Photos courtesy CAM

CAM SPREADS THE HEAT FARTHER SOUTH THAN EVER

We’re catching up with one of the biggest hitters in California, as she continues to spread her SoCal footprint, Anna Willey of CAM.

Willey is about as famed a female minority legacy operator as it gets. She got her start as a child on the underground NYC delivery scene. Eventually, she would open one of the most popular shops in Colorado. But she knew if she really wanted to crush it long-term, she’d have to move to California. After a short stint in the bay, she’d landed in Sacramento. From there, she coordinates CAM’s statewide growth.

She’s proud to be where she’s at, but you won’t hear her tooting her own horn much, as she surveys the devastation in the cannabis industry. 

“Well, I think that it’s a really, really hard time for legacy operators,” Willey told L.A. Weekly. “There’s so much pride in saying we’re going to bootstrap it and do it on our own.”

But it’s a different time. Running houses and small warehouses was dope. But to start partaking in the economy of scale as cannabis continues to grow, you’re going to be able to need to access funding. 

“When you’re talking to investors. I don’t think people have to mention that oh, by the way, you’ll be giving 62% away to the state, federal and local governments,” Willey said. “So I think that you kind of just got a warehouse and got to lease wherever you could. But you know, 4% tax, I mean, these are just huge. This is like what usual normal business it would make to survive.”

Willey with Hudson from Airfield Supply

But bootstrapping is possible with the heat. She pointed to No Till Kings and Fig Farms as great examples. She emphasized that all of these companies took some risks and owners figured out some parts of the businesses that they might have not been that great in, that sole person, and kind of built a team around people that are good as those parts of the business. 

Our conversation turned to the lack of middle ground in cannabis right now. Sometimes it feels like everyone is either crushing or closing. She believes there should have been a lot more room to be successful in the middle of the pack. 

“Yeah, maybe they’re not like knocking out of the park, but they’re doing what they love. They’re putting out a great product. They’re paying their people, they’re putting food on the table, and they’re doing it as a community,” Willey said, “It’s heartbreaking to watch that smaller farms maybe not have the opportunity to be around next year; it is really, really sad.”

There weren’t a lot of women in cannabis, and when Willey got started there weren’t a lot of brown people either, given the targeted enforcement they faced over cannabis. Especially in her hometown of NYC prior to legalization, just look at all the ACLU data from over the years.

But times have changed a lot. We asked Willey if she thought it was easier for a person like her to get in the game now than when she first did.

“I think that I think for women and for minorities or for anyone that I think it’s, I think it’s getting easier, and it’s getting better than it ever has been,” she replied. “I will say that there’s so much opportunity for people that want it. And I didn’t think it was that bad then either. So I think I’m always looking at it from the perspective of a kind of work ethic.”

Willey emphasized to farms that are struggling that whatever you can do to stay in business for another year is going to give you the best opportunity to win. She said you never know what’s right around the corner, just look how many people the COVID boom helped keep afloat. 

We asked Willey when she first got the chance to do business with women that looked like her.

“I would honestly say not until I came to California. In Colorado, it was my fellow peers, dudes. I think that there are a lot of home-growers in Colorado that kind of either cobble together a couple of bucks or did it with their friends and opened up a shop. It was a lot more peer-oriented than it is now,” Willey said. 

Keep an eye out for CAM flowers all over SoCal. It’s some of the best bang for the buck in the state and absolute heat. My favorite at the moment is the Biscotti BX1, but the Kush Mints has won a lot of stuff. 

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. 

PUTTING PURPLE ON THE MAP

Purple weed was already a thing when Ken Estes got his hands on Grand Daddy Purple in Mendocino County and brought it back to his grows in the bay area, but that journey south really put the winds in its sails. 

We ran into Estes during our recent travels to cover Spannabis and the wider Barcelona club scene. He noted he had spent much of the last decade dealing with his health — this is what originally forced him to take his foot off the gas back in the mid-2010s. But his impact to this day is undeniable. We’d catch back up in California to talk purple a few weeks later. 

While not as prominent in the era of 40 new exotic flavors a month, GDP, as Grand Daddy Purple would be known to many, still dots menus up and down California. Prior to the rise of dessert weeds following Cookies hitting the scene, GDP was where people went for a combination of flavor and impact. Even Cookies’ most famous sibling Cherry Pie was the Durban F1 used to make cookies paired to GDP. 

