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.
Over the last two years, L.A. Weekly has had a front-row seat to the rise of Zalympix.
For the uninitiated, the Zalympix is the biggest contest in the world when it comes to recreational boutique pot. The few and far between that can actually hold up with the quality of the streets. It’s hosted by Greenwolf, one of L.A.’s most famous places to buy great pot. L.A. Weekly recently took part in the process to whittle down the 109 entries to 27, for this year’s California edition.
We caught up with Greenwolf’s founders Brian and Adam to get their take on the Zalympix rocket now going national with East Coast and Michigan editions currently taking place. We started our chat by asking the pair what it had been like watching their event grow to three time zones since kicking things off in early 2021.
“It’s awesome. I mean, it’s really cool. I just feel like down to everyone involved, the cup runneth over with benefits for everyone. And it’s just really cool to see,” Brian told L.A. Weekly. He very much appreciates how taken seriously the Zalympix are in different places. Especially in Michigan, there is a lot of fire out there they hope to highlight through the competition.
“It’s just humbling to talk to some of these, you know, top-tier people in the space and have them say this competition is the pinnacle. This is the one that really stands out amongst the others these days,” Adam added.
From the outsider’s perspective, it all seemed pretty rapid for sure. Basically, as soon as the first boxes went out in 2021, people were believers. The quality of entries made it easy, as the top-shelf entries in the box mirrored the quality Greenwolf’s shelves has been famous for.
We asked the pair when they knew they were really on to something with the event as a whole. Adam and Brian debated when they first got the vibes about Zalympix possibly taking off the way it has. While the initial gut feelings are debatable, when 4,000 people showed up last year to celebrate, they knew things were looking up for the future.
This was also the first time they were ever worried. They’re not party guys per se. They wanted to ensure everything checking in that number of people went smoothly. Adam was standing out front himself grabbing VIPs and handing them wristbands.
That evening saw Zalympix go from 700 people at the inaugural awards show to 4,000. The Zalympix between the two events featured a digital awards show due to a COVID spike in L.A. But the jump in attendance raises the obvious speculation of just how big the event can go? The likely answer is pretty huge. It’s not unreasonable to think 20,000 people will be attending in the not-too-distant future. One lesson from last time is, they plan to have more delivery
Right now they are looking to lock down where they will host the Zalympix growing footprint for the upcoming awards show. Some of the possibilities they are tossing around right now could see them hosting up to 6,000 people. One thing they’re sure about is, they want to start the party a lot earlier, so vendors have more time before the 10 p.m. curfew on legal sales.
While expectations are high for the next California edition, many in the cannabis community are excited to see Zalympix branching out from California. The two had initially pondered the idea, but when their Michigan partners at Exotic Matter hit them up, it was on. Everyone believes bringing the Zalympix to Michigan will benefit the state’s best cultivators.
Adam said it’s been great working with their Michigan partners. They’re getting ready to celebrate the winners of Michigan’s second edition on April 14.
“We know they’ve had a long medical time frame there. When we got there last year, we just were shocked at how amazing the quality of the product was out there,” Adam said.
We asked the pair how the flower in places like Michigan and the East Coast stacks up with the competition back home in Los Angeles?
“I’d say, there’s a lot of good stuff in a lot of places. A lot of people are doing things out there. Especially in Michigan, they’ve always been,” Brian said. “I think it’s the second closest in terms of like, Cali quality. There are real breeders out there. They’re really doing their thing out there and they have been, so for me, it shows.”
As for the differences between the trio of Zalympix contests now happening around the country, the main thing is scale. Michigan is the smallest of the three — they have to keep things a bit more low-key and were not able to have vending at the event. Nevertheless, the vibes carried the show. Many called it one of the best events Michigan’s legal market has seen, noting it’s one of the few times all of the state’s hitters have been inside the same room. They’re hoping to push the bar further next year and be the first event in Detroit to do compliant sales.
Detroit has been a trouble spot for Michigan’s cannabis industry, and with things opening up, it looks like the time is ripe to bring things a bit closer to the population center. Back in the day, events occurred well outside of the city.
“It’s similar to being in an Adelanto or a San Bernardino. You know, they weren’t here,” Adam explained. ”They were quite the drive from like the city, and so we knew our whole goal was, as with the L.A. Zalympix to keep it in LA, in Michigan, do it in Detroit, not be an hour and a half away from town. And then same with New York, we looked at doing other spots, but you know, we just think it’s imperative to be in Manhattan.”
New York is looking dope. It’s a little different for the Greenwolf team not being there, but they’re thrilled with the lineup for the festivities on April 19. A big contingent of California’s best cannabis minds is heading east to NYC for the holiday anyway, so the timing worked out perfectly for the Greenwolf team. They’re expecting somewhere between 2,500-3,000 people for the show. Brian noted they’re going pretty hard for the next couple of weeks.
What’s the difference between the contest entries? It varies. Last year there was so much Runtz in the Michigan Zalympix, it was no Runtz allowed this year. Brian found that interesting.
“I’d say there is a lot of Z everywhere but also like more on the East Coast you see more candy, gassy stuff. I definitely know OG over there, and some OG over here (in the entries). But you know a lot surprised me. There were a lot of Exotic Genetix entries and I noticed there were some different breeders with different gear,” Brian said about the entries.
One thing that’s interesting about Zalympix’s expansion is watching its perceived value from place to place. Obviously, it’s huge here in California. But it seems like a lot of the time it’s reaffirmed many people’s takes on names like Blueprint, Deo, Zushi, and Wizard Trees. In New York, there is this different kind of quest for brands trying to catch lightning in a bottle out the gate with a win.
