3. Recreational Opium
4. Stephen Harper Don’t Smoke Hash
5. The Founders
Part II: Reward
6. Bruce Being Bruce
7. Justin Time
8. Rolling
9. Growing Pains
10.17
Part III: Revenge
11. God Bud
12. Dark Clouds
13. All of the Lights
14. 50 Shades of Grey
15. Licensed to Kill
16. Edible
Part IV: Redemption
17. Got ’Em
18. 2.0
Chapter Covid-19
20. Merge or Die
21. Last Dance with Mary Jane
Epilogue: The Last Drag
Index
About the Author
Prologue The First Hit
“Look at what we did, man.”
The phrase hangs over our small table at an off-the-Strip Las Vegas steakhouse like a puff of smoke from a Canadian pre-roll. I’m sitting with Canada’s two original weed kings — Terry Booth, founder of Aurora Cannabis, and Bruce Linton, founder of Canopy Growth. They are dining together for the first time. Booth is straightening out with a double Ketel One vodka after taking an edible someone had passed him at the cannabis convention earlier that morning.
Booth is the man who put down $3 million to start Aurora in 2013 in his hometown of Edmonton, Alberta. He knew about weed because he used to pinch some from his father in between beatings, smoke it, and sell it to his high school friends. Before launching Aurora, which he’d grow to be worth more than $15 billion and now has a $230-million market cap, he spent three months in the cannabis underground, hitting black market dispensaries, examining grows, meeting patients, watching his back, and getting high.
It’s October 2021, three years after Canadian pot legalization, and Booth is fifty-seven years old. He is stumping for his new U.S. marijuana company. He is bearded, beaming, and coming down. He’s wearing a hat and T-shirt bearing the name Audacious, a cannabis company he spun out from Aurora that aims to grow and distribute marijuana in the U.S. He speaks with a mumbled Western accent. Machine Gun Kelly, the pop star, will fly in with his girlfriend, Megan Fox, to meet Booth, smoke weed with him, and perform for Audacious the next night at the Cosmopolitan Hotel.
Terry is magnanimous, spontaneous, funny, aggressive, loyal, cutthroat, and self-destructive. Rumours have circulated that his board at Aurora pulled him back from public appearances after he appeared drunk onstage one time too many. Between the booze, blow, ’shrooms, and edibles, Terry says he was having too much fun to give two shits. “Convincing twenty-five countries to allow cannabis as an alternative medicine was more important to me than what some dipshit at a conference thinks,” he says. There were drug rumours, especially about cocaine, but they may have been fanned by businessmen in Toronto making fun of the cowboy from Alberta who looked at Bay Street with spite.
Or they may have been true.
Terry Booth doesn’t care. What Booth said onstage at a cannabis conference when his defences were down was that “Ontario and British Columbia shit the bed on the legal marijuana rollout.” What he meant was that, as the companies began actually selling legal weed and none of the lofty financial projections proved true, the fault lay with the regulators — not with companies like his own.
He has always been a brash player in the world of legal pot. Back in 2016, rival cannabis executives sent out a joint press release about ending the taxation on marijuana medicine, but they included signatories from illegal cannabis dispensaries, who had paved the way for the legal system. Booth responded by emailing his colleagues at 2:30 a.m., in defence of the early activists: “Pull your heads out of your asses,” he wrote. “We’ve been handed the torch from the pioneers!”
Now Terry Booth is back in weed after getting sacked from Aurora. Back in Vegas, pressing the flesh. Back, in between shutdowns from Covid and proxy battles with dissident Audacious shareholders, making deals, giving interviews, drinking Ketel One, buying companies, wearing company swag, and taking edibles from strangers. Tonight he wants Bruce Linton, who has ordered for the table, to invest in his new American weed brand.
Bruce Linton is listening.
At this stage of his career — fifty-four years old, his hair grown long, his beard hanging an inch beneath his chin — Bruce is restless. For no real reason, he had the American founder of the cannabis company Tilray fly up on his private plane to meet him and walk the aisles of tomorrow’s Las Vegas weed expo. They weren’t friends. But Bruce thought it would be fun. And Brendan Kennedy, Tilray’s founder, worth more than $2 billion in 2018 and now estimated by Forbes to be worth closer to $230 million, listened to Bruce.
Bruce Linton is a conduit of action. Another cannabis executive, Sébastien St-Louis, the founder of Hexo, says that when Linton brought the alcohol behemoth Constellation Brands into cannabis, it was “a magic trick.” Linton started Canopy Growth in 2012. Like Booth, like Kennedy, like St-Louis, he was white and rich. He had never smoked pot then, but didn’t care. He wasn’t a stoner. He was an opportunist, a genie, a promoter — a visionary who sensed in weed a product he could sell.
Canopy’s market capitalization — the value of all its shares — grew to $22 billion. This was hoisted up by hedge funds and investment banks. “King Kong on cocaine” is how Linton’s right-hand man, financier Sean McNulty, describes him during this period. Tireless, spontaneous, hungry, bellicose, having the time of his life — and, heeding a call of his own, from nowhere, building a company selling marijuana once worth more than U.S. Steel.