NEW REPORT: 77% DECLINE IN YOUTH INCARCERATION The Sentencing Project’s latest report found a 77% decrease in youth held in juvenile justice facilities around the United States. The report numbers are based on one-day counts of how many youths are in the facilities. At the turn of the century, the number climbed as high as almost 109,000. Over…
NEW REPORT: 77% DECLINE IN YOUTH INCARCERATION
The Sentencing Project’s latest report found a 77% decrease in youth held in juvenile justice facilities around the United States.
The report numbers are based on one-day counts of how many youths are in the facilities. At the turn of the century, the number climbed as high as almost 109,000. Over the past two decades, it has declined to just over 25,000 in a one-day count taken in late October 2020. The number includes those awaiting their court date in detention facilities, youth prisons, residential treatment centers, group homes, or other placement facilities as a court-ordered consequence.
“The sharp declines in youth arrests and incarceration demonstrate the possibilities for similar success for the adult population, as well. However, the persistent racial and ethnic disparities in the youth justice system highlight the need to address the sources of those disparities wherever they emerge,” The Sentencing Project noted when announcing the new report.
One of the big takeaways was racism in the criminal justice system doesn’t have a minimum age requirement. Youth from communities of color were far more likely than whites to be detained in the facilities in the counts.
“In 2019, Black youth were 4.4 times as likely to be incarcerated; Tribal youth were 3.2 times as likely; and Latinx youth were 27% as likely than white youth to be incarcerated,” the authors noted.
California had one of the worst disparities in the nation. Forty-eight white youths per 100,000 California residents are in placement at some kind of facility. White youths were also much more likely to be offered some kind of diversion program that would see them avoid jail time. At the same time, 488 Black youths are in a correctional facility per 100,000 people. This equates to a 9/1 disparity here in California. The only places worse were The District of Columbia, Connecticut, Nebraska, New Jersey and Wisconsin; in all but Nebraska, Black youth are more than 10 times more likely to be incarcerated. While it’s bad, the disparity dropped 4% in California from 2015 to 2019.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, California youths weren’t as horrible per 100,000 residents in 2019 as other states. When it came to larceny, the 74 Californians arrested per 100,000 was a fraction of what other states were seeing; Alabama was over 10 times higher at 785. Drug abuse crimes were a lot lower too, likely due to more progressive approaches to the war on drugs. But the numbers weren’t so good when it came to robberies. The 72 California youths arrested per 100,000 was only topped by Delaware, Illinois and Maryland.
South Carolina, Tennessee and Nebraska have seen their racial disparities grow by at least one-third over that same window. While Tennessee, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nevada saw a dip of more than a third in their disparity levels. Three of those states legalized cannabis during that window in some form.
The Juvenile Justice Information Exchange spoke to the dip youth offenders earlier this year. At the time, the JJIE noted that most juvenile arrests had been dipping in recent years, unfortunately with the exception of murder. Homicide numbers have been on the rise.
The JJIE noted that less cash going to house youth offenders in the most expensive incarceration options allows those resources to be diverted to alternative placements in the community. This might be group homes or programs that provide rehabilitative and wraparound social services.
For fiscal year 2023, Congress appropriated $400 million for juvenile justice programs. The Congressional Research Service noted in January that this is the largest appropriation since the $424 million provided in FY2010. The federal government doesn’t administer juvenile justice by itself, it leaves that job to the states. But there are a variety of programs in the Department of Justice that distribute anywhere from $5 Million to $100 million to states depending on their individual need.
When announcing the program on Tuesday, the DOJ noted CAPP will provide partner cities and counties DOJ legal support to address illegal cannabis activity through administrative enforcement and nuisance abatement. Essentially, the city or county signs on to ramp up local enforcement and then the DOJ provides extra resources. The DOJ will provide educational materials for locals to build out their programs and provide mechanisms for evidence collection in future statewide enforcement operations that have been umbrellaed under the new Effort to Prevent Illicit Cannabis.