And boy are they. Sixty-seven brands came out in an attempt to qualify for the finals in NYC. They were narrowed down to 20. The qualifying idea in New York inspired the team to bring it back to California. The Greenwolf team selected 25 tastemakers to pick out the finalists.
“I think there’s going to be some very surprised winners in there. Some brands that you know, people may not have ever heard of, including ourselves,” Adam said.
Tickets for the New York Zalympix are still available.
Purple weed was already a thing when Ken Estes got his hands on Grand Daddy Purple in Mendocino County and brought it back to his grows in the bay area, but that journey south really put the winds in its sails.
We ran into Estes during our recent travels to cover Spannabis and the wider Barcelona club scene. He noted he had spent much of the last decade dealing with his health — this is what originally forced him to take his foot off the gas back in the mid-2010s. But his impact to this day is undeniable. We’d catch back up in California to talk purple a few weeks later.
While not as prominent in the era of 40 new exotic flavors a month, GDP, as Grand Daddy Purple would be known to many, still dots menus up and down California. Prior to the rise of dessert weeds following Cookies hitting the scene, GDP was where people went for a combination of flavor and impact. Even Cookies’ most famous sibling Cherry Pie was the Durban F1 used to make cookies paired to GDP.
But before all that came to be, GDP was the last stop for those looking for high-impact cannabis that wasn’t OG Kush. Some would also argue the purple was a bit more couchlock-heavy than the OG Kush of the time. And while Ken Estes certainly didn’t invent purple weed, he changed the demand level, all while living through the dark ages of cannabis.
And he was loud. Few pushed the limits like Estes. During an event in 2010, he opened a dispensary 20 yards from the steps of Oakland city hall. When he wasn’t executing his business plans, he was hitting city council meetings, eventually opening one of America’s first chains of dispensaries with his Grand Daddy Purple Collective shops in NorCal. His being so “out there” during that era led to frustrations for both his peers and city officials, but folks certainly had a knack for following Ken into town.
Estes’s path to cannabis would start after a motorcycle accident at age 18 in the 1970s paralyzed him from the neck down. Prior to the accident, Estes had been playing soccer at an elite level in California. Pele, in town with the New York Cosmos at the time, gave him a call of support from the hospital’s lobby so he wouldn’t have to fight the crowd there to support Estes in the days following his injury.
Six months into his rehabilitation, he experienced cannabis for the first time with a group of Vietnam veterans who were in the same care facility. This began his lifelong connection to medical cannabis.
“I was a young kid. I was 18. My first personal experience with weed was pretty strong. But I went back to my room and I slept all night. It was the first night in six months I slept all night,” Estes told L.A. Weekly.
He recalls how common the idea of marijuana being medicine was. All the nurses and doctors knew. And he certainly knew it was medicine from his first experience. After that first joint, Estes would end up having eyes on the scene for the next 45 years.
“I’m shocked and surprised where this movement went,” Estes said. “I thought we were just in California getting it for patients. When I started, it was the gay world that came from fighting for gay rights to we have people dying in San Francisco of AIDS. Why can’t they use marijuana? And then Brownie Mary got arrested and that changed the game.”
Mary Jane Rathbun was a San Francisco General Hospital volunteer. She eventually became famous for baking hundreds of brownies a day as the AIDS epidemic hit San Francisco hard. Between 1981 and 1992, she was arrested three times for her famous brownies, but her activism helped push Prop 215 across the finish line. Now, Brownie Mary Day is Aug. 25, in San Francisco.
But we quickly turned back to that first rotation in Vallejo. Since he was still fully paralyzed, the orderly had to hold the joint to his lips for him. But over the next few years, he would work to the point that allowed him to gain some independence.
“It really took me years of intense exercise, but I was an athlete. It was three years, four years, before I really started being able to transfer onto my bed. I could transfer (to) the floor, put my knees together, leaned forward over my legs to transfer back to my chair,” Estes said of his rehabilitation.
That moment he was able to transfer on his own signaled to him he would be capable of living on his own. Marijuana was already his lifestyle well before that day. He was still fully paralyzed the first time his friends took him up to Arcata in Humboldt County.
“I found the Skunk. I found Thai Stick. I found people with Columbian Gold and Panama Red,” Estes said of that first trip at age 19. “I found marijuana so awesome that I wanted the good stuff.”
He’d run into brick weed. The compressed nugs were far from medicine and he knew it. It further motivated him to search for the best options. That first trip north arose from a friend telling him he knew a guy with sensimilla.
“I said, what is sensimilla?” Estes noted with a laugh. “It’s a seedless weed? And it’s green, lime green? Let’s go there.”
The locals hooked him up, given his medical situation. He scored his first pounds of sensimilla for $100 bucks. That would be about $460 today.
As for the traditionally tight community up north, especially during the early era of enforcement, “My disability broke me in. People were very compassionate and they understood medicine,” Estes said.
Estes noted his original host in Humboldt understood the benefits of medical cannabis all too well having recently lost his father to cancer at the time.
“He lost his dad. His dad had cancer. He got help from cannabis. They think it dragged his life another two years, but he swears he was happier. He saw other people who were on pharmaceuticals dying. They were miserable, moaning, and his dad (had) weed on the way out. He really is a compassionate man,” Estes said.
Estes pointed to the statement “all cannabis use is medical.” He said he gets it, to different degrees. But in his case, it wasn’t really up for debate, and the farmers of The Emerald Triangle showed him a lot of love.
Part of it was because they knew in addition to it being for his own medical use, he was paying top dollar. Some of the brown frown was going for between $30-$50 a pound. Estes wanted nothing to do with it.
“When I got the first Skunk, which was fluffy, I had 24 bags. I sold it for $100 a bag and I would buy that. Next time I bought the Skunk it was $200, the next time it was $400 a pound and after that it was $500 a pound,” Estes said.