But before all that came to be, GDP was the last stop for those looking for high-impact cannabis that wasn’t OG Kush. Some would also argue the purple was a bit more couchlock-heavy than the OG Kush of the time. And while Ken Estes certainly didn’t invent purple weed, he changed the demand level, all while living through the dark ages of cannabis. 

And he was loud. Few pushed the limits like Estes. During an event in 2010, he opened a dispensary 20 yards from the steps of Oakland city hall. When he wasn’t executing his business plans, he was hitting city council meetings, eventually opening one of America’s first chains of dispensaries with his Grand Daddy Purple Collective shops in NorCal. His being so “out there” during that era led to frustrations for both his peers and city officials, but folks certainly had a knack for following Ken into town. 

Estes’s path to cannabis would start after a motorcycle accident at age 18 in the 1970s paralyzed him from the neck down. Prior to the accident, Estes had been playing soccer at an elite level in California. Pele, in town with the New York Cosmos at the time, gave him a call of support from the hospital’s lobby so he wouldn’t have to fight the crowd there to support Estes in the days following his injury. 

Six months into his rehabilitation, he experienced cannabis for the first time with a group of Vietnam veterans who were in the same care facility. This began his lifelong connection to medical cannabis. 

“I was a young kid. I was 18. My first personal experience with weed was pretty strong. But I went back to my room and I slept all night. It was the first night in six months I slept all night,” Estes told L.A. Weekly. 

He recalls how common the idea of marijuana being medicine was. All the nurses and doctors knew. And he certainly knew it was medicine from his first experience. After that first joint, Estes would end up having eyes on the scene for the next 45 years.

“I’m shocked and surprised where this movement went,” Estes said. “I thought we were just in California getting it for patients. When I started, it was the gay world that came from fighting for gay rights to we have people dying in San Francisco of AIDS. Why can’t they use marijuana? And then Brownie Mary got arrested and that changed the game.”

Mary Jane Rathbun was a San Francisco General Hospital volunteer. She eventually became famous for baking hundreds of brownies a day as the AIDS epidemic hit San Francisco hard. Between 1981 and 1992, she was arrested three times for her famous brownies, but her activism helped push Prop 215 across the finish line. Now, Brownie Mary Day is Aug. 25, in San Francisco. 

But we quickly turned back to that first rotation in Vallejo. Since he was still fully paralyzed, the orderly had to hold the joint to his lips for him. But over the next few years, he would work to the point that allowed him to gain some independence. 

“It really took me years of intense exercise, but I was an athlete. It was three years, four years, before I really started being able to transfer onto my bed. I could transfer (to) the floor, put my knees together, leaned forward over my legs to transfer back to my chair,” Estes said of his rehabilitation. 

That moment he was able to transfer on his own signaled to him he would be capable of living on his own. Marijuana was already his lifestyle well before that day. He was still fully paralyzed the first time his friends took him up to Arcata in Humboldt County. 

“I found the Skunk. I found Thai Stick. I found people with Columbian Gold and Panama Red,” Estes said of that first trip at age 19. “I found marijuana so awesome that I wanted the good stuff.”

He’d run into brick weed. The compressed nugs were far from medicine and he knew it. It further motivated him to search for the best options. That first trip north arose from a friend telling him he knew a guy with sensimilla.    

“I said, what is sensimilla?” Estes noted with a laugh. “It’s a seedless weed? And it’s green, lime green? Let’s go there.”

The locals hooked him up, given his medical situation. He scored his first pounds of sensimilla for $100 bucks. That would be about $460 today. 

As for the traditionally tight community up north, especially during the early era of enforcement, “My disability broke me in. People were very compassionate and they understood medicine,” Estes said.

Estes noted his original host in Humboldt understood the benefits of medical cannabis all too well having recently lost his father to cancer at the time. 

“He lost his dad. His dad had cancer. He got help from cannabis. They think it dragged his life another two years, but he swears he was happier. He saw other people who were on pharmaceuticals dying. They were miserable, moaning, and his dad (had) weed on the way out. He really is a compassionate man,” Estes said.

Estes pointed to the statement “all cannabis use is medical.” He said he gets it, to different degrees. But in his case, it wasn’t really up for debate, and the farmers of The Emerald Triangle showed him a lot of love. 

Part of it was because they knew in addition to it being for his own medical use, he was paying top dollar. Some of the brown frown was going for between $30-$50 a pound. Estes wanted nothing to do with it.

“When I got the first Skunk, which was fluffy, I had 24 bags. I sold it for $100 a bag and I would buy that. Next time I bought the Skunk it was $200, the next time it was $400 a pound and after that it was $500 a pound,” Estes said. 

