Max Montrose

Occupation: I am a cannabis educator and I teach cannabis education
classes at the Colorado Free University. I am writing one of the models for the
Responsible Vendor Course that dispensary workers will eventually have to take.
Currently, budtenders and dispensary workers in Colorado don’t have to have a
license to sell cannabis. There are more stringent licensing exams for hairstylists
in the state than there are for people selling medical marijuana. I have worked
in dispensaries where I would see patients given whatever product we were
trying to move and not what they needed; it broke my heart. I want to ensure
that budtenders don’t just treat their jobs like its alcohol. That’s why I wrote
my book, The Art & Science of
Everything Cannabis. My book talks about the history, the sociology, the
legal structure, the medicine, the cultivation and basically everything else in
between. I want to help set the standard for cannabis experts. I want cannabis
experts to be looked at the same way as an expert wine sommelier. I call them “Interpeners,”
or cannabis experts who interpret terpenes.

How did you get involved in cannabis advocacy?

I became an
advocate in high school. I was that kid who would write papers on why cannabis
was illegal and when you look into it, it is a social and legal atrocity.
People are losing their lives because they don’t have access to the medicine.
People are spending half their lives in cages because they were busted for laws
that were created for selfish economic power more than anything else. Cannabis
prohibition is an injustice. I care about people and I care about society. The
more I started learning, the angrier I became. I am, at heart, an activist that
can’t know that something is wrong and not do something about it. I started
testifying at cannabis law and ruling hearings in early 2008. I have testified
on almost every medical and recreational law in the state since then. I started
when I was young and it’s because I care.

If you could change one thing about how people perceive
cannabis, what would you change?

Super simple: The
stoner image. Think of five cannabis movies off the top of your head. In all of
them, every main character who smokes weed is portrayed as stupid. There are
sophisticated and smart lawyers, doctors, scientists, business men and women and
house moms who smoke cannabis and don’t fit the stereotype of the “stupid
stoner.” We need to look at cannabis in a new light. It can be respected and
people who use cannabis can be respectable.

MaxMontrose.com