THE 12 STRAINS OF CHRISTMAS 2023

GROWING BELUSHI GOES GLOBAL FOR THIRD SEASON

We talked with Jim Belushi ahead of the third season of Growing Belushi as he looks to take the brand international. 

The third season will also be the biggest run for the series yet with Discovery doubling the order to six episodes after a 30% jump in rating from Season 1 to 2. It makes sense, there are plenty of things to talk about in the cannabis industry at the moment, both foreign and Domestic. Belushi told L.A. Weekly should things go well, they have the footage for a couple more episodes.

Some regulars who will be tagging along and making appearances on this season’s tale of survival and expansion include Dan Aykroyd, cousin Chris and Larry Joe Campbell.

Belushi is excited. 

“We’re on Wednesday night! And we are following Moonshiners. So it’s like, grab your illegal whiskey and grab your legal weed and it’s go for the evening,” Belushi told L.A. Weekly. “Third season, it’s going a little more national and global. I’m really taking it from the little flower to going to see what’s going on in the national picture.”

After the first two seasons at his cannabis farm, Belushi is excited about how far and wide they went for the latest installments of the series. Production saw the team visit 14 states and three countries, including Canada and Albania. 

Belushi really enjoyed his time diving into the Albanian scene. 

“It’s beautiful. They’re building it. It’s incredible what’s going on in that country. It’s gonna be the new resort area for tourism, and tourism is just skyrocketing because the prices are really great. The food is great. It’s a very young crowd there,” Belushi said. “They’re very curious about expanding medical cannabis for export there, and I know the Prime Minister and Albania, and he wanted to pick my brain.” 

Belushi explained part of this season is him letting his ego get the best of him. Hence the call for expansion and international market domination, the latter probably mostly a joke, but rooted in high hopes.

We asked Belushi what it’s like to shoot in this more touring style compared to sharing his personal trials at the farm. 

“Oh, well, there are a lot of personal trials,” Belushi replied. “That’s the whole point, like national expansion isn’t that easy with every state having different compliance, different rules and some are medical states, some are recreational states. So that’s what we can explore a little bit.”

We asked Belushi what going national meant to him. Was it licensing intellectual property? Setting up gardens in other states?

“Lot of it is licensing. But vetting out the growers and the companies,” Belushi explained. “We got a great opportunity and Shelbyville, Illinois, taking over indoor grow that was a charity grow, all the profits go to charity. And we are taking that over and actually kind of doing like a Bar Rescue of like going into this girl upgrading everything and it becomes a Belushi Farms in Illinois. So we’re going to be growing in Illinois. We’re growing in Oregon and we’re licensing other places, other states, and possibly growing in Albania.”

Keep an eye out for new episodes of Growing Belushi starting Wednesday, April 5. 

Belushi’s Farm

FAKE CANNABIS PACKAGING PLAGUES INDUSTRY

One of the worst parts about being an internationally respected cannabis brand? The fakes. 

The further you climb toward the mountaintop, the more people are going to pretend they’re selling your product or just flat-out use the reputation you’ve built with heat and flame to rob others. On a positive note, if you’re at the point people are copying you, then you’ll probably make it through the dumpster fire that California cannabis is in.  

Here in L.A., where much of the weed people are pretending to have is grown, counterfeiting is still an issue. If you go down to the Vape District on Wall Street, you can find all the bags you’ll need to convince people on the other side of the Sierras you got the heat. And most of those people have never seen real Doja, Jungle Boys or Cookies, so just having the logo on the bag is going to go a long way with them.  

According to Doja Pak founder Ryan Bartholomew, they’ve been dealing with people faking their product since 2018, well before things blew up for the brand over the last couple of years since the initial RS-11 drop that made waves. 

“Then, we were doing the cans. Shortly after we released the cans, we started to see cans that were being tagged on IG and they were fake,” Bartholomew told L.A. Weekly. “They were different. We could just tell that the font was off. It was very obvious to us, being the ones that made the cans, they were fake.”

When they made the jump to bags in 2019, it was much of the same problem. First they started to see fake bags float around L.A., then they started to appear online. Even worse, the bags were a bit easier to fake than the cans. So it can be a lot harder to spot the difference until you look inside at the nugs. 

Bartholomew noted the internet helped it become an international problem. Websites like Calipacks.co.uk are currently selling Doja Bags for a little over a quarter. 

