Introducing Minute17
Where thoughts Light Up.
Where thoughts light up.
Between minute fifteen and twenty1
Between minute fifteen and twenty, something happens for the cannabis smoker.
The cannabinoids and terpenes have completed their circuit through the body, fully engaging the
endocannabinoid system — a network of receptors that balance mood, focus, and calm.
The body enters what researchers describe as a cannabinoid plateau2 —
a physiological alignment where tension drops, perception sharpens, and breathing syncs with thought.
The human plane ascends beyond the anxiety cloud bank, and the mind arrives at the present moment.
This is what I call Minute17. Even as cannabis becomes legal in more states than not, we rarely talk about the moment of balance.
The focus is always on consumption — never on what happens next.
But the cannabinoid plateau is where the real story begins. That’s where the body steadies and attention settles.
It’s the physiological proof that calm and clarity are not opposites. And yet, it’s still taboo to talk about using cannabis as a performance-enhancing tool —
especially during the day. People use it like Adderall, but we’re not allowed to say that.
They use it to manage energy, to focus, to restock the patience reservoir that modern life constantly drains.
We call vapes discreet, but what we really mean is permitted only in silence.
We’ve accepted the object — but not the intent.
The conversation stops at the word "high" - that word still triggers shame in a large percnetage of cannabis consumers.
Used with intention, cannabis doesn’t cloud; it calibrates.
It restores rhythm, narrows the signal, and helps the mind move through the day with more presence and less panic. We’ve legalized the plant — now we need to legalize the experience. Minute17 is inspired from that physiological moment —
when the body’s chemistry finds rhythm and the mind finds visibility.
It’s not about intoxication; it’s about equilibrium.
A reminder that insight is measurable, and balance is an art. Minute17 lives at the intersection of data, design, and dialogue —
part atlas, part journal, part dinner table.
Every project here, from maps to essays, begins from the cannabinoid plateau —
the space where science meets self-awareness and stigma dissolves into curiosity. Minute¹⁷ expresses itself through four distinct but connected channels: Each vector lives under one sky — each a different way of showing what happens when thought lights up. Minute17 isn’t a celebration of consumption.
It’s an invitation to understand what happens when the body and mind align —
when the science of calm meets the art of thought. So take a breath. 1 Huestis, M. A. (2007). Human Cannabinoid Pharmacokinetics.
Journal of Analytical Toxicology, 31(1), 491–501. 2 Ohlsson, A., Lindgren, J.-E., Wahlen, A., Agurell, S., Hollister, L. E., & Gillespie, H. K. (1980).
Plasma delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol concentrations and clinical effects after oral and intravenous administration and smoking.
Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics, 28(3), 409–416.
Why It Matters
What Minute17 Is
The Vectors
Conversations from a Golden Gate vantage point — the East Berlin of Cannabis.
Over food and wood smoke (wink-wink-nudge-nudge), people gather to talk about what it really means to build an industry that began as resistance and is still finding its language of belonging.
The Invitation
Find your altitude.
Stay a while — on the cannabinoid plateau, where thoughts light up.
📚 References
— THC concentrations in plasma peak within 10 minutes of inhalation; subjective and physiological effects stabilize between 15–30 minutes post-intake, representing a plateau before gradual decline.
— Demonstrated the characteristic rise and stabilization (“plateau”) of THC levels following smoking, correlating with steady subjective effects.
Understanding the Cannabis Consumer, Part 1 — The Emotional Legacy
It all begins with an idea.
Vector: Retail Best Practices
Between the shelves and the smell of fresh flower lies an invisible truth: cannabis consumers are not like other customers. They carry an emotional history that began long before they walked through your door.
For nearly a century, the cannabis story was written by others—by lawmakers, editors, and industrialists whose motives had little to do with public health. William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, for instance, helped install the architecture of fear that would define “marijuana” in the public imagination.1
That fear became policy. Policy became propaganda. And propaganda became shame.
The Inheritance of Shame
If you were raised in the era of D.A.R.E. posters and “Just Say No” assemblies, you absorbed an emotional message that drugs—all drugs—were dangerous, dirty, or morally weak. Even when you learned later that cannabis was medicine, or that it had been criminalized for reasons that had nothing to do with science, that emotional imprint didn’t disappear.
Shame doesn’t yield to reason.
Intellectual knowledge is not a sponge that erases it.
What happens instead is that shame hides in the body. It becomes a somatic reflex—tight shoulders, lowered tone, the glance over one’s shoulder in the dispensary line. Cannabis consumers, even those who shop weekly, often arrive with a subtle internal tension: Am I allowed to enjoy this?
The Counter as a Place of Permission
This is where the beauty—and the privilege—of cannabis hospitality begins. When a budtender greets a customer with calm confidence and genuine warmth, something ancient in that customer relaxes.
The transaction becomes a small act of social repair.
Behind every product question—“What helps with sleep?” or “Will this make me anxious?”—is an unspoken emotional question: Can I trust this space? Can I trust myself?
A great budtender answers both.
You don’t need to psychoanalyze anyone. You simply need to hold a steady, compassionate frame. When you do, the customer feels it. Their nervous system recalibrates. That moment of ease becomes loyalty that no punch card or discount can replicate.
Why This Matters for Retail
Understanding the emotional legacy of cannabis prohibition isn’t sentimental—it’s strategic.
Because when you design retail experiences that account for emotional safety, everything else works better:
- Staff communicate with more patience and empathy.
- Customers linger longer, ask better questions, and purchase with confidence.
- Compliance conversations feel less like rules and more like care.
In other industries, customer experience is about delight.
In cannabis, it’s about trust.
