MISSOURI CELEBRATES FIRST ADULT-USE CANNABIS SALE Missouri’s first weekend of legal cannabis sales is in the books. The nearly 200 dispensaries dotting the state netted $12.6 million in sales in the first three days of adult-use sales. There is an argument to be made that number may have been higher had the permit release timing…
MISSOURI CELEBRATES FIRST ADULT-USE CANNABIS SALE
Missouri’s first weekend of legal cannabis sales is in the books.
The nearly 200 dispensaries dotting the state netted $12.6 million in sales in the first three days of adult-use sales. There is an argument to be made that number may have been higher had the permit release timing been a little clearer; even operators didn’t realize they would be allowed to commence sales Friday.
John Mueller is the CEO of Missouri’s largest operator Greenlight, a multi-state operator that has 15 retail permits in Missouri. Mueller, a Missouri native, told L.A. Weekly that Greenlight had its fair share of action over the weekend, with sales doubling overnight once adult-use kicked in.
Mueller notes the tail end of last week was a bit of a gray zone.
“Then what happened is, on Thursday, the state said they would start issuing out the licenses and you didn’t have to wait. We thought they would have all licenses at open at whatever time on the sixth,” Mueller explained.
They would get the permit at 8:30 a.m. Friday morning and be open in an hour and a half. But unlike the big lines we’re used to seeing outside dispensaries on opening day, at first it was a quest by consumers to confirm the news on shops opening earlier than expected. Mueller says the phone continues to ring off the hook in that regard.
Even with the traditional first sale not the spectacle it’s been in other states, dispensaries did great. Mueller noted some places saw up to four times the amount of usual foot traffic depending on where.
Mueller said there is plenty to be happy about besides the numbers. He feels dispensary operators got a lot to work with in the regulations.
“Thrilled with the performance, but there is a whole lot of stuff. You know we got drive-through here authorized, express pick-up windows in the lobbies and then also making sure that that patient wasn’t relegated to a bad status.”
Greenlight has separated the adult-use and medical lines at the dispensaries to make sure none of the state’s 200,000 medical cannabis patients feel left behind in the transition over to adult-use sales.
Mueller doesn’t feel like things have been overly restrictive on operators, apart from the normal childproofing packaging and things like that.
“We carry about 300 products per store, so we’re a pretty wide selection and we’ve got a pretty robust cultivation and manufacturing side of this equation,” Mueller said.
He noted the dispensaries currently operating are able to acquire flower from 28 different cultivators in the state. He thinks there are about 50 different manufacturers in the state that are all cranking out products too.
While that number may sound small to Californians, it’s still a decent number of producers on day one. We asked Mueller if it was enough for a real level of competition similar to the fight for shelf space we’re seeing on the west coast.
He was quick to argue, sure. Currently, Greenlight’s discount eighths are running $25, with the top shelf clocking in at $45.
There weren’t a lot of surprises for Greenlight during the transition. The company was able to lean on its past experiences transitioning from a medical market to adult-use in Nevada. Greenlight also has operations across the southeast and midwest in Arkansas, West Virginia, Illinois and South Dakota.
THE YEAR IN GLOBS 2023: OUR FAVORITE HASH FOR 7/10
As the 7/10 holiday approaches, it’s time to recognize California’s standout hash extractors.
This organically formed holiday, distinct from Green Wednesdays or CBD Day, was created by Task Rok and the first-generation globbers to celebrate the rapid progress in the hash space. Not a PR company. Over the past decade, the hash sector has witnessed significant advancements in both technique and hardware and this is when we celebrate it each year.
Solventless hash, produced using ice, water, and screens instead of volatile gas extraction, has become the reigning king. The hash industry has thrived in the pursuit of new flavors, with the hunt for unique terpenes driving the competitiveness of the companies listed below.
While this year introduces fresh faces, some well-established players make a comeback due to their continued excellence.
While the tidal wave hasn’t hit the shore yet, there will be a ton of Piattella-style cured water hash this year. It blew up in Spain during the pandemic after Uncle’s Farm put it on the map, a first wave of Americans was exposed in 2022, myself among them. This year there were ten times as many Americans at Spannabis as in 2022, so a lot more people got hyped about it. Many Americans are working on perfecting it, including the popular Professor Sift. His efforts are in the featured photo.
