Tag: home grow

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Thousands toke and buy weed as Sacramento hosts first legal marijuana fest in California

A cloud of smoke hung over Cal Expo Friday afternoon as thousands gathered for the High Times Cannabis Cup, the first permitted event in California to allow recreational use of marijuana.

Organizers expected upwards of 15,000 people over the course of the two-day festival, which boasts musical performances from acclaimed artists, including Lauryn Hill, Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, Rich The Kid, Cypress Hill, Rick Ross and Ludacris.

The event was at risk of becoming a music-only festival until the Sacramento City Council approved a license for on-site consumption and sales in a 6-2 vote Tuesday. Weeks earlier, a similar High Times event had its permit denied by the San Bernardino City Council just before it was scheduled to take place.

At Cal Expo, crowds maneuvered their way through the rows of booths Friday afternoon, sometimes stopping to take long drags from blunts or sample products. In between puffs from a neatly-rolled joint, Brian Johnson said he was grateful to the city for approving the license.

“I think it was really cool for the city of Sacramento to trust the cannabis community to do something like this,” Johnson said. “I think we’ll hold up our end and have a great event with no mishaps. We’re just out here having fun, trying to socialize and enjoy our products.”

Other attendees, like medical marijuana user William Bennett, said they simply came to learn more about the cannabis industry.

Bennett said he wanted tips for growing marijuana at home. Bennett, who said he suffers from chronic pain caused by a back injury, began using medical marijuana about five years ago as an alternative to prescription opiate painkillers, which he said caused him unbearable side effects. Bennett has since started to grow his own.

“I’m kind of on the fence with recreational, but in the long run, it’s better than people drinking and doing other things,” Bennett said. “You don’t hear about people having big brawls and fights at (events like this). Everyone’s just sitting back.”

Bennett’s wife, Dianne Kirk-Bennett, said she was impressed with how expansive and well-organized the event was.

“If this is your thing, this is the place to be,” Kirk-Bennett said.

The event has approximately 280 vendors, selling marijuana-themed apparel and art, vape pens, concentrates, topicals, edibles and a variety of other cannabis products.

High Times Chief Revenue Officer Matt Stang said it felt “incredible” to host the event, which he characterized as a watershed moment for the industry.

“It gives me a feeling that we’ve really progressed as a country. We’ve come to a point where we can have a peaceful gathering to consume and purchase cannabis with a state sanction,” Stang said. “The ability to do this legally — it’s been a long fight. High Times has been doing this for 44 years. We started as the voice of the opposition, and now we’ve grown into the majority. ”

Security was tight during for the strictly 21-and-up event. Unlike most music festivals, no alcohol sales were allowed.

Joe Devlin, Sacramento’s chief of cannabis policy, said the event would generate more than $200,000 in tax revenue. Devlin said High Times “has a distinguished track record of hosting safe, successful and compliant cannabis events,” noting that the company had developed a “comprehensive security plan” that was approved by law enforcement and had organized a ride share program for those attending the festival.

Stang said High Times had contracted with two separate security firms to ensure no attendees purchased more than the legally-allowed amount and to check for impaired drivers. Ticket buyers were given Uber and Lyft codes at the time of purchase in order to minimize the risk of attendees driving under the influence.

For those in the industry, the event served as a safe demonstration to convince skeptics and state government officials.

“We want to make sure that people understand what a great, compliant, adult-use event can be, because we want this to be the model for the rest of the country,” Stang said.

 

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Universities Meet Growing Demand With Weed 101

As the first executive director and general manager of the city of Los Angeles’ Department of Cannabis Regulation, Cat Packer will lay the legal foundation for how the United States’ second-largest city handles marijuana. But it wasn’t until three years ago, in her last semester of law school, that she even knew what she wanted to do professionally.

That’s when she took a life-changing law class on marijuana.

“I will admit, before taking the class, I was completely oblivious to the many interesting conversations happening around the country about this subject,” Packer said.

A growing number of students across the United States have taken some of the country’s first marijuana-themed university classes and found nearly instant success with this unique knowledge.

“Think about it: If you graduated from law school 10 years ago, you couldn’t study this, because the reforms hadn’t happened yet,” said Douglas Berman, the Robert J. Watkins/Procter & Gamble Professor of Law and the creator of Packer’s Marijuana Law, Policy & Reform Seminar at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.

