FAKE CANNABIS PACKAGING PLAGUES INDUSTRY One of the worst parts about being an internationally respected cannabis brand? The fakes. The further you climb toward the mountaintop, the more people are going to pretend they’re selling your product or just flat-out use the reputation you’ve built with heat and flame to rob others. On a positive…
FAKE CANNABIS PACKAGING PLAGUES INDUSTRY
One of the worst parts about being an internationally respected cannabis brand? The fakes.
The further you climb toward the mountaintop, the more people are going to pretend they’re selling your product or just flat-out use the reputation you’ve built with heat and flame to rob others. On a positive note, if you’re at the point people are copying you, then you’ll probably make it through the dumpster fire that California cannabis is in.
Here in L.A., where much of the weed people are pretending to have is grown, counterfeiting is still an issue. If you go down to the Vape District on Wall Street, you can find all the bags you’ll need to convince people on the other side of the Sierras you got the heat. And most of those people have never seen real Doja, Jungle Boys or Cookies, so just having the logo on the bag is going to go a long way with them.
According to Doja Pak founder Ryan Bartholomew, they’ve been dealing with people faking their product since 2018, well before things blew up for the brand over the last couple of years since the initial RS-11 drop that made waves.
“Then, we were doing the cans. Shortly after we released the cans, we started to see cans that were being tagged on IG and they were fake,” Bartholomew told L.A. Weekly. “They were different. We could just tell that the font was off. It was very obvious to us, being the ones that made the cans, they were fake.”
When they made the jump to bags in 2019, it was much of the same problem. First they started to see fake bags float around L.A., then they started to appear online. Even worse, the bags were a bit easier to fake than the cans. So it can be a lot harder to spot the difference until you look inside at the nugs.
Bartholomew noted the internet helped it become an international problem. Websites like Calipacks.co.uk are currently selling Doja Bags for a little over a quarter.
“He’s in the UK and he prints… like at this point they’re printing stuff we never even made,” Bartholomew said. “Yesterday this guy was like, are these jars in Switzerland real?”
A website offering fake Doja packaging.
Bartholomew had to inform that person the jars they were dealing with were fakes.
Doja Pak attempted to create a verification system, but as Bartholomew noted, you got to be pretty headie to scan a QR code on the back of a bag. Doja handled the back end of the verification system and could see just how much people were interacting with it.
“Beyond the fake product, too, there’s a lot of scam accounts,” Bartholomew said. “There’s Instagram accounts with more followers than mine, Instagram accounts with the exact same amount of followers as mine with the exact same comments, but they have maybe like two K’s”
Bartholomew has people that come up to him all the time at events and they’ll tell him they sent money for an ounce.
“I’m not asking anyone to send me any money,” he said. “So there’s constant scamming going on every single day. I’ve been saying if we could see the dollar amount of scamming going on every day it would make us throw up in our mouths.”
Bartholomew estimates there are at least one hundred people pretending to be Doja Pak on the hunt for victims.
One thing that’s been helpful is unique packaging. Doja Pak’s Re:stash has become a unique identifier of the brand you can only get in person at events directly from the Doja Pak team. Additionally, they don’t have to worry about the Re:stash team printing a bunch of fake jars to give out, given the relationship they’ve built with them over the years.
Another famous L.A. brand that’s faced its fair share of fakers is The Jungle Boys.
“I mean we’ve definitely dealt with it a lot,“ Ivan from the Jungle Boys told L.A. Weekly from Florida, as they prepare to open their Miami Beach location today.
Ivan said more than fake products alone, these days people are faking the whole entity. There was even a fake Jungle Boys store across the street from City Hall in New York City. There was also another underground dispensary using their name in a less prominent location. Ivan finds the whole thing pretty wild.
One thing that will help the Jungle Boys distinguish themselves from the fakes is their new packaging released last month. The new jars are BPA-free and made from 100% recyclable plastic. They’re currently handpicking strains to make the jump to the new jars. The first was Strawberries N Later.
As is tradition, with this list we present a holiday-size helping of the heat we’ve found in the past couple of months following the harvest and trips to scope out the marketplaces in Vegas, abroad in the Canary Islands and Thailand.
The 12 Strains of Christmas also is our most extensive flower list of the year. It’s always a pleasure to highlight some killers so they have one more thing to share with their families during whatever holiday they might enjoy together.
Here are the strains you should leave out for Santa in 2023.
Red Pop S1 #37 (Riddles) – Royal Key Organics
As with many strains from breeders that offer as extensive a catalog as Exotic Genetix, it can take a couple of years to get the full wind in their sales. Red Pop has had a fantastic 2022. Its offspring, Red Runtz, is entering its own hype wave, but the Red Pop is still elite and 2022 was the first year many had the chance to try it. One of our favorite phenos of anything Red Pop belongs to Royal Key Organics in Humboldt County. In particular, their Red Pop S1 #37 they named Riddles. It smells like buttery popcorn with cherry Kool-Aid sprinkled on top.
Zkittelz – Alien Labs
The Alien Labs rendition of Zkittlez is tied with IC Collective for the best Z terps we’ve ever seen grown outside of Mendocino County. We got our first peek at it during Las Vegas Heat Quest on MJ Biz Con Eve. As people approached us with their versions of Z throughout the week, nothing else came close. Back home here in California, few can produce Z terps at this level commercially.
