A dispatch from the big house
One of the country's last federally imprisoned weed traffickers speaks from lockup in Pennsylvania
This was originally published on Beard Bros Pharms dot com. Please click here to read the original piece, which both the brothers and the author, Dan Muessig, have graciously allowed me to republish in full. Muessig wrote and emailed his copy from his official prison email, where he and I are also currently corresponding.
Another point I’d like to make before continuing: When Muessig got busted on May 24, 2019, Pittsburgh had already decriminalized small amounts of cannabis for personal use, and he had been out of the game for several years. Medical use was legalized in Pennsylvania three years earlier.
If you’d like to hire Dan after he’s out of prison in three years, I am authorized to put you in touch with him, depending on if the connection is right and he okays it. He has a law degree and used to be licensed to practice law (obviously, as a convicted felon, he is no longer, but he can consult or work for your weed company, depending on state laws). He also ran a profitable trap game for a long time, which, truthfully, some of you legal industry suits could really use a lesson on (Sorry! But it’s true). Read what he has to say, learn more about the business that put him in prison at the bottom, and let me know if you think you might want to get to know Muessig.
I write to you from a place where people die of diseases you would have believed to have been treated in your great-grandparent’s time. A place where we eat refuse, are counted like livestock, and sleep with knives. For breaking the same laws you do to make your comfortable and relatively unthreatened incomes, I have given these fetid dungeons the best years of my life.
I have never seen my daughter in person, only on a $6000 cellphone that put me in 24-hour lockup for months on end. I have seen things the uninitiated could not comprehend, let alone survive. And I want to tell you a few things you may find disturbing or threatening.
But I do not care. For transparency’s sake, I am angry. I think you can gauge that. And my seething rage at the inequities which have destroyed my life is not confined to cops and judges and prosecutors.
It also extends to you. Yes, you are sitting comfortably at the tables or dais in this lobbying conference where you will hobnob performatively and then flit off to various restaurants, bars, and hotels to accomplish nothing of note or effect.
Suppose you work in legal cannabis and you have not done prison time for cannabis, particularly as a professional advocate, corporate employee/executive, or a 501(c)(3) organization. In that case, you need to implement provisions immediately to replace your workforce with those who were formerly incarcerated for cannabis, at least until the list of qualified candidates has been exhausted.
If you are already doing so, then I salute you and offer my heartfelt thanks on behalf of my community. I understand this is probably upsetting or even infuriating to hear. I also do not care how this lands, so long as it lands. None of you would have your jobs were it not for us.
We created the industry from which you derive your lifestyles, safety, and security. And most tellingly, you are beneficiaries of a corrupt bargain with an intransigent government where we lose our lives doing the same thing you profit from. I ask you to look back on the plight of cannabis prisoners.
Let us be frank. Cannabis will not be legal this year or next year, federally. No federal prisoners, except a handful, are coming home until their sentences are over. At this point, a clear-eyed look at advocacy in the space would reveal that there is no way to help us until we are released.
And that is where the help fails. We are felons. Most of us are ruined. We bear the scarlet letter, the mark of Cain. Background checks are meaningless. A single Google search can reveal our incarceration, and then we are categorically excluded from the living wage economy. You are not getting us out of prison. And you cannot mollify us with commissary.
We need good jobs to support our families when we come home. We need your jobs, in all honesty. There is no justice to be gained by the law. There is solely economic justice. And with no justice, there can be no peace.
I entreat you to do the hard work and employ those of us who need the work, no matter what it does to the unafflicted. We demand a seat at the table. We do not need web mentions or commissary. We need in. Help us. We demand it.
– Daniel Muessig, FCI Fort Dix
Daniel Muessig sent this letter to Beard Bros. Pharms via prison email to publish with permission. Please click here to read the original piece.
While touring the world as a freestyle rapper and practicing as a criminal defense attorney, Daniel Muessig, aka Dos-Noun, established what many consider the largest legacy cannabis business in Western PA. According to Pittsburgh Independent, it was “Pittsburgh’s destination, an invite-only underground cannabis dispensary, 7 days a week, 12 hours a day in the middle of an East End neighborhood for six straight years.” I know many folks who passed through back when it was up, and everyone agrees. It was the spot.
I’ve also known Muessig via the airwaves for a few years now, since before he went away. We corresponded while he was awaiting prison; lately, we have been catching up. Before his sentence, he and his wife lost an adoption bid due to his conviction. Since then, they had a daughter via IVF. Our children are six months apart in age. Only I get to spend every day with my son. Muessig’s never met his daughter. He says he’s not doing so hot, mentally. It’s not hard to see why.
Muessig is whip-smart, quick with observations, and dryly funny, belying his education, law degree, and wealthy Squirrel Hill Pedigree. I like chatting with him. He reminds me of my friends from home, and hearing about prison is interesting and, I feel, also necessary to bear witness to. But I feel guilty when we talk, knowing I’m benefiting from everything destroying him and his family. It’s a tough pill to swallow. Still, I’m glad to be back in touch.
Anyway, back to Pittsburgh. Muessig built a whole distro network that also fed his retail location, and he pioneered branding, customer loyalty programs, security technology, and a flat pricing scheme to increase his business's market share aggressively. He also published a cheeky “Better Call Saul”-style marketing video that likely played unfavorably in his subsequent case. “Boys and their videos,” I said to Muessig, who replied, “Haha. There’s something to that.”
An FBI raid in May 2019 forced the closure of his wholesale business, which was technically unlicensed (Pennsylvania’s legal framework would never have allowed for it at the time, nor now, even if he had intended to operate legally). He also closed his retail business, which was also unlicensed, in hopes of reopening it later.
Two and a half years after a forced retirement from legacy cannabis while working as a real estate developer and landlord, he was indicted for the 2019 incident due to the widespread use of informants. Refusing to cut a deal or speak to authorities, he was given a mandatory 5-year prison sentence in the federal system.
Dan Muessig currently lives at FCI Fort Dix. Previously, he was a resident at FCI Morgantown before being transferred.
Man your going to be pretty sad to see what RETAIL has done to Cannabis. No one in this game has REAL street cred or knows what a real hustle is. They just find a rapper and slap his picture behind some product.
The industry doesn't pay anyone enough to survive let alone real ones not living at home and secondly they won't hire felons because the classification of cannabis. Hope your stay isn't much longer and your getting plenty on the books.
This is for the homie locked up to read btw not the rest of ya!