Berman is proud of Packer, but when he started the course in 2013, not all students were as enthusiastic as she. Some said they didn’t enroll out of concern that future employers wouldn’t like it, according to Berman.

As marijuana has become more mainstream, his class now fills quickly. And even if students don’t go into the field like Packer did, with medical marijuana legal in more than half of the United States and recreational pot legal in nine, chances are that what they learn will come in handy.

“And with all that heat in this space on this still controversial topic, I try to emphasize, lawyers should be bringing more light, rather than heat, to these conversations, armed with the facts,” Berman said.

The facts about marijuana are still at the center of the debate, because while states are more permissive, federal law still puts marijuana in the same category as heroin: a Schedule I drugwith “no currently accepted medical use,” at least in the eyes of the federal government.

That leaves researchers and universities offering classes in uncharted waters.

Despite the limits, a handful of determined professors have stepped up, without textbooks or well-trod academic territory, and created courses to try to ensure that the next generation is prepared to match the public’s interest. There seems to be only one “weed major,” the medicinal plant chemistry program at Northern Michigan University, but a growing number of weed-themed classes are being offered on campuses across the country in law, business, medicine and general science.

Demand outpaces science
In 2013, the Washington Attorney General’s Office provided Beatriz Carlini, a research scientist at the university’s Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute, with funds to develop training modules for health professionals who can get continuing education credit. They learn about how cannabis works and about its best uses; a second module teaches best clinical practices.

Marijuana is legal in its recreational and medicinal forms in Washington, and with more legal access comes a public desire for more education. But unless your doctor is in his or her late 90s and can remember before 1942, when it was legal to prescribe cannabis, more than likely they learned nothing about its benefits in medical school.

“Hopefully, we can help patients make good decisions,” Carlini said. “People won’t wait for these things to resolve federally.”

Yu-Fung Lin teaches the physiology of cannabis at the UC Davis School of Medicine. Physiology is a branch of biology that looks at the functions of living organisms and their parts.

The elective focuses on how cannabis and cannabinoids impact the body. It also looks at physiological impact, therapeutic values and history. It’s the first class of its kind in the University of California system.

Lin, an associate professor who usually teaches medical students, didn’t know what to expect from her 55 undergraduates. “I’ve been quite impressed by their commitment,” she said.

She hopes her class will inspire future research. “Just knowing what we know, and the limitations of what we know, should inspire students, and they in turn could do research that would be really helpful in this field.”

Jam-packed
The Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont can’t create classes fast enough. Its on-campus medical cannabis class was so popular, it had to relocate twice, settling into the largest available lecture hall according to the University. Its online continuing medical education program and the cannabis science and medicine professional certificate program have wait lists. Enrollees have come from as far away as Thailand. It has created webinars and a cannabis speaker series, and even the school’s farm extension provides original plant research about hemp.

Dr. Kalev Freeman, an emergency room physician, and Monique McHenry, a botanist, helped create these courses to address several needs. Freeman said he’s seen too many people taken off ambulances after overdosing on opioids, and he hopes to offer information about a “safer alternative to the public.” McHenry wanted to find a topic attractive to “young minds to get them interested in science.”

Their classes focus on basic science, the drug’s physiology, molecular biology and chemistry. The professional training also drills down on practical issues like effective dosing, delivery methods and drug interactions.

“The more we can do to focus on getting evidence-based facts out to more medical professionals and the public, the more we will have a real success,” McHenry said.

Freeman agreed: “It’s a disservice to the public if professionals aren’t equipped with this knowledge.”

The bud business
The skills that students in Paul Seaborn’s Business of Marijuana class learn at the University of Denver are in demand, and other professors have noticed. He’s gotten calls from all over the world, asking how the class works.

“People want to learn from the Colorado experience,” Seaborn said. “It’s been fascinating to learn the pros and cons of the business in real time as state and federal laws evolve.”

Understanding the rules of the game is key, since those rules create a “unique set of challenges,” Seaborn said. His students learn about marijuana law and history, and they tackle its complicated finances, accounting, marketing and management.