Flowers of Zion – Fidels
Courtesy of Fidels
On the heels of his self-made docuseries and summer win at the Transbay Challenge I threw in L.A. for his KMZ, Flowers of Zion is the next one to keep an eye on from Fidel. The Flowers of Zion brings together Garlic Cocktail with Symbiotic Genetics’s timeless classic Mimosa. With his cultivation site operational, expect to see even more of Fidels Flower throughout the state.
Seed Junky and Fidel Buds took top honors at Ego Clash a couple of weeks ago on the eve of The Emerald Cup’s Harvest Ball, thanks to some ultra-elite hash from Simply Adam that topped the uber-competitive contest where many of the world’s best hash makers score each other. The Banana God is a pairing of Wilson and Banana OG. The version that won Ego Clash was a Banana God F2 that was done by @ibean_poppin2much and then grown by Simpleeadam.
Cap Junky – Capulator x Seed Junky
Courtesy of Capulator
A collaboration between two Los Angeles heavyweights, Capulator and Seed Junkie’s CapJunky was certainly a favorite for us in 2022. It’s among the gassiest offerings from both breeders and is an absolute ripper. It has limited availability in town, but you can score some at Peace of Green at 1155 East Pico Blvd., in DTLA.
Stardawg x Gelato 41 – Doja Pak
Ever since we first covered the original RS11 drop in LA a couple of years back, it feels like you’d need one of those NASA cameras that tracks the rockets after launch to keep pace with what they’ve been up to. While strains named after art supplies and animals are dope, we think the Stardawg x Gelato 41 was a pinch underrated during the hype storm this year and wanted to give it some extra love.
Blackberry Gary – Serge Cannabis x Powerzzzup
Courtesy of Serge Cannabis
Arguably the biggest strain to drop in California this fall, Blackberry Gary has lived up to the hype. The rare collaboration from Powerzzzup is an absolute killer. Most of the Cereal Milk and Gary Crosses out there are from reversals, but Serge was able to work with the real gear and get the Powerzzzup team’s blessings on the final product. It carries on the flavor and impact tradition of the Gary Payton line.
DEO – 580
Courtesy of DEO
580 is the most underrated strain from Deep East Oakland Farms. Everyone is tripping balls. I’m not saying it’s RS or Zoap, but saying it’s not special is batshit crazy to me. It tastes so much different from the rest of their pack. Now I love me some dessert weed, but the smell of nail polish is one of my favorite things. The freshest batches of 580 have it in abundance. It smashes into your sinuses when you open a bag.
Red Bullz x Fishscale – High Rhythm Farm
The Santa Cruz-hunted version of the Compound Genetics heater was certainly on the podium for us at The Emerald Cup Harvest Ball. Few things came close in the quality of the terpene or look. The impact was great, too, when we got the chance to try it. We highly recommend keeping an eye out for this one.
Prism OZ – Cipher Genetics
Courtesy of Cipher Genetics
An offering from the newest company on The 12 Strains of Christmas, Cipher Genetics is the latest project from Compound Genetics founder Chris Lynch. Our favorite offering from the launch drop is looking to be the Prism OZ. While we haven’t seen the finished product yet, we’re very excited for the recipe of SFV OG x ( Zkittelz x (Zkittelz x Gelato 41)). We’re convinced it’ll be a heater, much like a lot of Lynch’s past classics.
OZ Kush BX1 – 3rd Gen Family
Courtesy of 3rd Gen Family
Numerous companies in the cannabis space got their start with a pack of 3rd Gen Family’s Dying Breed Seeds, and one of the strains that launched the most or helped take things to a new level was OZ Kush. It brought together the Eddy OG and Zkittelz and the first packs sold five years ago. As I look at their current lineup, if I’m a cannabis company desperate for an epic house flavor to help me stay afloat in the darkest times ever for the marketplace, I’m buying as many packs of OZ Kush Bx1 seeds as I can and finding myself a little bit of hope.
Double Dawg – Dr. Dope Bangkok
On our recent adventure to Thailand alongside High Times and High Rise TV, we went to a ton of spots and looked at a bunch of Thai weed. With the exception of the 100 Hands at Phandee in Japan Village in Bangkok, none of it could compare to what Dr. Dope was doing. I would say thanks to Dr. Dope’s Double Dawg, the best weed I’ve seen grown in Thailand is better than the best weed I saw grown in Las Vegas during MJ Bizcon last month.
The Weed, Sex, and Chocolate Guide is back to help you with your quest to enhance the Valentine’s Day festivities.
Weed is one of the greatest Valentine’s Day gifts of all, regardless of your plumbing. You can buy it for the person you started dating last week or last decade and you never have to worry about it being too over the top. Not the lube, but the other stuff.
We’ve always used this list to highlight the chocolate of the moment. We’re also trying to include plenty of new faces this year, but you’ll certainly recognize a couple of OGs that just have it down. Nevertheless, we’re sure this lineup of cocoa in all its glory produced all over California will fill the air with, at the very least, a love of weed chocolate.
