THC Stays in Your System Long After You’re Sober. A DUI Charge Doesn’t Care.

Justin Kahn built and sold multiple companies across a 20-year career, holding professional licenses along the way — but living in Utah, a state with a strong conservative political culture, taught him something uncomfortable early on as a cannabis consumer: a single criminal conviction tied to cannabis use could put everything he’d built professionally at risk. After selling his last company, he deliberately went looking for an underserved population carrying real, unnecessary risk — and landed on cannabis consumers specifically, betting that insurance built around individual behavior, rather than the traditional actuarial models of risk and loss, could fill a genuine protection gap.

That bet became Reepher. In Episode 73 of InsurTechTalk, Justin and I covered exactly how a sober cannabis user can still end up charged with a DUI, why there’s essentially no reliable underwriting data to build this kind of product on, and why some VCs won’t touch a cannabis-adjacent company even when it never handles the plant itself.

About Justin Kahn

Justin Kahn is CEO and co-founder of Reepher, a legal expense plan covering the costs associated with being charged with a cannabis DUI. Before Reepher, he spent 20 years building and selling multiple companies across various professional licenses, based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Product: $15 a Month, $15,000 of Coverage

Reepher’s product, at the time of recording live in Missouri, is straightforward in structure: a member pays a minimum of $15 a month, and if they’re charged with a cannabis DUI, a $15,000 legal expense plan activates to cover the legal and associated costs of navigating the criminal justice process. Depending on the state, Reepher is regulated either as a legal services plan or as a regulated insurance product — a distinction Justin said adds real complexity to launching state by state, on top of the already substantial work of standing up any new MGA-style program.

Why This Product Needs to Exist at All

The core problem Reepher is built around is genuinely counterintuitive: THC, cannabis’s psychoactive compound, remains detectable in a person’s system long after any actual impairment has faded. Someone who consumes cannabis as infrequently as once a week — the federal government’s own definition of “regular” use — will fail a blood or urine drug test regardless of when they last consumed or where they currently sit on the impairment scale. That means a genuinely sober driver can be accused of, and ultimately charged with, a cannabis DUI purely because THC is still present in their system.

Justin walked through how that process actually unfolds. It typically starts with field testing — a police officer’s questions and behavioral observations, followed by physical tests (touching the nose, walking a line, reciting the alphabet backward, counting down by sevens) designed to identify impairment. If an officer suspects impairment based on that testing, the next step is arrest: the driver is cited, their car is towed and impounded, and they’re taken to jail pending a blood or urine test. If the driver caused no damage or injury, they’re typically released on their own recognizance or bailed out — but all of that expense (towing, impound fees, bail, initial legal costs) accumulates before the toxicology results even come back, and before the person has any chance to defend themselves in court. If any detectable amount of THC or other cannabinoids shows up — a threshold that varies by state — that alone can be enough to formally charge someone with a crime, at which point they need to hire a lawyer to defend themselves.

Justin used Missouri, one of Reepher’s first launch states, as a concrete example: cannabis is legal there for medicinal use with a medical card, but the state applies a zero-tolerance standard — meaning any detectable amount of any cannabinoid (THC, CBD, or otherwise) found during a police-initiated test is sufficient grounds for a DUI charge, regardless of actual impairment.

The Underwriting Problem: No Reliable Data Exists

Asked directly how Reepher approaches underwriting given the total absence of established actuarial data in this category, Justin was candid: there is no good data on cannabis use patterns, no good data on how THC or other cannabinoids actually correlate to impairment, and — critically — no test for impairment itself beyond a police officer’s subjective judgment call in the field. Reepher is effectively building its own data models from scratch, working from aggregated, anonymized information across its own member base — tracking things like where cannabis DUIs are geographically concentrated, where the company’s own member sign-ups are coming from, and attrition rates over time, rather than drawing on any pre-existing industry dataset.

