VIBES AND THE LAST PRISONER PROJECT DROP RELEASE PAPERS

Vibes and The Last Prisoner Project are releasing a new line of papers advocating for the release of cannabis prisoners. 

Founded by Cookies co-founder and rapper Berner, Vibes has carved a place for itself in the higher-end rolling paper scene traditionally dominated by Raw’s unbleached papers and Elements. Regardless of how difficult it is to truly claim a chunk of the rolling paper market, Vibes was able to pull it off. A variety of sizes and offerings you just don’t see from the competition also helped put the company on the map. 

Vibes will now turn that energy to aid the Last Prisoner Project(LPP). At the end of July, Vibes and LPP launched Release Papers in collaboration with the creatives at Mother. The papers now serve as the heart of an advocacy campaign looking to push the continued release of cannabis prisoners. 

“So many people are still locked up with lengthy sentences related to cannabis. While at the same time, so many states have made up their mind that cannabis should be legal, and those states are where those people are still serving time, which makes absolutely no sense,” Berner said when announcing the effort. “Campaigns like this are part of who I am, we have to speak up, stand next to and support causes like Last Prisoner Project. I’ve helped raise awareness for Richard Delisi, Corvain Cooper and soon, Robert Deals. There are so many more people to fight for, and I need your help to fight for their freedom.” 

The collaborators went on to note 72% of Americans support cannabis pardons for the numerous folks serving time for nonviolent cannabis offenses.

The general ethos of the campaign is to use RELEASE PAPERS as an educational tool that will also get the public to engage in advocating for those still behind bars. The papers will include the name of one of the four prisoners featured in the pack. They are:

• Edwin Rubis, currently serving a 40-year sentence in Talladega, Alabama, for a victimless offense
• Hector McGurk, serving a life sentence in Victorville, California, without the possibility of parole for a nonviolent marijuana offense
• Moe Taher, sentenced to 25 years in prison in Welch, West Virginia, for selling cannabis
• Ricardo Ashmeade, serving a 22-year sentence in Pollock, Louisiana, for a victimless offense. Despite a reclassification of a California conviction from a felony to a misdemeanor, the federal courts have refused to resentence him.

The collaborators noted inside the pack people will find a QR code directing them to release-papers.com. The site gives supporters the opportunity to sign the Cannabis Clemency Now petition urging President Biden to release federal cannabis prisoners. Site visitors also will be able to participate in the letter-writing program supporting the featured inmates. 

I work at a dispensary that used to organize letter-writing campaigns for Eddy Lepp, one of California’s most famous medical cannabis prisoners. He always notes how thankful he was when mail call came and it showed how much people cared about his fight. It’s not unreasonable to think the same could be said for the four prisoners featured in this campaign. 

“Vibes Release Papers are helping illuminate the injustice our constituents continue

to face, even as more states legalize cannabis. President Biden has the power to right

history and free Edwin, Hector, Moe and Ricardo with the stroke of a pen, says

Stephanie Shepard, LPP board member and director of advocacy. “We are grateful to

have Vibes join our fight, as we keep advocating until everyone still incarcerated for

cannabis is fully free.”

A portion of the profits also will go back to the Last Prisoner Project to support its efforts in calling on President Biden to grant clemency to the tens of thousands of individuals currently incarcerated due to federal cannabis-related convictions.

DEATH ROW CANNABIS LAUNCH SHOWS SNOOP DOGG BRINGING IN THE EXPERTS

We sat down with the team at Death Row Cannabis last Friday as the world learned about the iconic Los Angeles record label and brand’s move into the cannabis space. 

Last February, word got out Snoop Dogg had acquired Death Row Records. At the time, Snoop Dogg was excited to take the reins of the brand he had started his career with and the rest of us were curious to see the types of things he’d do with it. Any rough patches the brand’s identity had been through over the past 30 years were essentially cleaned up with the purchase, given Snoop Dogg’s distance from everything and general mainstream likability. Remember the Super Bowl blunt?! What a guy. 