The Weed
Alien Labs – Super Silver Haze x Xeno
The pheno of SSH x Xeno that we tried was probably the haziest American thing we’ve ever had the chance to sample. It tastes more like something from Europe than Sacramento. I think the thing that shocked us the most was just how overpowering the Haze terps were over the complexity of Xeno. A lot of people would argue hazes are some of the best sex weeds with the exception of this dominatrix I knew from San Francisco who said Blue Moonshine. But I think she just wanted a heavy indica to make it easier to tie people up.
Symbiotic Genetics Rosin
Courtesy of Kalya Extracts
Symbiotic Genetics is one of the most stored seed companies of the decade. In addition to its genetics taking top honors at Chalice, its work has dotted podiums all over the world for years. I even saw some Mimosa grown in Africa that would be competitive. As luck would have it, the amazing flavors are now available in hash made by some of the world’s best extractors. Keep an eye out for their work with Royal Key Organics and Kalya.
The Chocolate
Fig Farms – High Flyin Chocolates
Courtesy of Fig Farms
The first-ever Emerald Cup indoor flower champions are diving into the world of edibles with a new chocolate offering. Made from the same quality material that’s taken home a podium spot in every contest it has ever entered, you’ll certainly be able to feel the difference. But the actual flavor of the Cookies and Cream rosin-infused chocolates is spot on, too, with no weedy flavor to it at all.
Oui’d Confections
Courtesy of Ouid
Is another rosin chocolate starting to make waves, Ouid is owned and operated by Michelin and James Beard Award-winning chefs Matthew Kim and Matt Rowbotham. The pair strived to bring their high-end cooking experience to the world of cannabis edibles. They argue that they are putting out restaurant-quality confections and it would be hard to say otherwise. Ouid Confections is available all over Los Angeles.
Cosmic Cookie Dough
Courtesy of Cosmic
We covered the tale of Cosmic Cookie Dough last year, and they remain one of the easiest ways to please vegan edible lovers. If you want to show your vegan lover you care, bake some up for the holiday or just bring two spoons and raw dog it. There are no eggs, so you don’t have to worry about food poisoning.
Punch Edibles
Courtesy of Punch Edibles
Punch always has a Valentine’s day offering, but this year, the new half cookie bar is definitely our pick. Punch is a company that was made famous during the medical era for its potency but had to fall back on quality alone once the value buying aspect of cannabis edibles was lost to the 100mg THC cap that came with Prop 64. This year the company celebrates a decade of getting Southern California lit with its exceptional edibles.
Native Humboldt
Courtesy of Native Humboldt
Want to get your V-day chocolate from a women-owned farm in the heart of The Emerald Triangle? Look no further than Native Humboldt. The bars are filled with the quality and love of the game it takes to be a survivor up north these days. With so many farms devastated over the past few years up north, it’s important to support the farmers up there when you get the chance, but we’re not telling you to buy it out of sympathy. It’s great chocolate.
Jelly Wizard Magic Morsels
Courtesy of Jelly Wizard
We have been a wizard gang since the moment they entered the recreational market. We were literally standing at the booth smoking a blunt with them when they made their first legal sale at Kushstock a couple of years ago. While the gummies helped put them on the map along with some killer hash and flower, do not sleep on Jelly Wizard’s chocolate offering. You can truly taste the hype in The Magic Morsels.
The Sex
Flora + Bast Aphrodisia Intimate Arousal Oil
Courtesy of Fiona + Bast
The dual purpose oil is designed for both topical and edible adventures in the bedroom. Now is the $77 price tag steep for 1,700mg CBD and 1,000mg CBG? Maybe that’s just the cost of great cannabinoid-laced sex these days. Flora + Blast note when applied topically it makes you slippery and stimulates the libido. If you eat it, the CBD makes your Valentine’s Day hookup less regrettable. The oil also comes in a Sex System they call “the kit” (not my quotations) because why not, right? That set features a QR code to download the book “Becoming Cliterate” by author and sex educator, Laurie Mintz, Lelo’s sonic massager Sona II Cruse and the Aphrodisia Oil for $149.
Lavinia Oh.Hi Lubricant
Courtesy of Lavinia
In one of this year’s list’s most heartwarming tales, here is Lavinia’s backstory that I couldn’t possibly word better:
“The brand was founded in 2021 by Katie Enright, a former celibate studying to be a nun. In a quest to help herself and others obtain easy, powerful, multiple orgasms, Enright began by studying cannabis and sex, and created her first product for herself, then for friends, then friends of friends. After an earth-shattering orgasm, Lavinia’s first product, oh.hi, was born.”
The company claims the THC and CBD-infused lube increases blood flow for heightened sensation when applied vaginally or for Valentine’s Day butt stuff. Oh.hi is latex friendly, glycerin-free, glycol-free, paraben-free, hypoallergenic, unscented, unflavored, and 100% vegan. It’ll take about 15 minutes to work, not the slippery part, the weed part. Oh.hi is available at dispensaries all over California.
We chatted with Housing Works Cannabis Co CEO Charles King as the NYC nonprofit prepares to kick off legal cannabis sales in the state of New York today.
Most notably, the 10 cash registers and 4,400 square feet of retail space at 750 Broadway in Manhattan will be the only place in the state you’ll be able to get legal weed for months, as other retailers continue to navigate the permitting process. While the idea of this total monopolization may seem off in the era of social equity, given it’s a longtime nonprofit it seems a lot palatable for folks.