“He’s in the UK and he prints… like at this point they’re printing stuff we never even made,” Bartholomew said. “Yesterday this guy was like, are these jars in Switzerland real?” 

A website offering fake Doja packaging.

Bartholomew had to inform that person the jars they were dealing with were fakes.

Doja Pak attempted to create a verification system, but as Bartholomew noted, you got to be pretty headie to scan a QR code on the back of a bag. Doja handled the back end of the verification system and could see just how much people were interacting with it. 

“Beyond the fake product, too, there’s a lot of scam accounts,” Bartholomew said. “There’s Instagram accounts with more followers than mine, Instagram accounts with the exact same amount of followers as mine with the exact same comments, but they have maybe like two K’s”

Bartholomew has people that come up to him all the time at events and they’ll tell him they sent money for an ounce. 

“I’m not asking anyone to send me any money,” he said. “So there’s constant scamming going on every single day. I’ve been saying if we could see the dollar amount of scamming going on every day it would make us throw up in our mouths.”

Bartholomew estimates there are at least one hundred people pretending to be Doja Pak on the hunt for victims. 

One thing that’s been helpful is unique packaging. Doja Pak’s Re:stash has become a unique identifier of the brand you can only get in person at events directly from the Doja Pak team. Additionally, they don’t have to worry about the Re:stash team printing a bunch of fake jars to give out, given the relationship they’ve built with them over the years. 

Another famous L.A. brand that’s faced its fair share of fakers is The Jungle Boys. 

“I mean we’ve definitely dealt with it a lot,“ Ivan from the Jungle Boys told L.A. Weekly from Florida, as they prepare to open their Miami Beach location today. 

Ivan said more than fake products alone, these days people are faking the whole entity. There was even a fake Jungle Boys store across the street from City Hall in New York City. There was also another underground dispensary using their name in a less prominent location. Ivan finds the whole thing pretty wild. 

One thing that will help the Jungle Boys distinguish themselves from the fakes is their new packaging released last month. The new jars are ​BPA-free and made from 100% recyclable plastic. They’re currently handpicking strains to make the jump to the new jars. The first was Strawberries N Later.

CANNABIS INDUSTRY WAITS FOR NEW YORK SALES NUMBERS

As state recreational markets have rolled out in recent years, one of the big moments is the first release of sales numbers. So why haven’t we seen that data in New York yet?

Because they’ve only been able to get three dispensaries open in three months. Some argue the data would show just how badly they messed up the launch by opening one dispensary at a time. While the state recently approved another group of operators that will put the statewide dispensary count north of 60, there is still a lot of work to be done. Currently, it would take nearly five hours for someone on the Canadian border to get to the state’s first operating dispensary outside of the city, Just Breath located in Binghamton.

And it’s not just a geography game, it’s a numbers game, too. Currently, New York has about one dispensary per 6 million people. And there are only about 25 cash registers for 20 million people. Once the latest set of dispensaries that received state approval open, it will be roughly one dispensary per 298,182 residents. 

To help put this into perspective, Oklahoma had just over 2,600 dispensaries, as of last November. With a state population of just under 4 million, that equates to roughly one dispensary per 1,733. But that’s the wildest figure you’ll see. Oklahoma has proven to be the easiest place to get a permit. 

Missouri recently announced its first month of legal cannabis sales saw over $100 million in products sold. Missouri is not too much smaller than New York City in terms of population. Imagine what the sales numbers would have looked like here, where there is an easy argument to be made that cannabis is even more popular. This is clearly noted by the hundreds of underground cannabis stores dotting the boroughs. 

Advocates however would note there isn’t anything delayed, this is just what a truly equitable roll out that gives the communities of color the best shot in the cannabis industry looks like. Since there had never been a truly equitable rollout in any state or jurisdiction, we’ve never been able to see what that looks like to compare against. Essentially if something is truly the first of its kind, like the New York Social Equity rollout, how could we define what is fast or slow?

One advocate that monitors social equity efforts across the county noted they don’t think that it matters if people are staying with their underground sources for weeks or months, compared to the long-term impacts of when and to whom a state gives a head start advantage. They also argued the lost tax revenue over months or even a couple of years is negligible compared to the benefits of taking that time to set up something with an impact lasting over generations. They don’t think short-term tax revenue should be a goal of legalization at all, nor should equity programs depend on initial revenue in order to start up.

