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Bud Brand Inspired by Band: Cannabis entrepreneur remedies neuropathy, pays homage to Phish with cannabis company AURORA RAE FOR MICHIGAN GREEN STATE Over a decade ago, Rob Robar made a decision that changed his life. After working a job that required driving long hours cross country, he blew his back out in 2001. Herniations, sciatic pain, and even surgeries followed. He returned to the job less than a year later, and for the next decade, remedied his neuropathy – and pain – with prescription drugs. “(It was) five years of straight Vicodin, and whatever else type things like that,” he said. “Then it was those plus Xanax or other benzos, things like that, that were to make me feel better about the other (because) you were so miserable… I never felt better, ever.” FEELING BETTER Robar said he made a choice, in 2010,
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to pursue natural methods… and found himself finally feeling better. “I left all pharmaceuticals behind,” he said. “For the most part cannabis is what saved me back then. It gave me great not only pain relief but focus. It also gave me the ability to get up and workout a bit, spending 30-minutes a day of movement, or just start to feel better… Next thing I know a year later, I lost 175 pounds.” Robar obtained a medical marijuana card and turned to cannabis infused products he bought from dispensaries, like Bloom City Club based in Ann Arbor, to relieve his symptoms. “I was buying them… and I was like ‘Wow this is really cool, its works’,” he said. “But then, also, it was a little bit expensive.” AN INSPIRATIONAL TRIP TO COLORADO In 2016, Robar traveled to Colorado to see his favorite band: Phish. Unlike his
more recent discovery of cannabis, the rock band was nothing new to him. “I always call them the soundtrack to my life,” he said. His infatuation with Phish began after seeing them for the first time on a Grateful Dead tour thirty years ago in Ann Arbor. “The first ever show I saw was in (1991 in a) little, tiny bar downstairs, maybe 200 people and I’ve now seen them with as many as 150-some-thousand.” Phish has been “a big influence (on) how I do a lot of things,” he said, including entrepreneurship. It was in Colorado he bought “a bunch of topicals” that, as expected, helped him relax. He said his “legs constantly spasm”, especially in his sleep, and finding the relief he did with topicals inspired him to personally recreate it and do more with cannabis than simply use it himself. “When I came back home, it just inspired
me to do something with it,” he said. “And create something that I thought was more.” CREATING A PLATFORM
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