That part is also a double-edged sword. Some fear the Housing Works permit will be pointed to as a sign of intent, when the wider equity program has hiccups like so many have in the past. The officials who screw it up will point to this license to show it was the plan all along to take care of equity and nonprofit permits. That being said, whatever happens next on the regulatory side isn’t Housing Works’ fault and it has as worthy a track record as any nonprofit who might have had the chance to open first.
Housing Works has provided an array of services to 30,000 homeless and low-income New Yorkers since 1990. The organization identifies as a community of people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS with the mission to end both homelessness and AIDS through advocacy and providing services. A big part of the way it has sustained the mission is creating businesses like the dispensary, a SoHo bookstore, and a network of high-end thrift shops to fund its advocacy. All proceeds from the dispensary go directly back to the nonprofit.
The staff are excited to open their doors today.
“”This is a once in a lifetime moment,” said Sasha Nutgent, store manager of Housing Works Cannabis Co. “That said, our nonprofit’s mission remains as urgent as ever. We are eager to take the lead as a social equity model for America’s cannabis industry, specifically with our hiring practices and continued support of individuals and communities disproportionately impacted by the unjust War on Drugs.”
We chatted with Charles King, CEO of Housing Works, late last week as they prepared for the big day.
“So we actually approached Gov. Cuomo in his office three years ago about Housing Works being able to obtain a license for retail cannabis sales,” King told L.A. Weekly. “We’ve been pressing the agenda of nonprofits that serve people who have been criminalized by cannabis, due to cannabis related offenses, having the opportunity to enter in the market. That’s part of our reason for doing this.”
King argues one of the reasons it’s been such a long rollout for New York was establishing mechanisms different from any other state in terms of advancing equity interests.
“That said, I think there’s a big question about whether what New York is doing will actually go far enough to accomplish its equity agenda,” King argued. “Housing Works is a large organization where we’re well-capitalized, so we’re prepared to invest up to a million dollars, some to make our cannabis retail work and make it profitable.”
King knows the state is preparing to invest money to back social equity licenses, he’s just not sure it will be nearly enough to be competitive. This would lead to the worst-case scenario of equity license holders turning into figureheads as they attempt to raise the capital they need to stay open.
“I think that’s going to be the big test,” King said. “We’ve seen it in other jurisdictions, where equity license holders have ended up simply essentially being front people for commercial cannabis. And we certainly don’t want that to happen here.”
Housing Works plans on taking a very hands-on approach on its quest to help the New York social equity movement. For starters, it’s hiring people who have criminal records for cannabis, but it goes so much deeper than that.
“We’re also developing training programs, not only to help people to advance in management, even with our competitors,” King said.
King hopes that program will help start people’s own journeys to go from cannabis conviction to dispensary owner.
“We’re negotiating with the Office of Cannabis Management to help people, to allow people to go through a training program with us,” King said. “That would get them credentialed as having met the entrepreneurial requirements for obtaining their own license, and then we would help them with their license application, help them get up and running, so that they can genuinely have an opportunity to enter into business on their own without having to be proxy for some commercial investor.”
Given Housing Works’ wider history of community service, we asked if there was any push back on the team when the conversations about the dispensary started. The organization is no stranger to the subjects around drugs many Americans avoid.
“We are a harm-reduction organization. We were, over 30 years ago, we were the first organization in the country to house people with substance use disorder without any restrictions on their personal use in the privacy of their home. We didn’t place any drug- and alcohol-free conditions on people moving into supportive housing,” King said.
Additionally, Housing Works runs two of the largest syringe exchange programs in the state.
“So, even though we’re a licensed drug treatment provider, our license is very explicit that we use a harm-reduction approach,” King said. “Our goal has never been abstinence, it’s always to help people manage their use in ways that give them effective control over their lives.”
King thinks it’s been more interesting to hear the response from the public who clearly don’t really understand who they are and what it is that they do.
Housing Works expects to be able to offer about 75 to 100 products from six different brands on opening day. As testing gets in order around the state, they expect to be up to about 24 brands to pick from in February. It’s a safe bet every cultivation site in the state will be hoping for shelf space.
As with many dispensaries across America, they’re currently cash only. There was a recent sweep of offshore merchant services companies prodigy services to the industry, so it’s a little trickier than bouncing from one to the other at the moment. This is even the case for shops that have been open for decades.
House of Puff is one of the brands on shelves today at Housing Works.
“For years, advocates and members of New York’s cannabis community have been working toward this momentous milestone; the first adult-use dispensary opening its doors, stocked with brands and products grown, processed, manufactured and owned right here in New York,” said Kristina Lopez Adduci, CEO and founder of House of Puff. “We are ecstatic that House of Puff will be one of those New York brands that will be available for purchase and thank Housing Works for supporting us and other local cannabis companies during this crucial moment.”
Lopez Adduci was also excited as to what the dispensary meant to the broader goals for legalization.
“The opening of their dispensary is just one embodiment of the vision set out by the MRTA and is a significant step towards establishing a fully operable and equitable legal cannabis industry built by and for New Yorkers and our communities most adversely affected by cannabis prohibition,” she said.