We asked Estes as he watched the pound price creep up, when did he know it was time to become his own supplier and get in on the cultivation side? He laughed and said it was right around the time he saw that first $500 pound. He’s already been collecting seeds in film containers and noting what they were.
In 1977, he would purchase his first hydroponic system. He said it took him about a decade to get to the point where he is comfortable looking back and saying he was dialed in. To help put that into perspective, the biggest movie of the year in 1987 when Estes started growing heat was Beverly Hills Cop 2.
The first grow went well, but he missed the part about changing the plants’ light cycle to get them to flower. By the time he did, they had been vegging for a couple of months. The plants exploded and he started selling grams for $5 after the harvest.
“I actually started catching a BART to the 51 bus on Market Street. The 51 bus took me over to Haight Street and Stanyan McDonald’s right there. I’d set up with little tiny bags in there. And I could sell down the street over there for 20 bucks,” Estes said. This was around 1984 and 1985.
Estes would move his garden outside. That wasn’t a bad thing — in that era, the best outdoor was widely regarded as the best cannabis available, period. He said it took another decade for the best indoor to start beating out the sungrown.
He saw cannabis grown under High-Pressure Sodium lights for the first time when one of his buddies took a light from a baseball field. Eventually, the HPS lights got a bit more normalized, but there was only one place you could buy them at first. Going in and grabbing more than one light was a red flag to anyone casing the store. Estes and others would send friends and family to grab a light each, until they eventually had enough for whatever size room they were trying to put together.
“If they saw you putting 10 lights in your car, they followed you home. You had a search warrant on your house a week later. So we were all nervous about that,” Estes said.
In the late ‘80s, he moves back indoors and starts building out grow houses. The product would eventually end up in Dennis Peron’s San Francisco dispensary. He would go from a 10-light house to a 100-light operation in Oakland in 1992.
While it was a big jump doing 10 times as many lights, he was confident in his standard operating procedures. He also had a lot of faith in his nutrients and pest management ability, too.
When Peron shut down, Estes went on to work a stint at the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club. Eventually, Estes decided to open up his first dispensary in Concord in 1997. As Estes went from city council to city council attempting to open more shops in places with no ordinances around medical cannabis, he faced a lot of opposition. Some of the very cities that he went to battle with are now booming cannabis commerce hubs.
But back then, he was attacked by 1990’s and 2000’s NIMBYs, terrified of the thought of cannabis in their town. They would call him things like a street dealer.
“I said you have never spent one time in my house and at my table having dinner with me. You don’t know who I am at all sir, or ma’am. But I was attacked all the time. That was the way they did it back in those days for sure,” Estes recalled.
He said San Mateo was the most vicious municipality of all back then. He estimates he probably opened 20 clubs over the years in different cities.
Estes credits his activism to meeting disabled activist Dan O’Hara. O’Hara rolled his wheelchair across America and the length of the Mississippi River. He was a vocal advocate in Sacramento and Washington D.C., for the disabled. He was even honored by President Jimmy Carter for his efforts, and the Vatican. Estes and O’Hara became friends.
“So I became very, very active, much more of an open activist. It was not a secret. I wasn’t behind the scenes.”
Estes has witnessed every level of cannabis regulation in California. We asked what it was like seeing things go from Prop 215 to the legal era. He thought it was all going to move a lot faster, given how fast he opened a shop in the wake of Prop 215 passing.
“Even though I wasn’t granted a license to have my facility, and I’ve always lasted about one year in these towns, it was enough to start the dialogue, to start the process where other people came behind me pushing, getting attorneys. And next thing you know, there are ordinances,” Estes said.
The conversation would turn toward the purple weed Estes helped turn iconic. Back when he was exposed to purple on his earliest trips to The Emerald Triangle, it didn’t denote some special quality. He’d see the haze Jimi Hendrix made famous in the late 1970s. He said it was good, but it wasn’t great.
But in the early 2000s, he started to notice some purple strains were bomb. The Purple Erkel was high on the list for quality, but it was a very finicky plant to deal with. Estes argues the Erkel is really just Lavender and everyone changed the name.
“It was finicky, but when you smoked it, it was fire. It had that taste,” Estes noted.
In 2003, his relationship with purple would change forever. He was showing his friends Charlie and Sarah, they were Blackfoot and Pomo Indians. The Pomo have a deep history in Mendocino.
The Pomo traditionally lived in what is now the area around Clear Lake, Alexander Valley, and the Russian River watershed. The Pomo spoke seven different dialects while living in small independent communities that relied on hunting, fishing and gathering to meet their needs.
Estes showed the pair some Big Bud x Erkele from Bodhi. A lot of people thought that was the GDP, but it wasn’t. It did do well though, taking home top honors at an early cup in L.A. at one point. This put the purple, and the affection Estes had for it, on Charlie and Sarah’s radar.
During a later trip to visit their home on the Eel River, Estes saw some suits as he was pulling up. He provided the pair with cash from a score he had made that day to keep their home. Charlie would go on to tell some other folks in the tribe about what Estes had done.
Eventually one of the members of the tribe showed Estes what they called Purple Medicine. It was phenomenal.
“He brought it to me. And I had a bright light shined on them. I was like, oh my god, this is amazing. The color was amazing, purple everywhere. But you could have rolled that pound out of the bag like a bowling ball. It all stuck together,” Estes said. “They had it for 18 years. You could peel buds off the pound like velcro.”
A GDP outdoor crop.
Estes wanted to buy as much as he could, but after a few rounds, the tribe didn’t want to do business with him. They gave him the cut of Purple Medicine so he could run it himself. It became what we know today as Grand Daddy Purple. Estes went all in on his new cut and changed all of his operations to GDP. When he couldn’t produce enough in his 200-light operation, he brought it north for his friends to grow, too. Since he was paying $4,000 a pound, they were more than happy to run it for him.
