David & Crystal Spang

David and Crystal Spang founded Nine Dot, a cannabis beverage brand, after eight years of running hemp stores together.

Chad set up the visit, and the Spangs drove into a building in FOCO that was put up decades ago by a Star Trek fan, so the front of it looks like the Enterprise. Roofers drilled overhead through most of the taping. A tall boy sat on the desk in front of Brad, who had wanted to drink one before the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast started and was talked out of it by his staff.

Their 12 ounce can holds three milligrams of THC, which David calls conservative and puts at about a beer or a glass of wine. The tall boy holds ten, plus ten milligrams of CBG and a sativa terpene profile, because they wanted the drink to lift a room rather than flatten it. He is the one who reads the research. Edibles are unreliable, he explains, because a liver enzyme converts THC into a more psychoactive form and people carry wildly different amounts of that enzyme. Nine Dot uses a water soluble emulsion that passes through the stomach lining instead, so the dose lands the same way for the customer who swears by ten milligrams and the one who swears by a hundred. They spent the better part of two years getting that emulsion right before they put the brand out.

Twelve years ago David put everything he had into the first production run of Boost Band, a bracelet that charged your phone. The cord was too short, so it snapped when you pulled it over your hand. Every unit broke, the credit cards were maxed out, and the rental model came out of that: pay once at a festival, charge all weekend, and they replaced whatever broke. Their first festival, in Ohio, took $800 in three days of total revenue, and they did not have gas money for the next one. They drove to Summer Camp in Peoria, Illinois anyway and made enough there to fund the next run. Crystal slept on tent floors through that stretch and drove out to a Walmart when the festival toilets got unbearable.

David says he was not a good student and was not a good employee, and that having the whole weight of it land on him is the reason any of this worked. He still drinks, and is clear they are not in the business of demonizing alcohol. Crystal runs the social accounts against a shadow ban that keeps them off the advertising channels everyone else gets. He sits on the South Carolina board of the American Healthy Alternatives Association, fighting bills that would end the industry. A portion of revenue from all their businesses goes back into that nonprofit.