As for enforcement actions, CAPP will provide attorneys to act as administrative prosecutors before local hearing bodies when necessary. CAPP also will provide bodies in general to those smaller municipalities that are just too strapped for cash to do anything. This will include assisting in facilitating administrative procedures and assisting with logistical issues through the use of private process servers, contract code compliance officers, and abatement contractors.
“Complex problems require creative and collaborative solutions,” said Attorney General Rob Bonta. “This innovative new program allows my office to better support local governments in our collective efforts to tackle illegal cannabis activities, and we are confident that this new cost-effective program will have dramatic and measurable effects. I thank the City of Fresno for their partnership and look forward to working together through this new approach to hold participants in the illegal cannabis market accountable.”
Bonta’s office noted the cooperative effort with local jurisdictions leverages the administrative enforcement powers of cities and counties. The DOJ also noted this work being done at the local level will supplement the work of the Department of Cannabis Control and the Governor’s Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force. The task force is led by the Department of Cannabis Control and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Fresno’s city attorney is excited to be the test case.
“Our partnership is aimed at assisting the local legitimate cannabis industry and help grow Fresno’s tax base,” said Fresno City Attorney Andrew Janz. “It is my hope that this, first-of-a-kind joint venture between the Fresno City Attorney’s and the Office of the Attorney General will be a model for other large cities. For far too long, these underground operations have targeted children and minors without fear of retribution. This inventive new approach will seek to put an end to that.”
The state seems to be revving up for a higher level of enforcement. You could see the numbers start to bump in Q1 when the Unified Cannabis Enforcement Taskforce announced the amount of product they seized jumped from $32 million to $52 million in just a few months. It’s a safe bet the highest numbers will likely be attached to harvest season this year.
In addition to the jump in the amount of product seized, the plant eradication count went way up. Through the first three months of the year, the task force destroyed 43% more plants than the quarter before. The DCC noted that was despite serving 30% fewer search warrants. The bump was a direct result of targeting large-scale operations with the resources they had available.
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.
Alien Labs’ Zkittelz strain secured top honors in the new Best Thing Smoking category last weekend’s Zalympix competition hosted by Greenwolf.
The new category’s winner was selected by Proper Doinks in a tournament format.
With a record-breaking number of participants, this edition of Zalympix attracted more entries than all previous events combined. Alien Labs consistently demonstrated its excellence by placing among the top three or winning various categories in the past. However, this triumph marked their most significant achievement yet, as they added another three trophies to their ever-expanding collection.
Speculations arose last week regarding the challenging nature of the competition for Z due to the abundance of Zkittelz hybrids in the mix. Nevertheless, the judges ultimately disagreed, and Zkittelz claimed the highest podium. Since its meteoric rise in 2014, when it dominated the Mendocino Secret Cup and secured a top-five spot at the High Times NorCal Cup, Zkittelz has continued to captivate enthusiasts. It became the first breakthrough strain since Cookies emerged in the late 2000s and would go on to be in the lineage of basically every hype strain that came after.
Before he departed with the trophies for Sacramento, we caught up with Alien Labs’ founder, Ted Lidie. Our conversation began by highlighting the fact that this particular Zkittlez batch contributed the material that produced the original winning rosin entry at this year’s Emerald Cup.
We then delved into Lidie’s decade-long pursuit of winning strains through diligent seed hunts. Like clockwork, he meticulously assesses hundreds of jars every few months, aiming to discover Alien Labs’ next champion. We inquired whether he was disappointed that the victor did not arise from all that effort.
“Definitely, I would have loved to win with one of our own creations,” Lidie told L.A. Weekly. “We’ve spent a decade searching for exceptional genetics, but the past five years have been dedicated to cultivating our distinctive strains.”
Lidie further noted that Alien Labs aims to reach a broader audience compared to Zalympix. As Lidie put it, their selection includes flavors that may not be as trendy, but cater to those seeking the unconventional. He pointed to weird Super Silver Haze crosses as a great example.
