By Madicyn Marinaro The cannabis industry is full of unbelievable tales. After all, this is a world where illegality suddenly became legal. While I’ve always championed the caregivers who risked their livelihoods during prohibition, I also know there’s a criminal element whose motives have nothing to do with helping patients.
That’s not to say most cannabis dealers are 
violent. My experience mirrors the data: most felony cannabis charges are non-violent. But there is a counterculture — a world where fast money talks and the streets listen. And because I’ve used cannabis for over twenty years, I’ve experienced that culture firsthand.
There was no medical program in Philadelphia in the early 2000s. If you were a young patient, you had to make your own way. That early experience shaped me. It’s why I fought so hard for medicinal access. I saw the clear dichotomy between inner-city Philly and the early California medical market. Anyone who says cannabis causes harm while prohibition doesn’t has never lived in the real world. Anyway, I digress.
I say all of this is to say: I was not naive. I had range. I had experience. But even then, nothing prepared me for what happened when Prop 64 passed in California and Canada fully legalized recreational use.
The Green Rush Hits
They called it “The Green Rush,” and my God, was it a heady time. It’s important to understand the financial landscape during this period. Not only did cannabis legalization open the door for a multi-billion-dollar illegal industry to suddenly become legitimate — crypto was also exploding. Bitcoin’s price was climbing, and ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) became big business. And with these events coinciding, there was a blend of anti-establishment and even lawlessness in the air. And a LOT of dumb money.
I realized something important then. I could leverage my underground network — growers, caregivers, edible makers, manufacturers, distributors — to help build the industry and carve out my own path. There were no cannabis directories. Barely any Google results. The only real currency was trust. And I had that.
Seemingly overnight, my LinkedIn exploded by the thousands. I connected with all of the movers and shakers of the legal cannabis industry. I helped sell millions in CBD. I pushed for common-sense reform, not the overregulated mess California created that pushed legacy operators out. But behind all the optimism was the truth: the industry ran almost entirely on vibes and trust. There were no credentials, no oversight, no way to verify anything. And with that came opportunity — and also danger.
Here’s where my naiveté showed. I understood street culture. What I didn’t understand was how brutal legal business could be. When you go from people moving ounces — maybe pounds — to corporations moving acres and millions of dollars, the stakes get extremely high. And I was not at all prepared for this new world I found myself in. People were using me for my connections — and then using them. No one was getting paid except the people at the top. And what could you do, call the cops? Not only is that idea foreign to anyone who’s been part of the cannabis counterculture for years, but we still had zero legal protections. Nothing would hold up in court. Not even signed contracts.
And the corporations entering cannabis from other verticals — namely pharma, tobacco, booze — fully understood this landscape and took complete advantage of it. There was now so much money flying around. Newly legal cannabis revenues, corporations pouring in with deep pockets, crypto gains being funneled into anything that looked like a fresh opportunity. And there were zero real laws or protections in place to counter the level of greed that comes with the idea that a piece of that money could be yours.
It was a different world, a different level — one I wasn’t remotely prepared for, or honestly even equipped to understand at the time.
The Billionaire Enters
At this stage, there was all this money rushing into the industry, but banking was still pretty much off-limits. During my CBD sales, there were talks of piles of cash and armored car transports. I mean, truly wild times were had. So when I connected with someone who claimed he could bank canna businesses, I jumped at the chance.
This person seemed completely legitimate. He was being written up in all the cannabis trade magazines as an industry leader. Harvard-educated. An Iraq War vet. Now a hedge fund manager and a billionaire. And he wanted to fix the cannabis industry’s biggest problem at the time — banking.
We’ll call this person Jason Ostello.
Jason knew I not only had in-roads into the industry, but, more importantly, that people trusted me. I said what I did and did what I said. I vetted people before working with them, I wouldn’t sell product off-spec. This industry mattered to me — the people we could help with this medicine mattered to me. And I wanted to be here for a long time, not just a high time.
So Jason started cozying up to me, pitching his banking services. And I started to dig in and go through my own vetting process: read all the documents, cross-reference everything against current law, talk to the people he claimed he was already working with.
Honestly, if you’re not caught up chasing quick money, it’s pretty easy to discern truth from fiction. Fiction doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t align. There are gaps in the story, pieces missing. Truth, on the other hand, is sensical. It’s stable. It follows a clear timeline of events. It doesn’t leave you with a bunch of unanswered questions and nagging doubts.
And that’s exactly what I was left with after vetting Jason Ostello: unease, doubts, and lingering questions. When you ask a liar too many questions, they tend to get annoyed — which is another red flag. Jason was getting angry with me for asking basic questions. Given that we were talking about banking cannabusinesses pulling in, at minimum, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, why wouldn’t someone take the time to answer a couple of questions to ensure the deal runs smoothly?
His attitude didn’t sit right with me. But here I was — a patient advocate and long-time cannabis consumer, pretty much creating my own way in this industry — up against an apparent billionaire who was so well-connected he was being published in every major cannabis outlet. People were revering him almost like a god. Who was I to question it?