After pulling the Death Row catalog from underpaying music streaming services and streamlining the rest of the company, a few months after the purchase the iconic label started eyeballing the cannabis industry. That culminated with last Friday’s release of their first flower drop. We sat down to chat with two of the people running point for Snoop Dogg on the project, his longtime sound engineer and cannabis inspector Shaggy and AK.

AK will be bringing a lot of heat to the table. Six years ago he came down to California on the hunt for funding something up in Washington. A year later he’d make the move seeing the obvious opportunity for people that speak flame in California’s emerging legal industry. He’d even end up taking part in the Wizard Trees pheno hunt where the RS-11 and Studio 54 phenos were selected, arguably the most influential hunt of the last few years. He kept the #3 for himself, swearing to this day it’s the best one. AK still owns a fertilizer company with Scott from Wizard Trees. 

Death Row Cannabis Was Years in the Making

AK would go on to become VP of cultivation for TRP. Founded in 2019, the company has quickly amassed a footprint of 14 states growing for companies like Cookies and Dr. Greenthumb. But even before TRP was founded a few years ago or the Death Row Records purchase, AK had been working on a deal with Snoop Dogg. Arguably the most mainstream cannabis consumer in America next to his literal pals Willie Nelson and Martha Stewart, the latter now with her own CBD company. 

“I ended up working for TRP, I’ve been within the last year and a half, about three or four months ago Shaggy reached out to me and said, yo Dogg hit me up, asking if you’d still be interested in doing something with us,” AK told L.A. Weekly explaining how the deal finally came to fruition.  

As they started pondering the possibilities, Shaggy quickly realized the lack of red tape at Death Row Records compared to doing another “celebrity line” with the boss. And while last Friday’s launch was certainly intertwined with its new owner heavily in the cannabis news cycle, they still did a good job pushing the Death Row identity to the forefront. 

The launch packaging for Death Row Cannabis.

AK had his foot on the gas over the last three months in the buildup. From designing the brand’s identity and packaging to promo to selecting the weed, he had it all covered. While they did look at a lot of cannabis, much of it was grown at their distribution partner’s facility.

“There’s a grow here at the distro, as well, and that’s where three out of the four strains that we’re gonna drop were grown around here by us using my nutrient line,” AK said. “I personally wasn’t involved in growing it, but we literally run the same program. The guys that built that garden and I have done consultations together. And I’m here all the time, so I’m not hands-on but I’m hands-on, if that makes sense.”

AK also emphasized the brand won’t be exclusive to the $60 price point. A big part of the plan is making sure the brand is accessible to all. 

“Even if we have more affordable price points we’re still not going to put boof in those bags,” AK emphasized. “I can go get fire ass deps that rival indoor, like fakers (The stuff nice enough to tell east coast people it’s indoor) and then price them correctly instead of just trying to hit people as fakers and gouge them on it.”

The four flower stains for launch will be Tropicanna Cookies, SFV OG, LA Runtz, and Strawberry Gary. TRP-affiliated shops will be the first to get them in San Diego, Brentwood and San Bernardino. They’re shooting to get the number of stores up to 50 to 100 in the first quarter, but are much more focused on making sure the consumer understands they’re getting heat and it has some real grassroots people behind it. 

Snoop Dogg’s Specialist

Shaggy, who is leading the effort for Snoop Dogg’s team, has been working with him as a recording engineer since he was 19, he’s 33 now. Over those years, he started helping Snoop Dogg source his flower and taking the responsibilities that come with it, specifically, making sure it’s proper. If someone showed up to the studio with something that wasn’t up to standard, it was up to Shaggy to be the heartbreaker.

“And so that just rolled over when he started doing some cannabis initiatives. He put me and Tiffany in charge of, you know, getting some of his cannabis initiatives up and going. I know a lot of people like AK,” Shaggy explained to L.A. Weekly. 

We asked Shaggy when Snoop Dogg knew it was time to pull the trigger on something like Death Row Cannabis given the plethora of pot opportunities that must have been piling up at his door over the years.