“I know what I got. I’ve got this. This is it. This is to me just like the Grand Poobah. It’s like the grand something, Grand Daddy Purple, and then I high-five Charlie,” Estes said, remembering how he came up with the name.
As he started making the trip more regularly, farmers would wait for him south of Garberville to try and catch him before he spent all his money on someone else’s weed. One time a utility truck flagged him down at night, the pounds were inside the bucket you would use to do maintenance on a telephone pole.
Estes said the best GDP came from all over. It wasn’t a particularly challenging plant to grow, so a lot of different people in various conditions were able to make the most of it.
On his way back from up north he would call his friends’ answering machines and just say Grand Daddy Purple and code word that it was on its way south. Eventually, he would open his shop in Oakland’s former Oaksterdam neighborhood. Oakland loved purple.
“People back then thought purple meant it was overdried or always moist or something. And then there was no purple on any menu,” Estes said.
In the earliest days of trying to convert Oakland to purple, Estes would hand out nugs to the people in line at his competitor and offer refunds to people who bought eighths if they didn’t like it.
“Pretty soon, within six months, we got E40 and Keak Da Sneak are smoking it. It was on Weeds. It was in Pineapple Express. Snoop Dogg said on Howard Stern it was his favorite strain. It was just this crazy blow-up thing. I did kind of have the idea it could happen, but I didn’t know it would happen as fast as it did,” Estes said.
Estes began collecting seeds from the 200 lights. Every run there would be a dozen or so. When he decided it was time to hunt for a male, he had about 60.
“I backcrossed it to stabilize the genetics. I tried to focus on the traits that I like, the rock-hard buds, the nose, the nice branching, the dark green waxy leaves, so that we came up with Ken’s GDP,” Estes explained. He argued some people liked Ken’s GDP better than the original. In the most technical terms, Ken’s GDP was essentially Grand Daddy Purple Bx1.
He also took that male and put it in a room with seven of the bomb strains out at the time. Estes said a lot of people won cups with the seeds that came out of the room. He believes a big chunk of what’s commercially viable in the market dates back to that breeding project.
Estes ended up dealing with a federal case for six years. Nobody wanted to touch him at the time.
“You have to almost like, stop doing what you’re doing to get them to leave you alone,” Estes said. “I remember being in their office in San Francisco and asking, why do I have this target on my back?”
One of the things that caused Estes some headaches was his choice to start declaring his cannabis income on his taxes early. He figured if he was paying his taxes, how could they say it was illegal? Well, they certainly took the money no problem.
“I want all my cases, but it took me six years. I had three federal cases. I got raided in 2005, 2008, and 2009,” Estes noted.
One of his shops was caught up in the massive San Diego sweep of 2009 that saw 13 stores shut down. People would tell Estes they weren’t growing the Purple anymore because he was too hot and he shouldn’t come around.
But the more cultivation in urban settings got normalized, the less he needed people up north to help, as GDP would prove to be an indoor strain. When you run it outside, it’s 80% leaves and 20% buds; thankfully it’s the exact opposite indoors. While it wouldn’t quench the thirsts of the eventual three-pound-a-light crowd on the hunt for maximum dollars, it was always heat.
These days Estes is doing his best to keep GDP alive. He recently had it tissue-cultured. While a popular long-term storage method, tissue culture is also a way to clean a plant of diseases. The freshest piece of the meristem is cut before it has a chance to be infected like the rest of the donor plant. Two people are currently running the clean version of GDP.
“I just want to be the brand ambassador,” Estes closed laughing.
Every year there is even cooler stuff available for cannabis consumers on 4/20.
It will be no different in 2023. There is a wide array of new products and strains sure to take our breath away in the coming months. Here are our must-have products for 4/20/23 next week:
Puffco Wizard
Courtesy of Puffco
While the Gandalf-style pipe is nothing new, Starfish Designs was famous for pumping them out back in the day, in the past, glass versions have generally been designed for flower. With Puffco’s new Wizard attachment to complement the Proxy, you’ll now be able to smoke hash Gandalf, too. While it looks cool, some people find that little bit of extra space compared to the stock Proxy attachment rips a little bit smoother. The Wizard is $99.99,
Talking Terps Clothing
Courtesy of Talking Terps
Few artists have been able to get the cannabis scene as excited at the concept of high-end art as Talking Terps. Their knack for limited editions and luxury now sees their products gracing the offices and homes of some of the coolest folks in the cannabis space. Some recent hits include the Terp Fetti sweatpants. They look like one of those delicious vanilla confetti cakes but are super comfy to match. We haven’t tried them out yet, but the new footholders they’re about to drop look pretty sick, too.
Globmops Slurper Cleaner
Globmops are nothing new, the company has long been one of the two main titans of cleaning your quartz after a dab with a lab-grade cotton swab that’s spun a lot tighter than a Q-tip, so you don’t have to worry about it breaking up and leaving behind anything on your quartz banger. But now, Glopmops has a Slurper Cleaner design perfect for Terp Slurpers. They’re kind of a hassle to clean with the standard Globmops so a lot of people would dunk them in iso after every dab; this will make it a bit quicker.
Wizard Trees Seeds
Courtesy of Wizard Trees
Wizard Trees is one of the most celebrated cannabis farms in California in recent years. While they had traditionally been known for making excellent selections in pheno hunts and then producing great flower, they’re now making an even deeper jump into genetics with their first seed drop ever. It was initially timed with the Spannabis festivities. The drop is available at WizardTreesGenetics.com and there are a lot of RS-11 crosses on the list that are easy to get hyped about.
