Your Origin Story, Chuck
Over the last many years, whenever I’ve heard you explain how you became involved with cannabis in town, it’s felt super phony.
It’s felt phony, Chuck, in part, because when the topic has come up, you make sure—without fail—to insert your origin story, where you remind your listeners how “anti-cannabis” you were based on how you were “brought up” and how “being the new guy” on the Select Board you “kind of got stuck with” having to serve on the Marijuana Working Group in 2018 and how “since then” your opinion on cannabis “has gone full circle” and how today, you see this plant “in a whole new light.”
I’ve heard this origin story several times since 2018.
Your snappy little phrases have been consistent enough to suggest you’ve memorized this tale of your humble beginnings as a public servant during a time of great transition with cannabis coming to Littleton.
Your avowals of aversion—your “I was forced into it” claim—don’t square with your actions while on our town’s Select Board.
Just three weeks ago, I was told that this origin story of yours doesn’t begin in 2018, as you like to tell it, with you getting “stuck” on the Marijuana Working Group.
Your origins go back to (at least) 2016 when you showed up to a meeting between Jason Sidman (multi-millionaire owner of Sanctuary Medicinals, a multi-state, multi-operator in the cannabis industry) and two elected town officials who themselves had planned to meet with Sidman alone to discuss Sidman’s business interests vis a vis growing cannabis in town. (At the time of this meeting, Sidman had yet to sign an HCA with the town.)
This scheduled meeting was a three-person meeting, that you weren’t invited to, that, objectively one might believe, you had no interest in.
But interested you were.
And in the meeting, you stayed.
It seems Sidman had no objections to you being there, completely unannounced, at a business meeting with those two elected town officials since, as I understand it, Sidman was quick to point out, that you, Chuck, were also an elected town official.
So, if you were barging in on meetings the town didn’t invite you to about cannabis way back in 2016, your origin story is leaving out a couple of really important foundational years.
TTYS,
Jkb