This story was republished with permission from Crain’s Detroit.
This spring, Ryan Basore will return to Morgantown, West Virginia.
It will have been a decade since he walked out of federal prison there, after serving three years for federal drug crimes linked to a 41-plant medical marijuana grow operation in Okemos in the early days of legalization in Michigan.
But Basore, 48, returns to West Virginia as an owner and operator of a newer, growing marijuana company. His Lansing-based Redemption Cannabis Co. will find its products in a dispensary of one of the U.S.’s largest cannabis operators, Trulieve Cannabis Corp.
“What they did to me and my family … I was a mess going into prison,” said Basore, whose soft voice and wide shoulders say more small-town barstool intellectual than a hardened inmate. “My attitude going in was to use this as my crucible moment. I started walking. I lost 70 pounds. I read 300 books, mostly about branding. I did 100 sweats with the Native American group in prison. I did everything I could so that I was shot out of cannon when I got out. I knew I was getting right back in the industry.”
Basore has spent the last 10 years rebuilding his life — his brother-in-law and father-in-law were also swept up in the federal prosecution and served federal time — and building his brand.
Redemption Cannabis is as much a story as it is a product.
Basore uses his indictment as a battering ram against marijuana drug laws — he helped author Michigan’s adult-use laws that allowed for those with federal charges to gain access to cannabis business licenses and raised funds for pot-friendly politicians like Attorney General Dana Nessel — and as a means to grow his company. Redemption Cannabis donates money to federal prisoners and it got the attention of Trulieve, which is now expanding the Redemption brand across the nation, currently in four states and adding a fifth in West Virginia.
Running afoul
Basore, a longtime marijuana user and advocate, left a real estate insurance career to open Lansing’s first medical marijuana provisioning center, Capital City Caregivers, in 2010.
The success of that operation led Basore to open a medical marijuana cultivation site a few miles down the road in Okemos.
At that time, then-President Barack Obama had eased federal restrictions on state legalization of marijuana. Michigan voters approved the medical marijuana caregiver laws in 2008, but the industry largely existed in a gray area with few rules and then-Attorney General Bill Schuette rallying to upend the law and give county prosecutors authority to shut them down. Schuette later won a Michigan Supreme Court Case in 2013 that said medical dispensaries could be shuttered over the Michigan Public Health code classifying them as a “public nuisance.”
Basore said he was careful in opening the grow site, allowing the Michigan State Police and other law enforcement to inspect the operations before moving forward.
Credit: Ryan Basore Redemption Cannabis founder Ryan Basore, at left, attends a pro-cannabis legalization rally in this undated photo.
But Basore was outspoken for the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, and against Schuette. Despite believing he had the blessing of the federal government, Basore’s operations were raided by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, National Guard and the MSP on Dec. 1, 2010, only months after the cultivation site opened.
The investigation would take more than two years, resulting in Basore being indicted on 13 federal counts for the manufacturing and distribution of marijuana.
Basore held out hope that an open seat in Michigan Western District Court would be filled by a marijuana-friendly judge. Obama appointed then-Dickinson Wright attorney Pat Miles Jr. to the role; who did not dismiss the case against Basore or the six others charged, known as the Okemos 7.
By early 2013, Basore said he ran out of money to fight the charges and pled guilty to two felony counts with sentence of 48 months in prison at Federal Prison Camp Morgantown in West Virginia.
“They had threatened to indict my now-wife,” Basore said. “I was out of money and knew I had no choice but to accept a plea deal.”
Basore received an early release in May 2015 after attending a federal behavioral modification program.
He quickly reentered the industry, but only as a consultant. Michigan’s medical marijuana laws prohibited individuals with felonies from holding a license.
Credit: Ryan Basore
Ferndale-based Gage Cannabis awarded Ryan Basore a $50,000 grant as a part of a social equity program after cannabis was legalized in Michigan in 2018. Basore used the grant to establish Redemption Cannabis.
Basore spent the next several years as an axe battering away at the armor of Michigan’s anti-cannabis political establishment.
He, and his partners, became major political fundraisers for Dana Nessel’s campaign to become Attorney General and push the state’s adult-use recreational marijuana laws, which would allow for felons like Basore to hold licenses under a special social equity distinction.
After Michigan voters overwhelmingly passed Michigan Regulation and Taxation of Marihuana Act in 2018, Ferndale-based Gage Cannabis offered $1 million in grants to social equity applicants. Basore secured a $50,000 grant to establish Redemption Cannabis.
