FIG FARMS DOUBLES UP AT SOCAL CANNABIS CUP Fig Farms continued its 2023 run of excellence by winning two out of three flower categories at the High Times SoCal Cannabis Cup. The victories came in the Indica and Hybrid categories. Animal Face won in the hybrid category after winning best indoor flower at the 2022…
FIG FARMS DOUBLES UP AT SOCAL CANNABIS CUP
Fig Farms continued its 2023 run of excellence by winning two out of three flower categories at the High Times SoCal Cannabis Cup.
The victories came in the Indica and Hybrid categories. Animal Face won in the hybrid category after winning best indoor flower at the 2022 Emerald Cup. Blue Face won the Indica category a few months after winning both best indoor flower and best indoor at this year’s Emerald Cup. This is just further validation for the work Keith and Chloe Healy are doing with their team of monster growers in Oakland.
The Blue Face took home two top prizes this year and is absolute rockstar cannabis. Fig Farms describes the aroma as a combination of acetone, tree bark and pickled ginger. The Animal Face that took home the top hybrid is absolute gas and fuel terps. I judged the hybrid category it won. I saved the Animal Face for last to see if anything would top it. Nothing did, but the same could be said for the 20 Emerald Cup flower judges who didn’t see a strain or farm when they picked Blue Face, just the heat in the jar and a number. Regardless of mine being labeled, we came to the same conclusion on Fig’s different flavors.
Animal Face
Fig Farms finds itself among a small group of people who have been holding strong in certain contests for the last few years. It raises the question from others as to whether these contests are even worth it. Do they matter?
“They do for sure. We got offered space in Oakland the next day after we won the Cannabis Cup,” Keith Healy, Fig Farms founder and CEO, told L.A. Weekly.
They were negotiating on an Oakland location and one in Sacramento.
“The day after winning we got offered the Oakland space,” Healy said. “I wouldn’t have been as confident to perform. I wouldn’t have been as confident to pull it off.”
Fig has been selective in the contests it has entered in the years since that win. But after winning The Emerald Cup earlier this year, it returned to the Cannabis Cup for the first time since that 2017 victory that changed everything. Fig was certainly thrilled with the results of its comeback.
“To win two out of three was just mind-blowing and honestly confusing since, like you win the Emerald Cup and High Times, trying to explain to somebody like a stranger that these things aren’t easy,” Healy said emphasizing he doesn’t have the confidence of being some egomaniac.
The catch-22 of that lack of confidence Healy claims is that he only enters his absolute flame. By the time he’s convinced it’s fire, it probably is, as opposed to someone that needs that new hype strain to keep their thing going. So it’s easy to understand why everything they entered this year, in everything, did so well.
Blue Face
We asked Healy which of the accolades the farm has received in recent years meant the most to him.
“I think being on stage with Chloe while she was pregnant at the Emerald Cup win in 2022 was pretty incredible because that was the first time that I’ve been able to share a stage with her,” he replied.
Healy went on to note that another thing that has made each win special was the timing. Just like the 2017 win got him into that new space, these other wins have each meant something in the moment.
“Every single one has come at a time when I needed it,” Healy said. “That kind of time where it’s like the confidence to push forward on the next task, whether that’s building out more space or it’s just the confidence to keep doing what I’m doing.
The High Times win meant a lot to Fig because it was so different from the win at The Emerald Cup. High Times is essentially people’s choice compared to the expert panel The Emerald Cup brings in for judging. We joked with Healy about how many cup kits he bought, he laughed and noted just one to try the other flavors.
Despite their continued dominance, Animal Face and Blue Face need to keep an eye on their shoulders. Fig recently worked with Zeclair and their whole catalog. We got to check out the pheno hunt a few weeks before it was chopped down. Everything was absolute heat and you can expect some crazy Z terps from Fig Farms soon.
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.
Predictmedix Inc. may have the answer to squash concerns about stoned driving.
The lack of a validated mechanism to test someone’s level of impairment from cannabis use on the spot has complicated the national rollout. Regulators and elected officials vent their fears about stoned driving all the time. You can test someone’s saliva, urine, blood or hair, but these detection methodologies are too dated for the modern era. Mostly because they aren’t focused on the moment but whether you’ve used drugs over a more extended time frame that goes long after the impairment has stopped. If you were to base impairment on those tests, you would have a ton of false positives since more of the workforce are enjoying off-the-clock use and have those spent THC metabolites in their system.
