely possible to live in Canada and not even know we had legal medical cannabis. The other executives worked hard at being inoffensive and mature. Not Bruce. He wanted to be memorable. There hadn’t been buzz in the sector until now. Linton was making pot look fun. Get rich quick. And the publicity from the purchase of the Hershey factory and the ensuing narrative — marijuana company comes into Smiths Falls, Ontario, where the old chocolate factory’s been closed since 2008 and brings jobs back to a devastated sector on the promise of legal weed — introduced investors, and Canadians, to the new world of marijuana. It was the parking meter dream, only it worked: a marijuana chocolate factory with Linton as Willy Wonka. He was born for the part. He loved it. It boosted his bottom line.
Linton had big ideas. Easy to underestimate, he looked like Gary Busey and spoke quickly. He had gaps in his front teeth and was relentless, passionately endorsing a product he didn’t use. Alfred E. Neuman on speed — disarming, charming, and unscripted, a reporter’s dream. Bruce was raised on a farm and he had a tiny office at the Hershey factory. He let Zekulin have the big office because Bruce didn’t like being cornered. If he got bored in a meeting, he could walk out and not have people in his space. Linton made work for other people as he knocked on the doors of every investor. He spoke to any reporter who requested him. He was a frequent guest on Yahoo Finance and Bloomberg and always, always wore his company shirt. He spoke to Canadians refamiliarizing themselves with marijuana. He spoke to people who invested on Robinhood, the buzzy amateur-investor trading app, people in line at his local Sobeys, and to CEOs of other companies.
The Mettrum team once met with U.S. rapper Wiz Khalifa. They rebranded the back half of the Budweiser Stage as the Mettrum Grass. The Tweed people were in the audience that night — Wiz was performing with Snoop — and Michael Haines from Mettrum took a selfie of Linton’s team surrounded by Mettrum swag and sent it to Linton, who was livid. Any opportunity in marijuana had to be his.
Bruce also filled the information gap about weed. Every time he was interviewed, he helped reduce the stigma around marijuana and inform citizens and politicians that cannabis was a legitimate medicine. There wasn’t empirical data that said a certain number of drags from a joint alleviated knee pain or a strain in a vape helped reduce anxiety and usher in sleep. Neither the Le Dain or Shafer Commission led to meaningful research, and Dr. Mark Ware still couldn’t pinpoint, exactly, what pot did to help quiet the epilepsy in Terry Parker. Meanwhile, Mettrum or Tweed or Bedrocan couldn’t legally make claims that their Space Cake or Pink Kush helped reduce nausea, promote creativity, relieve pain, or stimulate appetite. All they had were anecdotes that cannabis did all those things.
But it wasn’t the same as Xanax or Percocet, or even a name-brand opioid like Oxycontin. For Oxy, a patient got a prescription and a drug identification number, Health Canada’s system for tracking a medicine’s ingredients and dose. Pot, even when it was legal as a medicine, wasn’t dispensed like that. You couldn’t get it at a pharmacy. (Today you can.) How to convince people that the drug of choice of Bob Marley was something you could use for nausea or anxiety while also hosting concerts for Wiz Khalifa and Snoop?
It wasn’t easy. Pot remained a pseudo-medicine. You didn’t buy Tylenol directly from Johnson & Johnson, but you did buy your marijuana directly from Tweed. The public had to be trained on the new world of cannabis. Bruce Linton — who didn’t use the product — was obsessed with showing the way first to Canadians and then to the rest of the world.
“Publicity would be one hundred percent of our marketing,” Linton tells me. While Fencott and Haines focused on clarifying how to sell their pot as medicine, and Tom Flow at MedReleaf studied grow cycles and lights, Linton grabbed the spotlight. He was a businessman, but also an entertainer. His idols include Mark Cuban and Elon Musk. Getting attention led to getting money — even though the disconnect between appearances and reality, then as now, was stark. Every business wants their outward face to seem successful. But when Bruce Linton purchased the Hershey factory, animals freely roamed the grounds. The retrofit would be costly — and would take as long as the money would hold. Mark Zekulin remembers his introduction to Smiths Falls. Unlike the welcome the Mettrum team got in Port Severn, when Zekulin and Rifici met the mayor of Smiths Falls, they found an interested, even enthusiastic, audience. The mayor asked the Tweed executives if they wanted coffee. They said sure. So the mayor ran across the street to Tim Hortons.
