Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, February 11th. Today on Forbes, Zinn, but with weed,

the pouch craze hits the cannabis industry. In October 2011, Cliff Sammet and his friends

pulled a Ford escape into the Stanford Football Stadium parking lot and sparked a joint

while they looked for a spot.

The guys were all up from Santa Cruz for a game against USC. While hotboxing in the parking lot,

they rolled down their windows and got dirty looks as they passed parents with young children.

Samet, who was working at a hospital at the time and getting drug tested, couldn't hit

the joint that was being passed around.

Instead, he packed a pinch of Copenhagen smokeless tobacco and tossed the tin on the dash.

Then, in a nicotine-fueled buzz, he had an aha moment.

He says, quote, I threw in a lipper and thought, why not put the pot in the chew?

His friends, who were all glazed over at that point, naturally thought it was a brilliant idea.

It would be another four more years until Samet ran into Case Mandel, an old high school buddy and

cannabis entrepreneur who was running an illegal THC extraction lab in Humboldt

County, California at the time, and pitched him on his idea, create a lip pouch laced with

cannabis, not nicotine. This was before Zinn, Philip Morris International's pouches became a cult

obsession in the United States. But Samet, a long-time dipper, had been introduced to

snooce pouches, which contained pasteurized tobacco and pure nicotine products. His idea had coalesced

over the years, and he realized pouches, not dip, would make for a better delivery system for

THC. Mandel, who is 40 years old, and Samet, who is 38, and a small scrappy team decided to use

the husks of coconuts as a filler.

Coconut coir is incredibly absorbent and typically used by cannabis cultivators.

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