Here are some of our favorite California hash companies from the past year:
Fully Melted
Humboldt’s Fully Melted has been impressing consumers in The Emerald Triangle for some time. Although their Zkittelz initially faced controversy at the Emerald Cup, it gained recognition for its incredible terpenes. Alien Labs even used the same pheno that produced the material to claim The Best Thing Smoking at Zalympix a bit over a month after the cup. Must be pretty fire! Every offering from Fully Melted is definitely worth exploring.
Royal Key Organics
Royal Key Organics successfully transitioned from producing award-winning sauces to crafting exceptional solventless hash in recent years. This is in addition to their world-class flower offerings. Their Arcata facility, now expanded, allows more people to experience the wonders of hash made from plants grown in living soil. Their IOS OG 90u Sift, bred in-house, exemplifies the quality and passion behind their products.
“Selection number 24 instantly took us back to our favorite OGs we and our friends grew in the early 2000’s,” Josh Vert, founder or Royal Key Organics, told L.A. Weekly, “Memory can be a funny thing, so we gave it to OG connoisseurs around the state. Everyone who experienced “HHSFV Dog” no.24 said it checked all of their boxes for smell, taste, smokabilty, high, and bag appeal. They also wanted more, and considered it a fantastic OG in cured flower form. We then named it iOS OG, short for I only smoke OG.
Kalya
Despite facing numerous challenges, Kalya has consistently excelled in producing high-quality hash. Their recent move to Santa Rosa has brought them smoother operations after dealing with the perils of Oakland over the past few years. They continue to impress with their offerings, such as the delightful Dole Whip they had in their possession when I ran into the team a couple of weeks ago. Some of the nicest rosin I’ve seen this year.
LA Family Farms
LA Family Farms made headlines last August by securing top honors at The Transbay Challenge, surpassing many renowned names in the industry. Their Cotton Candy Gas, grown and washed in-house, is a highly celebrated new addition. It’s the perfect showcasing of their expertise in creating Los Angeles-based single-source rosin.
Cali-X
Cali-X deserves recognition for its underrated rosin in the recreational market. Each jar of their hash is exceptional and wholly made in Los Angeles. As a “single source” entity, Cali-X turns things they grow themselves into unique flavors that add excitement to the rosin market. A lot of Cali-X’s genetics are exclusive to them, so it makes the thoughts of the flavors they may possess in hash form fascinating.
Rosin Tech
The 2022 Emerald Cup winners, Rosin Tech, continued to crush throughout the year with their high-quality products. Their foray into hash holes has been successful, firmly establishing them among the finest in the industry. The hash inside their joints steals the show, thanks to the incredibly loud flavors they deliver. Their collaborations with Luma Farms are some of the most prized jars in the spread.
Moonshine Melts
Moonshine Melts, the hash wing of 3rd Gen Family Farms, has earned numerous accolades and remains one of the most awarded cannabis companies in the space when it comes to the trophies that actually matter. Their Zkittelz is renowned for its exceptional quality. Acquiring their single-source hash is akin to hitting the jackpot. There was a point in the mid-2010s when people had to start with the question of whether they thought it could beat Moonshine Metls before they even entered a contest. Many didn’t risk it.
Trilogy 710
The team at Trilogy 710 has mastered terpene preservation like few others. Their jars contain some of the juiciest rosin available. In addition to their impressive techniques, their collaborations with renowned breeders promise to deliver exciting new terps to the market. Keep an eye out for their work with Symbiotic Genetics for potentially mind-blowing results.
Cryo Labs
Cryo Labs has gained global influence in recent weeks, with their Gary Payton hash jar making waves at the Mary Jane Berlin festival. They have been pioneers in exploring unique terps, such as Compound Genetics’ Apples & Bananas and Grape Gas. Extractors producing their own material now consider Grape Gas a must-have strain but Cryo Cure was dropping it a year before anyone.
Have Hash
Hash Hash has rightfully claimed numerous trophies this year. They triumphed in Europe during Spannabis week by winning The Ego Clash Barcelona and securing second place at Masters of Rosin a few days later. Then when they returned to America they won San Francisco’s highly competitive challenge at Hippie Hill. We eagerly anticipate the release of their new flavors from the latest harvest.
Arcata Fire
Not everyone can access raw extracts, so Arcata Fire’s Rosin Syrup is the perfect alternative. Their pens recently claimed top honors in The Emerald Cup’s fiercely competitive Solventless Cartridge category. This achievement is expected to improve the availability of their products across the state in the coming months.
Swollen Heads
Another California company making waves abroad is Swollen Heads. When we linked up with Swollen Heads this spring we got the chance to test all of their terps of the moment. Everything was grown by them and then processed. Each flavor held up against most of what we’re seeing in the market with no problem. We highly recommend trying to get your hands on a jar.