The same people who don’t want to change drug testing laws to protect off-the-clock use are ironically well-versed in the reality of current testing not truly benefiting public safety in real time. But what if you could use artificial intelligence to determine someone’s level of impairment in 20 seconds?
Predictmedix calls itself an emerging provider of rapid health screening, medical devices, and remote patient care solutions globally. Over the last three years, the now publicly traded company has raised $3 million.
“And all that money has gone into developing the technology. And now we’re commercially deployed,” Toronto venture capitalist Steve Singh told L.A. Weekly. He went on to break down the difference between their tech and the breathalyzer tech that’s been in development for years. “With the breathalyzer and you get a result in 20 minutes that’s biased, with Rahul’s technology, it’s 20 seconds and unbiased.”
The Rahul that Singh mentioned is Dr. Rahul Kushwah who founded Predictmedix after leaving academia to pursue AI-based impairment testing. To date, 50,000 people have now been screened by his Safe Entry Stations at places like The Super Bowl and F1 races.
The stations are powered by a proprietary AI. It uses multispectral cameras to analyze physiological data patterns with its screening technology to detect many conditions. They include cannabis or alcohol impairment, infectious diseases, mental illness, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, respiratory illnesses, COVID 19, and signs of fatigue. The stations are about 90% accurate. Kushwah told LA Weekly that the tech still had trouble with people under the age of 18 and over 75. If you were to remove those groups from the data pool, he estimates the accuracy would be well over 95%.
“It’s almost like we have developed this new language. With this language, you can write impairment, you can write fatigue. You can write health care parameters, screening for diseases, whatever you want. So effectively, we have a platform that can be used to screen an unlimited number of things,” Kushwah said.
We asked Kushwah how helpful it is to have the road out in front of them with no real sign of another mechanism to test a person for their current level of cannabis impairment in the near future.
“So let’s say we talk about cannabis impairment. First of all, this whole concept of using breathalyzers for cannabis just cannot work from a scientific perspective because the only time you can make a freaking correlation is if you can measure the level of THC in the brain,” Kushwah replied. “The THC has to cross the blood-brain barrier to impair you in the first place. So that’s why we’re not even going after measuring THC. What we’re identifying are signs of impairment.”
Kushwah went on to explain, Predictmedix can actually create thresholds in terms of what you want to define as impairment within your organization. If it’s zero tolerance, they can make it that way in the Safe Entry Stations. The red light is going to come on, even if somebody is showing just the slightest signs of impairment.
Since launching the Safe Entry Station, Predictmedix has worked to scale down the machines to something a bit more manageable. They’ve not reached the point where they’ll release a phone app that pairs with a small multispectral camera you plug into your phone.
“You put the camera in front of you, you look at the camera, you say a few sentences that are popping up on your phone and that’s it, and that can be used to identify impairment in 10 to 15 seconds,” Kushwah said.
Kushwah explained the reason for using multispectral imaging is because they don’t really care about how you look on top of your skin. He argues there is no such thing as looking stoned.
“It’s more about, how are the changes in the underlying blood flow patterns that we are able to identify. And that’s part of the reason that our technology, I mean, is a bit Star Trek in a way. I mean, just think about it. Not only the technology can tell you if you’re impaired if you’re fatigued, but it can also tell you your heart rate, breathing rate, temperature and a lot of your vitals, without even touching you,” Kushwah said. “ And we have completed a few clinical studies in different parts of the world where we have had medical institutions basically signing off on our technology and saying how this is the future and the future is now.”
The app could certainly be a game changer. Imagine police officers being able to give people impairment tests without even getting out of their cars. If they fail, they can do a full sobriety test that would confirm the test or catch a false positive
We’ll continue to keep an eye on how this plays out.
EMERALD CUP PICKS CALIFORNIA’S FINEST CANNABIS FOR 2023
The Emerald Cup was back for 2023 last weekend and repeat champions weren’t in short supply.
This year would see the Emerald Cup’s award show move to the Bay Area for the first time after a long stint in wine country before the pandemic and last year’s show at The Montalbán in Hollywood. While nowhere in the state worth having the cup could be considered neutral territory given how many competitors dot the state from north to south, the Bay is one of the better spots to have it because it’s essentially halfway between L.A. and Arcata — most of the state’s cannabis enthusiasts and businesses lie between that two points, too. The venue at Richmond’s Craneway Pavilion was undoubtedly the most gorgeous the cup has seen since it left the redwoods in the early 2010s for bigger venues closer to population centers.
