Looking to Invest in the Medical Cannabis Industry? Here’s a Sampling of MMJ Opportunities

Investors who want to pump money into the medical marijuana industry or buy a cannabis company have plenty of options, if they can stomach the sizable risks and meet tough legal requirements.

There are plenty of dispensaries and grow operations for sale, particularly in California (and, specifically, the Los Angeles area). For buyers and investors who are more risk-averse and don’t want to be directly involved with cannabis, ancillary businesses might be the best bet.

Here’s a sampling of opportunities:

- The Weed Blog – an Oregon-based website focused on all things marijuana, including MMJ – is seeking outside money to expand the business. The site is immensely popular with the marijuana crowd, generating an average of almost 400,000 visitors and twice as many page views a month, according to data from Google Analytics (which you can view on The Weed Blog’s home page). The two guys behind the site – Johnny Green and Jay Smoker (pseudonyms, of course) – want to capitalize on that traffic from a financial perspective. The site currently doesn’t bring in much revenue – sales come from a smattering of ads – primarily because the focus has been on growing traffic and “getting the message out,” Green said. But the owners are confident about The Weed Blog’s potential. “If we were able to team up with someone that had a lot of resources that saw the same vision and did the math, I think they would see the potential as well,” Green said. He added: “We have always felt that, in a perfect world, someone would purchase us for $100,000 and hire us to continue to run the content and technical sides of the blog, and the new owner would then be responsible for the monetization part of the project.”

- For $349,000, you can buy a long-standing medical marijuana dispensary in Hollywood. The center has been open for more than six years, meaning it has a solid existing client base. But buyer beware: Los Angeles recently banned dispensaries, though the move is on hold at this time. The future of MMJ in the city is very unclear at this point. There’s a chance the ban will be rescinded or modified. Under one proposal, only long-standing dispensaries would be able to stay open, and the one for sale in Hollywood allegedly would qualify under that provision, according to the listing. Should a full ban go into effect, however, your entire investment could go up in smoke overnight.

- A medical marijuana Web portal based in Montana can be had for $250,000, complete with $50,000 in inventory. The site “serves the medical marijuana community with practical, relevant and substantiated medical cannabis news and links to services.” According to the listing, the business has 1-3 employees, was founded in 2009 and can be relocated to another area. The post also says the business offers a unique opportunity to produce “heirloom quality, strain-specific medical cannabis seeds.”

- If you’re willing to fork over big money for an established business, you can buy a dispensary in Washington State that’s been around since 2009 for a cool $1.25 million. The MMJ center is located in a “thriving business district” in Pierce County and serves roughly 4,000 patients. Gross revenues are listed at $2, which most certainly is a typo.