“I knew I had an opportunity, but I had no capital and needed to rebuild everything,” Basore said.
Errors and absolution
But the hard luck continued for Basore. He ordered his first batch of Redemption Cannabis packaging in 2019 from Wuhan, China — the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak.
He eventually received the packaging and launched Redemption in 15 stores across the state.
In the meantime, Basore launched the Redemption Foundation, designed to aid federal prisoners in jail for nonviolent marijuana crimes.
Credit: Ryan Basore. Redemption Cannabis founder Ryan Basore, left, and Vice President of Business Development Mark Passerini, right, hold a donation to the Redemption Foundation.
The foundation has purchased wheelchairs, food and gifts for children with a parent in prison and funded expungements. But its largest function is to fill the commissary funds of select prisoners.
Redemption Foundation has deposited money into the commissary accounts of 195 inmates across the U.S. so they can buy better shoes, snacks, toothpaste and other supplies in prison.
Basore said the money goes a long way to supplement prisoner paychecks. He earned $0.14 an hour as a custodian in the West Virginia prison, eventually earning $35 per month working the facility’s law library. Meanwhile, phone calls in prison cost $0.50 a minute and internet use was $0.25 a minute, he said.
Last month, the foundation deposited $15,500, roughly 10% of the cannabis company’s revenue plus donations from partners, into commissary funds.
As Basore’s operations grew, so did the company’s appetite for cultivation. Last year, Driven Cannabis, a grow operation run by his friend Drew Driver in Frederic Township between Gaylord and Grayling, merged with Redemption Cannabis.
The Driven operations, which include 15 acres of outdoor grow, 60,000 square feet of indoor cultivation and 15,000-square-feet of processing, will be rebranded as Redemption Cannabis in the coming months.
The growth is triggered by a licensing agreement Redemption secured with Florida-based multi-state operator Trulieve Cannabis Corp. — the third-largest cannabis company in the U.S.
Trulieve grows Redemption’s handpicked cannabis strains in other states and packages them for Redemption. The brand launched in Maryland in June last year and is now for sale in Pennsylvania, with launches in Ohio and Arizona in the fall later this year.
“Michigan is just a knife fight,” Mark Passerini, vice president of business development for Redemption, told Crain’s. “It’s a crazy competitive market and we’ve been a top-15 brand here for a while. While we’re proud of that, we knew we needed to expand elsewhere.”
Redemption now employs more than 100 workers and is available in 250 dispensaries across the state.
Basore said the company’s blossoming in the tightest margin market in the country makes growth elsewhere easier.
“If you can make it in Michigan, you can make it anywhere,” he said with a rare wry smile.
‘The Jared Goff of weed’
Basore is selling a story with Redemption. It’s a social cause behind a label. It’s his story of incarceration and comeback that he hopes is resonating.
Nick Young, an advisor for Baltimore-based cannabis advisory firm Tivity Labs and adjunct professor at Western Michigan University, said it’s a marketing strategy that works in cannabis.
“Prohibition branding resonates with 30- to 45-year-olds; the people who saw marijuana prohibition and saw it come down,” Young said. “It strikes an emotional chord for them. And I know my students are willing to pay a little more to feel good about a service or brand — whether that’s sustainable packaging or another social mission like Redemption’s. The commissary fund is something they’ve done a good job marketing. I think about them as the Jared Goff of weed. Sent off to rot and came back stronger than before. That resonates.”
Basore’s return to Morgantown with Redemption and Trulieve is a middle finger to the political powers and laws that incarcerated him.
“Leaving that place, I never wanted to go back,” he said. “I can take myself back to that cell in my mind. But now I see that time with gratitude, or try to. Because of that experience, we have to be successful no matter what. It raised the stakes for me.”
And by all measures, Basore has won.
In December, the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced it would be permanently shuttering the federal prison in Morgantown, which houses roughly 390 white-collar and drug crime inmates, due to “staffing shortages” and “crumbling infrastructure.”
To complete his full redemption, Basore is seeking a full presidential pardon from President Joe Biden — a clock that will expire on Jan. 20 when incoming President Donald Trump is inaugurated.
Still, Basore said he has contacts within that administration as well.
“That’s redemption to me,” he said. “I can’t have a gun as a felon. Just to be able to go hunting again, to have my slate wiped clean. That’s very real for me.”
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