But the most beautiful sights to behold on the water’s edge were the glass cases filled with this year’s entries. As the judges, contestants and special guests entered the venue, they were greeted by the cases. The flower entries were the most packed, as people wedged in tight to get pics of all the pretty buds for the social media adventures.
As the award show kicked off, it was like the final countdown to the big categories at the end began. After making its way through some of the more niche photography and product categories, it was on to the social justice awards. In one of the coolest moments of the night, Luke Scarmazzo came on stage to accept The Social Justice Award on behalf of his good friend Weldon Angelos.
Angelos was released in 2016. He was originally sentenced to serve 55 years over a cannabis conviction with a mandatory minimum sentence but only served 13 years. After his release, Angelos began advocating for others who remained in the circumstances he was able to escape, eventually founding The Weldon Project. One of the people Weldon has helped get out of prison was his close friend Scarmazzo.
As he took the stage, Scarmazzo noted he was celebrating 100 days since being released from prison after serving 15 years over medical cannabis. The news received one of the loudest ovations of the night.
Other awards would include The Pioneer Award going to Amber Senter for her work on Social Equity and The Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award going to Mila Jansen for her contribution to the world of hashish over the last 50 years as an entrepreneur, smuggler, and inventor.
From there we started into the big dog categories of flower and hash. This year’s theme was champions still crushing it. The rest of the evening would feature a carousel of repeat winners or those returning to the podium after a year or two off.
One of the biggest returns was Ridgeline Farms. After being the only mixed-light cultivator to qualify for the Zalympix finals, the LANTZ hype rolled on this weekend with Ridgeline taking top honors.
Founder Jason Gellman shared the experience with L.A. Weekly.
“With all the competition going on these days, The Emerald Cup to me is still the most prestigious and authentic. The judging is taken seriously by a talented group hand-picked for their dedication to the plant,” Gellman said. “As our small cannabis communities have taken a giant hit from the challenges of the industry, it’s as important as ever to stay relevant. I take lots of pride in growing the best herb possible, so when I submit my entries I always feel they have a chance to win.”
After the near-perfect farming conditions up north for most of the last year before monsoon season hit, it was expected Southern Humboldt would be very competitive. Most of the years that a NorCal farmer didn’t win the cup it had something to do with mother nature. Gellman was proud to see what the county did this year.
“This year, Humboldt County showed up big. Winning is huge, but it’s more about us representing our community as a whole than just one of us,” Gellman said. “Ridgeline took home multiple awards including first in mixed light with my new strain LANTZ, but what we were the most proud of is winning the Breeders cup.”
Gellman had been working on creating this strain for over four years.
“Lots of time, energy, money, fails and finally one giant win,” Gellman said. “I knew LANTZ was the one, but this just solidifies it. The cup was a giant success this year and was great to see so many real heads in the game. Overall, it was a great day in the bay”
Rebel Grown took home top honors in the Full Sun. After regularly gracing the top 10 and top 20 over the years, this time they were able to take first place with their Double OG Chem.
In indoor, Fig Farms would became the only indoor farm to ever win The Emerald Cup twice after now winning both the past two renditions of the contest. The Blue Face that won the indoor category was also the first-ever indoor flower to win The Emerald Cup’s prestigious best-in-show award.
“The love we received at the Emerald Cup has elevated to a new level,” Keith Healy of Fig Farms told L.A. Weekly, “Two years at the top spot for indoor flower, and this year going a step further by receiving Best in Show. Fig Farms’s Blue Face is the first indoor flower to receive the Best in Show award, which has been given exclusively to Sungrown flower until now. I am so proud of our team, and truly honored in a way that cannot be put into words.”
ADVOCATES WANT CANNABIS DESCHEDULED NOT RESCHEDULED
Last week’s leaked letter from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommending that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reclassify cannabis from a Schedule I to a Schedule III controlled substance under federal law was lacking for advocates who want to see it descheduled.
All of the OG cannabis reformers are weighing in. Congressman Earl Blumenauer has been involved in cannabis reform for 50 years. He founded the Congressional Cannabis Caucus in 2017.