He acknowledged the standard underwriting risk factors any new behavioral insurance product has to account for — adverse selection, moral hazard, and the built-in assumption that essentially every customer is by definition a cannabis consumer — while declining, reasonably, to detail Reepher’s specific risk mitigation approach as proprietary. His broader point was that managing those risks requires reinsurance and capacity partners genuinely willing to back a new underwriting model built around individual behavior rather than traditional loss history.

A Real Market Among Seniors

Asked specifically about older customers, Justin noted Reepher isn’t covered by Medicare or Medicare Advantage — it functions more like a subscription product, comparable to AAA or AARP membership, than a traditional insurance benefit. But he flagged geriatric patients over 65 as a subset the company had specifically tested and taken seriously during early product development, for a very concrete reason: many older patients are being prescribed or recommended cannabis later in life, often for pain management, and for many of them, their car is their sole connection to independence and the outside world. Losing a driver’s license to a cannabis DUI suspicion could be genuinely catastrophic for someone in that position — not just inconvenient, but a real threat to their broader financial and physical wellbeing, given how tightly health, mobility, and financial stability are intertwined for a fixed-income retiree. What Reepher doesn’t yet know, in Justin’s own words, is how expensive it will be to reach that specific senior population through marketing.

He framed Reepher’s core value proposition around this exact cascading-cost dynamic: the plan isn’t just paying for a lawyer, it’s covering the full downstream fallout — a suspended license, a towed and impounded vehicle, and the time and cost of navigating the entire criminal justice process — while deliberately excluding coverage for anything outside that specific behavioral scenario, which is what keeps the membership price low while keeping the benefit meaningfully sized.

Still the “Wild West,” Even for a Cannabis-Adjacent Company

Asked about the broader state of the cannabis industry, Justin didn’t sugarcoat it: genuine regulatory, banking, capital, taxation, and illegal-market pressures are all still very much live issues shaping the space. Pointedly, he noted that Reepher itself has nothing to do with the cannabis plant at any stage — no cultivation, sale, or distribution — but has still had venture capital firms decline to invest specifically because of morality clauses in their own LP agreements that treat anything cannabis-adjacent as off-limits. His framing of the opportunity in that constraint: companies willing to establish themselves properly in the category now are best positioned to succeed once federal policy eventually shifts, relative to companies that wait to enter after the fact. At the time of recording, Reepher was funded through angel investors and actively raising capital.

Advice: Two Ten-Minute Breaks From Everything

Asked for a closing recommendation, Justin’s answer was a personal life hack rather than a book: twice a day, ten minutes of total silence, ideally outdoors, without his phone or music — just reconnecting with natural ambient sound as a way of retuning his own focus before returning to whatever he needs to concentrate on next.

Key Takeaways

• Reepher sells a legal expense plan, not traditional liability insurance — roughly $15 a month for $15,000 of coverage against the legal and associated costs of being charged with a cannabis DUI
• The core risk Reepher addresses is genuinely counterintuitive: THC remains detectable long after impairment fades, meaning a sober, legal cannabis consumer can still be charged with DUI purely based on a positive drug test, especially in zero-tolerance states like Missouri
• Significant costs (towing, vehicle impound, bail, initial legal fees) accumulate before a driver ever has a chance to contest the charge in court, which is the specific financial exposure Reepher’s plan targets
• With no reliable industry data on cannabis consumption patterns or THC-to-impairment correlation, Reepher is building its underwriting models from scratch using its own aggregated, anonymized member data
• Seniors on fixed incomes represent a specific, underappreciated risk segment — losing a license to a cannabis DUI suspicion can threaten both mobility and financial stability for a retiree whose health and wealth are tightly linked
• Regulatory complexity varies meaningfully by state (legal services plan versus regulated insurance product), and even cannabis-adjacent companies with no direct involvement in the plant itself can face investment barriers from VC morality clauses
• Justin’s underlying thesis — insurance products built around individual behavior rather than traditional loss-history models — reflects a broader bet that emerging, poorly served risk categories can support genuinely new underwriting approaches once data begins to accumulate