Free Seed Day
With the timing of this year’s 4/20 issue, we’re thrilled to be able to let you know you can get out to Free Seed Day this Saturday, May 15, at Masonic’s on Fairfax. The day is a celebration of all things Los Angeles cannabis genetics. We dove into its three-year evolution with Masonic Smoker last week. As the name entails, there will be plenty of free seeds to go around with bags ready for the first 1,000 people that come out. But even if they run out of the official bags, you can expect to not leave empty-handed if you really love seeds.
Oni Flowers
Courtesy of One
The long-awaited first drop of flowers from the legendary Oni Seed Co hit California dispensary shelves in recent months. So far the flower is holding up, as more people around the state get access. The phenos were selected from a big pheno hunt, when you pop a lot of seeds, of Oni’s storied genetics collection. Two of our favorites so far have been the Zahiti Rainbow and Purple Something, the latter helping fill a bit of the purple void in the marketplace at the moment.
Brothers Broadleaf
Florida-based Brothers Broadleaf has exploded onto the blunt scene over the past couple of years. We were originally put on to them by Adam Ill at Kushstock a few years ago. In the time since it was like watching a snowball roll down the hill with all of their varieties becoming a massive hit. Even the discount Dudz line made up of imperfect leaves is considered among the top of the game. You can use discount code “JimiD15” to get 15% off on Dudz.
Preferred Gardens
As we highlighted in our explanation about what makes mixed-light cannabis awesome earlier this year, Preferred Gardens is among the most respected names in all of cannabis cultivation. This can be said for both indoor and mixed-light greenhouse operations. They’ve now taken the act on to Florida with more states on deck, but fear not, the weed here at home is still heat. It feels like it’s been a couple of years since we’ve seen something competitive with Preferred in that $35 an-eighth price bracket.
L.A. Family Farms
L.A. Family Farms winning The Transbay Challenge
Known for both the quality of their flowers and concentrates, L.A. Family Farms continues to shine locally. The Rainbow Belts rosin the farm won Transbay with was some of our favorite hash of 2022 for sure. In addition to all the great product, L.A. Family Farms’ logo is a common sight at cool events around town, its team in attendance, or sponsoring stuff based in the more authentic wing of the Los Angeles cannabis industry.
Doja Pak Coffin Candy
Doja Pak continues to revolutionize the way Los Angeles looks at Thursday night, as the strain premiers continue to be a massive hit with L.A.’s headiest. Their latest big new strain is a doozie. Coffin Candy is technically (Runtz x (Z x (Gelato 33 x 18 Coffins)). With Doja going all in on supporting the new flavor, we have high school expectations, given their epic run of curating hitters over the last few years.
Runtz Wraps
Already Runtz up your life? No worries gang, now you can Runtz up your blunts, too. Runts’ new line of Dominican leaves for rolling blunts is awesome. First off, you get six in a pack. For most five packs of blunts, I end up tossing one. Since you never have to toss out the loose leaves, it basically works out to two free blunts in every pack. They are also very stretchy compared to most blunts and forgiving.
The Emerald Cup is deep into its judging cycle for 2023 as organizers prepare for May’s Award ceremony and we’re back on the solventless team.
We’ve had great access to the contest since 2018. This is my fifth year judging one of the hash categories. While the state has seen some upstart contests making waves in recent years, the two decades of consistently bringing the heat still had The Emerald Cup firmly cemented as the top dog.
Currently, the judges are meeting once a week to go over the various categories. Edible and flower judges have to stick to the most vigorous schedule. You can smoke all the hash in a day if you party hard enough, but between the hundreds of flower entries and the pace of your metabolism on edibles, it’s easy to understand why some of the categories are referred to as a full-time job.
High Time’s Jon Cappetta noted on Twitter this past Sunday, it took him three weeks to finish all the flower samples. He also said it was a gauntlet that he was glad was over.
For better or worse, the cup tends to prove as a launching point for a lot of ideas within the game. That goes from everything from new flavors to hardware. The ideology there is if you can pull it off out of the gate at the cup, the wind will be in your sails as you enter the market.
But if you go all in for the cup without consistency in the product that hits the market after, the win isn’t worth much. There are plenty of brands that took the top prize in various categories that were never to be heard from again after the win. Maybe they just couldn’t scale up, maybe they entered white label they couldn’t grow themselves.
L.A. Weekly is back on the solventless team to help judge some of the best concentrates, or hash, on the planet. The reason The Emerald Cup’s hash categories are home to some of the best terps from around the globe is the quality of material California extractors have access to, this goes for both the solventless and hydrocarbon categories.
Hash is one of the places we see the new ideas we mentioned before. Every year there are experimental consistencies, especially in the personal use category. This is one of the places where the most important lesson of all is terps over tech. If the material you are using to make the hash isn’t that good, you’ll never be able to compete with the top of the food chain, regardless of how pretty you’re able to make it look.
The kit I’m using to judge this year is essentially the same as last year with a few upgrades and additions. Most notable is the new hitman rig, it hits a bit smoother than the mini beaker I was using last year. Also, all the quartz I’m using to judge this year was made in Los Angeles by Alien Flower Monkey Glass. Puffco also released the Proxy since last year. It’s great for water hash, so that will help speed the process up for judging water hashes this year.
I’ve focused on the rosin and personal use categories so far. I’m currently in The Canary Islands judging flowers at The Canary Islands Champions Cup and couldn’t bring the entries with me, so I wanted to make sure I had solid notes for the meeting I’ll do with the other judges while I’m here. When I get back to America, I’ll bust through the water hash entries in a day or two, since it’s the smallest category with about a dozen entries. On the other hand, Rosin has 42 entries and personal use has 13.
