Earlier this week came news, via mmjobserver.com, that a subsidiary of the publicly traded company G-Pel International Inc. (OTCMKTS:KGET) had scored a huge coup. It had become, it was pleased to announce, one of the first wave of applicants to score a permit to commercially grow cannabis in that marijuana mecca — Humboldt County, California!

Stocks soared on the news, we are told.

“In the last trading session,” writes either mmjobserver staff or G-Pel itself (it’s not clear), “the stock price of G-Pel jumped 50 percent to close the week at $0.00030.”

So that was pretty good news for G-Pel CEO Bo Linton. That’s right — that Bo Linton, who of course you remember from his stint playing Dr. Richard Dosky, M.D. in a seven-episode arc on General Hospital in 2012!

What you might not know is that when he’s not getting suckered by handcuffed femmes fatales, Bo Linton serves as the chief executive officer of CaliPharms, Inc. — which, confusingly, is another name that G-Pel goes by — and the new 10,000 square-foot mixed-light facility his company plans to build just outside the Fortuna city limits is a key part of his master plan to wean America off opiates and alcohol, to end domestic violence and child abuse (and maybe even cure cancer?), and to just generally make the world a better place: 

Well, no one said saving the world would be easy. As of this writing, shares of G-Pel have slumped down to $0.0001 — a full one-onehundredth of a cent below where they were trading before the company got its golden ticket from the Humboldt County Planning and Building Department. Google Finance currently calculates the firm’s market total capitalization at a somewhat underwhelming $645,770. In just a few days, two-thirds of its value has disappeared.

Does that mean it’s time to buy at the low? We have no idea. Talk to your licensed, professional financial adviser, and don’t be surprised if she tells you to run screaming from penny stocks — or hundredth of a penny stocks, in the present case. A 2014 study found that legal weed was the new hot hunting ground for the eternal “pump and dump” scam, which is more or less the defining feature of the market in over-the-counter stocks. Investors may have lost as much as $23.3 billion on pumped and dumped weed company stock in that year alone, the study found.

But what about the fundamentals, you ask? Again: We are no experts, but they don’t look so hot. G-Pel has been through many iterations since it was founded in the mid-’90s. A trip through its SEC filing history shows that it has, by turns, and through several changes of ownership and name, been nominally in the business of exploring for minerals off the coast of Argentina, producing animated TV shows based on fairy tales, manufacturing and selling hydrogen gas for alternatively powered vehicles and hawking wood pellets.

So it is not remarkable for its stability. Its balance sheet is much more remarkable, but not in an encouraging way. G-Pel / KGET / CaliPharms’ most recent annual report showed that at the end of 2016 the company had a grand total $2,798 in assets — all cash — and over $10 million in liabilities. Oops!

Maybe the Fortuna weed farm will turn all that around. Operated by CaliPharms’ subsidiary, Pacific Cannabis Growers, Inc., they’ve gotten the green light for 10,000 square feet of grow on Pampas Lane, off Loop Road in the Rohnerville area. They say they’ll soon be pumping out the pounds of Blue Cheese, Dairy Queen, Girl Scout Cookies, King Louie OG, Skywalker OG and Kosher Kush … and they just might change the world.

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