Gary Johnson can add the title of $50 Million Man to his resume that includes former two-term Republican governor of New Mexico and the 2012 Libertarian Party presidential nominee. That’s how much the thinly-traded shares of Cannabis Sativa, Inc. - listed as CBDS on the Over-the-Counter stock market - gained in total value in the days since the company named Johnson as its president and chief executive officer on June 30.
With the Associated Press, Reuters, Gawker.com and plenty of other news outlets picking up the story, shares of Cannabis Sativa, Inc. jumped to $8 from $4 in just a few hours in brisk trades.
Overlooked in the green rush is the company’s status as a development stage outfit aiming to sell marijuana products in Colorado, Washington State and anywhere else where pot is eventually legal. That basically means the company has yet to produce a profit. Yet investors are betting some day it will, with a fairly big name like Johnson at the helm.
Johnson: 'I don’t know if I’m the Bill Gates of marijuana, but we might be the Microsoft of marijuana. The whole country is going to legalize marijuana in 10 years, and then so goes the world.'
In the world of the stock market, Cannabis Sativa, Inc. remains in the purely speculative realm of penny stocks, where several marijuana-inspired companies now reside.
But it has a good story. Joining Johnson in the company is Steve Kubby, the 1998 Libertarian Party of California candidate for Governor and an author on drug policy reform. Kubby is now chairman of Cannabis Sativa Inc. Both are long-time supporters of cannabis legalization. Johnson hopes to deliver products “that could change the world for the better.”
However, citing an old Doonesbury cartoon from the '90s dot-com boom: So far the company’s only major product is its stock.
Under a deal to buy Kubby’s company, Kush, Cannabis Sativa, Inc. will research, develop and license cannabis formulas, edibles, topicals, strains, recipes and delivery systems, license from Kubby a medicinal cannabis strain called NZT, and sell a proprietary cannabis lozenge delivery methodology and a trauma cream formula, among other plans. About the lozenge, Johnson raves, "It's very, very pleasant. Rather than a go-to-sleep marijuana, it’s a clean-your-house marijuana.”
Playing up the media interest around his new job, Johnson adds with hyperbole: “I don’t know if I’m the Bill Gates of marijuana, but we might be the Microsoft of marijuana. The whole country is going to legalize marijuana in 10 years, and then so goes the world.”
High hopes indeed, but you never know. If Cannabis Sativa, Inc. could sell sound bites along with grass, it would be challenging Microsoft already. But somebody is going to make billions on legal weed sooner or later. The Budweiser of bud may be closer than you think. Trust me, somebody, perhaps even Cannabis Sativa, Inc., is going to hit it big.
