At the 2020 Psychedelic Liberty Summit, longtime cannabis activist Steven DeAngelo addressed one of the elephants in the room concerning the blossoming psychedelic industry: the wresting of agency from those connected culturally, spiritually, and idealistically to psychedelics, by those who see psychedelics as the next exploitable resource to sell to the masses.
DeAngelo founded one of the first cannabis dispensaries in the United States—Harborside in Oakland, California—and helped create the ArcView Group in 2010, with the mission to develop the first cannabis-focused investment group. He knows firsthand how the corrosive effects of capitalism can eat away at the cultural values of once-subversive cultures.
“With Arcview, we hit on the energy of free enterprise to power the social change we wanted, and a lot of the progress we made is because we did invite the investor class in, but it came at a cost, a significant cost,” DeAngelo said.
“Prior to Arcview inviting the investor class in, the movement was driven by people who loved cannabis, but we attracted a lot of people whose motivation was not love of cannabis but love of making money.”
ArcView’s investor network now includes over 600 accredited investors who have reportedly injected more than $260M into hundreds of cannabis-focused companies.
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