Entrepreneur Jesce Horton Goes LOWD on Inequity

Jesce Horton is a co-founder and CEO of LOWD. His company cultivates some of the most popular, high-end, legal, cannabis in Portland. LOWD (Love Our Weed Daily or “loud,” a euphemism for quality ganja) is an award-winning cannabis producer.

Jesce Horton

He Didn’t Listen

Horton started smoking at 16. When his father found out, things didn’t go well.

Horton’s father, James, did seven years for possessing less than an ounce of weed. As a result, the father did everything he had to curtail his son’s desire to puff.

Now almost 40 years old, Jesce Horton attests, “It was crazy, man. He would drug test me after high school.  Sometimes I failed, sometimes I passed, but” [his parents] “did everything they could to keep me away from cannabis.”

Thankfully, the efforts of the Hortons failed. The son became a cannabis entrepreneur.

Getting the Dream Off the Ground

LOWD is an award-winning flower crafter. In an industry dominated by white billionaires, Horton wants LOWD to reclaim an economic opportunity snatched away from victims of the disastrous war on drugs.

It stresses Horton that the cannabis industry stands on the backs of people of color, people punished for the smallest cannabis connection. He’s frustrated that in a thriving cannabis business only five percent of owners are black.

The Early Days

Horton started growing herb in his Portland basement. A little over 12 months later, he quit his job at Siemens and focused on his plants. The grower decided he needed to make his business legit.

Original LOWD investors were black. It was a process. Horton reached out to 2,000 financial prospects and didn’t get a single response. He decided to go to an unlikely source: his father. (Upon hearing of his cannabis plans, Horton’s mother hung up on her son.) James Horton gave his son $30,000. The son then pitched to other family and friends, all people of color. Besides funding, parents and family came in with scissors to trim buds on the first harvest.

Better Days

Horton admits his first arrest for cannabis was at 18. But like his dad (who earned an MBA after getting out of prison), he wasn’t a stoner. The son went to Florida State, studying engineering, mathematics, and physics. He interned with General Electric but couldn’t get a full-time spot after failing a drug test.

Today, he cultivates in a 7,500 square foot indoor facility.

Like many of his fellow weed entrepreneurs, Horton wants to pay it forward. He’s involved in two legal, social, and equity-based cannabis reform nonprofits.

With wife Jeannette, he launched the NuLeaf Project, the only U.S. organization of its kind granting and loaning the majority of its funds to cannabis businesses owned by black and brown people.

Horton says, “The community as a whole has been harmed, is afraid, is not trusting of legalization. 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.’”