How Colorado’s Legacy Dealers Are Saving The Industry From Itself

From an outsider’s perspective, Colorado may seem like a green utopia. As the first to legalize recreational cannabis, the state has something of a reputation for being a stoner sanctuary.

For Colorado’s residents, however, this promised land has some cracks in its foundation. Constant tension between supply and demand has caused weed prices to plummet, leading to unstable business models, unsafe labor practices, and inconsistent (if not borderline toxic) production standards. In 2025, the Mile High Festival — one of the first 4/20 rallies in the country — charged its attendees an entry fee for the first time, marking a stark contrast to its origins of unapologetic advocacy and open-air community consumption.

It’s not just the recreational side that’s affected, either. The state recently doubled the price of a medical card application, adding another unnecessary obstacle to an already challenging program. At the same time, some of the state’s most foundational medical dispensaries are closing their doors, losing their licenses, and struggling to adapt in an industry that’s no longer as novel as it once was. Grows are floundering to stay above water, as return on investment gets harder to capture, leading to high-stress environments that seep down through the chain of command, harming every employee on their way down.

The cannabis industry in Colorado is on life support, and its cause of death could be corporate greed.

That is, unless its residents step in to save it.

Meanwhile, in a suburb just outside of Denver, grow lights click on in a secluded garage. These lights are part of a larger ecosystem supporting a crop of particularly picky plants. Their grower, Shane, meticulously monitors this ecosystem day after day, ensuring the plants have the exact environment they need to thrive.

Shane has been growing cannabis for over half of his life. When he was 15, he ordered a seed from overseas with a money order, planted it in a box he made in middle school wood shop, and experienced a lightning strike of what he calls “beginner’s luck.” That wood box opened a Pandora-sized passion in Shane, changing his life’s trajectory.

Now, he operates a large-scale legacy cannabis business growing, harvesting, and selling his weed. Shane may not have expected that first seed to grow into a full-time job as professional drug dealer, but it’s safe to say he’s always been a true believer in the benefits of cannabis (and, if the high school teacher who suspended him for possession is reading this now, just know – it wasn’t a phase, and he turned out just fine).

Since that first seed, he’s quickly climbed the ranks in the cannabis world, both on the legal and legacy sides of the market. From trapping in his New Jersey hometown to managing a licensed grow in Colorado, Shane has practically done it all — and yet, it was during his time in the legal market that he saw the most corruption in cannabis.

There, he observed unsanitary and predatory practices by some of the state’s most powerful industry leaders. He saw the licensed market at its worst: bleeding money, cutting corners, and pushing contaminated product just to keep investors happy. With a skeleton crew getting wearier by the second and a warehouse full of mold and pests, management started remediating flower that should’ve been trashed, blasting it into butane hash and sending it to shelves — bugs and all. When Shane tried to push back, it became clear that profit would always come first.

“You’re having mold and mildew problems all over your grow. You’re spraying improper pesticides on plants at improper times during growth cycles because you’re trying to meet deadlines and be able to go back to your investors and say that you’re getting this much of a harvest out of it,” Shane disclosed. “I talked with one of the owners, and I said, ‘We can’t give this to people. This is morally and ethically wrong.’ But after we harvested it, then soon you’re seeing it on the shelf in the store. And personally, that was when I drew the line.”

After a few years in the legal space, Shane had seen enough. He returned to his legacy roots, where he could control the quality from seed to sale – without compromises and without breaching basic human ethics.

In the legacy space, Shane met Kyle – a fellow grower with the same sense of passion and morals. Now partners in business, they work together to recenter safe, high-quality products in mainstream Colorado cannabis culture.

Upon meeting them, Kyle and Shane sesh like the dirty stoner boys we all grew up with. The only difference is now, they’ve made a living out of it. Picture a world where your high school plug spent the last twenty years learning everything he could about weed, and you have a decent idea of who Kyle and Shane really are.

Their success in gaining trust across the state can be attributed to a near-perfect match in strengths. While both are experts in their crafts, Kyle has a mad-scientist level understanding of the mechanics behind cannabis growth and extraction, quick to explain the intricacies of his work — how it works, why it works, and why it matters.

But while Kyle serves as equal parts cultivator and chemist, Shane is the American Gangster of the pair, smoothly operating discreet business practices that keep both them and their customers safe. He’s a sharp realist focused on the implications of their work together, whether the consequences are as small as a package seized by USPS or as big as deconstructing injustices in the space.

Despite their differences, the boys share similar backgrounds in legacy dealing. Like Shane, Kyle started growing weed early on, growing in his teens and his college closet until moving to Colorado in 2013. There, he stepped under the wing of Colorado’s early cannabis pioneers.