During the qualification round, Alien Labs relied on their Area 41 strain, but when it came to the finals, they had approximately two weeks’ notice to make their choice.
“We had to locate a superb flower batch, and that particular strain generated significant hype,” Lidie said. “My QC team, Justin and Jesse, and I had to sample numerous batches to identify the ultimate standout. The Zkittlez batch from the Merced site, cultivated by an outstanding team, truly excelled.”
Lidie promptly acknowledged the high caliber of competition in the event. He expressed his belief that previous editions paled in comparison and commended all participants for delivering their finest work.
“It’s astonishing. If you observe the evolution from the first event to this one, it’s clear that people now have a much better understanding of quality,” Lidie said. “The entries were all exceptional, with consistent white ash and enticing aromas.”
Lidie sees the event as an indicator of overall improvement in quality within the recreational market.
“At least for those of us who participate and care about this industry, we are refining our craft. We won’t let anyone undermine the recreational market because, in the end, it’s the top-tier cultivators who produce the finest cannabis,” Lidie asserted.
We inquired about Lidie’s thoughts on winning what many consider to be the state’s second most esteemed competition, trailing only The Emerald Cup. Lidie highlighted that these events cater to distinct audiences and asserted that the Zalympix victory would have a greater impact in New York City than an Emerald Cup win.
“I’m not criticizing the cup; I’m a judge myself. It’s just that they attract different audiences, and The Emerald Cup holds diverse meanings for different individuals,” Lidie clarified.
Lidie further elaborated on the nuances of indoor judging at Zalympix, emphasizing that participants invest $700 per box, and the judges are accustomed to regularly sampling this caliber of cannabis. This differs from The Emerald Cup, where some judges only smoke indoor strains because they have to for the cup.
WE HIT THE MR. GRAY, DEPPE, DARBY, BEN DAVID SKULL IN HUMBOLDT
Imagine you are sitting in the woods of Humboldt County enjoying some of the finest cannabis the galaxy has to offer and then out of nowhere one of the most legendary pieces of glass art anyone has ever smoked out of gets put on the table.
That is precisely what happened last weekend. And not only did we get to see it, we got to hit it, too.
The skull is a collaboration of Mr. Gray, Scott Deppe, Darby Holm and Ben David. It is considered by many to be the nicest piece of glass ever created for the sake of cannabis consumption. I consider myself among that crowd. Since 2014 when Scott Deppe first posted it to his Instagram, it has absolutely captivated hash and glass enthusiasts all over the world.
It’s not just a looker, the Mothership Torus encased within the skull is an absolute ripper. I found out the hard way. This past weekend it was set up with a dual hookah hose attachment so two people could hit it at once. And back when it was first created, terp slurpers weren’t a thing yet. One might argue a decade later, the skull is in its final form as the masses are able to enjoy it with the best quartz tech to date.
And man did that tech rip. Mr. Gray loaded up a glob of hash for me to smoke out of his most legendary creation. He asked me how big I wanted to go and I said medium. As the beads of sweat started to drop down my brow halfway through, I began to get the impression that he may in fact have gone a little chunkier than a medium. The next 15 minutes were a journey through time and space.
At one point minutes after that fateful rip, I was just sitting there on the couch fried and this really nice lady came up and gave me this crazy crystal pendant and said thank you for coming up to Humboldt. I just remember trying to piece together a thank you as I sat there melting, and by the time I stood up five minutes later, I couldn’t even remember what that lady looked like. So if you’re that lady, thank you again!
Following my recovery, I stood with the crowd of folks who lined up around the skull to watch everyone rip it. It was fun to watch the expressions of people as they walked in and looked at the table mesmerized. As cool as the pictures are, it’s hard to capture the way the natural light kisses the glass — it is really something special, even on an overcast day like when we saw it. It was a really headie crowd in general. A lot of people knew exactly what they were looking at, even though it was the first time they had ever seen the skull in person.
