One North Texan was a prototypical party boy who's now singing the gospel of marijuana to lawmakers, the press and _ most important _ to prospective clients.
The other brings a critical component to a multimillion-dollar operation: the science of cannabis oil extraction.
These two make up half of the C-suites at Denver-based Organa Brands, which went through 10 tons of marijuana on its way to $118 million in revenue last year, selling 68 products like vaporizer pens, edible gummies and cannabis-infused energy drinks, all based on the liquid gold.
Arlington native Chris Driessen is the company's sales guru, and carries the official title of president of U.S. operations. Chris McElvany, from Granbury, is one of three co-founders of Organa Brands and is the president of Organa Labs.
"There are probably still some Texas voters who were probably misled like me growing up, where they really think cannabis is awful. The "Reefer Madness" crowd," McElvany said. "But we'd like nothing more than to get our products into Texas when the time is right. Texas, I think, is going to swing open sooner than most people think."
Both McElvany and Driessen would consider the opening of a Texas recreational marijuana market a monumental victory, for obvious reasons: the size of the state, which would immediately make the market comparable to California's, and the pioneering mindset that permeates Texas business culture in seemingly every field except marijuana. By July of 2018, eight states and Washington D.C. will be ahead of Texas in generating tax revenue from what Driessen calls "the next great American industry."
Organa operates in 11 states, selling recreational products in California, Colorado, Nevada and Oregon, and making medicinal sales in seven of the 29 states with medical use regulations. There's also Jamaica.
Organa's blockbuster product, the O.Pen and the accompanying cartridges of cannabis oil that come in different strains, flavors and potencies, position the company as kind of "the Kleenex of the cannabis oil world," Driessen said.
Even vaporizer pens not made by their company, O.PenVape, are commonly called O.Pens. In 2014, actress Sarah Silverman showed her O.PenVape product to a national television audience, calling it, "my liquid pot," before carrying home an Emmy Award.
A 500-milligram cartridge of the company's purest oil retails for about $100, said Pepe Breton, who owns five dispensaries under the name Euflora in the Denver and Aurora, Colo., areas.
"I had a meeting with the O.PenVape guys in 2014, and at the time, we were on a pretty strict budget, being a new store," Breton said. "Chris Driessen looked at our location and said, 'Wow, you guys are going to kill it.' I was looking to put in about a $25,000 order, but he was sure I'd need about 10 times that. They made us a deal where the other $225,000 worth of product they dropped off would be on consignment that first time around, and he never batted an eye about doing it. Two months later, we had sold all that product, and it's been a close relationship ever since."
Organa Brands refined the 10 tons of marijuana it went through last year into 1.2 million grams of oil, distributed through a network of 1,200 dispensaries like Breton's.
Why does Driessen describe marijuana as 'the next great American industry"?
Because, for years, people way outside the traditional "pothead" mold have secretly enjoyed the drug. Driessen recalls a moment at a recent family gathering at his wife's parents' house in Weatherford.
While younger relatives went on and on about how cool his company sounded, Driessen could tell the conversation was making his mother-in-law uncomfortable.
"At the time, we were featured in both High Times and Time magazines," Driessen said. "And to bring her around, all I wanted to do was to tell her to flip to page 43 and 44 of that Time magazine on her end table, but out of nowhere, her uncle from rural Western Pennsylvania, very conservative, devout Christian, chimes in."
"Chris, I think it's great, what you're doing," Uncle Doug said to the room full of family, not all of whom agreed with the sentiment. "Me and my golf buddies have been sharing a joint every Tuesday morning for the last umpteen years, and I think it's awesome."
Driessen's entry into the cannabis market was roundabout. His father, Klaus, a retired superintendent of schools, busted him with the first nickel bag he ever bought, as a high schooler attending Arlington Martin, where his mother taught science.
He was dismissed from Texas Tech "for partying too hard" before rebounding for a degree in public relations from the University of North Texas. He made a small fortune selling copiers before landing at Organa in 2012.
Meanwhile, McElvany took a more direct route into the cannabis industry after what he described as a somewhat "sheltered" upbringing in Granbury. He smoked marijuana for the first time in college at Tarleton State University.
McElvany was a biomedical science major until he took a deep dive into cannabis culture after realizing that cannabis wasn't "as evil or as bad as I had been led to believe," he said. He changed not only his major, to agricultural economics so he could study cannabis, but also the "whole focus of my life at that point."
He transferred to Texas A&M in 1994 and became an insurance underwriter in Colorado after he graduated. He met Driessen in Colorado, "just a couple of ski bums after college," as Driessen puts it. But even then, before McElvany was able to make his passion for marijuana his business, he was preparing to be the brains behind Organa Labs and Organa Brands.
"I had already begun doing my own experiments when e-cigs popped up around 2007," McElvany said. "A friend of mine was trying to quit smoking. The first time I saw her using an e-cig, I took it out of her hand and ripped it apart, and figured out a way to put hash oil in it."
Organa Brands is a "house of brands," the scientific underpinnings of which are tied together at McElvany's Organa Labs. Bakked makes and sells cannabis oil concentrates used for "dabbing," Organa Brands Alternatives is a line of cannabis-infused wellness products; and there's District Edibles and The Magic Buzz, which are cannabis-infused functional drinks like 5-Hour Energy shots.
Organa buys marijuana by the ton in Colorado and California. But in other states, where regulations demand that cannabis companies be vertically integrated, they grow their own.
McElvany had a lot to do with Driessen coming on board in 2012. Driessen was leading a regional sales team for Konica Minolta when the statewide referendum passed legalizing marijuana in Colorado.
"It passed screamingly, with flying colors, as it would in Texas right now if my home state allowed voter-introduced ballot initiatives," Driessen said. "And all of a sudden all the reasons my dad or my wife thought we shouldn't do this for a living turned into, 'Well, huh, maybe.'"
Referendums, which are tacked onto election ballots if they get enough signatures from voters in their state, have been the avenue for the legalization of recreational marijuana in all eight states that have the right to smoke freely. Twenty-nine states and Washington D.C. allow marijuana for medicinal use under different guidelines.
McElvany had cashed out the 401k he earned as an insurance underwriter three years earlier to buy Bakked, which was then a mom-and-daughter edibles company. He repurposed the brand around his vision of vape-pens and cartridges, but shortly after was approached by Jeremy Heidl and Ralph Morgan, who were talking about combining their efforts to form what would become O.PenVape.
"I showed Jeremy the cartridge I had made," McElvany said. "He organized a meeting with Ralph, who I knew as one of my competitors at the time. We all sat down and decided that it made more sense for us to align our forces, not compete, merge our companies, and that's how O.PenVape was conceived."
Since then, Organa Brands has grown with the cannabis industry. According to cannabis research firm ArcView, sales in the North American recreational cannabis market rose 34 percent in 2016, to $6.9 billion.
Driessen estimates that by 2020 cannabis will be a $20 billion dollar industry, and ArcView's numbers agree, calling for an average 26 percent growth per year until marijuana is a $22 billion market by 2021.
"The thing I would tell Texans is, look, you're either for a regulated industry, i.e. adult use and legalization, or you're for the black market, period. There is no in-between," Driessen said. "They estimate that drug cartels make 40 percent of their money from cannabis. Well, mine's cheaper, better, stronger and safer than what you're going to get from across the border."
