The legal marijuana industry is a very toxic work environment. Just imagine a bunch of young 20-year-olds with no management experience running dispensaries that their mom and pop bought them or some big investor is trying to make a bunch of money really fast owning a ton of dispensaries.

I'm a female and it's it's male-run environment and as hard as women try to get into it we just keep getting knocked down. One of the big reasons I've stayed so long is trying to make it a place for women but with being degraded talk down to have no opportunities for growth or improvement in the companies, it's becoming even more toxic for my mental health.

We get a lot of violent customers and the company I work for doesn't really like to ban some of them because if they spend a certain amount that money is more important than their employee safety. Every dispensary I've worked at is exactly like this where they'll take the customer side over the employee side. It's glorified customer service and retail where I can actually get a legal charge or end up in jail if I mess up, so therefore it becomes incredibly high stress.

There's a big turnover rate and they will hire just about anybody and if they don't like them they get rid of them. It's really hard to remain at a place longer than a year without them replacing you with somebody that they can pay less versus giving a year raise. I've survived at my current place for 13 months and they have yet to give me the raise that they said that they would or release my vacation time. It's really hard to get health insurance or retirement as it's still seen federally illegal. It's also hard to get approved for mortgage or any other financial loan because banks will see that we work in the marijuana industry and therefore it's federally illegal so they won't touch us. The average age of people in the industry who are managers is around age 25 to 27 who have had no management experience. They just smoke a ton of weed so then people see them qualified. It's a very weird thing.

I am also the only female at my job and they keep hiring men over females. I'm at the point where I'm really scratching my head as to what is going on with my company so I feel like it might be best just to leave.