After they took it all in, they lined up to hit it. One person noted that by the time they arrived at the party at 6:30, it seemed the skull had laid a path of destruction through the crowd. The Mr. Gray-loaded dabs had people somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.
While I was in no condition to ask him at the moment, as I headed back south from Humboldt on Sunday, I reached out to Mr. Gray to get his take on how iconic the skull continues to be all these years later.
“To most people when they think of a glass pipe, they think of a bong they use or their first spoon, but I think of something more elaborate,” Mr Gray told L.A Weekly. “ Here in Humboldt, I have immersed myself in glass to the point of no return.
Even with the full-on immersion in cannabis culture, Mr Gray emphasized this one holds a special place in my heart.
“It’s a Holy Grail every time I serve someone a dab,” Mr. Gray said of the joy on people’s faces. “I believe it elevates their mind, body and spirit, and I hope it makes it slightly easier being in these human bodies.”
Jacob from Have Hash, one of the most award-winning hash companies globally over the last year, explained how we all ended up getting to hit the skull.
“I apprenticed for Mr. Gray in between farm work when I had just moved to Humboldt, so we’re buddies,” Jacob told L.A. Weekly, “He now works with my friend Zach who does One World Humboldt, a new heady gallery that holds the piece, and I figured it would be a great opportunity to bring it out so I asked em if they wanted to.”
Over the last few months, L.A. Weekly has spent more time in Bangkok, Thailand covering the developing cannabis scene than anyone.
Thailand took the international cannabis scene by storm last June when it announced it would be decriminalizing cannabis after having first made a move to legalize medical cannabis in 2018. Thais were initially suspect of decrim, but once they saw the government start letting people out of prison for cannabis offenses, they knew it was about to be on.
And boy was it. In the months since it’s now estimated that Bangkok has opened north of 700 to 800 dispensaries with another opening every few days. The first budtender that helped us on our second trip at the 24-hour Thai Terps lounge told us he was preparing to open up his own shop in the next few weeks.
The common number tossed around on how much it costs to start a full retail storefront at the moment is about 500,000 Thai Baht. That’s the equivalent of just over $15,000 USD. This has led to a surge of cannabis access in Thailand that is more reminiscent of Oklahoma than California. It was a lot easier to get a permit out the gate in Oklahoma before they started to tighten things up than it ever was in California. Remember the METRC protests!! Thai influencers are now protesting the fact shops are writing ID numbers down, imagine what they would think of full track and trace.
On our first trip to Thailand just before The Emerald Cup, our biggest mistake was not visiting Sokhumweed. While we were there in November, JJ-NYC of Top Dawg Seeds invited me to come to rage with him and Arjan from Green House Seed Co. That originally put it on my radar.
When we arrived at the shop unannounced, its founder Beer spotted us quickly. The dude just loves weed. He took us over to view a spread of portraits from the Cookies opening a week prior that he’d got printed fast enough to have Berner sign one before leaving after the big launch in Bangkok. That’s how much Beer loves weed.
“I opened a day early in June,” Beer told L.A. Weekly with a laugh. “What were they going to do? Throw me in prison for 12 hours?”
Beer was part of the legislative effort to push cannabis reform in Thailand, so with his eye on the ball, he got things rolling on Sokhumweed a couple of months prior to opening.
“So after witnessing this policy develop over the last seven years, I got the keys to the shop about three days before we opened,” Beer said before noting the shop is working with about 15 farms at the moment, many run by Beer’s longtime friends he’s excited to support.
Sukhomweed’s founder Beer.
Another thing Thailand has in common with Oklahoma is the fact most of the best weed ever seen there is from California. Not all of it, but the vast majority.
This had led to this weird situation where people don’t believe the heat is grown in Thailand. I was carrying around some absolutely gas Double Dawg, some of the best fuel/petrol aromas I’ve ever seen outside the U.S. When I showed it to Thais, they tried to convince me it was the fresh stuff from California. So to an extent, the weed in Thailand got good so fast that they don’t even believe it.