That advocate’s main concern with New York wasn’t the number of dispensaries, but the property and capital that social equity applicants have been led to believe they’ll have access to. 

They also noted the requests for access to data were appropriate, but added that the means to track and deliver that information effectively may not have been set up yet, as opposed to anyone trying to hide the number.

Whenever we do find out how much legal cannabis has been sold so far in New York, expect the number to be a lot lower than you anticipated. But maybe that’s just how it is in a fair industry. 

JUDGING ZALYMPIX 2023 QUALIFYING ROUND

We just wrapped up judging the preliminary round of the biggest Zalympix competition yet. 

The 2023 installment of Greenwolf’s massive contest is bigger than ever in terms of entries this year, not just hype. Greenwolf opened up the competition to over 100 farmers for the next installment. 

That’s a huge jump from the 16 we’d seen in the previous boxes to 109. Obviously, there was going to be a need to switch the format up a pinch given the scale of how big the contest is this year. Greenwolf’s solution? A preliminary round. 

The Greenwolf team assembled a reputable squad to go whittle down the pack. It included past winners, famous growers, and other journalists. Everyone they selected was based on their faith in their palette and opinion on cannabis.

Getting the kit in two boxes.

I received my box on Feb. 8 and had through the 21st to finish the samples. I went into the last day with four left. That worked out to trying just over nine samples a day. I smoked every single entry in a backwood because they are kind of like a cheat code when you’re grading marijuana. If you can taste it through the woods, you know it’s the goods. 

One thing about this contest was the fact it was refreshing to not have to pick a winner. We had to pick 27 things we thought had a shot in the final round. That’s a ton. If I knew something had to be in the box I just gave it all fives. Even if it wasn’t my favorite terps, I just couldn’t deny it a shot at the big show. 

I ended up with 18 out of the 109 in that must-go-in-the-box category. These were fantastic representations of lots of different kinds of weed. There were certainly a ton of dessert terps across the field of entries, but dotted between the Gelatos and Lemon Cherries were both new and old flavors.

There were a ton of OGs. To be expected from a Los Angeles-based contest? Sure. But they were of varying qualities; some leaned on the pure fuel smell while others smelled more like Skywalker or Tahoe cut with a bit more pinene in them. 

Most of the things I scored the highest were rockstar-level gas, which is weed that literally smells like there was some kind of accident at a gas station that needs to be reported. I wasn’t worried about color either when I was scoring. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted the stuff I was picking to be aesthetically pleasing, but a wild nose went a hundred times further in my opinion building than a couple of hints of purple. 

A lot of people entered new gear they thought might be their golden ticket. I’ve regularly checked out the Compound lineup over the last few years as they were testing out new gear. I smelled a lot of notes from last year’s seed drops like Gastropop and Pave. 

Jon Cappetta from High Times was among the others selected to make their way through the entries in search of the 27 he thought worthy.

“Sorting through almost 120 samples in two weeks is a feat for even the most seasoned veterans, but The Zalympix preliminaries were a great preview of the gear we can expect to see making headlines this year. It seems like ‘23 is going to be another year of candy gas, but I’m holding out hope for more unique flavor profiles,” Cappetta told L.A. Weekly. 

We’re going to go deep into Zalympix for 4/20 this year. Keep an eye out. 

61% OF AMERICANS WANT CANNABIS ON VALENTINE’S DAY

A new survey from Wired Research suggests most American adults will be including cannabis in their Valentine’s Day plans. 

According to the survey, 61% of American adults plan on using cannabis or gifting it to someone this Valentine’s Day. The survey was commissioned by Verano Holdings to see how consumers would treat cannabis around the holiday as it continues to get further normalized nationally. 

Another fascinating takeaway is the number of Americans that will skip booze this holiday season and opt for cannabis. Wired Research put the number at about 19 million. If just half those people bought a top-shelf eighth for the holiday, you’re talking about $60 million dollars in revenue before you even add the taxes. 

While it was close, men were a little bit more likely to include cannabis in their Valentine’s Day plans (66%) than women (57%). This gap is actually closer than the gap between men and women admitting to use in wider society.  In 2016, Columbia University Professor Deborah Hasin noted the rates at which men and women used cannabis had held steady for a long time at 13% of men and 7% of women through the mid 2000s. But in 2007, experts started to see a shift that would see the rate at which men were using rise another 4% while women’s use rates would rise 3%. 

