A New Daily Cannabis Show Has Launched, But You’ll Need an Invitation

On Tuesday – or 4/20 as marijuana celebrants call it — the platform began hosting “The State of Cannabis,” a California-based cannabis advocacy and event production organization.

“We are the cannabis industry leaders, elected officials, regulators and lovers of cannabis,” the organization declared in a press release. “We are here to collectively move cannabis policy forward in an inclusive and sustainable way.”

The “State of Cannabis News Hour” is being broadcast on Clubhouse weekdays from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. Pacific Time (noon to 1 pm Eastern). To be discussed are critical industry issues and social topics.

The programs are using a roundtable-style news format in which subject matter experts discuss stories from the cannabis world that are driving developments as well as restrictions.

Why now? Susan Soares, founder of The State of Cannabis, said she’d been inspired by another Clubhouse news show to build one on cannabis that would air daily, on weekdays. “Since first visiting in December 2020, I’ve been all in on Clubhouse,” Soares said. “With 69 percent of Americans now support[ing] legalizing cannabis [according to a Quinnipiac poll], there is a real hunger for information about the industry, and we are hoping to provide it.”

Soares pointed out that 300,000 Americans work in today’s legal cannabis industry – and were considered “essential” during the Covid emergency. This, plus the increasing number of states legalizing recreational marijuana, and medical cannabis’s solid footing, has impacted the economy, Soares added.

The platform she chose for her show, Clubhouse, lists 9,400 members to date for the cannabis program. Though currently set up only for Apple’s iOS, it may become available for Android devices too. Members enter an online “room” where they can interact with speakers and “raise their hands” to be called on.

Clubhouse was declared the queen of cool, once it started to gain an audience earlier this year. “Today, it has millions of users, a valuation of roughly $1 billion and a ton of buzz,” the New York Times wrote in February.

Both Tesla founder Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook had recently appeared on Clubhouse at that point, the Times wrote, adding that so many participants had jumped on that the platform nearly crashed.