‘Aging Ent’ of Chehalis at Work on Pot in Washington, Online

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Michael Schroeder moved from Chicago to Chehalis because he wanted to be part of the marijuana industry. 

Once he got there, he saw a niche that no one else had filled. Now, he’s trying to help shape the conversations people have about the plant and foster a higher level of refinement among the people who sell it. 

Schroeder goes by the Internet moniker “the Aging Ent” and built a website under the same name. The word “Ent” was created by J.R.R. Tolkien to refer to a race of creatures who resemble and live among trees. People who use marijuana and talk about it in Internet communities adopted the term to reference themselves. When developing a brand for himself, Schroeder chose the Aging Ent as a way to strike a middle ground and separate himself from the younger and older marijuana cultures online.  

“I feel I can strike a balance because I can market to both ends of it and be non-intrusive to the cultural aspect,” he said. 

He’s built a blog where he reviews marijuana stores, the knowledge and customer service of their staff and the strains they offer. He also started two podcasts, online radio shows that can be downloaded and listened to at any time, where he reviews marijuana products and converses with people in the industry.  

His idea isn’t new. There are a number of websites that feature user-submitted reviews of stores and strains of plants, but Schroeder wants to take it to a more sophisticated level. 

“There needs to be references for people beyond, ‘Hey, this is really awesome. They had great pot.’ How was their service? What do you know about them or their strains?” he said, referring to the reviews often seen online. 

Legalization is a political experiment that has drawn international attention, and the Internet gives people a window into how it’s unfolding. With a laptop and a microphone, he has broadcasted what’s happening locally out to the world. 

Although his website has been up for about four months, it has already attracted the attention of 16,000 visitors from across the globe without any real advertising. 

“I’ve gotten a lot of attention, I mean a ton. I’m huge in Israel,” he said. “I got a bunch of traffic one day, but I was thinking it was fake traffic. Then I got a bunch of hits the next day and the next day and it was a bunch of Israelis up late reading my blog.” 



He thinks of marijuana much the same as many would think of whiskey. There are flavor profiles and complexities behind every blend that were developed by careful and crafty people over years. 

But while alcohol has been around long enough for people to imbibe, ponder and discuss, marijuana is something that’s been part of the counterculture for decades and still has a stigma attached to it. 

So while there are hundreds of varieties with different characteristics, the knowledge about them has spread little beyond the growers themselves. 

“I’m trying to create a whole new conversation around how pot is talked about and how it’s sold and the interactions people have about it,” he said. “One of the important things about legal marijuana is it’s tested, you know what you’re buying, it’s heavily regulated and you know you’re not buying some nonsense where someone walked up with it out of a backpack.”

One of the big tipping points for Schroeder was when he visited the same store on three separate occasions and had the same product explained three different ways by the same person. As medical marijuana gets absorbed into the recreational structure, product consistency and knowledge possessed by stores will be important for clients. 

Schroeder hopes to take what he’s learned about the law and the product knowledge he’s amassed and market himself as a consultant to marijuana businesses looking to improve. 

Schroeder chose Washington over Colorado because he believed it took the better of the two legalization paths. While Colorado relied on medical dispensaries to sell legalized marijuana, the Washington State Liquor Control Board set strict and narrow guidelines for the entire process of how marijuana can be produced and sold. 

The “seed-to-sales” monitoring rules meant legal pot trickled onto the market at a rate that was frustratingly slow for people in the industry and led some in the media to believe that stores might never open. When it comes to the spread of legalized pot, Schroeder thinks the Washington model will spread more easily to other states. 

“(Washington’s) goal is a tightly controlled legal marijuana market; in Colorado it is to have legalized marijuana,” he said. “The two sound similar but the difference between working to control and working to legalize is big. … We live in a society where the control structure wins.”