The December issues of Marijuana Venture from 2014 and 2023.
The December issue of Marijuana Venture will be the publication’s last monthly print edition — at least for a little while.
After the December issue is published, Marijuana Venture is going to switch to a quarterly publishing schedule for 2024. We will print four magazines in 2024 — Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter — with each issue addressing some of the most critical topics in the cannabis industry. We will continue to publish some of the most popular recurring features of every year, including the 40 Under 40 and Women to Watch issues, while also adding new sections and in-depth features that take more time to research and develop.
We may switch back to a monthly publishing cycle at a later date, but for now, there are a multitude of reasons why it makes sense for us to reduce the number of magazines we print each year, including the desire to build out our digital platforms and the need to expand our flourishing event sector, with Interchange as the centerpiece of that plan.
However, there are two main reasons for making this change. One is the evolving cannabis economy. As the industry — and the economy as a whole — goes through this turbulent stretch of time, now is the ideal moment for us to take a step back, focus our energy on the events that really benefit industry operators, refine our mailing list to account for the hundreds of businesses that have closed up shop nationally, and improve our digital platform, including our website, social media, advertising options and newsletter mailing list, which have all been overshadowed by the need to publish a monthly print magazine.
The second issue is my health, something I have not previously discussed with many people in the industry or even many of my friends. In March, I was diagnosed with Stage II Hodgkins lymphoma. I had a sizeable, cancerous tumor in the middle of my chest that had been affecting my breathing and causing a host of other symptoms that apparently befuddled health care professionals for well over a year before a simple chest X-ray led to my diagnosis.
Hodgkins lymphoma is known as one of the most treatable forms of cancer, with about 90% of patients able to be cured by the frontline chemotherapy treatment. Unfortunately, although chemo initially treated my symptoms, it did not eliminate the tumor or cancer the way doctors expected.
After seven months of ups and downs, during which my symptoms flooded back in full force, I began my second treatment regimen, which will include a combination of immunotherapy, chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant. As I write this, I am in between my second and third immunotherapy infusions. I feel great and I’m optimistic for success, but the upcoming months with chemo and the stem cell transplant are expected to be pretty rough, requiring me to step away from work for some undetermined amount of time — and thus emphasizing the need to re-evaluate Marijuana Venture’s printing schedule.
Publisher Greg James and I have been producing a monthly magazine since March 2014 (and along with senior editor Patrick Wagner, our core team has been working together for more than nine years). That’s 118 issues of Marijuana Venture — not to mention the 12 issues we published of our quarterly sister magazine, SunGrower & Greenhouse, and two issues of Psychedelia, which we co-produced with a handful of business partners. By any calculation, it’s been an impressive run for a small, independent publishing and events company — and I’m looking forward to 2024, getting to the other side of my treatment plan and continuing the next evolution of this company.