“It’s why I’m unemployable,” he explains. “People say, well, you’re an entrepreneur. I say, ‘No, I’m a very, very bad employee.’”

Still, Gage was so eager to bring Linton into the fold that parent company, Wolverine Partners, changed its name shortly after announcing the hire to Gage Growth Corp.

The company liked him, and Linton liked them.

He first visited about a year and a half ago, to see how Gage spent its money and to inspect the grow ops.

“I was completely blown away, like, these guys made excellent capital allocation decisions,” he says, citing, in particular, the company’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system.

While recreational sales in Michigan didn’t begin until last year, medical cannabis has been legal in the state for 12 years and, as a result, Linton says the market is sophisticated. “You can’t just show up and grow junk,” he says. “The market expects quality and they’re willing to pay for it.”

For Gage, which has a number of leading cannabis brands in its portfolio, the products are resonating. Linton says the average basket size for a Gage customer is three times as much as the average spend in California.

“That shows up in our revenue growth, and our brand loyalty. So I’m loving, you know, cannabis, Michigan, Gage. And as you look forward, the last two months of sales in the state have been over 100 million dollars. That puts them in the top four states. But what do we hear about? Illinois? Pennsylvania? Those are not as exciting as this, I think.”

Other benefits come with operating in the U.S., such as less restrictive marketing guidelines than north of the border.

One of the brands Gage works with is Cookies, which was founded by Berner, a California budtender turned rapper. Berner has more than two million followers across his social media channels and the hype around the Cookies brand has been near-constant since its launch in 2015. So much so that Berner turned down an $800 million offer to acquire the company in its early days.

“With Cookies, I would say I was wrong. I didn’t appreciate how well branded flower could be done if you spent a lot of time on strain development and your brand,” Linton says.

“If you look at what’s going on in the U.S., you actually have brands developing, which can sustain a seriously differentiated price, so long as the brand continues to deliver great quality and an authentic story.”

And while it’s difficult to imagine a similar story unfolding around a celebrity cannabis brand in Canada, where celebrities are barred from endorsements, Linton says there are ways to get around the rules. “You can’t have Leaves by Snoop but you can have LBS and I do think the celebrity thing is going to come and go because there are so many ways to work around it in Canada,” he says. “I’d say the celeb thing is less of a headache and more of a headline. But branding is more of a headache and less of a headline.”

Still, he adds; “What’s the biggest thing on the container that you notice here? It’s that stupid stop sign. If you buy a can of beer, you need glasses to read what percentage alcohol it is. But if you buy anything with THC, it’s got a ginormous stop sign.”

The future of neuro medicine

Several years ago, Linton made an appearance on the now-defunct CBC business show, The Exchange, sitting down with Amanda Lang and Kevin O’Leary to talk about cannabis.

But during his appearance on the show, O’Leary was focused on the U.S. federal ban on the plant, where it still remains a schedule 1 drug.

“He told me ‘I can’t invest because I’ll go to jail.’ After the show, I’m like, are the two related or did you do something criminal? Like, f*** off with this thing that you can’t give me money or you’ll go to jail, that’s not true. And he’s like, I can’t chance it. I’m like, Okay, well, you didn’t really help me on air, dude.”

Though they didn’t know it at the time, O’Leary and Linton would come together in 2018 to invest in Mind Medicine Inc. Earlier this year, after listing on Toronto’s NEO Exchange, MindMed became the world’s first publicly traded psychedelic company.

While O’Leary’s stance on cannabis hasn’t changed, he’s bullish on the potential of psychedelic medicine.

MindMed’s first product in development is a derivative of Ibogaine called 18-MC. In its natural state, ibogaine can induce powerful, uncomfortable hallucinations and is potentially toxic to the heart. But it has shown promise in treating heroin, alcohol, methamphetamine and opioid addiction. The derivative maintains the anti-addictive properties of ibogaine but is non-toxic and non-hallucinogenic.

“When I first got approached on this one, my initial reaction was no, this is another cannabis situation with a schedule one narcotic,” O’Leary told The GrowthOpearlier this year. “But the more I investigated it, the benefits of just pursuing one outcome, such as solving, or at least helping, opiate addiction, was a multibillion-dollar business. And that’s when I started to do some due diligence.”

Linton says O’Leary’s investment, along with his own, brought visibility to an emerging sector that many still viewed as “a sketchy area.”

“It’s neuro medicine,” Linton says. “And if you want to take the shortcut to come up with a good molecule, start with a good molecule and modify it minorly, maybe just take out the hallucinogenic effect and see if there are still some other therapeutic applications. That’s MindMed.”

Mark Haden, the executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Canada and an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia, agrees that markets can help push psychedelics forward socially. “They’ll be a huge number of people who want to improve treatments and a lot of people who want to make money and both will come together and legalization will move forward,” he told The GrowthOp earlier this year.

And while O’Leary sees the psychedelic market as purely medicinal, Linton says there is room for recreational companies, as well.

He is the chairman of the advisory board with Red Light Holland, an Ontario-based company that works in the production, growth and sale of magic truffles in markets where they are legal, like the Netherlands.

“My approach is if something exists on the planet, and people are using it and buying it, and the government ignores making it available and makes it into a criminal punishment to get it, that is, like, the worst public policy,” Linton says. “What you need to do is regulate it, monetize it, and educate, meaning make rules for where you can buy it, how often you buy it. Put some form of government tax on it, and then use the money that comes from the tax to explain to people why they might not want to use it.”

Sixteen months after he was fired from Canopy, Linton says he’s “pretty happy” with where he’s landed and his position in both the cannabis and psychedelic sectors. But he’s not done.

Constantly on his mind these days, he says, is the disruptive potential of hemp.

“It’s one of these crops that every day I learn new stuff you can make from it. I’m not talking like bracelets and socks; I’m talking about super flexible bumpers for cars. Unbelievably light and strong and crash-resistant components of car seats. Interesting foods that I think will disrupt the whole vegan and vegetarian food chain.”

Hemp, he says, got a bad rap, and while the 2018 U.S. Farm bill legalized the crop and kick-started some growth in the industry, for now, it remains a small sector with limited infrastructure.

Linton expects the future could be better. The story of hemp, much like his own, is still being written.