Drug-dealing executives: How potheads fell in love with LinkedIn
LinkedIn is probably the last place on the internet you would look for drugs.
This social network is like the web's version of a store that only sells khaki pants, a place where Chad from accounting networks for his next job and influencers are “thought leaders” who post about how to bring more value to your next PowerPoint presentation.
Yet, remarkably, America’s potheads have fallen in love with LinkedIn.
Cannabis aficionados have flocked to the website, making Bay Area-headquartered LinkedIn the best place online to see experts talk about growing pot, making exotic cannabis hash or selling millions of dollars of weed. Last month, I even saw an interstate drug deal negotiated in public on the platform.
“If you’re on social media in cannabis, you’re on LinkedIn,” said Joyce Cenali, the CEO of Sonoma Hills Farm and a co-founder of the Cannabis Media Council. Cenali told SFGATE that LinkedIn is “the most important social media network for the cannabis industry.”
This green wave is hitting LinkedIn because the rest of social media is a minefield for cannabis companies. Pot’s federal illegality has led Instagram and TikTok to regularly delete cannabis accounts. Weed companies are told to avoid showing pictures of cannabis flowers or pot plants on Facebook. But LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, rarely moderates cannabis content. This permissiveness has allowed a thriving cannabis community to grow on the network.
A LinkedIn drug deal
Dustin Hoxworth can still remember the moment he first learned LinkedIn was pot friendly. Last summer, Hoxworth was transitioning from a corporate career in Atlanta’s film industry to the cannabis industry when he opened LinkedIn and saw a photo of a massive cannabis flower. It shocked him.
“I was like, what the f—k is this doing on LinkedIn? That was my reaction. It opened a whole world of cannabis on LinkedIn that I had no idea existed,” Hoxworth told SFGATE. That inspired him to openly talk about cannabis on his profile, a move he called “coming out of the green closet.” Since then, he’s started a cannabis marketing company and a pot magazine, called Fat Nugs.
“Everything that we have done with this magazine is through word of mouth on LinkedIn,” Hoxworth told SFGATE. “It’s networking on steroids for cannabis. It’s the No. 1 place to be for social media when it comes to cannabis.”
A spokesperson for LinkedIn confirmed to SFGATE that the cannabis community is welcome to talk about the business of pot on the network.
“Members come to LinkedIn every day to share knowledge, insights, and perspectives around the world of work and their particular industries, which can include the cannabis industry,” the statement said.
This might seem like a mild corporate statement, but explicitly welcoming the pot industry makes LinkedIn unique compared to other major social networks.
The cannabis industry has always known the limits of internet speech. Long before Donald Trump lost access to Twitter, huge pot social media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers were getting their accounts deleted and their content moderated. Cannabis influencers have resorted to paying secretive dealers to get their accounts back. And even the New York state government was blocked from posting cannabis information to TikTok. TikTok’s extreme bias against cannabis led one account to make videos of joints rolled with literal broccoli to avoid being moderated. The account still had many of its videos deleted.
LinkedIn, on the other hand, rarely moderates any cannabis content or shuts down pot accounts, according to cannabis marketing agencies. Although there does appear to be a limit to the network’s permissiveness.
Last month, Hoxworth posted a photo of a warehouse filled with cannabis. The photo’s caption began with “I could use some assistance please” and proceeded to ask if any of his 9,000 followers could help him negotiate a wholesale cannabis transaction in Illinois, where pot is legal. He had a buyer — a cannabis manufacturer in need of pot — so he went on LinkedIn to find a cannabis seller. Hoxworth was openly conducting an interstate drug deal on LinkedIn. I watched as comments piled in, people shared the post, and dozens of people interacted with the post.
LinkedIn deleted Hoxworth's post after I asked them about it, saying in a statement that “sharing content that facilitates the purchase or sale of illegal or regulated goods and services is a violation of our Professional Community Policies.”
Hoxworth said he still thinks LinkedIn is pot friendly even after the network deleted one of his posts. To his credit, LinkedIn only took action after I brought it to their attention. And by then, the drug deal was done.
‘Playing Whac-A-Mole with Facebook’
There are serious limits to what you can do with LinkedIn, even for the cannabis community. Its reach is considerably smaller than other networks, like TikTok or Instagram, which have more than twice the number of active users as LinkedIn. The network is specifically built around work, which keeps most of LinkedIn’s content insulated within individual industries.
That means LinkedIn isn’t giving pot companies direct access to their customers, in the ways that Instagram or TikTok do for traditional companies. You can’t buy pot on LinkedIn like you can purchase pottery on Instagram.
But LinkedIn has formed a natural fit with the developing pot industry’s professional class. Legal weed is a white-collar profession in the United States with all of the demands of an extremely competitive emerging market. Running a pot business requires you to stay on top of both a fast-moving scientific world — making a modern pot edible is a high-tech endeavor — and a rapidly changing legal environment. Weed executives have to lobby the government and act as industry champions in the news, mostly out of fear that their products could be made illegal overnight.
That’s made LinkedIn, a social network that turns your work into your personality, a natural fit for the pot industry.
Jessica Tonani, the founder of a Seattle cannabis bioscience startup, VerdaBio, said she started posting on the network six months ago after she realized some of the world’s smartest pot experts were on it.
“There’s a number of people I actively follow just because they help me look at things with a different perspective,” Tonani told SFGATE. “... I think there are a lot of people with really good things to say on the platform.”
These active scientific discussions have created a network that, to many people, encapsulates the rarely realized promise for all social media: a place where people can share new ideas that expand everyone’s world view. Tonani said that is wildly different from her experience on other networks. “Most of the interactions are actually active discussions going on on the platform,” she said.
Tonani said she’s had posts on other networks taken down.
“Traditional social media is really hard in this space. We’re constantly playing Whac-A-Mole with Facebook. Even if you post scientific articles they will block it,” Tonani said. “There’s really good content coming through LinkedIn and that content is not being blocked, so people are just moving to it.”
Cenali, the chief operating officer of Sonoma Hills Farms, said having a LinkedIn account has become required to work in the industry. She is also an executive at Big Rock Partners, a cannabis investing firm, and she said investors will hesitate to work with other companies if their founders aren’t on LinkedIn.
Hoxworth agreed, saying it’s one of the best ways to work your way into the industry.
“If you’re in cannabis and you’re not on LinkedIn, you’re screwing yourself,” Hoxworth said.