We asked Estes as he watched the pound price creep up, when did he know it was time to become his own supplier and get in on the cultivation side? He laughed and said it was right around the time he saw that first $500 pound. He’s already been collecting seeds in film containers and noting what they were.

In 1977, he would purchase his first hydroponic system. He said it took him about a decade to get to the point where he is comfortable looking back and saying he was dialed in. To help put that into perspective, the biggest movie of the year in 1987 when Estes started growing heat was Beverly Hills Cop 2. 

The first grow went well, but he missed the part about changing the plants’ light cycle to get them to flower. By the time he did, they had been vegging for a couple of months. The plants exploded and he started selling grams for $5 after the harvest. 

“I actually started catching a BART to the 51 bus on Market Street. The 51 bus took me over to Haight Street and Stanyan McDonald’s right there. I’d set up with little tiny bags in there. And I could sell down the street over there for 20 bucks,” Estes said. This was around 1984 and 1985. 

Estes would move his garden outside. That wasn’t a bad thing — in that era, the best outdoor was widely regarded as the best cannabis available, period. He said it took another decade for the best indoor to start beating out the sungrown.

He saw cannabis grown under High-Pressure Sodium lights for the first time when one of his buddies took a light from a baseball field. Eventually, the HPS lights got a bit more normalized, but there was only one place you could buy them at first. Going in and grabbing more than one light was a red flag to anyone casing the store. Estes and others would send friends and family to grab a light each, until they eventually had enough for whatever size room they were trying to put together. 

“If they saw you putting 10 lights in your car, they followed you home. You had a search warrant on your house a week later. So we were all nervous about that,” Estes said.

In the late ‘80s, he moves back indoors and starts building out grow houses. The product would eventually end up in Dennis Peron’s San Francisco dispensary. He would go from a 10-light house to a 100-light operation in Oakland in 1992. 

While it was a big jump doing 10 times as many lights, he was confident in his standard operating procedures. He also had a lot of faith in his nutrients and pest management ability, too.  

When Peron shut down, Estes went on to work a stint at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club. Eventually, Estes decided to open up his first dispensary in Concord in 1997. As Estes went from city council to city council attempting to open more shops in places with no ordinances around medical cannabis, he faced a lot of opposition. Some of the very cities that he went to battle with are now booming cannabis commerce hubs. 

But back then, he was attacked by 1990’s and 2000’s NIMBYs, terrified of the thought of cannabis in their town. They would call him things like a street dealer. 

“I said you have never spent one time in my house and at my table having dinner with me. You don’t know who I am at all sir, or ma’am. But I was attacked all the time. That was the way they did it back in those days for sure,” Estes recalled. 

He said San Mateo was the most vicious municipality of all back then. He estimates he probably opened 20 clubs over the years in different cities. 

Estes credits his activism to meeting disabled activist Dan O’Hara. O’Hara rolled his wheelchair across America and the length of the Mississippi River. He was a vocal advocate in Sacramento and Washington D.C., for the disabled. He was even honored by President Jimmy Carter for his efforts, and the Vatican. Estes and O’Hara became friends. 

“So I became very, very active, much more of an open activist. It was not a secret. I wasn’t behind the scenes.”

Estes has witnessed every level of cannabis regulation in California. We asked what it was like seeing things go from Prop 215 to the legal era. He thought it was all going to move a lot faster, given how fast he opened a shop in the wake of Prop 215 passing. 

“Even though I wasn’t granted a license to have my facility, and I’ve always lasted about one year in these towns, it was enough to start the dialogue, to start the process where other people came behind me pushing, getting attorneys. And next thing you know, there are ordinances,” Estes said. 

The conversation would turn toward the purple weed Estes helped turn iconic. Back when he was exposed to purple on his earliest trips to The Emerald Triangle, it didn’t denote some special quality. He’d see the haze Jimi Hendrix made famous in the late 1970s. He said it was good, but it wasn’t great. 

But in the early 2000s, he started to notice some purple strains were bomb. The Purple Erkel was high on the list for quality, but it was a very finicky plant to deal with. Estes argues the Erkel is really just Lavender and everyone changed the name.

“It was finicky, but when you smoked it, it was fire. It had that taste,” Estes noted. 

In 2003, his relationship with purple would change forever. He was showing his friends Charlie and Sarah, they were Blackfoot and Pomo Indians. The Pomo have a deep history in Mendocino. 