But it’s also fair for folks to question things a bit. Sure, the best stuff coming from California is absolutely balls-to-the-wall heat, but it’s few and far between. Most of the California stuff is product from mid-2022 that people had trouble moving in the flooded U.S. market. And a lot of that year-old stuff is in fact better than some of the Thai product being grown without any real standard operating procedures known for producing heat here in the U.S.
But regardless, the demand is there for the local product. Most coming into Sokhumweed are looking for Thai-grown cannabis. For those wondering what local strains to keep an eye out for, Beer argues the Freaky Buddha is one the best hybridizations of a Thai landrace at the moment.
Beer made the Freaky Buddha from a Thai landrace and Freakshow. Freakshow is famous for its unique look. While the nine seeds of Freaky Buddah he popped had a lot of males, he’s thankful he found a winner.
Another similarity between the United States and Thailand? The government weed sucks. On our second visit, we stopped by a facility growing medical cannabis for the government. It was probably a pinch nicer than the things that have come out of the University of Mississippi, but it could not compare to the other indoor operations we saw in Bangkok.
Here is the documentary on our first trip to Bangkok in November.
Advocates are celebrating federal cannabis arrests dropping 24% in 2022
After frequently noting all the cannabis progress happening around the country and the world in recent years, we were a bit caught off guard by the large jump in cannabis arrests during the first year of the Biden administration. That 2021 jump in arrests was the biggest in a decade, as we noted last year.
This was despite Biden’s promises to pursue decriminalization, now two and a half years ago. Nevertheless, 6,606 people will be arrested by the DEA and partner agencies in 2021. There were further resounding messages from the community that this was the opposite direction we had expected to see cannabis enforcement take in the Biden Administration.
The 5,061 people arrested on federal cannabis charges last year represent a 24% drop from the year before. It also nearly erases the jump from 2021 when the decade-highs in arrests represented a 25% jump from the year before.
NORML noted that while arrests were down, seizures trended in the opposite direction.
The DEA’s Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program Statistical Report noted agents and partner agencies confiscated approximately 5.7 million cultivated cannabis plants last year, 37,000 edibles, and 60,000 concentrates. NORML noted that as in the past, most of this enforcement is happening in California. Just over half of all federal cannabis arrests in 2022 took place in California and 88% of all product seized nationally was in The Golden State.
“California has always exported the majority of its marijuana crop out of state and the adoption of adult-use legalization in the Golden State has done little to change this fact,” acknowledged California NORML Coordinator Dale Gieringer. “Illegal marijuana cultivation will persist in California so long as there remains a substantial demand from other states and as long as interstate commerce remains prohibited by federal law.”
California had the most plants seized by a mile. Of the 5.7 million law enforcement scooped up around the county, 4.9 million were here. We had 16.6 times as many plants confiscated as runner-up Oklahoma. Kentucky and West Virginia rounded out the top four.
“The reasons we are still seeing relatively high levels of marijuana eradication and interdiction are simple,” said NORML’s Political Director Morgan Fox. “Despite considerable state-level progress, more than half of all U.S. states continue to ban regulated adult-use cannabis markets. Furthermore, the federal government overtaxes state-licensed cannabis businesses and makes it extremely difficult for them to access basic financial services so that they can better compete with unregulated operators.”
Morgan believes the expansion of state markets and fewer hurdles for operators will do a lot more damage to the underground cannabis economy than any enforcement could ever hope to.
“Spending billions of taxpayers’ dollars to enforce federal cannabis prohibition, putting law enforcement officers in unnecessary danger, and hampering the implementation and effectiveness of state-regulated markets are clearly not the answers to this issue,” Fox said. “Rather, the federal and state governments should work toward furthering sensible policies that facilitate regulated cannabis markets and work to repair the harms caused by nearly a century of prohibition.”
Photo courtesy of Attorney General’s Office.
Photos by Jimi Devine
