How LOWD Founder Jesce Horton Built A Multimillion-Dollar Cannabis Brand After Being A Casualty Of The War On Drugs

Like many kids graduating high school in North Carolina, James Horton was enjoying the final days of summer with his friends before taking off for college. After being accepted to the University of North Carolina, all that was left to do was relax. But one night, as he was driving home from a party, he saw those red and blue lights in his rear-view mirror. Horton didn’t have a license—but he did have a little under an ounce of pot in the car. He knew he was in trouble. And he knew he wasn’t going to be a freshman on campus that fall.

“[He] was a good kid,” says Jesce Horton, James’ son, “[he] ended up getting seven years in prison for that.”

Upon his release, Horton’s father got back into UNC, earned a Master’s in business administration, and worked his way up from being a janitor to a vice president at State Farm. When Jesce started to experiment with cannabis around 16, his dad, naturally, tried to prevent him from using the substance that put him in prison.

“It was crazy, man,” says Jesce Horton, who is now 38.  “He would drug test me after high school.  Sometimes I failed, sometimes I passed, but [my parents] did everything they could to keep me away from cannabis.”

They failed.

Today, Jesce Horton legally grows some of the most sought-after, high-end cannabis in Oregon as the cofounder and CEO of  LOWD, headquartered in Portland. LOWD, which stands for Love Our Weed Daily (“loud” is also slang for high-quality marijuana), prides itself on being an award-winning cannabis company that sells some of the state’s most anticipated craft flower. The company utilizes a precise tempered curing room, with custom lighting and racking, preserving their flowers in glass jars before arriving at the retailer.

Horton, who is Black, co-founded LOWD in 2019, partially as a way to reclaim the economic opportunity in the $20 billion industry for communities who have been hurt by America’s decades-long war on drugs. In an industry that is projected to generate $41 billion by 2025, less than five percent of cannabis business owners today are Black. But LOWD was originally backed by a roster of all-Black investors. The company netted roughly $750,000 in revenue last year and Horton says revenue is projected to reach $3.5 million by the end of 2021 and expects to clear close to $1.5 million in profit.

Today, 37 states now allow medical marijuana while 18 have legalized adult-use. Earlier this month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced a draft of a bill proposing federal legalization, but the votes are not likely there yet.

For now, in an industry dominated by companies backed by white billionaires, Horton is making his voice heard through LOWD. “The importance of being at the table, period, point blank,” Horton says of Black cannabis entrepreneurs having a say in legislation and business development. He and his family know all too well how cannabis prohibition has systematically targeted Black and brown communities across America for decades. Due to the racial disparities of drug enforcement, Black and brown people are 3.73 times more likely to get arrested for marijuana than white people, even though usage rates are similar.

Despite his parents’ best efforts, Horton was first arrested for cannabis at 18 and continued to have minor runs with the police throughout the next few years.  His affinity for marijuana stayed with him through his adult life, but he wasn’t a slacker. In 2002, he attended Florida State University, where he majored in industrial engineering and minored in mathematics and physics. FSU and HBCU Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, combine to create one engineering school between the two institutions.

During college, he interned for General Electric for three consecutive summers, but missed out on a full-time opportunity after failing a drug test. But like his father, he didn’t let adversity get in the way of his plans. Horton got a job at Siemens in their leadership development program and went to work at the company’s headquarters in Munich, Germany. On the weekends, he spent his time in Amsterdam, sampling cannabis at the city’s famed coffee shops.

Horton cold-called and emailed some 2,000 potential investors in the cannabis industry. He got no responses. 

In 2013, Horton took a transfer to Portland, just when the legal cannabis industry was sprouting in Oregon. Dissatisfied with his work at Siemens, he decided to grow a little herb in his basement. It was only a matter of time before he fully dedicated his professional life to growing cannabis. After just over a year in Portland, he quit his role at Siemens. He called his mother and broke the news, she hung up on him.

Horton immediately began to look for funding. After cold-calling and emailing some 2,000 contacts from a list of potential investors in the cannabis industry, he got no responses. 

“There was a lot of bootstrapping in there,” says Horton on his early days after Siemens. “Those 2,000 investors, they didn't know me. I didn't have the intrinsic qualities, maybe that they wanted, that helped them get to know me, or maybe help them see themselves in me.”  

Eventually, he found a solution from an unlikely source—his father. James Horton agreed to invest $30,000 in the nascent business and Jesce then approached friends and family, putting together a funding round entirely made up of people of color. His parents and a few other family members, each with a pair of scissors in hand, helped him trim off the buds for his first harvest. To save money, Horton has been using his training as an engineer to build efficient facilities. Today, LOWD cultivates cannabis in a 7,500-square-foot indoor grow operation.        

And like most cannabis entrepreneurs, Horton is devoted to paying forward what he has sown. He has helped start two nonprofits focusing on social, legal, and equity-based cannabis reform. Horton and his wife, Jeannette, launched the NuLeaf Project, which has partnered with Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s and his new cannabis venture Ben’s Best, Scotts Miracle Gro and the city of Portland, has given $1 million in grants and zero-percent interest loans to Black and brown entrepreneurs running cannabis companies. By focusing on gathering capital, providing education and exposure, and making connections for future entrepreneurs, NuLeaf wants to build intergenerational wealth for communities that have been most affected by unfair cannabis laws and practices in the past.         

Horton also helped create the Minority Cannabis Business Association, which promotes economic empowerment in communities of color by helping create policy, social programming, and outreach initiatives. “[We’re] utilizing cannabis tax funds to execute real community benefits,” Horton says, “regardless of their connection to cannabis.”

Today, decades after his life took a detour before college, James Horton is proud of the work his son does. But Jesce Horton also knows there is much work to be done to make the industry more diverse.      

“The community as a whole has been harmed, is afraid, is not trusting of legalization,” says Horton. “If we can develop programs that really utilize this prosperity of cannabis…to really support things so people can say, ‘If it wasn't for that cannabis industry, I don't know this opportunity would have been presented for me.’”