Shaggy argues Death Row Cannabis made sense, and the brand has been going through a lot since the purchase. Now we know that most of that time some kind of cannabis discussions were happening in the background, but since February, Death Row has started to revive its merch line with spins on old concert T-shirts and into NFT-embedded albums.  

“With the cannabis market, it just made sense, because like AK said, right now a lot of the celebrity brands come out and they hit the really high price point and they don’t offer the value for what you’re paying for,” Shaggy explained. “Like the best price point is like that 30 to 40 range, you know, maybe like $45 because, like this top tier stuff is just too expensive and it’s not always operating to value you know, I’ve been very disappointed you know.”

Shaggy admitted to getting out into the rec market a bit more over the last year as things came together. He regularly left with $65 dollars worth of disappointment as he sees it. His experiences with growers over the years have convinced him that good weed doesn’t have to be really expensive and cheap weed doesn’t have to be bad. 

“There’s weed that’s not as expensive, that’s really really good. And basically with us, we want to kind of help stimulate the culture, a little bit of a miseducated culture, and kind of give them good flower at a good price showing that this is possible,” Shaggy said.

Photos courtesy of Ted’s Bud Co

TED’S BUDZ CO PREPS FOR TED FEST 2 IN DTLA

Ted’s Budz Co and its stable of heaters are prepping to take over the roof of Cookied DTLA this weekend. 

This will be the second annual edition of Ted Fest and the biggest ever. Ted’s is moving to a model where it’s going to start hosting its own events more, to give the brands the company is distributing a chance to get out into the community without getting taxed by event producers. This edition will feature The Gooniez, Super Dope, Blackleaf, Zatix and a host of other SoCal heat cultivators. 

We sat down with Ted this week as he was preparing for the festivities Saturday night from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., at 921 Venice Blvd. 

“I’m going to start throwing events myself instead of going to other people’s events since we distribute for so many really good cultivators and really good brands,” Ted told L.A. Weekly. “Everyone that I worked with works really hard. It’s hard to get them to come out because they’re so stuck in daily tasks.”

Those little things that keep the farmers he works with busy are what make the difference between Ted’s and a lot of other distributors. With the exception of cup winner verticals that are distributing themselves, it is hard to point to a distributor with that level of Ted’s quality across the menu all the way through.

And as we see the big dogs of California cannabis fall, small boutique distros like Ted’s that specialize in quality high enough to hold the line with its other products are faring better and better as time goes on. Just this week we’ve seen distros picking up some big brands from all the fallout from closures. 

One of the things that pushed Ted to throw more parties is the ability to curate musical performances. He tried to perform or push his friends’ music to a lot of cannabis events over the years. 

“Everyone’s like, no, no, no, I’m like fuck it, I’ll throw my own,” Ted said. “And then you have so many lounges and shops that are like begging us to come out and do events. When we do takeovers, they are not like anyone else’s event. There is a good amount of people that come out when we do strain releases. So I mean, that’s kind of what we’ve been on.”

In addition to those lively happenings, some of the collaborations Ted’s Bud Co has lined up are starting to gain steam. Two of the most prominent are offerings with Lamar Odom and Birdman of Cash Money Records. Ted said Cream City’s CEO, Lil Ki, was instrumental in helping land the deal with Birdman. 

“Those are just things that were kind of thrown into my lap,” Ted said of the collabs. “If it wasn’t for my buddy Ki, the Cash Money collab wouldn’t be the one that was thrown my way. He knows that I’m probably one of the most solid people to start a brand with, as far as an influencer.” 

He noted lots of influencers he ended up working with because they had previous bad experiences. 

“They ended up coming over because, I mean, I’m more straightforward,” Ted said. 

One of the things Ted is most excited about is an upcoming drop from gear he got from Wyeast Farms. Wyeast provided a lot of the gear that backboned Compound Genetics before the split. Ted scored a super exclusive drop Wyest in collaboration with Oregon Elite Seeds. 

He’s currently searching through the new gear for winners. 

