"My father was killed in a drug deal when I was three. That's where my story with cannabis starts — not with a joint, but with a funeral."
Jeff Freeman didn't choose cannabis. Cannabis chose the trajectory of his life before he could even understand what it was.
Growing up in Seattle, he watched his older cousins bag up quarter-pounds in his grandmother's house. They had the cars, the Jordans, the status. But Jeff also knew the cost. His father was gone. His mother, raising two kids alone, turned to alcohol to manage the pain. He spent his childhood in NA and AA meeting rooms, absorbing stories of addiction, loss, and the systems that created both.
He was against cannabis for years. Completely. He saw the destruction the drug trade caused and wanted nothing to do with it.
Then his mother's chronic pain changed everything. Watching her suffer, watching pharmaceuticals fail her, he started researching. He started listening. And slowly, reluctantly, he began to see what cannabis could actually be when it wasn't tangled up in prohibition and violence: medicine. Relief. A better option than what the system was offering.
That shift didn't just change his mind. It built a company.
"There's the cannabis passion — and then there's people who are really good at business. We are really good at the cannabis business."
In 2012, Jeff co-founded mFused with Adam Melero and Yung Tan. They started in Washington's medical space with a simple conviction: patients deserved safe, consistent, lab-tested products.
They launched one of the first high-CBD vape cartridges on the market. Not because CBD was trendy. It wasn't yet. But because patients needed it.
From there, they built. Not with venture capital. Not with institutional money. Not with debt. With revenue. With reinvestment. With the radical idea that you could fund a half-billion-dollar cannabis company the same way you build anything real: by making something people want, selling it for a fair price, and putting the money back into making it better.
Fourteen years later, mFused is the #1 cartridge in Washington state, the #1 processor by revenue and oil production, and one of the largest distribution channels in the Pacific Northwest. They process up to 8,000 pounds per month from over 100 partner farms. They've expanded into Arizona, New York, Maryland, and Missouri.
Over half a billion dollars in retail sales. Zero outside investment. Zero debt.
That's not a business story. That's a statement.
"The people funding our small business — our customers — stayed top of mind, and we reinvested their money back into the product. That's our ethos of conscious capitalism."