The Pomo traditionally lived in what is now the area around Clear Lake, Alexander Valley, and the Russian River watershed. The Pomo spoke seven different dialects while living in small independent communities that relied on hunting, fishing and gathering to meet their needs. 

Estes showed the pair some Big Bud x Erkele from Bodhi. A lot of people thought that was the GDP, but it wasn’t. It did do well though, taking home top honors at an early cup in L.A. at one point. This put the purple, and the affection Estes had for it, on Charlie and Sarah’s radar. 

During a later trip to visit their home on the Eel River, Estes saw some suits as he was pulling up. He provided the pair with cash from a score he had made that day to keep their home. Charlie would go on to tell some other folks in the tribe about what Estes had done. 

Eventually one of the members of the tribe showed Estes what they called Purple Medicine. It was phenomenal. 

“He brought it to me. And I had a bright light shined on them. I was like, oh my god, this is amazing. The color was amazing, purple everywhere. But you could have rolled that pound out of the bag like a bowling ball. It all stuck together,” Estes said. “They had it for 18 years. You could peel buds off the pound like velcro.”

A GDP outdoor crop.

Estes wanted to buy as much as he could, but after a few rounds, the tribe didn’t want to do business with him. They gave him the cut of Purple Medicine so he could run it himself. It became what we know today as Grand Daddy Purple. Estes went all in on his new cut and changed all of his operations to GDP. When he couldn’t produce enough in his 200-light operation, he brought it north for his friends to grow, too. Since he was paying $4,000 a pound, they were more than happy to run it for him. 

“I know what I got. I’ve got this. This is it. This is to me just like the Grand Poobah. It’s like the grand something, Grand Daddy Purple, and then I high-five Charlie,” Estes said, remembering how he came up with the name. 

As he started making the trip more regularly, farmers would wait for him south of Garberville to try and catch him before he spent all his money on someone else’s weed. One time a utility truck flagged him down at night, the pounds were inside the bucket you would use to do maintenance on a telephone pole. 

Estes said the best GDP came from all over. It wasn’t a particularly challenging plant to grow, so a lot of different people in various conditions were able to make the most of it. 

On his way back from up north he would call his friends’ answering machines and just say Grand Daddy Purple and code word that it was on its way south. Eventually, he would open his shop in Oakland’s former Oaksterdam neighborhood. Oakland loved purple. 

“People back then thought purple meant it was overdried or always moist or something. And then there was no purple on any menu,” Estes said. 

In the earliest days of trying to convert Oakland to purple, Estes would hand out nugs to the people in line at his competitor and offer refunds to people who bought eighths if they didn’t like it. 

“Pretty soon, within six months, we got E40 and Keak Da Sneak are smoking it. It was on Weeds. It was in Pineapple Express. Snoop Dogg said on Howard Stern it was his favorite strain. It was just this crazy blow-up thing. I did kind of have the idea it could happen, but I didn’t know it would happen as fast as it did,” Estes said. 

Estes began collecting seeds from the 200 lights. Every run there would be a dozen or so. When he decided it was time to hunt for a male, he had about 60. 

“I backcrossed it to stabilize the genetics. I tried to focus on the traits that I like, the rock-hard buds, the nose, the nice branching, the dark green waxy leaves, so that we came up with Ken’s GDP,” Estes explained. He argued some people liked Ken’s GDP better than the original. In the most technical terms, Ken’s GDP was essentially Grand Daddy Purple Bx1. 

He also took that male and put it in a room with seven of the bomb strains out at the time. Estes said a lot of people won cups with the seeds that came out of the room. He believes a big chunk of what’s commercially viable in the market dates back to that breeding project. 

Estes ended up dealing with a federal case for six years. Nobody wanted to touch him at the time. 

“You have to almost like, stop doing what you’re doing to get them to leave you alone,” Estes said. “I remember being in their office in San Francisco and asking, why do I have this target on my back?” 

One of the things that caused Estes some headaches was his choice to start declaring his cannabis income on his taxes early. He figured if he was paying his taxes, how could they say it was illegal? Well, they certainly took the money no problem. 

“I want all my cases, but it took me six years. I had three federal cases. I got raided in 2005, 2008, and 2009,” Estes noted. 

One of his shops was caught up in the massive San Diego sweep of 2009 that saw 13 stores shut down. People would tell Estes they weren’t growing the Purple anymore because he was too hot and he shouldn’t come around.