“Since the MRTA was signed, now nearly two years ago, we have all been envisioning the moment that legal adult-use sales would finally launch here in New York,” said Allan Gandelman, President of CANY. “The state’s first recreational dispensary opening its doors with shelves stocked full of New York-owned-and-operated brands, including products grown and processed by CANY members, is a culmination of all the hard work, dedication and advocacy of the cannabis community over the past several years. We applaud Housing Works for being mindful and supportive of this vision and congratulate them on their entrance into the industry.”
Gandelman went on to note that while the moment feels surreal, everyone hopes it’s just one of many upcoming milestones.
Purple weed was already a thing when Ken Estes got his hands on Grand Daddy Purple in Mendocino County and brought it back to his grows in the bay area, but that journey south really put the winds in its sails.
We ran into Estes during our recent travels to cover Spannabis and the wider Barcelona club scene. He noted he had spent much of the last decade dealing with his health — this is what originally forced him to take his foot off the gas back in the mid-2010s. But his impact to this day is undeniable. We’d catch back up in California to talk purple a few weeks later.
While not as prominent in the era of 40 new exotic flavors a month, GDP, as Grand Daddy Purple would be known to many, still dots menus up and down California. Prior to the rise of dessert weeds following Cookies hitting the scene, GDP was where people went for a combination of flavor and impact. Even Cookies’ most famous sibling Cherry Pie was the Durban F1 used to make cookies paired to GDP.
But before all that came to be, GDP was the last stop for those looking for high-impact cannabis that wasn’t OG Kush. Some would also argue the purple was a bit more couchlock-heavy than the OG Kush of the time. And while Ken Estes certainly didn’t invent purple weed, he changed the demand level, all while living through the dark ages of cannabis.
And he was loud. Few pushed the limits like Estes. During an event in 2010, he opened a dispensary 20 yards from the steps of Oakland city hall. When he wasn’t executing his business plans, he was hitting city council meetings, eventually opening one of America’s first chains of dispensaries with his Grand Daddy Purple Collective shops in NorCal. His being so “out there” during that era led to frustrations for both his peers and city officials, but folks certainly had a knack for following Ken into town.
Estes’s path to cannabis would start after a motorcycle accident at age 18 in the 1970s paralyzed him from the neck down. Prior to the accident, Estes had been playing soccer at an elite level in California. Pele, in town with the New York Cosmos at the time, gave him a call of support from the hospital’s lobby so he wouldn’t have to fight the crowd there to support Estes in the days following his injury.
Six months into his rehabilitation, he experienced cannabis for the first time with a group of Vietnam veterans who were in the same care facility. This began his lifelong connection to medical cannabis.
“I was a young kid. I was 18. My first personal experience with weed was pretty strong. But I went back to my room and I slept all night. It was the first night in six months I slept all night,” Estes told L.A. Weekly.
He recalls how common the idea of marijuana being medicine was. All the nurses and doctors knew. And he certainly knew it was medicine from his first experience. After that first joint, Estes would end up having eyes on the scene for the next 45 years.
“I’m shocked and surprised where this movement went,” Estes said. “I thought we were just in California getting it for patients. When I started, it was the gay world that came from fighting for gay rights to we have people dying in San Francisco of AIDS. Why can’t they use marijuana? And then Brownie Mary got arrested and that changed the game.”
Mary Jane Rathbun was a San Francisco General Hospital volunteer. She eventually became famous for baking hundreds of brownies a day as the AIDS epidemic hit San Francisco hard. Between 1981 and 1992, she was arrested three times for her famous brownies, but her activism helped push Prop 215 across the finish line. Now, Brownie Mary Day is Aug. 25, in San Francisco.
But we quickly turned back to that first rotation in Vallejo. Since he was still fully paralyzed, the orderly had to hold the joint to his lips for him. But over the next few years, he would work to the point that allowed him to gain some independence.
“It really took me years of intense exercise, but I was an athlete. It was three years, four years, before I really started being able to transfer onto my bed. I could transfer (to) the floor, put my knees together, leaned forward over my legs to transfer back to my chair,” Estes said of his rehabilitation.
That moment he was able to transfer on his own signaled to him he would be capable of living on his own. Marijuana was already his lifestyle well before that day. He was still fully paralyzed the first time his friends took him up to Arcata in Humboldt County.
“I found the Skunk. I found Thai Stick. I found people with Columbian Gold and Panama Red,” Estes said of that first trip at age 19. “I found marijuana so awesome that I wanted the good stuff.”
He’d run into brick weed. The compressed nugs were far from medicine and he knew it. It further motivated him to search for the best options. That first trip north arose from a friend telling him he knew a guy with sensimilla.
“I said, what is sensimilla?” Estes noted with a laugh. “It’s a seedless weed? And it’s green, lime green? Let’s go there.”
The locals hooked him up, given his medical situation. He scored his first pounds of sensimilla for $100 bucks. That would be about $460 today.
As for the traditionally tight community up north, especially during the early era of enforcement, “My disability broke me in. People were very compassionate and they understood medicine,” Estes said.
Estes noted his original host in Humboldt understood the benefits of medical cannabis all too well having recently lost his father to cancer at the time.
“He lost his dad. His dad had cancer. He got help from cannabis. They think it dragged his life another two years, but he swears he was happier. He saw other people who were on pharmaceuticals dying. They were miserable, moaning, and his dad (had) weed on the way out. He really is a compassionate man,” Estes said.