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.
California’s quarterly cannabis tax revenue dipped $95 million from Q4 2021 compared to Q4 2022.
On Wednesday, The California Department of Tax and Fee Administration (CDTFA) reported cannabis revenue today for the fourth quarter of 2022 totaling $221.6 million; these numbers are always adjusted when the next quarter comes out. So we’ll have the final number in a few months, but regardless, the $108 million in excise tax collected and $113.6 million in sales tax revenue from cannabis businesses will be a monster dip from 2021.
When the final numbers for the last quarter of 2021 were released in 2022, the number climbed from $308 million to $316.59 million. That figure includes $160.64 million in excise tax, $39.99 million in cultivation tax, and $115.96 million in sales tax.
The $95 million in lost taxes represents a 30% dip in cannabis revenue for Q4 2022 compared to the same quarter a year prior. This revenue loss also is up from the $82 million loss in comparison of Q3 2021 to Q3 2022.
The quarter-to-quarter dip wasn’t as bad, but still pretty brutal. The numbers for Q3 2022 were revised to $251.3 million. This represents a $30 million dip in Q4. The revenue dip from Q4 2021 compared to Q3 2021 was $25 million. The dip in revenue this year was roughly 20% larger than in 2022.
Some would be quick to point to a halt in the cultivation tax for the loss, but lawmakers only expected to lose $150 million on that over three years. Sure they lowballed it, but there have to be other places the tax dip is coming from too.
We asked Kyle Greenhalgh of Heritage Mendocino if he felt like the dip in taxes was from brands going under.
“I think in general, people got broke in California and weren’t spending as much in the stores as they used to,” Greenhalgh told L.A. Weekly, “I know we still see the same amount of door swings, but a quarter of the spending of what it used to be. People were buying their needs, not their wants. So I think a bunch of dispensaries went to a value-driven model, but I see spending and higher quality bouncing back.”
Greenhalgh watched the shop’s average spend go from $100 to $20 really fast. He thinks people had to choose from buying gas at the gas station, or cannabis, and gas to get to work won that battle.
“This in turn made it very hard for most big corporations and brands to make a profit, and the exit started to happen. I’m seeing a lot of success and movement now for more of the smaller and craft brands though,” Greenhalgh noted.
“Overall, the dip in licensed cannabis tax revenues appears to be driven mostly by a small reduction of sales tax compared to the big hits to excise tax and the removal of the cultivation tax last year,” Katz told L.A. Weekly.
He notes the tax dip spread across the supply chain and unfortunately did not provide the level of direct relief for which cultivators had hoped for.
“Big picture I’d say that reduced sales are still primarily due to the high taxes levied on licensed products,” Katz argued. “As inflation has forced people to spend more and more on even the most basic of necessities, it becomes harder and harder for them to justify spending two or three times as much for licensed cannabis products. At the same time, there’s a significant amount of unregulated and untaxed cannabis retail throughout the state, offering product that looks ‘legal’ but costs a fraction of the price.”
Katz closed by noting, as long as the taxes remain high, most consumers who have less money in their pockets will be incentivized by their bottom lines to shop outside of the licensed market.
With annual surpluses coming to an end in 2022, the state will look to figure out how to replace that $95 Million.
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.
Los Angeles’ Alien Flower Monkey Glass is crushing it with some of the best deals on American-made quartz deals on the market
We sat down to chat with AFM Glass’s general manager Dimitar Tantchev to hear the ups and downs of the glass game since its founding in 2014 after its owners had already spent years in the scene prior to opening. Over the years, they scaled up production internationally, but are still producing about 20% of their products domestically, most notably, their quartz banger line.
Quartz bangers are the most time-tested delivery medium of the dab era. In 2008, Hash consumers saw the first skillets for smoking the new hydrocarbon-extracted hash that was a bit more refined than the honey oils that had been going around for years. Titanium nails quickly became the norm in the early 2010s. By 2015, the quartz bucket design of the banger from Quave glass would become the definitive style. Within a few years, different variations were being produced all over the world.
Lots of other cool quartz smoking mechanisms would come out, the terp slurper among the most successful. But not everyone wants to deal with a marble set every time they want to smoke a little hash. Hell, many don’t even want to heat up a banger with a torch and have switched to electronic dabs with companies like Puffco, Carta, and Ispire, developing their own followings. But many purists still love a quartz banger.