“This is a step in the right direction, but it is not sufficient. I hope it is followed by more significant reforms,” Blumenauer said. “This is long overdue.”
Blumenauer noted he pushed the Biden Administration to deschedule marijuana last December. Later in the spring, he called for more transparency in the wider Controlled Substances Act scheduling process.
NORML, the nation’s oldest marijuana reform organization, noted the DEA said as recently as 2016, cannabis had no current accepted medical use regardless of all the babies with Dravet’s Syndrome that started the CBD explosion making national headlines for years at that point. The DEA will have the final say in all of this; we know how it went the last four times.
NORML’s deputy director and longtime policy ninja, Paul Armentano, weighed in on the letter.
“It will be very interesting to see how DEA responds to this recommendation, given the agency’s historic opposition to any potential change in cannabis’ categorization under federal law,” Armentano said. “Further, for decades, the agency has utilized its own five-factor criteria for assessing cannabis’ placement in the CSA — criteria that as recently as 2016, the agency claimed that cannabis failed to meet. Since the agency has final say over any rescheduling decision, it is safe to say that this process still remains far from over.”
Like Blumenauer, NORML has been calling for cannabis to be removed from the Controlled Substances Act for years. They recommend doing it in a manner that’s similar to liquor and tobacco.
“The goal of any federal cannabis policy reform ought to be to address the existing, untenable chasm between federal marijuana policy and the cannabis laws of the majority of US states,” Armentano said. “Rescheduling the cannabis plant to Schedule III of the US Controlled Substances Act fails to adequately address this conflict, as existing state legalization laws — both adult use and medical — will continue to be in conflict with federal regulations, thereby perpetuating the existing divide between state and federal marijuana policies.”
Armentano closed, noting it’s the same level of intellectual dishonesty to categorize cannabis next to anabolic steroids as it is in its current situation on the list next to heroin.
With the US recreational cannabis market worth more than ever, it would seem something is going to have to be done to remedy the situation. Last week, California announced it had taken in just over $5 billion since the legal market kicked off in 2018, New York City’s first shop did $12 million in its first six months, and there are about 50 more data points off the top of my head why states aren’t going to let this fly.
In the end, descheduling is likely. But the road is going to be a bit longer. And you can expect it to be the result of a future Congress and White House taking some kind of mandated action that the DEA won’t have a say in.
New York’s first recreational marijuana dispensary sold $12 million in sales in the first six months of operations.
When announcing the figures this week, Housing Works Cannabis Co boasted the store has already directed millions of dollars to some of the city’s communities in the most urgent need of support. Sales are directly supporting programs that provide New Yorkers a variety of services. Housing Works noted those services include health care, housing, job training, harm reduction, case management, advocacy for health equity and social justice initiatives, LGBTQ+ youth programs, and sexual health services.
The shop’s manager noted these kinds of services were a keystone of what Housing Works does long before cannabis permits were a thing.
“Our goal, going back over 30 years ago through Housing Works, has been to empower New Yorkers through advocacy and bridge communities to life saving services,” said Sasha Nutgent, retail manager at Housing Works Cannabis Co. “From the resources we’ve rolled out, to the brands we carefully select for our customers, everything we do here has a greater purpose, and we’re humbled to see the support our mission is receiving.”
Things Started Strong
As expected, New York’s first recreational dispensary was a madhouse when it opened a couple of days before the new year. Housing Works notes the shop did an estimated $40,000 dollars in sales in just its first three hours open. Over the course of the next month, the numbers would get up to $1.6 million with sales continuing to roll on to hit that $12 million mark at the tail end of July.
What are New Yorkers buying?
According to Housing Works’ data from the last six months, New Yorkers are buying for strength. The biggest determining factor in purchases so far is potency. Some would argue that means consumers are uneducated, but that’s not necessarily the case. There is certainly some balance between potency and quality even if the weed with the highest THC number isn’t the best one on the shelf. People that try and disenfranchise the importance of potency in cannabis may be trying to cover for inferior products that don’t get the numbers needed to be commercially viable in this market. In a fun surprise, Housing Works noted that people are leaning towards sativas and sativa-leaning hybrids. Once there is a bigger data pool in New York, it will lean toward gas and dessert weed for sure, with the exception of great diesel.