Estes pointed to the statement “all cannabis use is medical.” He said he gets it, to different degrees. But in his case, it wasn’t really up for debate, and the farmers of The Emerald Triangle showed him a lot of love.
Part of it was because they knew in addition to it being for his own medical use, he was paying top dollar. Some of the brown frown was going for between $30-$50 a pound. Estes wanted nothing to do with it.
“When I got the first Skunk, which was fluffy, I had 24 bags. I sold it for $100 a bag and I would buy that. Next time I bought the Skunk it was $200, the next time it was $400 a pound and after that it was $500 a pound,” Estes said.
We asked Estes as he watched the pound price creep up, when did he know it was time to become his own supplier and get in on the cultivation side? He laughed and said it was right around the time he saw that first $500 pound. He’s already been collecting seeds in film containers and noting what they were.
In 1977, he would purchase his first hydroponic system. He said it took him about a decade to get to the point where he is comfortable looking back and saying he was dialed in. To help put that into perspective, the biggest movie of the year in 1987 when Estes started growing heat was Beverly Hills Cop 2.
The first grow went well, but he missed the part about changing the plants’ light cycle to get them to flower. By the time he did, they had been vegging for a couple of months. The plants exploded and he started selling grams for $5 after the harvest.
“I actually started catching a BART to the 51 bus on Market Street. The 51 bus took me over to Haight Street and Stanyan McDonald’s right there. I’d set up with little tiny bags in there. And I could sell down the street over there for 20 bucks,” Estes said. This was around 1984 and 1985.
Estes would move his garden outside. That wasn’t a bad thing — in that era, the best outdoor was widely regarded as the best cannabis available, period. He said it took another decade for the best indoor to start beating out the sungrown.
He saw cannabis grown under High-Pressure Sodium lights for the first time when one of his buddies took a light from a baseball field. Eventually, the HPS lights got a bit more normalized, but there was only one place you could buy them at first. Going in and grabbing more than one light was a red flag to anyone casing the store. Estes and others would send friends and family to grab a light each, until they eventually had enough for whatever size room they were trying to put together.
“If they saw you putting 10 lights in your car, they followed you home. You had a search warrant on your house a week later. So we were all nervous about that,” Estes said.
In the late ‘80s, he moves back indoors and starts building out grow houses. The product would eventually end up in Dennis Peron’s San Francisco dispensary. He would go from a 10-light house to a 100-light operation in Oakland in 1992.
While it was a big jump doing 10 times as many lights, he was confident in his standard operating procedures. He also had a lot of faith in his nutrients and pest management ability, too.
When Peron shut down, Estes went on to work a stint at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club. Eventually, Estes decided to open up his first dispensary in Concord in 1997. As Estes went from city council to city council attempting to open more shops in places with no ordinances around medical cannabis, he faced a lot of opposition. Some of the very cities that he went to battle with are now booming cannabis commerce hubs.
But back then, he was attacked by 1990’s and 2000’s NIMBYs, terrified of the thought of cannabis in their town. They would call him things like a street dealer.
“I said you have never spent one time in my house and at my table having dinner with me. You don’t know who I am at all sir, or ma’am. But I was attacked all the time. That was the way they did it back in those days for sure,” Estes recalled.
He said San Mateo was the most vicious municipality of all back then. He estimates he probably opened 20 clubs over the years in different cities.
Estes credits his activism to meeting disabled activist Dan O’Hara. O’Hara rolled his wheelchair across America and the length of the Mississippi River. He was a vocal advocate in Sacramento and Washington D.C., for the disabled. He was even honored by President Jimmy Carter for his efforts, and the Vatican. Estes and O’Hara became friends.
“So I became very, very active, much more of an open activist. It was not a secret. I wasn’t behind the scenes.”
Estes has witnessed every level of cannabis regulation in California. We asked what it was like seeing things go from Prop 215 to the legal era. He thought it was all going to move a lot faster, given how fast he opened a shop in the wake of Prop 215 passing.
“Even though I wasn’t granted a license to have my facility, and I’ve always lasted about one year in these towns, it was enough to start the dialogue, to start the process where other people came behind me pushing, getting attorneys. And next thing you know, there are ordinances,” Estes said.
The conversation would turn toward the purple weed Estes helped turn iconic. Back when he was exposed to purple on his earliest trips to The Emerald Triangle, it didn’t denote some special quality. He’d see the haze Jimi Hendrix made famous in the late 1970s. He said it was good, but it wasn’t great.
But in the early 2000s, he started to notice some purple strains were bomb. The Purple Erkel was high on the list for quality, but it was a very finicky plant to deal with. Estes argues the Erkel is really just Lavender and everyone changed the name.
“It was finicky, but when you smoked it, it was fire. It had that taste,” Estes noted.
In 2003, his relationship with purple would change forever. He was showing his friends Charlie and Sarah, they were Blackfoot and Pomo Indians. The Pomo have a deep history in Mendocino.
The Pomo traditionally lived in what is now the area around Clear Lake, Alexander Valley, and the Russian River watershed. The Pomo spoke seven different dialects while living in small independent communities that relied on hunting, fishing and gathering to meet their needs.
Estes showed the pair some Big Bud x Erkele from Bodhi. A lot of people thought that was the GDP, but it wasn’t. It did do well though, taking home top honors at an early cup in L.A. at one point. This put the purple, and the affection Estes had for it, on Charlie and Sarah’s radar.