“I was really in love with his Cold Snaps. I was really in love with Horchata and Apricot Gelato. You know, I’ve always been a fan,” Ted said of Wyeast. “Now I finally got my hands on some of those seeds. I’m looking forward to having these cloned and flowers. I’m looking forward to that and bringing some different shit because I mean, right now, the industry is kind of on a superduper candy wave, but I can see it going back. They’re looking for something different as we speak and the market is changing. People are looking for that fuel again.”

L.A. WEEKLY’S CANNABIS TRAVEL TIPS 2023

Here at L.A. Weekly, we have spent the last 12 months on an international quest for the heat and we want to share some travel tips from our adventures ahead of many of you heading to Spain next week for Spannabis. 

As the world continued to open back up, we started our travels at Spannabis 2022, later in the year we’d hit the Canary Islands for White Ash Weekend, and make two trips to Bangkok to check out its rapidly evolving dispensary scene. This is in addition to all our domestic adventures and traveling California from Arcata to Adelanto in search of the best cannabis in the world. 

In the process of all that, we’ve made a few key observations to make your travels more fun. 

Preflight Sesh

Is there anything more fun than getting rocked before you go through TSA to depart to god knows where to enjoy some exotic marijuana? Probably. Regardless, it’s a great time. Some people are scared to smoke giant joints or blunts at the airport, but you’ll more than likely be fine if you’re somewhere cannabis doesn’t get you prison time. As for TSA, I carry an ounce on me with a doctor’s recommendation PDF ready to go in the event of a worst-case scenario. Also, it’s best to keep your weed in your carry-on. Most of the dogs you actually see at the airport are bomb dogs, the drug dogs are smelling stuff as it lands in the international terminal. But if you’ve already landed on an international flight and see a dog, it’s probably a drug dog. They figure you would have blown up by the time the plane landed if you were a terrorist and they keep the different types of working K9s separate — the dogs get confused seeing the other dogs get alerted and affection over smells they haven’t been trained on.

The More Exotic the Destination, The More You Need to Bring Your Own Rolling Supplies 

You can probably buy most of your favorite rolling supplies in any major city in the world, but prices are going to vary. For example in Barcelona, I spent the second to last day of the trip hunting for Backwoods, while the homies prepped for a party. The box of woods I found would run me about €60. That’s roughly $63, which is very comparable to buying a box in America. They’re most expensive in CA these days; you can score them a bit cheaper than that in other parts of the country. In Bangkok, that same $63 only gets you one pack from that box of eight we got in Barcelona with five blunts in it. Even worse, if you get a stale pack, you’re screwed. But Bangkok is so humid that every wood we got in our pack seemed pretty fresh.

Be Polite About Spliffs

Don’t hate the culture internationally. Just say you don’t use tobacco, in a nice way. If people want to mix tobacco with their weed because they love spliffs, or just to stretch it out due to living under the yoke of the oppressor, don’t be a hater. You have to remember soccer and spliffs have a lot in common, they’re the most popular thing outside America. On a positive note, since spliffs are so popular you can basically smoke blunts everywhere you can puff. 

Swiss Army Trail Mix

There is a solid argument to make that trail mix is the most underrated drug smuggling tool in the modern era. You just bring your weed or mushroom chocolate bar to the airport, buy a fresh pack of trail mix available at nearly every domestic U.S. airport, break up your drug chocolates in bigger chunks than the regular ones and throw them in the bag. This is also one of the best ways to get weed into the worst places if you’re understandably scared to pull the trigger on flowers or hash. 

Make Sure You Know Just How Mad The Locals Get

Speaking of the worst! Don’t get Brittany Grinered — there is a good chance you’re not even an Olympian. It’s best to figure out ahead of time where things are going to fall on a scale of all good to having to bribe police, or worst-case scenario, becoming a political pawn over munitions shipments to Ukraine. But a lot of places are great. In Thailand, the most popular answer I got about smoking in public was: just don’t bother anyone. Seemed pretty fair to me. 

