Pot, Inc. by Greg Campbell

Author:Greg Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Sterling
Published: 2012-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

ON THE SURFACE, the expo seemed to have gone off splendidly, but behind the scenes, mutiny was brewing. One of the reasons Perlowin looked so haggard, I found out later, was because he was in a pitched battle over finances and strategy with his second-in-command, a burly man named Cliff Perry. While the attendees enjoyed riveting “call to arms” presentations by Cowan and heard war stories from Robert “Bobby Tuna” Platshorn, who’d recently been released from serving a twenty-eight-year prison sentence for marijuana smuggling (which is currently a record), Perry and Perlowin were all but coming to blows. There were differences in style, for one thing. Perry calls himself a pragmatist who took on all the myriad details of organizing the expo because Perlowin was too flighty to be depended on. That included paying out of pocket for so many things that he’d drained his checking account. Perlowin considered Perry to be a tight-fisted dictator trying to hijack the company. Worse, Perry later accused Perlowin of misleading interested investors by touting the expo as a raging financial success when in truth it was anything but—throughout the weekend, as Perlowin pitched his seminar franchise idea, he gestured around the room of about 150 attendees as proof of how much money there was to be made duplicating the event around the country. What the King of Pot never mentioned was that only about fifty people had actually paid the full $420 for the seminar series. The rest came for free, most likely because the expo was organized at the last minute. At least one person put down $100,000 for a license to put on a “King of Pot” seminar in Las Vegas, based partly on his belief that everyone in attendance in L.A. paid to be there.

The truth was, Perlowin’s company was so broke that its credit card, used to pay for Cowan’s and Platshorn’s hotel rooms, was rejected when they tried to check out at the end of the weekend. Perry rushed to the rescue, but he’d paid for so much else by that point that he couldn’t cover the bill—he had to talk MMI’s lawyer into paying for the rooms.

For Cowan and Platshorn, it was just more proof that Perlowin couldn’t be trusted. Both men left L.A. angry after learning that Perlowin tried to sweeten the deal for investors by telling anyone considering writing a fat check to a gang of former drug dealers that Cowan and Platshorn were both poised to join Medical Marijuana Inc. in some capacity, a detail Perlowin mentioned to me as well. In fact, Cowan heard from others that the King of Pot was supposedly working on a deal to buy Cowan’s current venture, a marijuana research and development firm in Colorado Springs called Cannabis Science Inc.

“Frankly, I was a little bit disturbed at the conference when two different people came up and told me that they’d been told that MMI was going to acquire Cannabis Science,” Cowan told me later. “There have been no—zero—conversations about that.

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