Tweed had $7 million in the bank in February 2014, after closing its latest round of investments — Linton still making cold calls and enlisting McSalty to work clients on his end. But construction on the licensed production facility was over budget and Tweed was burning from $2 million to $3 million per month. It also had no revenue because it had no product. From the beginning of medical legalization, there were huge supply constraints.
“As soon as you got your licence, patients started calling, but you had to say, ‘We have no cannabis for you, sir,’” remembers Trevor Fencott of Mettrum. The entire industry was in a race against time.
The lack of supply and the abundance of demand lit a fire under Bruce. “We were six months behind on production of a nine-month schedule and spending money like crazy, but the building wasn’t going fast enough,” Linton says. “We were supposed to have everything rolled out in April 2014, in time for the IPO, and know what we had? Nothing.”
Rifici was still CEO and there were construction delays, and also whispers of impropriety. It was reported that Rifici had borrowed money from a contractor he hired in Smiths Falls. Linton says that his nascent pot company faced bankruptcy on Valentine’s Day 2014. “I’m about to make a quarterly announcement and I knew the first question I’d get asked: What are you going to do about going bankrupt?” Linton leaned on his network and found a fund in New York willing to invest $15 million if he could produce another $5 million. It ended up being a “bought deal” for $22 million, a Canadian special, which diluted Bruce’s company — and set the industry standard.
A bought deal means the investment bank commits to buying the entire offering from a company on the understanding that it will purchase all the shares made available on such an offering at a discount. This usually happens around an IPO, but not always. And the broker usually has the deal sold before launching the IPO, to hedge their bets. After a bought deal is finished, the investment bank now owns the company’s shares, which it becomes their job to sell. The company becomes liquid, which is great for the brand and the bank; the bank earns commission every time someone buys or sells shares. This creates a financial story, and also creates hype, and moves a company away from fundamentals. Demand is being manufactured. The public, meanwhile — the retail investors, the marks — only gets their price after the funders have been paid. It was this first bought deal that gave Tweed the runway they needed for the $89 million valuation they received that April. McSalty’s $100 million appraisal had been pretty close.
Tweed became the first legalization-era cannabis stock listed on the public market.
On April 4, 2014, Tweed shares opened at $4.60. Amanda Daley was brought in from Pfizer to head up medical sales for Tweed in August 2014; she remembers touring the facility in Smiths Falls in June. Linton told Daley he wanted to see the stock trade at $10. It seemed to her like a stretch. “They only had a small quantity of cannabis and were sold out and when I toured the mother room, I remember thinking, ‘That’s not a ton of plants,’ and then they showed me the forty-two-hundred-square-foot vault — it was this big, cavernous room with shelf after shelf of nothing.”
Linton fired Rifici after the company went public. His plan was to outspend and outrace MedReleaf and Bedrocan. “When you’re building assets, you can spend twice as much money as anybody else if you have a long-term plan,” says Linton. “I thought long-term. So if I spend now, over the next three years my costs will be a third of the price to operate and my short-term pain of giving the stock away cheaper will be mitigated by higher margins and a competitive advantage. You’re going to win, win, win if it costs your competitors three times as much to produce as you — aren’t you glad they bought that shitty, cheap system?”
Now public, Linton was influencing the entire industry. Investment banks, Anson Funds, MMCAP, and Canaccord (not the big banks like Scotiabank, BMO, and RBC) saw a financial lever they could pull for an industry built on hype with inexperienced retail investors. Bought deals, assuming the investment banks could unload the weed stocks on the public, fuelled the industry’s growth.
“Tweed was much more aggressive than us, with everything,” says Mettrum’s Michael Haines. “Even in Kelowna, we were importing hundreds of kilos, which I thought was a lot, but they had five times that weight. But that was Bruce, and I don’t mean that as a compliment, not entirely. We had a shortage of product and problems with the product, as an industry, but he had stars in his eyes and brought capital into our market.”
Trevor Fencott says that, even back in 2014, Linton knew there was no way his company could ever make profits on the millions of dollars he raised and spent. “But the bankers didn’t care,” says Fencott. “They kept flushing money into Linton’s coffers, and he kept spending, getting bigger. At one point, they had enough funded capacity to give weed to every medical patient in Canada — absurd, because they were just one of thirteen Canadian weed companies, and if their product wasn’t the same as everyone else’s, it was much worse.”
