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No smoking zone: Nasdaq rejects weed social network

It’s reefer madness on Wall Street.

The chief executive of MassRoots, the so-called Facebook for pot lovers, was turned down on Tuesday for a listing on Nasdaq.

The company’s market cap of $35 million is well short of the exchange’s $160 million minimum — as is its $317,000 in shareholder equity.

Nasdaq requires a minimum shareholder equity of $5 million.

Despite the obvious shortcomings, MassRoots still lit up its application — and then wailed anti-pot bias when it was rejected.

“If we were a social network for tobacco users or alcohol consumers, the Nasdaq would likely be moving forward on our application,” Isaac Dietrich, the 23-year-old chief executive of the penny stock bluntly boasted to The Post.

Dietrich, his company clearly burned in the process, insisted the move wasn’t a publicity stunt.

The company, based in Denver, the Mile High City, which earlier this month claimed a marijuana user base of 900,000, had been vying to execute the first initial public offering by a US company in the cannabis industry on Nasdaq.

In fact, it has been trying to attain that distinction for nine months.

Its first attempt, in September, was turned aside because it lacked an underwriter. So Dietrich went out and hired Charden Capital Markets in April to underwrite the sale of up to $6.5 million in shares and warrants.

But that effort has now gone up in smoke — which left Dietrich smoking mad.

The ganjapreneur, who admits to having baked up the idea for the social network while “smoking weed in my college friend’s apartment,” quickly e-mailed supporters a link to Nasdaq and encouraged them to join him in an appeal.

The company also claimed Nasdaq said the rejection was tied to it being in the pot business, which is not legal under federal law.

But MassRoots made that statement, not Nasdaq.

Nasdaq, for its part, wasn’t about to get rolled up into a spat.

“We don’t comment on listing applications,” Joe Christinat, a Nasdaq spokesman, told The Post.

Nasdaq’s denial of MassRoots application sent shares of the social platform for marijuana down 18 percent, to 73¹/₂ cents per share.

The closing stock price also highlighted another shortcoming in MassRoots’ application.

Nasdaq requires companies to have a minimum share price of $3.