Speaker 1: Troy Dayton and Ryan Hurley joins us and discusses the renewed focus on the medical market in Arizona in the wake of adult use not passing this past election day. Ryan shares that he came into the industry as a patient, which turned it into an activist as it's wanting to do, speaking of activists, Troy Dayton, than joins us beginning the conversation in Arizona. His bottom line is that if we were outspent, we would have won. He then points though to the eight wins featuring cannabis businesses stepping up to get behind each of those winning initiatives. Troy goes onto discuss focusing on harmony as opposed to discord in dialogue. Welcome to cannabis economy. I'm your host Seth Adler. Check us out on social with the handle can economy. That's two ends of the word economy. Ryan Hurley, followed by troy. Date, enjoy.
Speaker 2: Because you've been around. I have, yeah. What a veteran. Now six years, six years put you at 2010. Yeah, right when Arizona is medical marijuana law passed. Okay. Yeah. So what happened here? What happened with Arizona? Yeah. Well our opposition spent a whole lot of money to lie to the public and you know, when they do that and you lie often enough with the big enough bank account, people start to believe. Sure. And so, you know, yes. Okay. Uh, there wasn't truth, but the bank account thing, so we got to get people more involved in, in Arizona, right. If we're going to beat them. Yeah. I mean, I think the crazy thing is, is we had an amazing showing from the industry. I mean we raised over $5,000,000 to put this on the, on the ballot and to get it past, nobody anticipated that kind of level of opposition in Arizona.
Speaker 2: I think they raised $7 to fight us and obviously they didn't have to spend 800,000 to get it on the ballot in the first place. So yeah. Okay. So, but it sounds like we're going to need about 8 million or 9 million next time. Yeah, potentially, uh, you know, we'll see and it'll probably be four years, so we'll see what kind of opposition is still around at that point in time. Maybe Sheldon Adelson dies by that point, you know, hopefully, who knows, you never know, who knows? But yeah, I mean I think another four years of seeing a all these success stories out there and it will get it done in 20, 20, so 2010 though, you know, you guys really do have a very good a medical program we do in Arizona. So talk about the early days in 2010 when it came to be. Yeah. So it was, it was chaos, uh, when, when the law passed, it was a, you know, everybody thought it was gonna pass and then it took about two weeks of counting the votes and it only ended up passing by 4,000 votes.
Speaker 2: So it was a, the slimmest of margins. Uh, and then, uh, the, the Department of health services rolled out the, the rules and start getting patients cards pretty quickly. But then the governor filed the lawsuit and tried to hold up the dispensary part of the program and so we had to deal with that. We went to federal court with her and obviously a brewer and that, uh, that got thrown out and uh, we had a little, a press conference to try to get some applications in and then they held that up again. So it was a 2012 before they actually issued dispensary licenses. Ah, about two year delay. Okay. Yeah. And so a dispensary licenses when, when did the first a one start to pop up that, uh, yeah, so they got issued in August of 12. And then right after that, our county attorney, who was our main prohibitionist and chief, so to speak and filed his own little lawsuit and kind of put a hold on everything.
Speaker 2: So there's about six or eight month period after licenses got issue where everybody was afraid to open pending the results of this lawsuit. And um, one of my clients just decided they were going to go ahead and do it and uh, you know, dared him to come and get them basically. And they opened up and literally the day after the court case came down saying that we were okay to do it. So I mean, they, I don't know if they just had a premonition or if they'd had enough and they'd spent enough money and so they had the first opening and we had 2013. Uh, so it was December of 12. It was, they made it in, in, in 2012. And then they started to pop up along the way in 2013. Yeah. And then, uh, over the next couple of years we opened up about 95 dispensary licenses in the state and they're all vertically integrated in Arizona.
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