During a later trip to visit their home on the Eel River, Estes saw some suits as he was pulling up. He provided the pair with cash from a score he had made that day to keep their home. Charlie would go on to tell some other folks in the tribe about what Estes had done.
Eventually one of the members of the tribe showed Estes what they called Purple Medicine. It was phenomenal.
“He brought it to me. And I had a bright light shined on them. I was like, oh my god, this is amazing. The color was amazing, purple everywhere. But you could have rolled that pound out of the bag like a bowling ball. It all stuck together,” Estes said. “They had it for 18 years. You could peel buds off the pound like velcro.”
A GDP outdoor crop.
Estes wanted to buy as much as he could, but after a few rounds, the tribe didn’t want to do business with him. They gave him the cut of Purple Medicine so he could run it himself. It became what we know today as Grand Daddy Purple. Estes went all in on his new cut and changed all of his operations to GDP. When he couldn’t produce enough in his 200-light operation, he brought it north for his friends to grow, too. Since he was paying $4,000 a pound, they were more than happy to run it for him.
“I know what I got. I’ve got this. This is it. This is to me just like the Grand Poobah. It’s like the grand something, Grand Daddy Purple, and then I high-five Charlie,” Estes said, remembering how he came up with the name.
As he started making the trip more regularly, farmers would wait for him south of Garberville to try and catch him before he spent all his money on someone else’s weed. One time a utility truck flagged him down at night, the pounds were inside the bucket you would use to do maintenance on a telephone pole.
Estes said the best GDP came from all over. It wasn’t a particularly challenging plant to grow, so a lot of different people in various conditions were able to make the most of it.
On his way back from up north he would call his friends’ answering machines and just say Grand Daddy Purple and code word that it was on its way south. Eventually, he would open his shop in Oakland’s former Oaksterdam neighborhood. Oakland loved purple.
“People back then thought purple meant it was overdried or always moist or something. And then there was no purple on any menu,” Estes said.
In the earliest days of trying to convert Oakland to purple, Estes would hand out nugs to the people in line at his competitor and offer refunds to people who bought eighths if they didn’t like it.
“Pretty soon, within six months, we got E40 and Keak Da Sneak are smoking it. It was on Weeds. It was in Pineapple Express. Snoop Dogg said on Howard Stern it was his favorite strain. It was just this crazy blow-up thing. I did kind of have the idea it could happen, but I didn’t know it would happen as fast as it did,” Estes said.
Estes began collecting seeds from the 200 lights. Every run there would be a dozen or so. When he decided it was time to hunt for a male, he had about 60.
“I backcrossed it to stabilize the genetics. I tried to focus on the traits that I like, the rock-hard buds, the nose, the nice branching, the dark green waxy leaves, so that we came up with Ken’s GDP,” Estes explained. He argued some people liked Ken’s GDP better than the original. In the most technical terms, Ken’s GDP was essentially Grand Daddy Purple Bx1.
He also took that male and put it in a room with seven of the bomb strains out at the time. Estes said a lot of people won cups with the seeds that came out of the room. He believes a big chunk of what’s commercially viable in the market dates back to that breeding project.
Estes ended up dealing with a federal case for six years. Nobody wanted to touch him at the time.
“You have to almost like, stop doing what you’re doing to get them to leave you alone,” Estes said. “I remember being in their office in San Francisco and asking, why do I have this target on my back?”
One of the things that caused Estes some headaches was his choice to start declaring his cannabis income on his taxes early. He figured if he was paying his taxes, how could they say it was illegal? Well, they certainly took the money no problem.
“I want all my cases, but it took me six years. I had three federal cases. I got raided in 2005, 2008, and 2009,” Estes noted.
One of his shops was caught up in the massive San Diego sweep of 2009 that saw 13 stores shut down. People would tell Estes they weren’t growing the Purple anymore because he was too hot and he shouldn’t come around.
But the more cultivation in urban settings got normalized, the less he needed people up north to help, as GDP would prove to be an indoor strain. When you run it outside, it’s 80% leaves and 20% buds; thankfully it’s the exact opposite indoors. While it wouldn’t quench the thirsts of the eventual three-pound-a-light crowd on the hunt for maximum dollars, it was always heat.
These days Estes is doing his best to keep GDP alive. He recently had it tissue-cultured. While a popular long-term storage method, tissue culture is also a way to clean a plant of diseases. The freshest piece of the meristem is cut before it has a chance to be infected like the rest of the donor plant. Two people are currently running the clean version of GDP.
“I just want to be the brand ambassador,” Estes closed laughing.
The Canary Islands continue to make their mark on the cannabis industry with the volcanic island chain now home to hundreds of dispensaries.
One of the fastest-growing cannabis contests on the planet also calls the islands home.
Tenerife, where we spent our adventure, popped a lot more than our last visit. It seemed like the social clubs were starting to permeate more into the tourist-heavy parts of the area. Weed Island was the best view we’ve ever seen somewhere you can buy weed. As you sit down to rollup on the balcony at the shop, you are greeted by a stunning seascape.