Stocking The Shelves
While sales have been great, getting the product to stock the shelves and drive those numbers has not always been an easy task for Housing Works.
“One unforeseen challenge and a pain point for both retailers and customers has been product rollout,” said Nutgent. “There have been major improvements with the state’s product testing timeline, for example, but the feedback we still hear from some Black-owned brands is that there is not enough funding to get their products into the market.”
In recent months the dispensary has added over 200 new products.
Delivery
Make no mistake about it, cannabis delivery has been an extremely popular thing in NYC for decades, with various services coming and going over those years. Housing Works has lucked out in becoming the first legal delivery service in the state in addition to its retail site. The company noted this falls right in line with its quest to be accessible.
“We’ve seen our delivery programs over the years forge meaningful and trusting relationships between our staff and thrift store patrons,” said Charles King, CEO of Housing Works. “To see the same positive dynamic emerge between customers and budtenders reflects our roots in the city, our deep understanding of New York City culture and the community trust we continue to nurture.”
Right now the delivery service is available in select zip codes in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens; anyone over the age of 21 with a valid ID can secure same-day and next-day delivery slots directly on Housing Works Cannabis Co’s website.
MAVEN GENETICS ONE OF LA’S TOP DOGS AT EMERALD CUP
L.A.’s Maven Genetics became one of the state’s premier cannabis companies two weekends ago at The Emerald Cup with a top-five finish for French Laundry.
While Maven’s rise around the state in recent years has been quick, this is the biggest accolade yet for the longtime OG cultivators (Kush and metaphorically) that transitioned to the recreational side of things at the dawn of the legal era. Even before the big win, the company found itself in roughly 400 shops at any given time.
XXX, Maven’s favorite OG these days.
We sat down with Maven’s cofounder and president Mike Corvington to talk about the win and their experiences transitioning to a fully vertically integrated company locally that still grows in some of its legacy gardens, distributes its own product and sells its cannabis through two storefronts on top of its hundreds-long client list.
“Los Angeles is a beast man,” Corvington told L.A. Weekly. “From the regulatory compliance things to L.A. in general, it’s good for us because it’s home. This is where we’re from, we’re very comfortable with the situation as a whole. The industry is going through a lot of bullshit, as it has for a long time. I don’t think that’s just related to Los Angeles. I think that’s probably California as a whole. But, you know, all in all, L.A. is our home man, our backyard. This is where we’ve been rocking for a long time.”
Corvington isn’t kidding. He admits up until a few years ago, they barely had to leave the L.A. bubble at all, as they pumped out awesome OGs for 15 years straight without a thought to creating what is now one of the widest lineups in the state. We asked Corvington if it was fair to call most of their cultivation and wider cannabis careers L.A.-centric?
“Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we’ve really started pushing up in the NorCal territories and distributing up there probably two years ago,” Corvington said. “We went pretty heavy on that first group, first few years in transition from medical to rec market. We get out and just kind of grew up grassroots. Everything we’ve done has been grassroots where we’re self-funded, we haven’t taken on any capital even to this day. I’m not trying to push into the market more than what is being asked of us. So we’re just kind of doing our thing and it’s been working successfully. We’re still here.”
Blue Agape
But the “still here” part hasn’t always been easy. As for many cultivators, one of Maven’s main jobs is to get the cash for the flower they pump into the marketplace. As with many of their peers on the cultivation side of things, that’s often proven easier said than done.
Over the last few years Maven’s been able to hone in on the problem accounts and who is actually going to pay them. Making sure the latter always has flower flowing their way is critical.
“You, unfortunately, have to weed out people that just don’t handle their shit professionally,” Corvington noted. “And there’s a lot of people who just kind of are trapped in old ways and are having a difficult time evolving with things as they moved forward. But paying your bills is just kind of number one.”
One of the things Maven has done during these times is try to be as accommodating as possible to the folks they’re working with. They’d rather constantly restock you with the freshest flower possible rather than have something sit there that is going to degrade the consumer experience and the shop isn’t going to be able to make the payment terms in the original time frame.
“We tell people we’ll come to deliver to you every day,” Corvington emphasized. “We don’t want to sell you anything that even has a potential opportunity to get old. We will happily, no charge, come to drop you fresh packs all the time. So we kind of scaled-down people’s orders a lot of times because sometimes these buyers don’t understand their own market or demographic.”
Photo: Andy Feliciotti