Local Access 

Before I was L.A. Weekly’s pot critic, I was regularly hunting for pot in different locations. One time in Mexico I ended up in a bait and tackle shop run by the cartel standing in a line five people deep. Everyone else was there for blow, and when I got to the front of the line the dude was like, “Hey, it’s the weed guy!” in reference to my appearance. A couple of armed men and I had a good laugh. But that’s the advanced class! You should start by asking bartenders and bellhops. They know they’ll get it back in tips if they hook you up. 

VITAL GARDEN SUPPLY PROVES ORGANIC CANNABIS IS SCALABLE

Photos by Jimi Devine

VITAL GARDEN SUPPLY PROVES ORGANIC CANNABIS IS SCALABLE

JIMI DEVINEMAY 11, 2023

The team at Vital Garden Supply continues to prove cultivating organic cannabis is very much possible at scale. 

As mega gardens have become more prominent and significant in the wake of Prop 64’s passing seven years ago, people wanted more shortcuts to go with the scale of their operation. Many didn’t care much what was in it if it passed testing and made their lives easier. Much of the time because they weren’t smoking it themselves. 

Brian Malin from Vital Garden Supply is the exact opposite of that ethos. Since 2006, Vital Garden Supply has provided California gardeners of all kinds with the means to grow things organically. But, of course, the company holds a special place in the hearts of cannabis farmers, to the extent that when the state said it was time to create a mechanism to certify organic cannabis farming in California, they called Malin in to help write the rules for the OCal program.

Pacific Reserve in Salinas.

This week we got to visit Pacific Reserve’s farm in Salinas. The garden was founded by Andy Demico, Billy Tomlinson, Brook Eagle, Bryce Heart and Malin. Most of the group of founders met in Grass Valley or Santa Cruz by using Malin’s products. 

Malin is deeply connected to the farm. Not only does it serve as the largest visible example of what’s possible organically with his products, but his son spent the last few years climbing the ranks through compliance and processing to become cultivation director. 

Malin went on to note there are other big farms using his products, but as of right now, the Pacific Reserve facility is going the hardest with them. Lots of people use Vital’s cocoa and other baseline nutrients to build out their own programs that may not end up totally organic. 

“But Pacific Reserve is 100% on the program, we have other full sun ones that are maybe a couple of acres that are probably similar,” Malin told L.A. Weekly at the farm. 

The group inspects a La Bomba x Oreoz pheno hunt.

We asked Malin when a company like Vital went from serving smaller-scale operations to the mega-farms of the modern era, too.

“Well, it was a slow and steady climb from 2006, that was the first year,” Malin said. “Here we are 17 years later, I’d say the last 10 we’ve been handling some pretty good scale stuff. I think the first really big customers were when these guys first had the place across the street and Crockett’s place. That was like 2,000 yards of soil. It was sweet.”

Malin was never thinking in terms of 10,000-square-foot greenhouses when he started. It was more like he felt he needed to start it to help supplement his own grows and more on a local scale. 

“So I definitely didn’t think of it turning into what it did. It’s pretty crazy,” Malin said. “People are using it now, using around not necessarily the whole world, but definitely all over the U.S. and the Caribbean on the islands. And it’s all clean and organic. So it helps me sleep well at night, knowing I’m like teaching good practices and cutting down on the use of other products that aren’t as good for the planet.”

La Bomba x Oreoz

We asked Malin how he balances growing the company and putting in the work in the garden that’s helped get it this far. He pointed to a combination of intuition and urgency, then laughed, noting it was basically whichever seemed the more important of the two on a given day. 

Recently Pacific Reserve’s parent company Kolaboration Ventures Corporation (KVC) bought Massive Creations and brought on breeder Shiloh Massive as its new head breeder. 

“Shiloh will use the large cultivation and nursery footprint of KVC as the backbone to breed, select these unique cultivars and bring them to market in a wide variety of consumer products,” the company noted when announcing the deal earlier this week. 

Massive joined us in Salinas for the day and explained that his original dealings with Malin saw him first visit the farm in 2016. Originally he gave them some cuts to mom out so he would have plants to back his work as Massive Creations continues to expand. 

