Cannabis Is Not Chill

Cannabis is supposed to be chill. Working in cannabis is something else entirely. In *Cannabis Is Not Chill: The People, the Pressure, and the Purpose Behind Cannabis Retail*, Christopher Sciarappa takes readers behind the dispensary counter and into the strange, funny, stressful, heartbreaking, and often unbelievable reality of legal cannabis retail. Drawing on nearly a decade working in the cannabis industry across New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut—and more than twenty-five years in retail leadership—Sciarappa tells the stories that rarely make it into conversations about legalization. There are customers you could never invent, employees trying to hold themselves together, regulations where seemingly small mistakes can carry enormous consequences, stores fighting to survive changing markets, and managers discovering that sometimes there really is nobody coming to help. But beneath the absurdity and pressure is something more important: people. This is a book about the budtenders, managers, customers, patients, and unlikely characters who give the cannabis industry its humanity. It is about leadership when there is no perfect answer, burnout and resilience, mistakes and second chances, finding humor when everything seems to be going wrong, and discovering pride in work that most people will never fully understand. You don't need to work in cannabis to recognize these people. Anyone who has worked retail, managed a team, dealt with the public, questioned their own abilities, or somehow made it through a day that seemed determined to break them will find something familiar here. *Cannabis Is Not Chill* isn't a celebration of cannabis or an indictment of it. It's an honest look at the people behind an industry—and what happens when the doors open, the customers arrive, and somebody has to figure out how to keep the whole damn thing running.