But the more cultivation in urban settings got normalized, the less he needed people up north to help, as GDP would prove to be an indoor strain. When you run it outside, it’s 80% leaves and 20% buds; thankfully it’s the exact opposite indoors. While it wouldn’t quench the thirsts of the eventual three-pound-a-light crowd on the hunt for maximum dollars, it was always heat. 

These days Estes is doing his best to keep GDP alive. He recently had it tissue-cultured. While a popular long-term storage method, tissue culture is also a way to clean a plant of diseases. The freshest piece of the meristem is cut before it has a chance to be infected like the rest of the donor plant. Two people are currently running the clean version of GDP. 

“I just want to be the brand ambassador,” Estes closed laughing. 

THE DREADED REBRAND

Rebranding, whether it applies to products or individuals, poses a significant challenge within the cannabis industry.

As the California cannabis sector gradually emerges from the turmoil of recent years, those who contributed to its struggles seek to join the soon-thriving market. They endeavor to conceal their involvement in the previous failures.

The detrimental effects of rebranding permeate every aspect of the marketplace, extending beyond the legal domain.

The Ambition of the Shady Players in the Recreational Market

Individuals who exploited the industry until now, leaving behind the chaos we find ourselves in, are observing the end of the dark times as bulk prices creep up. They are now witnessing the resurgence of value as the post-pandemic price crash subsides. Who would have predicted that the cannabis industry, only three years later, would find itself in such a predicament after experiencing its most prosperous sales period? However, sales eventually began to decline, and numbers were down for years until we started our recent climb out of the hole. 

But back then, prices continued to plummet, with a market oversupply devastating pound prices. If a product made it to the shelves, one prayed that the dispensary could afford to pay the distributor. You would assume that partnering with major distributors would secure access to the most shelves—a safe bet, right? Nevertheless, we recently witnessed the demise of Herbl, causing a considerable loss of livelihoods. As the company was on the brink of collapse, more aware brands swiftly switched distributors, demanding payment for their products directly from retailers. Unfortunately, it seems that the rest are left empty-handed for now.

I spoke with an entrepreneur who faced the perfect storm caused by the collapse of Herbl. First, he claimed that he was charged an additional $30,000 due to discounts on products that were initially paid on delivery with cash. Furthermore, one of his tenants lost everything in the collapse and hasn’t paid rent for two months, struggling to stay afloat. Lastly, the entrepreneur is unable to obtain the products he needs for his shelves until new distributors pick them up or he figures out how to handle distribution himself. Both options are time-consuming.

It is disheartening to consider that those responsible for inflicting these hardships on so many people may evade accountability. While retailers bear some responsibility for not settling their debts, should we allow those who perpetuated an unsustainable system, which lacks bailouts like the banking industry, to absolve themselves of the sweat, money, and time lost in this ordeal?

Certainly, the blame does not lie with the young individuals manning the booths or attempting to sell the products. They had no say in how far the company would stretch itself before the disaster that unfolded this week. Perhaps only a few individuals bear true responsibility. Understanding each person’s role in that current cannabis tragedy is crucial.

Although Herbl stands out as a recent catastrophe, numerous other companies also mistreated people. Some caused harm inadvertently, while others acted out of misplaced self-belief. However, the most egregious offenders are schemers who are eager to reenter the market, while the other two likely bear some trauma from their actions. We must not allow them to return solely to line their pockets and inflict further damage.

However, the issue extends beyond distributors.

Questionable Retail Operators Sold Shelf Space to Busters

These individuals are the ones who secured shelf space at corporate dispensaries, thereby overshadowing small, high-quality businesses through the payment of slotting fees. It is possible that they initiated the concept of slotting fees completely eroded the notion of customers obtaining the best value for their money from location to location. Many of those who managed to secure such positions were unscrupulous individuals with extensive networks of like-minded opportunists. It was an arduous and lengthy process for smaller retailers to establish themselves, unless they held significant influence or connections.

These people who undermined the initial wave of corporate shops are desperate to regain entry before interstate markets open up. They recognize this as their next prime opportunity to latch onto someone else’s value. We must not permit the worst offenders to jeopardize the national rollout. 

City councils played a role in enabling these unscrupulous individuals to thrive while everyone else suffered, lining their own pockets. Consider the immense financial losses incurred by L.A. Equity Program applicants over the years, following the rules set by a city council that was only revealed to be racist through a secret recording. Politicians throughout the state have also contributed to the headaches faced by the cannabis industry. As the market stabilizes and normalizes, it is crucial that these individuals are held accountable indefinitely and prevented from rebranding. Once we forget that they were never on our side to begin with, we may inadvertently allow them to alter the rules.