“So it was like kind of a no-brainer to let these guys have some proprietary genetics to run,” Massive told L.A. Weekly. “And then I could tap out and get some like clones from them to entertain other parties.” 

A recently harvested room.

It went well. The relationship continued to grow, the farm wanted to run more of his great, and eventually, it got to the point where they acquired Massive Creations and brought Shiloh in-house. 

“It was a long way, but a short time,” Massive said. “It just kind of happened almost overnight toward the end.”

Massive went on to note how fitting the whole thing was given his long history with Vital.  

“I worked in the Vital warehouse. I drove the forklift. I loaded trucks. All the seeds I’ve ever made have been made with Vital since it was ever a product, so it was just a natural fit,” Massive said. “Brian and I have been friends for a long time.”

Since coming on board, Massive has watched the rooms begin to be transitioned to a fully organic program, room by room. Each of those rooms is the size of a small aircraft hangar, so it’s a delicate process, so as to not screw up any production runs. 

That being said, the team swears by the recent results. 

“Everyone is amazed because the last salt run didn’t look too good,” Massive said. “And now the first organic runs are looking amazing. So it just kind of proves what we thought all along that organic cannabis was, I don’t want to say superior, but it’s just a great option for any kind of farming.”

Salinas is a much different environment than where Massive did most of his breeding work in the Emerald Triangle. Right now they are working through his library to figure out what works best. 

“Not every strain is hitting a home run. So now that we got a plan and we’re going to do more pheno hunting, we can do on-site pheno hunting and have a clone garden that kind of feeds this seasonally and we know which strains do better and which season,” Massive explained. “So we’re just in the infancy of it all. And we’re just tapping into the potential, but it’s really exciting to be along for the ride and to actually get a place to start playing with everything I’ve done.”

And it should be worth noting there is plenty of heat growing twice. Some of Pacific Reserve’s neighbors have won The Emerald Cup before. We’ll have the results from this year’s cup next week. 

ICEEXTRACT: THE HASH HARDWARE KING

There are few people on the planet that love hash as much as Ashley Gaetrig, co-founder of one of the top hardware companies in solventless hash, IceExtract.

I’ve had the pleasure of judging solventless at The Emerald Cup with Gaetrig for the last couple of years. It’s easy to presume she brings the same focus levels to all her work as she does judging the world’s best hash.

Much of the time over the years she made the hash she was smoking alongside her husband Eric. She emphasized it’s a shared journey. The affection for hash she shares with him proved a major catalyst for where their lives ended up. 

The pair started growing in Michigan for personal use 20 years ago. Eventually, the medical laws passed and they decided to take it to the next level as caregivers.

“Then we got some patients and we were growing the weed for them and basically charging them really cheap prices, $100 an ounce,” Ashley told L.A. Weekly. “That was on top of what we gave to them for free. And then they were buying the crap out of it. And then we realize that, like, oh, this is like crazy. So I started growing larger amounts to supply the dispensaries.”

Eventually, the pair would go on a trip to Amsterdam. While they were there, they tried the Sublimator Vaporizer.

“What it did was destroy our taste for flowers,” Eric said. “Because when we came home from Amsterdam, we started rolling joints again and it just tasted like we were smoking ashtrays. So then we started extracting our trim so that we could smoke hash.”

From there they attempted to research as much as they could in 2013. They started to learn more about how to dry the hash.

Some hash made by Ashley and Eric.

They started microplaning the hash onto parchment paper and drying it in the fridge. Microplaning is just breaking down the hash into a thin sandy looking layer that will release the moisture more efficiently and evenly in the early stages of drying it out, as opposed to the big chunks you get in spoonfuls out of the bag. 

“And we found out that was one of the best ways you can make hash. We fell in love. We haven’t gone back,” Eric said. “We haven’t smoked flower since then. We’ve been strictly nonsolvent hash smokers for 10 years.”