Most of the entries are either fresh-pressed or a cold-cured batter. The fresh-pressed is glorious looking and tastes bomb, but the market is moving more toward the shelf stability of cold-cured rosin. This could definitely be seen this year with the number of fresh-pressed entries way down, but a couple of them are still bangers.
We’ll share all the winners with you next month when they are announced.
In one of the season’s most unexpected 4/20 collaborations, Puffco and AriZona Beverages are dropping an ice-tea homage edition of the Cupsy.
We have to admit the kings of digital dabs are dropping a collaboration with the 99-cent beverages of my childhood that were not on my bingo card for the holiday season, but we’re ready to party.
“Puffco has long admired AriZona’s unwavering quest to bring affordable, great-tasting beverages to the masses, and we see a lot of synergy in the way we develop our products to celebrate the beautiful flavors of the cannabis plant,” said Roger Volodarsky, CEO and founder of Puffco. “This creative effort is all about marrying our innovative design with AriZona’s iconic cherry blossom print to offer another pathway for people to enjoy a cannabis experience that emphasizes taste.”
The Cupsy is a highly effective stealth smoking apparatus The original looks like a standard coffee cup, so you can just leave it in your cup holder and take bong loads at work all day without anyone looking in and seeing anything sketchy. Not that bongs are sketchy, but there are some square bears in our midst!
Puffco describes the Cupsy as a revolutionary design that pairs an unassuming everyday object with a high-performance cannabis bubbler system. A fair take. While I’m more of a glass tube guy, the Cupsy certainly was a ripper when I took it for a test drive after the original dropped roughly a year ago.
The AriZona Edition of the Cupsy is a lot more vibrant than its stock predecessor. That being said, at first glance, it’s still going to be pretty tricky. It’s got those vibrant pastel colors that make you think of Easter, if you’re not too busy thinking of ice tea. Generally, it’s a refreshing color palette compared to most of the space. The clear glass cup with the iconic AriZona logo on it also is a nice switch from the stainless steel wrapped in plastic in the original. The glass will still be a breeze to clean.
“Everything we do is built on taste. From our label design, to creating great quality products. At AriZona, our customers are our single biggest inspiration,” explains Spencer Vultaggio, chief marketing officer at AriZona Beverages. “Our mission is to bring customers a memorable experience: from ingredients, to unique merch. Puffco is another Brooklyn-born company that is deeply passionate about pushing the boundaries of design, flavor and accessibility, and that’s why we are excited to bring this collaboration to fruition.”
Adding to the fun? This is a true collector’s edition item. Puffco will only be producing 420 of these collaborations in honor of the holiday. It’ll likely be a must-grab item for the real cannabis accessory enthusiasts given how out of left field the collab feels like when you first read about it.
There also is an argument to be made about just how functional the Cupsy design is. There are not a lot of options that short that offer the same quality of percolation. While we’d love to see the bowl grow a little in the next rendition, the Cupsy is firmly planted on our stealth smokers list.
Puffco did this drop to coincide with the 4/20 holiday season, but they also drop new gear year-round. We recently featured the new Wizard attachment for the Proxy on our 4/20 list. It’s one of the best examples of what’s possible at the production scale with the modular system of the Proxy.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these end up selling out in just a day. Puffco SMS users will get a half-hour head start over the nonbelievers at 9 a.m., on 4/20.
The Canary Islands continue to make their mark on the cannabis industry with the volcanic island chain now home to hundreds of dispensaries.
One of the fastest-growing cannabis contests on the planet also calls the islands home.
Tenerife, where we spent our adventure, popped a lot more than our last visit. It seemed like the social clubs were starting to permeate more into the tourist-heavy parts of the area. Weed Island was the best view we’ve ever seen somewhere you can buy weed. As you sit down to rollup on the balcony at the shop, you are greeted by a stunning seascape.
Canary Champions Cup Flower Entries
Canary Social Club Culture
All the clubs come in various formats. They range from nightclub-style venues that can hold hundreds of people to more traditional Dutch-style coffee shops. These facilities continue to get nicer and nicer. This is because of how safe people feel spending cash to make their shop look nice. One club owner told me they spent six figures over the last few months ahead of its Grand Opening on 4/20.
California shops are currently facing some of their darkest days ever, Tenerife is another story. One club owner told us he’d never heard of a social club closing down because sales were bad. You’d think Tenerife might be hitting capacity for how many clubs the ecosystem can support, but each one we walked into was packed. Part of the reason for everyone’s success is the fact these tourists need somewhere to burn.
A rosin pressing demo at one of the after parties.
Why do they need somewhere to smoke? Because the rules on the island are so strict about cannabis possession and consumption. It’s technically against the law to bring it with you outside of the club and the police are hardcore. I was out raging with some locals last week and walking behind a bar on the boardwalk on one of the island’s popular beaches last week when five cops rolled on me. It was the most intense search I’ve experienced since I came back from Canada in ‘08 and declared my bong at the Vermont border. They went through my pockets and backpack, asking me questions. As they talked to me, they opened every bag I had in my backpack and asked me why I had a bunch of empties. I told them souvenirs. Eventually, they pulled out one of the TrapLoc bags I had with Grove Bags; once they saw my picture on the bag, there was a shocking attitude change from the cops. They thanked me for smoking all my cannabis inside clubs and not taking it outside.
And boy, did I. I smoked a ton of cannabis as I celebrated my first 4/20 there. The whole thing is an extra joke since the date starts with days in Europe and reads 20/4/2023. But everyone was certainly willing to pretend that 4/20 was a thing there.
Judging Flower at The Canary Champions Cup
One of my main responsibilities for the week was judging flowers at the sophomore installment of The Canary Islands Champions Cup. There ended up being over 50 samples of flower across the indoor and outdoor categories. The top flower in the contest mostly stood well above the competition. Big Bang Creations took third prize in indoor with Monkey Berries. RTZ was the first runner-up with Zowah. Fresh Farm’s topped the podium with their White Gold.