AFM Glass Terp Slurper
Where AFM comes into play is how accessible it’s made domestic bangers. While the price has dipped a bit more in recent years, for most of the 2010s you could expect to pay north of $100 at the bare minimum for good American quartz bangers. AFM has been able to cut that price in half.
Tantchev noted when the AFM was originally founded, one of the goals was to spice up the scientific glass space with a bit more color without going all-in as headie art pieces. When things kicked off originally, the market was still dominated by clear tubes. They found a comfortable position in the business-to-business space hitting mega trade shows, like Champs, where they help retailers from all over America stock their shelves.
“We kind of produce just really cool, fun, unique and colorful styles,” Tantchev told L.A. Weekly. “We tried to create color combos that kind of just are unique and just create some new styles.”
Between all of the different beakers, tubes, and rigs, Tantchev estimated they were offering just over 50 different styles right now.
As for why their domestic quartz products come in so far below others?
“It’s a good question. I think it’s really kind of a supply and demand, and a perceived value. Or maybe not so much both aspects. It depends on who you asked, what is more important? I think there’s definitely the art and like apprenticeship of glassblowing and going out to be far superior quality, not just by being a thicker glass or thinner,” Tantchev said.
In the end, the deals they are offering come down to the inhouse tech.
“I would say the way to answer your question in the long process of how we’re able to offer the price that we’re offering is, is just by you know, scaling our operation,” Tantchev said. “And we’ve just kind of figured out strategic operations, which were able to save a lot of money and pass that off to our consumers as opposed to taking it into our pockets.”
Since we first sat down with Masonic Smoker back in early 2021, he’s continued his rise on the genetics scene, locals might argue one of their favorite Masonic impacts on the community in those two years is Free Seed Day.
Now one of the most significant events on the calendar for Angelino cultivators, the event initially got its start as an homage to Free Comic Book Day. Before the pandemic, Masonic had been participating in Free Comic Book Day for a decade.
“I was hanging out at my store and then Free Comic Book Day is usually on the first Saturday of May, but because of COVID they kind of messed it up,” Masonic told L.A. Weekly. As he sat in his shop dealing with the FOMO of missing out on the rescheduled festivities, the idea popped into his head. “So it all kind of came to fruition there when I was doing FOMO on previous comic book days, I made my own Free Seed Day, and here we are.”
Masonic went a bit more into the development process for that first incarnation of Free Seed Day. He noted he is generally pretty off the cuff. When he saw a solid response to the feelers he was putting out there about the idea he knew he was on to something.
“Then I also went out of my way to shamelessly ask some of the bigger names in the seed industry to chip in on the day, and as soon as Exotic Mike said he was down with it, everyone else kind of followed suit,” Masonic told L.A. Weekly.
When asked if getting the big name early helped set the course, Masonic said at the moment it helped a lot. But people were also receptive to his argument people would be helping themselves, breeders, and the community all at once.
Masonic Smoker (right) with his podcast cohost Comedy Store regular Frank Castillo at The Ego Clash Barcelona last month.
The turnout for year one was solid. Masonic estimates it was between 300 to 400 people, but he notes it’s kind of hard to remember the first one because the second was huge. More than doubling in size, Masonic estimates Free Seed Day 2022 saw 800 to 1,000 people participate.
With the exponential growth rate, we asked Masonic how many bodies he can realistically move through the shop during the festivities. He plans on having 1,000 bags ready to go. He estimates the value of those bags to be between $300 to $500 each. But don’t worry if you are person No. 1,001.
“There are probably five breeders hanging around at any given time. So if there’s an overspill of more than those 1,000 that I didn’t keep in mind, well, we don’t necessarily have like a whole bag for them, but there are free seeds there for you. And there’s a bag that we can put them in,” Masonic said with a laugh.
Free Seed Day 2021
While Masonic is trying to avoid having people line up too early this year, he understands the enthusiasm. The early bags for those who waited the longest will undoubtedly have some gems in them. Regardless, there will be plenty of love to go around even if you can’t do the whole urban camping experience.
“The reason for Free Comic Book Day is to kind of breathe a breath of fresh air into whatever storefront that they have, right? So in this case, the comic books that are for free are the seeds from Exotic and Bloom. The way that we pay for them in our case is like we go out of our way for like two weeks and we divvy them up. And we have the storefront to actually facilitate a free seed day,” Masonic noted, hoping folks might grab a T-shirt while they’re at the shop. He’s got something for all tax brackets.