And trust begins by recognizing that the cannabis consumer is not just shopping—they’re rewriting their own story in public.
Next in the Series
In Part 2: The Obstacle Course, we’ll explore the regulatory hurdles and structural absurdities that shape today’s cannabis experience—and how great retailers can turn those obstacles into opportunities for connection.
Footnotes
- Hearst’s newspapers helped popularize the word “marijuana” in the 1930s, linking it to crime and fear to protect timber and paper interests—a propaganda campaign that still echoes in public policy today. ↩︎
Understanding the Cannabis Consumer, Part 2 — The Obstacle Course
It all begins with an idea.
Vector: Retail Best Practices
The System’s Three True Aims
- Prevent minors from obtaining cannabis.
The ID check is the moral cornerstone — and a reasonable one. It protects minors, satisfies public trust, and, in a twist of irony, gives cannabis retailers something every other category envies: perfect demographic data.
Every purchase is tied to age, region, and frequency. Used responsibly, that insight becomes a tool for understanding, not surveillance. - Prevent intrastate diversion.
Each ID is also linked to daily purchase limits — the invisible line that keeps six turkey bags from heading to Texas.
This friction isn’t arbitrary; it’s structural. When budtenders understand and can explain the “why” behind these limits, regulation turns from obstacle to reassurance.
Friction explained is friction softened. - Presume guilt until proven compliant.
In response to the federal ban, a quiet presumption of guilt still hangs over every legitimate cannabis operator.
To participate in the legal economy, retailers must prove their innocence daily — through seed-to-sale tracking, 24-hour surveillance, armored-car banking, and an avalanche of reporting that no other retail category endures.This framework has created an economic caste system, a kind of regulatory apartheid.
Cannabis businesses operate in the same neighborhoods, pay the same taxes, hire from the same communities — yet are treated as suspect by default.Banks close their accounts. Landlords double their deposits. Payroll providers like ADP and UltiPro cancel contracts because a general counsel decided the risk was “too high,” in the abstract.
And local governments often add their own layers of punishment disguised as prudence.
In Alameda County, for example, every prospective dispensary employee must be cleared by the Sheriff’s Department before being hired — a process that can delay onboarding by two to four weeks and costs more than $100 per person.
It’s a ritual of mistrust: slow, expensive, and entirely disconnected from the realities of modern retail operations.What’s dressed as “due diligence” is, in truth, a residue of fear — the same propaganda-era fear that still defines the frame.
Meanwhile, alcohol and pharmaceuticals do exponentially more damage to our communities, a point so obvious it hardly needs evidence.The message is clear: you are legal, but you are not legitimate.
And consumers feel that energy too — in the tone of signage, the language of warnings, the tension that hums beneath the surface of even the best-run stores.
Together, these three aims — protection, prevention, and presumption — form the architecture of the obstacle course.
Understanding them isn’t cynicism; it’s clarity. And clarity is the first step toward grace.
The Cruel Irony
The cruel irony of all this over-regulation is that the target of enforcement is not the source of the crime. The problem isn’t the consumer or the retailer — it’s the policy.
In California, the effective tax burden on legal cannabis hovers between 30 and 38 percent. The result? The State itself has created the economic conditions for its own black market. The higher the taxes, the greater the incentive to avoid them.
But the underground of today isn’t the outlaw culture of the past. Today’s illicit market is professionalized: companies with packaging machines and marketing budgets, selling legal weed out the front door and illegal weed out the back.
So while compliant retailers drown in paperwork and surveillance, non-compliant operators thrive in the margin the State created. It’s a kind of policy schizophrenia — punishing legitimacy while rewarding those who ignore the rules.
Until taxation aligns with reality, the system will continue to criminalize the very behavior it claims to have legalized.
The Bureaucracy of Permission
Cannabis is still regulated as if it were uranium, even though everyone knows it’s less harmful than alcohol or oxycodone. The rules were built on fear, not evidence — an inheritance from the same propaganda that once painted cannabis as a threat.
For the consumer, this creates a strange emotional equation: what’s legal still feels illicit.
You see it in the way customers whisper strain names, apologize for questions, or clutch their IDs like boarding passes. This isn’t paranoia; it’s conditioning. The system still hasn’t decided whether to welcome or test them.
Finding the Positive
For cannabis retailers, survival requires a kind of optimism that borders on art. The laws may be written in fear, but the day-to-day practice of cannabis retail depends on finding something human inside that fear.
Every operator knows the system doesn’t make sense — and so do most customers. They feel the absurdity: the cameras, the cash-only lines, the excessive packaging, the taxes stacked like toll booths on the way to relaxation.
This shared awareness is not a weakness. It’s an opportunity to connect. When a budtender acknowledges the reality — “Yeah, it’s wild what we have to do for a simple plant.” — it creates instant rapport. The conversation shifts from transaction to camaraderie. Both sides exhale.
Finding the positive doesn’t mean ignoring the madness; it means transforming it. It’s the recognition that even in a system built on mistrust, the act of serving cannabis can still feel revolutionary, generous, and sane.
In the best shops, humor replaces bitterness. Empathy replaces exhaustion. Every small act of grace — a kind word, a moment of patience, a knowing smile — becomes resistance to the noise.
This is how culture is built, one positive exchange at a time.
Why It Matters
This generation of consumers is writing the template for everyone who follows. If today’s experiences feel clinical or transactional, that becomes the norm. But if they feel human — calm, kind, dignified — that becomes the culture.
Cannabis retail is still young enough to decide what kind of hospitality it wants to embody. That’s the opportunity hidden inside the obstacle course.
Next in the Series
In Part 3 — Budtender 2026, we’ll explore what AI will mean for both the Customer and the Budtender.