The Hash is Awesome
Finally, it’s really important to note how advanced the hash culture on the island,. There is a solid argument to be made that the quality of the concentrates there are better than what you’ll see in most U.S. states for sure. Hash culture has always been a thing there given it’s proximity to Morrocco, but the latest tech has made its way to the island with avengance. Hanami Gardens, who won the cup, could hold his own against any hash makers in the world without a doubt. His rosin was explosive terps when you open the jar and he even chopped up some piatella, U.S. headie boys favorite new solventless trend!
We’ll have more coverage from my travels in the weeks ahead.
Bruno Van Holland, one of California’s premier joint rollers, took his act on the road to judge the Canary Champions Cup.
As the world exited the pandemic, one of the aspects of the cannabis industry that exploded the fastest was the hand-rolled joint scene. And in addition to the material going into them, the rollers themselves have become the stars of the show. Their ability and access to high-end flowers turned them into more natural likable influencers than the many trying to force it.
Bruno Got in Early
Van Holland is one of a few at the top of the pack. He got in the mix early, and his signature outfits and upbeat attitude quickly made him a staple on the event circuit. At many of the state’s most fantastic weed parties, you’ll find Van Holland posted in a bright corner rolling up cannons.
Given how things have gone for Van Holland, it was no surprise the Canary Champions Cup selected him to judge the pre-rolls.
“My first takeaway is how friendly everybody was,” Van Holland told LA Weekly. “The cannabis community over there is as inviting to us as foreigners – like it was, it was just a welcoming, like the way that they treated us. It felt like an honor just to be there. They treated us great. The first thing that comes to mind is just how well we were welcomed.”
Van Holland added the atmosphere those people are able to create at the social clubs he experienced was really special.
“The vibe there was amazing, the fact that we can go inside of a social club and play pool, smoke and by and by, and all in the same place. It was much different than what I’m used to here,” he added.
What Bruno Witnessed
Van Holland went on to note he appreciated the flower selection. There were many more sativas than he was expecting. He loved the fruit notes found in a lot of them. Given it was his first time hitting cannabis clubs outside America, he was excited to see those California strains that have a spot in his heart.
As for the contest, Bruno liked what he saw.
“In my category, I was impressed with the way that their joints were rolled,” Van Holland said of the entries. “Seeing back rolls is something that I’m not used to seeing here in California. And that hash wrap, I’ve never seen a hash wrap entered into a pre-roll contest before – that was impressive.”
Van Holland added he gets to see the best pre-rolls in the world in California. They are tough to beat. But the ones he saw abroad had their own unique style, which is tough to compare.
Comparing Tenerife to California
Van Holland went on to explain the differences between the sesh scene in California and the clubs in Tenerife.
“I found that people were talking a lot more at these ones. Everybody was kind of sitting around and talking more than the event that I was at today in California,” he said.
Another big difference was the spliffs they smoke.
“So they chain-smoke like crazy, and every couple of minutes, they’re lighting up a new spliff. I thought that the scene there was so much cooler. I thought the way that they had the social club setup was so much cooler than the way that we have the dispensary setup in California,” Van Holland said.
The event organizers were excited to have Van Holland in the mix.
“We were lucky enough to have Bruno in town, the black gloves and friendly smile are iconic. What a wonderful human, always kind and always rolling up just at the right time! He’s a certified hero,” Lawrence from The Canary Champions Cup told L.A. Weekly.
Nearly a decade ago, Rohan Marley helped his family take its first steps in the cannabis space, now his personal brand is rolling along strong after launching in Michigan.
Rohan is the middle child of Bob Marley’s nine kids. He and Stephen are the closest in age of the group and were born a month apart in 1972. When it was time for the family to start dabbling in cannabis in the mid-2010s following the first successful legalization initiatives, Rohan took the lead.
The family founded Marley Naturals in 2014. Marley Naturals was originally a partnership between Privateer Holdings. The brand would have some hiccups as it came to market. The family would buy the rights out in 2019 and take full control. Not too long after, Rohan would get the ball rolling on the cannabis element of Lion Order that recently launched in Michigan after a couple of years of pheno hunting before the flower went into full production.
We flew out to Detroit to check out Rohan’s new flowers and hear the lessons learned in California. He kicked things off by describing the vibes associated with Lion Order. They are similar to what the phrase means in Rastafarianism and his father’s music. Particularly, the ideas of strength, courage and righteousness in the face of oppression and adversity.
In the song his father named Lion Order on his final studio album, Confrontation, he would sing on the themes of standing up for your rights and fighting injustice, as he did frequently throughout his career.
After a walk through 305 Farms cultivation facility where the Lion Order line is in production, we sat down with Marley.
“After years of being an entrepreneur and wanting to do things my way, which is things I love, being a part of something that’s more than just cannabis. Being a part of a movement. And that movement is Lion Order and just the philosophy of Rastafari,” Marley told L.A. Weekly.
His goal going in this time was to create something he’d want to smoke and share with his brothers. Marley’s years in the coffee industry have made picking out the notes in aromas a regular thing. With Lion Order, his plan was to hunt down the flavors of his childhood.
He remembered the flavors he would come across in college. He didn’t know what indica or sativa was, he just knew he loved herb. He has spent the rest of his life chasing some of those flavors from his youth, just now it’s for the sake of good business as opposed to just his personal enjoyment.
“For me, it was like a pheno hunt all the time once I left college,” Marley said.
Marley would get his hands on some cannabis in Miami not long into the pandemic that had him thinking, this is really it? Eventually, Marley was introduced to Heavyweight Heads by fellow University of Miami alumni Mike James. James also played six years in the NFL after his time at The U.