Younger folks were a lot more down with adding cannabis to their holiday plans than seniors were, with 70% of Gen Z and Millennials surveyed saying cannabis very well could end up a part of their holiday plans. But even then, the seniors weren’t that far behind. While the survey was just under 1,000 people, the idea that more than half of the two oldest categories said they’d be including it in their plans was pretty wild. That is probably the number it would be fascinating to see scaled up into a bigger survey the most. 

Another big factor that will separate use rates this holiday? Kids. Parents were found to be more likely to partake in cannabis on the holiday than their childless peers. The survey found 69% of people with kids planned on making cannabis part of the fun, while only 57% of those without offspring said they’d be partaking.

As opposed to just another part of the evening’s fun, many argued they were using it as a tool to inspire romance. 

“The data from the survey show that Americans use cannabis to relax or improve their mood, which can help people be present and more connected, which is crucial to a better love life,” said Dr. Shannon Chavez, a Beverly Hills psychologist and sex therapist. “Valentine’s Day is a great opportunity for couples to try something new together and try a more dynamic and less formulaic approach to intimacy, which cannabis can help inspire.”

Americans are starting to come around on the idea. One in four surveyed believed cannabis would help get them in the mood. While separately, one in four surveyed said they expected to perform better sexually with the help of cannabis. 

Photo: Maria Oswalt

CURE ACT WOULD OPEN FED JOBS TO FORMER POT SMOKERS

The House Oversight and Accountability Committee moved forward with a bill that would expand federal employment opportunities for people who used cannabis at some point in their lives.

The Cannabis Users’ Restoration of Eligibility Act passed the committee in a 30-14 vote. It would allow federal agencies to consider applicants with a prior history of cannabis use when they are making employment and security clearance decisions. 

NORML, the nation’s oldest cannabis reform organization, praised the move by Congress. 

“Applicants for federal employment and security clearances should not be unfairly disqualified solely for their past cannabis use,” NORML’s Political Director Morgan Fox said. “While it is disappointing that the committee did not see fit to stop federal agencies from discriminating against those responsible adults and patients who are current consumers of cannabis, this legislation will nonetheless open up new opportunities to millions of Americans, increase the talent pool available to federal employers, and ultimately make our country safer.”

Fox went on to note many agencies are already reducing the impact cannabis use has on their hiring processes. 

“The Office of Personnel Management has similarly recommended that all federal agencies limit the window of time during which one’s past cannabis use is considered for denial of employment,” Fox said. “And a growing number of states are taking steps to protect the employment rights of responsible cannabis consumers and increase the opportunities available to them. Congress should do the same, and this overwhelming bipartisan vote today shows that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are moving in the right direction.”

After the FBI loosened its policy on marijuana smokers in the summer of 2021, it famously said that smoking marijuana more than 24 times would disqualify potential candidates. As Marijuana Moment noted at the time, there was no explanation of how the FBI got to that number. Use prior to someone’s 18th birthday would not disqualify them, so you had to have broken the law 24 times as an adult. 

The concept of opening the door for more people with a history of cannabis use is nothing new, but a decade ago in the months after Colorado and Washington kicked off our grand legalization experiment, it was a little “too soon” for some lawmakers. Then FBI Director James Comey joked to Congress that the amount of people who smoke weed these days is making the hiring process a bit trickier for the nation’s chief law enforcement agency, 

“I have to hire a great workforce to compete with those cyber criminals and some of those kids want to smoke weed on the way to the interview,” Comey said at the time according to The Wall Street Journal. 

While still a senator, Jeff Sessions got mad at Comey claiming his words could be construed as something supportive of cannabis use. Comey clapped back that was certainly not the case, but his hiring reality, and he was determined to not lose his sense of humor regardless of how serious a job it is to run the FBI. 

Gallup noted in 2021 nearly half of all Americans have smoked marijuana at some point in their lives. It seems like preventing half the population from getting a government job is absolutely madness. As more and more states move forward with legalization, it will become even more unsustainable to prevent our best and brightest from serving their country in some capacity because they smoked a little bit of cannabis. 

Hopefully, the CURE Act will continue on its path through Congress and onto the president’s desk, to give these people a shot at doing whatever they see fit in service to the rest of us.