Andrew Boyens and his company Natty Rems was introduced to me by my dear friend the Xiaolin, who turns Andrew’s golden hued cannabis oil into a richly textured hand-crafted, excelsior cannabis cigars. An ultra-luxury creation in itself, a hand-made cannagar from an Xiaolin Cannagar, then there is that concentrated cannabis oil from Natty Rems, it’s that good! I’m incredibly lucky to be privy to the secretive world of cannabis concentrates. Especially ones from such high quality flowers, yes, they are their own!
500mg Live Resin Cartridge and Battery (Photo by Damian Weiler) 1-01(PHOTO BY DAMIAN WEILER)
I just spent the last one and one half days in Santa Rosa, California. The California mood seemed pretty chill. But this trip wasn’t a time for shopping at dispensaries, seeking the finest herbs. I was heading to wine country to experience history being made at the Wine and Weed Symposium. The wine industry has been standing strong against most other agricultural endeavors that may attempted to invade their marketplace, to date. Now with massive pressures beyond their control, in the form of legal cannabis, the wine industry is finally coming to terms with the fact that cannabis, at least the legal kind is there to stay. And with wine still being popular, but not quite as popular, the times are changing with the years. Sonoma Wine, please meet the finest cannabis in the land.
Botanicals are our gateway to natures flavors, scents, and medicine. People have been using botanicals for pleasure, nutrition, and medicine for as long as we have existed. Botanical uses started with using the plants in their natural form, or, making a simple infusion or tincture. Later we learned how to substantially increase the potency of botanicals by using extraction. The difference is that natural plant material, infusion, and tinctures hold the scents, flavors, and medicinal values but they can be too weak and/or adulterated with other oils, butters or alcohols to host the collected botanical oils. The only way to arrive at a pure and highly potent end product is to implement and extraction process to isolate only the botanical oil harvested from the original material. The list of home remedies and botanical applications is very long, people use a lavender or chamomile extract for calming. Just a small dab of these on the wrist brings an almost instantaneous wave of calming to the entire body. The oil from citrus peel can relive arthritis and joint pain in minutes where other medications fail miserably. More dire and serious conditions like cancer, epilepsy, PTSD, depression, opiate addiction, MS, Parkinson’s, and many more are now being treated with cannabis and CBD and this is where intense interest in our home extraction equipment and community really gets stoked. Once people try cannabis and CBD and experience great success, they are quickly confronted with the problems of using extracts. The problems range from price, availability, quality, potency, reliable testing, and contamination. Using ExtractCraft equipment to do your own extraction puts the control of what is going into your body in your own hands.
I’m lucky to have a green thumb. Give me some seed or a cutting or just about anything and I can grow it. This was probably caused from my growing up on a Biodynamic farm belonging to my family in New Jersey. However, most people have black thumbs. They plant something in the earth and it just shrivels and dies no matter what they do. They can’t understand why the plant died, it just stopped being happy, then it turned to brown and said, without much fanfare, good-bye.
Five Questions with Morris Beegle, President of WAFBA (We Are For Better Alternatives)
Morris Beegle and I share more than names, (Morris is my middle name) — we are both a part of a much larger world of cannabis. In Morris’ case, he is a leading cannabis/hemp advocate and entrepreneur. As co-founder and president of the WAFBA (We Are For Better Alternatives) family of brands, including the NoCo Hemp Expo, Silver Mountain Hemp Guitars, Tree Free Hemp, The Hawaii Hemp Conference, and more, he stays quite busy engaging audiences in N.A., Europe, UK, Nepal and beyond, presenting at a dozen or more hemp conferences each year.
Mara Gordon is exactly what I thought of her, ambitious, someone with a smile on her face leading into her deeply intellectual side and then there is the plant. She sees cannabis as a medical product that has real healing. I would call it agility in the broader scope. Health and wellness needs a place to go within the cannabis dialect. It’s not only recreational cannabis that drives the market. There is real healing taking place here from real medical doctors who are not afraid to buck the tide and create real change away from traditional methods of healing.
I want to share with you someone who has some really fantastic ideas that have taken our collective energy to a higher place in the universe of healing. This is a person who sees a much broader picture in the term “medical cannabis.” Thus, without further delay, may I please introduce you to Mara Gordon.
1st Lady Of The West Coast Is The First Black Woman To Have Her Own Exclusive Strain Line #Flotwckush was created 2016, #DecemberNightsOg created 2018, #BlackGirlMagicOg created 2017. DAWNIELLE WASHINGTON
After writing a couple articles about the legal cannabis business in San Francisco, I was contacted by 1st Lady Of The West Coast. She is (for obvious reasons) not disclosing her name. But that should not preclude me from touting her Old School successes. She had the guts to contact me, that in itself is amazing. I respect her need for privacy and even I don’t know her first, nor her last name. Nor would I ask twice, it’s just not done. ‘Nuff said. So when I was given this honor to tell her story, there wasn’t any hesitation. I needed to do right by the universe, the cannabis family would be proud. And 1st Lady Of The West Coast would have fulfilled her goals. And what would that be? Being the fantastic person she is. I’m honored to be her friend. Thank you for allowing me the honor.