In doing so, he learned from his mentors to view cultivation as a craft. Those early leaders shaped the philosophy that now drives him: cannabis should be grown with care, transparency, and integrity.

Since then, he’s worn a lot of hats — cultivation, extraction, consulting — and watched the industry evolve in real time. He stepped into the Colorado cannabis scene just a few months after Amendment 64 made recreational cannabis legal in the state, and since then, he’s seen that foundational care and innovation die off into shortcuts to dollar signs.

“When I originally came to Colorado, you did everything you could to make sure [your product] was the highest quality for your patients. It was patients over profits all day,” Kyle shared. “I’ve seen the shift of people caring to it being only about money and staying in business. It became very, very competitive to where the quality started to dwindle. ”

Over time, he watched Colorado’s cannabis landscape shift from a patient-first mindset to one dominated by hype, branding, and bottom lines. Where once growers obsessed over quality and care, many now chase fast profits.

Nevertheless, the roots of that pioneering mindset still motivate him over a decade later. Now, he’s shifting his focus. He’s no longer in apprenticeship with Colorado cannabis legends. Instead, he’s paying it forward by teaching the next generation of users and cultivators how to move with intention. He’s passionate about producing the safest, most effective products possible and believes that comprehensive education around the plant is crucial to that safety.

An experience in 2020 only solidified this outlook, further opening Kyle’s eyes to weak points in the legal market. During that time, Kyle helped develop innovative cannabis technology in the hopes of not just providing benefit to medical cannabis users but also of stabilizing and uplifting an industry that’s lost its way.

While his tech could have marked a shift toward more transparent cannabis sales – and gained the interest of major companies – he quickly realized he was working in a “house poor” market. Even in 2020, big players in cannabis were hemorrhaging money, weighed down by bloated operations and broken business models. Massive grow facilities and flashy marketing tactics were causing these companies to lose money, leaving them unable to invest in their customers’ best interests.

READ: Who Killed Governor Pothead? Denver Is Still Haunted By The Ghost of 4/20 Past

For Kyle, this experience wasn’t just a missed opportunity: it was a clear sign that without a return to purpose and quality, the hype won’t hold. Partnered with Shane, he’s focused on what they can do together to push toward that return.

They’re perfect examples of why many consumers continue to buy from their legacy dealer rather than licensed dispensaries. In a market bloated with branding and hollow promises, Kyle and Shane have built something rare: trust.

“The consumer is realizing that the legacy market has people who actually care. And if they don’t care, then they’re not going to survive in the legacy market,” Kyle noted. “The legacy market is all about quality, and consumers are getting smart about what that quality looks like.”

When it comes to meeting those needs, their approach speaks for itself: no gimmicks or shortcuts, just consistency, integrity, and product that actually delivers.

Still, in a landscape oversaturated with AI-generated answers and marketing jargon disguised as education, the burden of finding good weed — and good information — ultimately falls on the consumer. And for most, that journey starts by simply asking questions.

That’s why Kyle pushes consumers to dig deeper, to learn what’s actually in their weed and how it was grown – not only for personal education, but to keep licensed dispensaries accountable to transparency.

“Try to learn what goes into quality weed. Try to ask questions that will perplex people,” he said. “So you know the saying with humans is, ‘You are what you eat,’ right? If you’re eating nutritious foods and everything else, it will affect how you operate, your energy levels. Your weed operates the same way. Just put the pieces together.”

But education isn’t just about terpenes or THC percentages. Raising awareness is crucial, especially when the systems in place are still harming people for doing the very thing others are now profiting from.

“There are places in the country where populations of people are being persecuted, you know, get pulled over in a car and getting searched and all these different things where other populations aren’t,” Shane said. “So I think that by pushing all this stuff out into the mainstream and making this a more normal conversation, we can help put a stop to that mistreatment, even if it’s indirectly.”

And while Kyle may seem all science and systems and Shane may seem all street and strategy, they both see speaking up about the realities of the industry as a crucial part of their job. Because if they don’t bring attention to the moldy product, shady business practices, and hypocrisy of the industry, who will?

Though they operate in the liminal cannabis space, outside of the spotlight (and the law), Kyle and Shane are doing the most important work of all by preserving the integrity of cannabis. They’re guardians of a culture that risks being erased.

And while not everyone can grow their own weed or build a trap-to-table business, every consumer has a role to play. Whether it’s asking the right questions at a dispensary, supporting small-batch growers, or simply speaking the uncomfortable truth, awareness is the first step toward accountability.

If the industry is going to survive, it won’t be because of billion-dollar branding or another overbuilt warehouse. It’ll be because people like Kyle and Shane stayed rooted in the truth — and invited the rest of us to do the same: because cannabis culture doesn’t just live in products. It lives in the people — the patients, the legacy growers, the educators — who care enough to keep it honest.