The Backlash
Well, if you know me, you know I don’t care about any of that. Some might call me “uncouth”, I prefer “real”. Regardless, I did not have experience in this kind of highly lucrative corporate landscape. I (wrongly) assumed that this being the legal cannabis industry, it would matter if someone was doing something majorly illegal. I mean, if people were getting arrested for selling dime bags on a corner, surely there had to be some kind of control at the top to stop outright criminal activity in the millions.
Not in the cannabis industry.
At this time, Jason was also involved in pumping his pot stock. And while I might not have understood the banking world, I was studying cannabis stocks and had a decent grasp of the market. The whole thing was crooked to the core. After digging more, I realized his company was basically a shell. Everything he said was a lie. He was conning people out of millions of dollars. Again — not to beat a dead horse, but this part is so important. The cannabis industry primarily revolved around trust at this point. There were no degrees, no certified experts, no way to verify anything. Just a landscape of lawlessness trying to become legal.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do to protect our industry. I took to LinkedIn and publicly told people that Jason Ostello should not be trusted. The funny thing about naiveté is that you’re naive to just how naive you actually are. It’s quite the conundrum. I was not at all prepared for the backlash that followed. And it wasn’t directed at Jason — it was aimed squarely at me. My credibility was shredded. Overnight, I went from being an up-and-coming industry insider to a crazy person who provided no value. I was suddenly the one deemed untrustworthy.
Money talks and Jason had many more supporters than I did. They saw the value in defending a “billionaire” over a lone cannabis patient and advocate. I couldn’t offer them anything, while Jason could offer them the world. Never mind the fact that I was trying to save people from being conned because I genuinely cared about the health of the industry and the patients it served. People did not want to hear a truth that, at this point, sat in total opposition to their worldview. Jason had created a façade he sold very well — and people bought into it to the tune of millions. The idea that it was all a lie, that he was an emperor with no clothes, was not something anyone wanted to entertain.
Then I got served a cease and desist by a leading cannabis law firm. At that point, I wasn’t just persona non grata in the industry — my livelihood and my foundation were being actively threatened. I was completely on my own and totally isolated. But I didn’t give up. I shared the documentation and evidence I had gathered publicly. I told the law firm that if they wanted to take me to court, they’d have to prove what I was saying wasn’t true. Spoiler alert: They couldn’t.
And I kept working with the people who genuinely cared about the industry and the medicine. I didn’t have the same level of respect or authority I once had — but honestly, that was okay. It had become very clear, very quickly, that I was outmatched in this world of billionaires and business interests.
The Reveal
A year passed, and the industry was still absolutely wild. The CBD lab I had helped bring millions of dollars in sales to decided not to pay me. I was also openly disagreeing with people who had come into the industry to make money off cannabis while simultaneously warning everyone about how “dangerous” it was. If you’ve read my previous stories, you know life in the cannabis industry has not been easy for me. So I was essentially cementing myself as an industry outsider, because in cannabis, truth is unwelcome. But it’s something I have a passion for, so I kept going.
Soon, I got a message via Linkedin from one of my connections. There was just a picture attached, and my jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There he was — Jason Ostello — on an FBI Most Wanted poster. Apparently, his lies had finally caught up to him. He was wanted for conning cannabis businesses and OTC stock investors out of millions of dollars.
He was eventually apprehended by the FBI in a remote part of Southern California while carrying a backpack full of gold bars, $70,000 in U.S. and Mexican currency, and a fake ID. I guess the man was fully breaking bad and getting ready to cross the border. You really can’t make this stuff up.
You’d think the cannabis industry would care about this. Maybe that I’d even get some kind of apology. But no — too many people had aligned themselves with Jason and his lies, and by then it was more convenient for various interests to pretend the whole thing had never happened. What a story, right? But the cannabis trade magazines that once featured him in all his “glory” had zero interest in reporting on his capture. Plausible deniability and all that.
So this is the tale of how a cannabis con man conned everyone but me.
It was a massive learning lesson. I saw how easy it is to criminalize a “black market” while people at the top of a legal industry are doing far worse and getting paid millions for it. I saw how much easier it is for people to believe a lie than to believe the truth — especially when the lie comes from someone who looks like they can make all your dreams come true. In that environment, the truth isn’t just ignored; it’s reviled. And the person who confronts that lie is put in a potentially volatile position.
I’m no longer naive about the ways of the corporate world, and honestly, this insight has helped me tremendously in my work against cannabis disinformation. As the old adage goes: there are no losses, only lessons. I may not have become a cannabis millionaire. But I became something far more powerful: someone the industry can’t silence anymore.
The experience sharpened me. It taught me how the game works. It prepared me for the work I do today — exposing structural disinformation, manipulation, and manufactured narratives. I didn’t lose. I evolved. And now I tell the truth openly, without fear, without permission, and without apology. Because I earned it.
Press enter or click to view image in full size
If this resonated, you might appreciate my earlier stories about cannabis disinformation and the inner workings of the industry. You can find them here.