Still Linton looked for ways to expand his operation. In the late fall of 2014, Bruce toured the Canadian Cannabis Corporation (CCC), which hadn’t yet received its licence, but was beginning to build its facility and was well capitalized — apparently. At the time, CCC had a larger market cap than Tweed. The CCC team came to Smiths Falls to see Linton’s operation, and then he went north of Toronto to see theirs.
“They had no plants, no lights. They had nothing. On paper, they could claim their worth was over $100 million, but its actual worth was no more than zero,” Linton says.
Bruce began sussing out the marijuana environment with a new ethos: he would acquire companies, but he wouldn’t partner with them. The CCC team made him uneasy. Cannabis still attracted bad seeds. In a market as regulated as legal weed, it was imperative to bend, but not break, the rules. Things slipped through the cracks, but the whole system was predicated on companies following the minutiae of the new MMPR laws. Bruce knew this. And unsavoury characters were drawn into the business, whether it be drug dealers or investors looking to pump and dump stocks. But above all else, a marijuana company had to protect its licence. Lose that, and you could no longer sell weed. This is why Linton wanted to handle the RCMP after the bust with Mettrum in Kelowna. The licence to sell marijuana was the entry stake to experiment, bend rules — make money.
It could be lost in a million big and little decisions every day.
After the IPO, Linton instituted a company policy: his employees couldn’t invest in other companies in the sector, but every Tweed employee would receive equity. In two years, formerly out-of-work manufacturers in Smiths Falls would grow rich. But they had to grow weed first, and it would’ve been easier, they were discovering, just to sell the designated growers’ shit from BC. The licensed producers, as a block, discovered that pot remained expensive and tricky to grow.
Linton spent his way toward a solution. Every six months, he says, Tweed bought acceleration. “If you’re not super strong, you have to make moves to show strength,” he says. “You need to continue momentum, and if you feel it slipping, you catalyze energy because the narrative always needs advancing.” It’s the narrative that needs advancing. A nascent industry is like a shark; it needs to keep swimming, or it will die. The worst thing Tweed could’ve done was to quietly keep building. Bruce didn’t want to be everyone else. So Linton needed to buy something to stay in front of investors and send out a press release saying that bought deals were now being offered to him.
Bruce began eying Marc Wayne’s Bedrocan. Bedrocan was a European medical cannabis company, and Marc Wayne directed its operation in Canada. Bruce’s interest was opportune because the young CEO was beginning to feel the shackles of his corporate parent on his wrists. Canada was moving quicker than the Netherlands, and having an out-of-touch boss in Europe was frustrating to an executive who’d spent so much time getting to this moment, from his first joints with his mom.
After considering a deal with Mettrum, Wayne met with Linton, and the two former competitors sat with Wayne’s stepfather, Murray Goldman, the real estate tycoon. They hatched a plan: join forces with Bruce and together attract all the capital. Wayne says, “I didn’t want to be the Canadian arm of Bedrocan. They were handcuffing me on so many things.”
Wayne wanted to hold more clinical trials and hone in on the medical properties of marijuana that had been restricted for so many years. This had been his interest since joining the Canadian Consortium for the Investigation of Cannabinoids with Mark Ware in 2008. Now, as founder of his own medical cannabis company, he wanted more. “The CEO in the Netherlands was closing this door and that door. I didn’t want to be a bit player in this industry I’d already been working in for so long,” says Wayne. Bedrocan was one of the most respected cannabis companies in the world, but Wayne knew, even back then, there were too many companies in Canada doing the same thing. Better to partner with Bruce Linton. The winning Canadian cannabis company would be whichever one had the most scale.
Linton scaled first. He saw the industry as a game of Pac-Man, and he could become more powerful eating up other companies, like ghosts. He says the decision to acquire Bedrocan — which he did by selling 33.9 million common shares, worth a paper $61 million — was instinctive, fast. “I gave up forty-five percent of the company and people said, ‘Holy shit! You gave away half of your company to buy a company that’s one-twelfth the size of you. Why the fuck did you do that?’ Well, a lot of people said that was a bad move, but we needed it for the brand position.”
The brand position Tweed achieved from Bedrocan was valuable because its Dutch pedigree helped book clients otherwise unable to differentiate among weed strains. “There wasn’t anything particular about the process or product — it was the same stuff — but Dutch cannabis had that allure,” Linton says. Allure being the most valuable commodity of the day.