Legal Cannabis. Blockchain Technology. The future is here, and it's weird and fun.

So, Steemit, huh?

As I approach 30, I often find myself engaged in deep thought about where I exist on the TIMELINE of humankind. It's 2018 now, and it seems like just yesterday I was playing my parents Atari and thinking it couldn't get much better. Now I play video games on a Nintendo Switch or PS4 and use the same devices to stream (??!!) pretty much any visual content I could ask for. I'm digressing, but the point is that as technology develops faster and faster (Moore's Law), it makes it a weird time to be alive. When you throw in capitalism, materialism, politics, and everything else involved with simply being a human, it gets really strange.

I was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and despite my whole family, including myself, working our entire lives to make ends meet, I am privileged enough to have become a first generation college graduate and get the fuck out of middle America.

I'm gay. I consume copious amounts of cannabis. I like to be outdoors when the air is clean. For all of these reasons and many more, Indiana is not ideal for me. My family and many friends still live in the area, and it sucks to be far away from them. But I love my progressive blue bubble.

Donald Trump and his administration are a shit show, no doubt. It's unfortunate that Jeff Sessions has rescinded Obama-era guidelines to prevent federal interference with cannabis operations in states where it has been made legal. I work as an Operations Manager at a licensed cannabis extraction facility in Aurora, CO. We make hash everyday (the best hash, I might add-- https://www.ascendcannabis.co) and make a pretty nice living doing it. Yes, we have to have inspections every quarter from multiple government bodies. Yes, we have to spend extremely large amounts of money on regulatory compliance. Yes, sometimes it's really frustrating to be under the microscope. All in all, however, I feel very lucky to be working on the front lines of the fight for further legalization.

You see, before I came to Colorado and joined this industry, I spent three years living and working in some of the lowest income neighborhoods in some of our nation's largest metropolitan areas, serving as an Americorps member in public education. I tutored and mentored children from Pre-K ages through Middle School. It was without a doubt the most difficult and most rewarding time of my life to date.

What really struck me the most about my time in this program was how different the "American Dream" looked to my students compared to what my white parents always told me. My dad always said, "Everyone in America has equal opportunity---that's what makes it a great nation." What I saw was a totally different story. I worked with students on the south side of Chicago who had never even been to "The Loop" (Downtown), despite their looking at the skyscrapers everyday and living right next to a train station.

What I'm coming around to is that the world is a very broken place, and what I've witnessed firsthand in America, at least, is no different. Many of my students families had been destroyed by crime and violence. Guess what spawns a good majority of that violence? "The War on Drugs."

If you don't think by now that the US War on Drugs is a disastrous failure of monumental historical proportions, you haven't been paying attention and/or are probably white and middle class. How many children did I have to console because they no longer had a parent, a brother, a sister, an uncle, etc to turn to? How many of THOSE people were in prison for minor drug crimes? I'll let you guess...

That's what drives my current work. I believe that by working hard each and everyday to ensure my company is run compliantly, I am playing a role in changing the image of cannabis and advancing the legalization agenda. For me, it's not about being able to get high--although I firmly believe that all adults should have access to safe, legal consumption of cannabis--especially considering how much drama is caused by alcohol, which is perfectly legal. No, it's about changing outcomes for the nation's poor and under-served communities. When everyone, everywhere, has access to legal, safe, regulated cannabis products, exponentially more resources will become available to improve community outcomes through programming and rehabilitation, not through imprisonment. If I do my job right and encourage others in my industry to do the same, maybe we will get there one day.

I think I veered off my title topic, but back to the blockchain. Now that you know a little more about who I am and why I do what I do for work, I want to touch briefly on the blockchain and what it means to me.

I love crytpocurrency and the entire idea of decentralization. Centralization is the cause for so many negative attributes to our consumerist society and so much inequality. Decentralizing money, goods and services will change the world--I fully believe this. Yes, we will face major pushback from the corporate elite. Yes, there are energy and maintenance concerns. Yes, it's confusing all around for most people. But we're making huge strides in the crypto community toward accessibility for the public at large.

I'm excited in particular about Ethereum and the dApps (decentralized apps) that are being developed. Steemit is a perfect example of what we can do when we use the blockchain technology to emulate existing programs which are less secure, vulnerable to censorship and corporate-owned. I believe cannabis legalization and the blockchain will merge very soon. There are already some e-Tokens that exist around cannabis and Microsoft has put forth some information in Canada regarding seed-to-sale tracking via blockchain technology. I think this is an excellent idea.

So, to sum up, it's weird that I get to sell cannabis everyday and make a living doing so, while people rot in prison elsewhere in my country. It's weird that money is changing. It's weird that the internet is losing its neutrality. It's weird that the blockchain even exists. But it's awesome, and I think it's only going to get weirder--and better.

ETH: 0xfc1f5Ee64b8c47A305A0c4C96d6bf335f41AB8C7
BTC: 1LXHnwPPHE4ZyRZdqetxDLL6iCFKkbPCqx
BCH: 18u3jry93TXyyqufXGAdqge26eUzaRR5cY