The university’s location presents unique opportunities because so many market pioneers live in the neighborhood and are happy to be guest speakers. Colorado was the first to legalize recreational adult marijuana use, so the industry bloomed there, creating more than 18,000 full-time jobs and generating $2.4 billion in economic activity, according to a study of the market in 2015.

“It’s a rare thing to have an industry start from square one in your lifetime and grow so quickly right around you,” Seaborn said. From his most recent class of 27, three or four students immediately went to work in the industry, and others will probably soon follow.

“There is certainly caution over an industry like this, especially with the federal legality in question, and there is still ongoing discussion and careful thought about how this works, but we want our graduates to come at this from an informed perspective,” he said. “The industry is not going to wait.”

Packer, the Los Angeles marijuana czar, would agree. “We’re in a real moment of transition,” she said. “These conversations about marijuana are incredibly complex. I found I can’t have a conversation about the law without talking about health and social justice issues and enforcement issues.”

It sounds like the perfect material for more college classes.

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Chinese crime syndicate’s alleged pot grows lead to seizure of 100 homes in Sacramento area

In the largest operation of its kind, federal agents swept across the Sacramento region Tuesday and Wednesday targeting about 75 homes serving as suspected marijuana growing sites that authorities say are operated by a Chinese organized crime syndicate.

The raids, which involved more than 500 federal, state and local agents, hit homes from Elk Grove to Sacramento to rural areas, and are aimed at forcing the forfeiture of about 100 homes to the federal government, an effort valued at hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate and marijuana.

“This represents one of the largest residential forfeiture efforts in the nation’s history,” the U.S. Justice Department said.

The investigation began in 2014 as authorities began to see an uptick in marijuana growing operations concealed in residential neighborhoods throughout the Sacramento area, and escalated in the last year as agents used utility bills and sophisticated financial analysis to track millions of dollars coming from China into the United States for the purchase of the homes.

The buyers, typically Chinese citizens in the country legally, are suspected of turning the homes into pot-growing operations that then shipped the marijuana through trucks, mail and couriers to the Eastern seaboard for sale, authorities say.

This week‘s raids resulted in the seizure of more than 61,050 marijuana plants, 200 kilos of processed marijuana valued at up to $100 million and about $100,000 in cash, as well as 15 firearms, officials say. Those numbers are expected to grow as the final tallies are calculated.

The bulk of the raids took place this week, although a couple dozen had been searched in prior weeks, including one in the 9900 block of Pianella Way, in a quiet subdivision in Elk Grove, about two months ago.

Neighbors said they saw authorities hauling away black bags filled with marijuana plants and taking a female occupant, who appeared to be Asian, into custody.

“I just woke up one morning, cop cars everywhere, and all the pot plants were in black bags in the garage,” said Mar Caballero, who lives across the street. “There were guys in hazmat suits.” He said the occupant was taken away in handcuffs.

The home was later put on the market, and a Realtor’s sign says a sale is pending. Wang Xiong, who works for HP Real Estate, was checking on the property Wednesday afternoon but said he had no information about the buyer, seller or the raid.  “It’s all news to me,” he said.  Caballero said he had no previous interaction with the woman but her living arrangement seemed strange. She lived alone but had a minivan, which was almost always parked in the driveway.  “It was kind of odd: a minivan, only one woman, no kids,” he said.

Another neighbor, Steve Johnson, said he believed other people lived there as well, but that he had no inkling of any wrongdoing.

“I had no clue that they were growing marijuana there,” he said. “This is a very quiet neighborhood.”

Federal officials said many of the people tending the grows inside the homes were essentially “indentured servants” forced to remain there and have food and supplies brought to them. Those individuals were offered victim assistance during the raids, and a handful accepted the help, officials said.

In an unusual twist, no arrests have yet been made as the investigation continues and focuses on the manner in which the homes were purchased and the identity of suspects federal authorities believe handled the transactions.

McGregor Scott, the U.S. attorney for the Sacramento-based Eastern District of California, emphasized that the raids, which used flash-bang grenades to gain access to some homes, are not aimed at restricting California’s new state law allowing recreational marijuana use.

“It absolutely has nothing to do with that,” Scott said. “This is illegal under anybody’s law.”

Instead, he said, they are targeting a foreign operation that he says has increased crime in neighborhoods where they are based and represents a massive effort to subvert federal marijuana laws.