I didn’t realize the cannabis I was buying and smoking in the 90’s was some of the best there is. I can recall our joints getting so oily they were hard to continue smoking toward the end. I’ve always grown as an adult, and my younger brother Ben has tried every growing method & system known to man over the last 20 years. I’ve had the best.
I guess that’s why I was so shocked when I went legal & had to start purchasing legal weed without seeing, tasting, or smelling the product.
Imagine that in the old days? Yes, this is it, look….. but don’t touch. For us it was a tradition to sit down & smoke one when you went buying. This legal world of cannabis can be hard to navigate. There are soooo many products on the market & it’s my estimation that only maybe 10-20% of growers growing legally are actually producing the fire. People can shop online/Black market/grey market as well legal cannabis. Where the quality & price vary greatly. It is so important that we do our due diligence & really vet the weed & the LP’s we buy our flower from.
Part of my method of market research is buying legal/or whatever is available in the places I travel. My BF & I recently went on a trip to the US. Staying at a resort in the Colorado Rockies, and then on to Redondo Beach in LA. In Colorado, there weren’t as many dispensaries as I would have thought, and the selection was pretty dismal. After being sent back to our hotel room to get our passports so we could enter the store (a Canadian drivers licenses showing we are both over 40 wasn’t enough). We purchased two packs of 3 x .5 PR’s they were both HORRIBLE see the pic! Not only that they were $25 US plus tax making them around $10 CAD a piece, they were .5g uninfused, fireproof, toxic smoke emitting garbage. I actually threw one pack out. It just wasn’t worth it.
I thought LA might be different, but we had to take a 20-minute cab ride from Redondo Beach where our Festival was to find legal Cannabis. They had a slightly better selection, but only two kinds of bud, and nothing to look at or smell really. No concentrates or PR’s but they did have Moon Rockets (two kinds). This place kept our ID’s while we were ushered into another smaller room through a weird hallway with locked doors at both ends. There was a Security guard in uniform standing in the smaller room full-time. Pretty full-on & not too comfortable of a shopping experience. Their flower was in big mason jars so you could see it and smell it. That was a first and the guy weighed it out by hand, even using his bare fingers to break up the Moon Rockets. The LA shop was better but seriously not by much.
I always put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure we have the BEST weed available. There is a lot of commentary from the peanut gallery to our legal budtenders about quality, price, and all kinds of opinions about our selection or the quality of the legal weed here in BC. This trip as well as many others made me realize that the cannabis we have here in BC is some of the best in the world. I mean some places (read MEXICO) has always had bunk weed. They just can’t seem to figure it out. I had higher hopes for the states, but two different cities in California & Denver as well as the super-rich ski towns in Colorado had nothing to offer. With sky-high pricing in US dollars no less. I came back feeling so proud of everything we have in our store. We have the best quality cannabis, concentrates, vapes, edibles, and more. Maybe growing up here has made me a bit of a weed snob- I don’t care, we all deserve the best!