In 2015 the pair would head to L.A. for the cannabis cup and enter, despite living in Michigan. They got to L.A., but the package was yet to arrive. The pair started to freak out a little bit. Eventually, it did arrive. The pair would unknowingly jump in the car to their future home Marietta, where ICEExtract is now based from.

When it was time for the awards show, they ended up winning the SoCal cup that year. Development on the bags started immediately. 

“And then after that, we started making bags basically. My first sale was in 2015 to 3rd Gen at the High Times Cannabis Cup in Michigan in Flint. He bought a set of 20-gallon 8-bag kits,” Ashley said.

In preparation for their next cup, the entry was caught in the shipment to Denver. They would end up getting raided a couple of weeks later. They’d already started looking at bag material samples earlier that winter after the L.A win. This forced them to put their foot on the gas with the bags. They sold their cars and put their life savings into the company, financing one car so they could drive to and from the manufacturing facility.

They would spend two and a half years in Michigan getting the ball rolling on ICEExtract and finishing probation. Eventually, they made the move to The San Francisco Bay area. That was when they made the jump into producing larger commercial-grade extraction equipment and not just bags.

After the CA move came the big hardware used to was the trichomes from plant material into the bags.

“We were sentenced to two years probation. But since we were good boys and girls, we got off early,” Ashley said. “It’s so funny because like a month before we got off, we weren’t even supposed to leave the state without permission for business release right? And we went to Chalice for the last one. I was there and like, literally took a dab and basically almost had a panic attack because I thought like I was gonna get caught.”

The pair noted that toward the end of probation, they knew they had made it when Cookies cofounder Jigga hit them up for some lessons on doing proper extractions. The lessons went great; they said they weren’t sure who was more nervous, them about the meeting or Jigga because he’d never made hash. It was another example of just how welcoming California was to the then-Michigan company. 

Things certainly worked out. But it wasn’t some dice roll, it was effort- and perseverance-based.

We asked the pair what it’s like to see the risks they took before coming to California work out for the best? Ashley quickly replied it was amazing, the way things played out reminds her of all those speeches her mother gave her in her youth about being able to do whatever you want in life if you apply yourself and work hard.

“And that’s essentially like what Eric and I did, every hurdle that gets in our way, we keep pushing it down and keep moving forward and trying to push the envelope for machinery and equipment,” Ashley said. “That is essentially why we wanted to start making the bags. Because like, we wanted better equipment.”

The little tweaks included making the bags a little shorter so they didn’t sit on the hash. That gives it the best shot to be as pristine as possible. They also made the bags a bit more durable than they were seeing in the marketplace. 

Ashley emphasized they just paid attention to detail.

“How can we do this and make these the shit, basically,” she laughed. “When we make and manufacture the equipment. Our goal is to make the best quality out there and it will never change as long as you know, we’re here at the forefront of ICEExract.”

Eric went on to note even with all the success, it was hard to not be a caregiver anymore. They were giving out a lot and it helped many sick people. Having that right taken away from him was one of the hardest things for him to adjust to through the whole process.

“I had to explain to him now instead of us helping just 12 patients and the people that buy our stuff at the dispensary now are helping the whole world like make clean our product and essentially we’re helping more people,” Ashley said. “So at the end of the day, he’s looked at it as being a win whether or not we were directly interacting with patients or not.”

The world of solventless hash is a much wilder monster than it was in 2015. These days, solventless reigns king. They’ve seen the growth as a whirlwind. It was almost like ICEExtract grew with the changing of the times as Ashley sees it.

With the rise of solventless came the fall of BHO. Even world champs say there is no month in it for them anymore. We asked the pair if they ever expected Butane Hash Oil to fall off this far, especially given there are some terpene profiles that just won’t produce through solventless extraction.

“I bet for sure, 100%,” Ashley replied. “Even though a lot of people in the beginning or a lot of the BHO people are like, oh the yields aren’t there. But the health craze is already coming into effect. Where people are more health conscious and stuff, especially here in California and not as much in Michigan. But I think that’s why respect for hash is a little bit greater out here, too.”