Canary Champions Cup Flower Entries
Canary Social Club Culture
All the clubs come in various formats. They range from nightclub-style venues that can hold hundreds of people to more traditional Dutch-style coffee shops. These facilities continue to get nicer and nicer. This is because of how safe people feel spending cash to make their shop look nice. One club owner told me they spent six figures over the last few months ahead of its Grand Opening on 4/20.
California shops are currently facing some of their darkest days ever, Tenerife is another story. One club owner told us he’d never heard of a social club closing down because sales were bad. You’d think Tenerife might be hitting capacity for how many clubs the ecosystem can support, but each one we walked into was packed. Part of the reason for everyone’s success is the fact these tourists need somewhere to burn.
A rosin pressing demo at one of the after parties.
Why do they need somewhere to smoke? Because the rules on the island are so strict about cannabis possession and consumption. It’s technically against the law to bring it with you outside of the club and the police are hardcore. I was out raging with some locals last week and walking behind a bar on the boardwalk on one of the island’s popular beaches last week when five cops rolled on me. It was the most intense search I’ve experienced since I came back from Canada in ‘08 and declared my bong at the Vermont border. They went through my pockets and backpack, asking me questions. As they talked to me, they opened every bag I had in my backpack and asked me why I had a bunch of empties. I told them souvenirs. Eventually, they pulled out one of the TrapLoc bags I had with Grove Bags; once they saw my picture on the bag, there was a shocking attitude change from the cops. They thanked me for smoking all my cannabis inside clubs and not taking it outside.
And boy, did I. I smoked a ton of cannabis as I celebrated my first 4/20 there. The whole thing is an extra joke since the date starts with days in Europe and reads 20/4/2023. But everyone was certainly willing to pretend that 4/20 was a thing there.
Judging Flower at The Canary Champions Cup
One of my main responsibilities for the week was judging flowers at the sophomore installment of The Canary Islands Champions Cup. There ended up being over 50 samples of flower across the indoor and outdoor categories. The top flower in the contest mostly stood well above the competition. Big Bang Creations took third prize in indoor with Monkey Berries. RTZ was the first runner-up with Zowah. Fresh Farm’s topped the podium with their White Gold.
The Hash is Awesome
Finally, it’s really important to note how advanced the hash culture on the island,. There is a solid argument to be made that the quality of the concentrates there are better than what you’ll see in most U.S. states for sure. Hash culture has always been a thing there given it’s proximity to Morrocco, but the latest tech has made its way to the island with avengance. Hanami Gardens, who won the cup, could hold his own against any hash makers in the world without a doubt. His rosin was explosive terps when you open the jar and he even chopped up some piatella, U.S. headie boys favorite new solventless trend!
We’ll have more coverage from my travels in the weeks ahead.
CANNABIS INDUSTRY WAITS FOR NEW YORK SALES NUMBERS
As state recreational markets have rolled out in recent years, one of the big moments is the first release of sales numbers. So why haven’t we seen that data in New York yet?
Because they’ve only been able to get three dispensaries open in three months. Some argue the data would show just how badly they messed up the launch by opening one dispensary at a time. While the state recently approved another group of operators that will put the statewide dispensary count north of 60, there is still a lot of work to be done. Currently, it would take nearly five hours for someone on the Canadian border to get to the state’s first operating dispensary outside of the city, Just Breath located in Binghamton.
And it’s not just a geography game, it’s a numbers game, too. Currently, New York has about one dispensary per 6 million people. And there are only about 25 cash registers for 20 million people. Once the latest set of dispensaries that received state approval open, it will be roughly one dispensary per 298,182 residents.
To help put this into perspective, Oklahoma had just over 2,600 dispensaries, as of last November. With a state population of just under 4 million, that equates to roughly one dispensary per 1,733. But that’s the wildest figure you’ll see. Oklahoma has proven to be the easiest place to get a permit.
Missouri recently announced its first month of legal cannabis sales saw over $100 million in products sold. Missouri is not too much smaller than New York City in terms of population. Imagine what the sales numbers would have looked like here, where there is an easy argument to be made that cannabis is even more popular. This is clearly noted by the hundreds of underground cannabis stores dotting the boroughs.
Advocates however would note there isn’t anything delayed, this is just what a truly equitable roll out that gives the communities of color the best shot in the cannabis industry looks like. Since there had never been a truly equitable rollout in any state or jurisdiction, we’ve never been able to see what that looks like to compare against. Essentially if something is truly the first of its kind, like the New York Social Equity rollout, how could we define what is fast or slow?
One advocate that monitors social equity efforts across the county noted they don’t think that it matters if people are staying with their underground sources for weeks or months, compared to the long-term impacts of when and to whom a state gives a head start advantage. They also argued the lost tax revenue over months or even a couple of years is negligible compared to the benefits of taking that time to set up something with an impact lasting over generations. They don’t think short-term tax revenue should be a goal of legalization at all, nor should equity programs depend on initial revenue in order to start up.
That advocate’s main concern with New York wasn’t the number of dispensaries, but the property and capital that social equity applicants have been led to believe they’ll have access to.
They also noted the requests for access to data were appropriate, but added that the means to track and deliver that information effectively may not have been set up yet, as opposed to anyone trying to hide the number.
Whenever we do find out how much legal cannabis has been sold so far in New York, expect the number to be a lot lower than you anticipated. But maybe that’s just how it is in a fair industry.