Roots of a Compliance Culture

Twilight barely starts breaking over the mountains when I hear heavy tires crunch on the gravel outside my cabin. It isn’t the usual ATVs making their early rounds. Through the window, I make out the headlights of a truck through the thick morning mist that rises and streams between the mountains like it does every morning this time of year. I pull my kettle off the wood stove and pull my boots on. I douse the fire and go to see what the visit is about.

Apparently, it’s time for the field of beautiful cannabis plants beside my cabin to be harvested. ‘Aw,’ I think to myself, ‘I’m going to miss waking up each morning to see the plants in their natural state. Their bluish haze in the morning light and dark greens glowing in the setting sun. Seeing them grow a bit more each day. The weight of the buds just beginning to bend their stalks.

One plant is already cut down and waiting in the truck bed to be transported somewhere to cure. As the team begins cutting the second plant, I overhear someone refer to the strain as “green crack.”

“There is no way that’s green crack,” I begin saying absentmindedly before prattling off the observations and genealogical guesses I had been making about the growing plants all season, “Look how dark it is, look how short and wide, it’s got to be a kush. Right?” Things go quiet as the team stops to take a long look at the field.

“Oops,” they say. It turns out that they have the wrong field. They would have harvested 50 Grand Daddy Purp plants if no one had mentioned that they were looking at the wrong plant.

I think, ‘Come on. There has to be a better way.

That was over 10 years before I began working in the compliance side of cannabis, but it wasn’t my first inkling that I had a future in that department.

About a week into my first trim job, I completed my first two-pound day. “How is it that you’re so fast already?” my boss asked in disbelief. True to form, I had sought and searched for every little bit of info I could about how to trim bud well in advance of my train ride up into the mountains.

But that wasn’t all that helped me adapt so quickly. The more experienced trimmers shared their hard-won knowledge: pointers on hand positioning, tips to prune the most structurally beautiful buds without disturbing the trichomes and how to keep smoking without slowing down on the job. We were trained communally and piecemeal according to the whims of the people around us or guided by our own curiosity and research. For me, that learning experience was lovely, but I was still thinking to myself, ‘There must be a better way.’

Each day that I work in cannabis compliance, I am reminded of these early industry issues and am struck by the progress that has been made in proving that there is a better way forward for compliance in the industry. A way forward that honors the legacy and culture that the legal industry is growing from yet provides structure for operational excellence. This way promotes skill sharing and community while bringing in structures and policies that prevent mistakes like harvesting the wrong plant and ensure no employee is left doing guesswork.

Now, as a Senior Compliance Manager at Ethos, I strive to blend curiosity and passion with structured engagement and focused improvements. Time-honored traditions like peer-led discourse and skill-sharing are encouraged and training is supported by accessible, easy-to-understand resources. The gap between the “roots” and the “suits” erodes and both groups are equally engaged in the exchange of ideas so that processes and policies meet the dynamic needs of a cannabis organization.

I’ve spent years turning quiet questions into concrete solutions, building systems that prevent avoidable mistakes and advocating for structure that protects both the plant and the people who care for it. I know firsthand how much pride and passion live in this work and I carry that with me into every policy I write, every audit I conduct and every conversation I have. What I bring to compliance isn’t just knowledge of the rules, it’s a deep respect for the cuWlture and a commitment to doing things better.