Producer, OR: Ep. 78 Jesce Horton, Panacea Valley Gardens

http://cecono.me twitter.com/canneconomy facebook.com/canneconomy In this episode, we sit down with Jesce Horton. You may know him as the founder of the growing facility/edibles manufacturer Panacea Valley Gardens, proudly at home in the state of Oregon, but he is equally well known as the founder of the Minority Cannabis Business Association, an association dedicated to supporting minorities in the cannabis industry. Horton tells us how, after a car accident, growing his own medicine helped him manage his own pain, and how that eventually led to him growing for other patients in his community. Encouraged by this, a year and a half ago he felt ready to leave the corporate world he had spent most of his professional life in to focus solely on cannabis. He offers enlightening perspectives on how the cannabis industry should be focusing on energy efficiency, and how minority empowerment lies at the core of cannabis's overarching message of social justice, economic opportunity, and universal patient access. Enjoy! "There's a lot of hurdles, a lot of things that we can look at that need to get better, and that will get better, and it's easy to focus on those things, but, by gosh, we have a cannabis industry right in front of us, and I never thought it would happen. So I just relish in that each and every day." "My parents helped, [and came to] do some of the trimming on our first flower." "Energy really is affected by the users... If you can track [energy usage], and you can show them, and they can see that, and even better... can you give them an incentive for reducing the amount of energy but increasing the yield - things like that. If we're able to hone in on those things, we're really able, I think, to make the biggest dent in this energy picture within the cannabis industry." "If we're building this industry without [diversity & minority empowerment] as a cornerstone... I think we're missing the boat - first as it relates to cannabis being a means of social justice... but also... if we want this industry to really be where it can be economically... then we have to have those things as a real cornerstone of how we're building it." "I would say the most surprising thing to me is the amazing medicinal value of the plant, and the fact that we're probably at such a low, infancy level of what we know about what it can do to benefit people and benefit mankind."