Cannabrand Ad Agency Says: We’re Weeding Out The Stoners

CANNABRANDCannabrand’s Olivia Mannix and her partner Jennifer DeFalco think stoners aren’t normal, professional or successful. But to cash in on the industry created and nurtured by stoners the two have founded an advertising agency devoted exclusively to exploiting marijuana. And much like the early marijuana prohibitionists of the ’30s these two are on a misguided campaign to re-brand cannabis by slandering stoners and belittling marijuana culture.

Cannabrand discriminates against stoners in hopes to “reach a more sophisticated clientele.” In fact, in a recent NY Times article Mannix made her hatred for stoners public, “We’re weeding out the stoners,” she said. “We want to show the world that normal, professional, successful people consume cannabis.” So that means the 25-year-old Mannix thinks that the majority of the people who will be purchasing the products she’s advertising aren’t normal, professional or successful. And the dispensaries where those Colorado stoners get their weed? Mannix told the Times that she thinks some of them “look like underground abortion clinics.”

“They are young, working overtime trying to project a business savvy, but they’ve also filled a hole in the industry that the mainstream business sector has yet to touch,” says the Times about Cannabrand. The business sector hasn’t touched that hole because it’s so small it’s not worth targeting. Anybody who has ever seen a beer commercial or cigarette ad will tell you that real advertising agencies focus advertising dollars on the people who use their products the most—not talk shit about them in the press. No wonder the Times reports these two don’t have a business background. However, they say DeFalco studied advertising. What’s her excuse?

The fact is, marijuana prohibition began by slandering stoners. Weed’s still illegal in most of the world because greedy assholes created and perpetuated stoner stereotypes. We’re looking at you DuPont, Hearst, Anslinger. Now we’re looking at you DeFalco and Mannix for leveraging those same sterotypes to trash an entire culture of people who love pot. HOW DARE YOU TWO COME INTO OUR INDUSTRY AND TELL US YOU WANT TO WEED US OUT!

“The most offensive part to me is that the people who fought and died to make legal the industry Mannix and DeFalco now wish to exploit — Jack Herer, Peter McWilliams, Michael Malta, Share Parker, Michelle Rainey, so many others — were the kind of people Cannabrand is now trying to “weed out,” wrote Radical Russ Bellevile in High Times.

We’re pretty offended as well. How about you? How do you feel about these two coming into this industry saying they’re going to “WEED OUT STONERS?” Let us know in the comments below…



3 Responses to “Cannabrand Ad Agency Says: We’re Weeding Out The Stoners”

  1. steve

    Cool beans, just remember there a lot of people that consume cannabis and stoner is not the right word to describe all cannabis users.

  2. therealmagicjohnson

    You know, at this point I think anything that portrays marijuana in a positive light is good for the cause. If the idea is that stoners, jokers, and regular smokers just want weed to be legal I don’t see a problem if a couple of entrepreneurs are looking for a way to rebrand pot culture. The fact of the matter is that many who are against the legalization of marijuana imagine those who use it as a caricaturized version of stoners – lazy, stupid, smelly dopes eating Cheetos on the couch and rubbing the cheese dust all over the cushions. There’s a lot of misinformation out there and if more people are encouraged to have an open mind and see that mainstream, clean cut, white collared people like to toke, well, then maybe that makes more people who will realize that legal weed is really not such a big deal after all. Well, not a big deal except for the millions of tax dollars the country would reap.

  3. Loudmouth707

    HighTimes doth protest too much, methinks.

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