As for the underground market, the rebranding problem is mostly just people renaming weed. It’s still shady, but less devastating. 

BANGKOK DISPENSARIES ARE OPENING UP SHOP QUICK

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.

Photos courtesy of IC Collective

IC COLLECTIVE STRIKES BACK

The Legendary cultivators are prepping for their first Illinois drop and gave an update on their return to California 

Few things have been more devastating to the California top-shelf cannabis smoker in recent years than the night IC Collective burned down in July of 2021. We caught up with founder Ben Brown as he prepares to enter the Illinois market and return home when possible. 

Backboned by Brown’s links to the Chem Fam, the network of famous OG growers that ran the Chemdog strain found by Greg Krzanowski in Massachusetts over a quarter century ago, IC Collective was famous for having the gas. Over the years, Brown collected a variety of killer flavors he would pair with the Chem and each other. The results would start filling their trophy shelves in 2013 and lead to their famous mantra, “We run on fuel.” 

In a world of dessert weeds and new equatorial concoctions that breeders pray may end up the next cookies or Z, most still associate the most potent marijuana in the world with that petrol or fuel smell that much of IC Collective’s catalog possessed in spades. And even the things that weren’t fuelly smelling were notable representations of whatever they were. I stand by the statement the best Zkittelz I ever saw that wasn’t grown in Mendocino was grown by Brown.

Despite the large volume of cannabis being grown in California, there are only a dozen or so cultivators that can compare to IC Collective. Hence, even with all that other weed, the void they left behind was massive. Especially given how few other people in that dozen actually specialize in fuel. 

But things are looking up. After a massive 1800-seed pheno hunt of gear Brown has been working on or hoarding for a decade, they are ready to send their first product to retailers in over two years. In the end, it looks like there will be about a 26-month gap in production. 

“I think our last delivery was July 2? Or July 1 2021. And then we burned down on the fourth. Two years dude,” Brown told L.A. Weekly. “The only thing I say that at that building was some mom plants.”

Thankfully the 12 strains he was able to rescue were some of his bangers. But not all made it, the Ziablo that was winning a lot of stuff was among the fallen. But Brown pressed on with what he was able to save until he finally got his Illinois rooms going. 

IC Collective got the permit for Illinois a week after the fire in Oakland. Needless to say, the week between was one of the more stressful of Brown’s cannabis career. As the pound price has crashed in California, we asked if he ever considered throwing in the towel in The Golden State, despite the presumption it’ll eventually be the production capital for the global connoisseur class of smokers that buy top-shelf products from people like Brown. 

He emphasized he’s plenty familiar with the challenges of California. But he’s one of the people that grows fire that’s good enough to deal with those headaches. 

“We did the same amount of money every year because we didn’t have the funds to build outright,” Brown said. “So I know that challenges in California, like how expensive it was. Even though we were successful, we really didn’t make any money or be able to progress our situation. So I was constantly trying to get better. Get my situation better in California. So that’s how I got to Illinois.”

When the firefighters let Brown rescue his plants the next day, he was but one of over 400 applicants hoping to cultivate in Illinois. He didn’t know how the next week would play out.

“And so that was like a long shot, and then I had already been trying to get a bigger building in California. And on the 15th, we won the license. So July 15, 2021, 10 days later, we won the license in Illinois, and then later that night, I got approved for my conditional use permit for another town in California,” Brown said. 

Coming Home

That town was West Sacramento. He just needs time and revenue to get back to doing it properly in California. Come early October, he’ll have both.  

“I have the building, I have two licenses for distro and manufacturing. I have building permits. I have half of the equipment. Like it’s a real thing,” Brown said, “It’s just you ask the question like you, you watch this, the 2021 market, and yeah, I’m scared and I think we can do it right.”

Brown said anyone who can make it in California can make it anywhere since they’re basically selling bottled water next to a waterfall and still surviving. 

“But yeah, it’s hella scary to come back to work here,” Brown said. “And before it was just all me, everything I work for I dumped in, and now I have supporters and like if a fear of disappointing other people, you know, or like failing is the ultimate fear for me. So we are slow rolling California, but I mean, I was just on the phone with the municipality the other day telling them that we’re still in the game.”

When asked if he expected to have the gassiest weed in Illinois come September, Brown replied, “1,000%.”