“And those guys, we spent about two and a half years trying to develop that taste profile I wanted. They would come in and I’d say that ain’t it,” Marley said. “I started to like get into the whole strain and my own thing to like all right, we need to create our own movement. Because I don’t like the herb that’s out there. I want my own herb of what I like to smoke. So those guys from Heavyweight Heads helped me to develop these genetics here. And when they brought the right one, I knew that was the one.”
That was King Clem, the current flagship strain. The King Clem’s nose profile is somewhere in the middle between a sour and an OG. It’s not quite either, but you can detect certain similar notes for sure. The structure is a bit chunkier than either of them too.
King Clem
Marley knew the King Clem was the one before he even lit it.
“Before you light it, you know they see that people pre-pull it now, when you get all those terpenes and all that flavor. That’s what I love. Then when I spark that and I’m getting that all together, I see that’s the one, so for me, that’s what we create,” Marley said.
Marley said it didn’t take long for them to create the rest of the line after that because they knew what ingredients would help produce the flavors he liked. Marley notes while he liked the more tropical flavor profiles, he still has the OG gassy thing in the mix.
We asked Marley what he thought of the argument that it’s hard for a cannabis brand to be elite in the eyes of the biggest whale buyers without the real strain name and lineage on the bag. He pointed to the traceability back to the farm.
“So if I create my own, like cooking, if I create my own dish and you like my dish, and you’re gonna eat that right? Then you can go there and eat his dish, but this is my dish. This is what I like,” Marley replied.
The conversation moved on to his early efforts in California. He called Marley Naturals a family movement that was ahead of its time. He argued it was one of the first in the game to ever have to deal with licensing and royalties in the midst of our ongoing prohibition of cannabis.
305 Farms
Marley argued that Marley Naturals went through the ups and downs of any startup.
“What I learned from that is that when you come onto my herbs, it has to be my way,” Marley said. “The partners learned some things and they’re doing wonderful things with beautiful accessories. We’re developing the herb.”
He went on to subtly emphasize the difference between the two, noting it’s one thing to have something with a licensing component, it’s another thing to have something that’s your own.
Fans line up for a Lion Order in-store meet and greet.
One of the things we noted was the move to packaging that seemingly would provide longer shelf life with Lion Order compared to Marley Naturals wood-top jars that needed to be shrink-wrapped with a Boveda inside, and it was still a little rough by the time it got to the shop.
Marley explained the packaging was one of the things the family tried on a quest for sustainability that can sometimes make them tricky to work with.
“What’s tricky is like, to work with us, you have to have ingenuity and be able to create things that are following in the family guidelines. Sustainable movement, you know? So we went into the wood and learn that because, obviously, as a consumable, it takes time to get to you, the consumer,” Marley said. “You have to go to the thing, then the journey, then the travel, and so that shelf life has to be preserved a certain way in order to maintain that freshness.”
Marley argued it’s not that the herb is not good. It’s just the way to procure it, in a way to give it a shelf life, is one of the things the family has learned in their quest to be as sustainable as possible.
Marley went on to discuss what it’s been like watching legalization from the context of a Rastafari, essentially getting the right to pray legalized.
“It’s beautiful and we love it because you know, it’s different when you’re driving down the street and the policeman is behind you. You don’t panic if you got the herb. You know that it can be good. Because like, people can create a lot of anxiety over herb. But it’s not really the herb that gives you anxiety, it is the consequences. So when you alleviate that, it’s wonderful. So we’re very happy about the movement, a part of that movement,” Marley said.
Lion Order is currently popping in Michigan, expect to see it in other states in the not-too-distant future.
One of our absolute favorite activities here at L.A. Weekly is to see the heat of the moment at major cannabis events. There are few places better to do it than Hall of Flowers as the industry gathers to grade the current product on the market.
As one might expect, the show and tell can get serious quickly. Here are some of our favorite finds from Hall of Flowers.
Fresh Powerzzzup Terps
One of the cool things about running into the Powerzzzup team is getting the chance to check out various renditions of their gear. As we noted in our feature article on Powerzzzup in 2021, lots of different farms across the country run their genetics. On this occasion, we got to see some 2090 Shit grown out veganically by the team at Feeling Frosty Hash. It was savage heat that tastes awesome but has a strong impact. f.
CAD Nana’s Ultimate Greaze
Carter’s Aromatherapy Design is at it again with one of the heaviest-hitting topicals on the recreational market. Nana’s Ultimate Greaze features 1000 milligrams of THC and 500 milligrams of CBD. This is probably a lot more potent than whatever topical you’re using if you’ve ever felt the urge to up the strength a bit more.
Bruno is Back in America!
Following his recent adventures to the Canary Islands to judge The Canary Islands Champions Cup, Bruno is back in California rolling some of the best prerolls in the game with some of the best material available. On this occasion, Bruno was rolling up prerolls at the CAM booth for the buyers on hand to try CAM’s wide range of flavors.
Joshwax Seabiscuit A2
While many of the big-name companies reminded us of why you hear their names a lot, Joshwax was someone who had to have their stock go up following Hall of Flowers. It’s not that Joshwax didn’t have good pot before last week, we just found the kushiness of the Seabiscuit to be something really special.
Masonic Seed Co x Fiore
The team at Fiore drops a lot of heat, but the Banana God is being grown in collaboration with Masonic Smoker is right at the top. You can taste all the flavor notes that have seen a lot of hardware added to Banana God’s trophy shelf over the last few months.
Dueling Strains
SF Canna’s new two-packs featuring two eighths is one of our favorite new offerings from anyone at Hall of Flowers. There is a QR Code on the back so you can score your favorites after and help the organizers find their winner.
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