Rasta ganja reigns supreme...
outclassing weed from foreign dispensaries, says US expert
RASTAFARIANS AND their traditional ganja farmer counterparts continue to outperform international cannabis brands that have now established cannabis dispensaries, particularly within the island’s resort areas, according to Atlantabased cannabis connoisseur James Burr. According to Burr, despite the locations of these entities in prime resort areas and their branding and marketing efforts using influencers and other means, ganja grown in open fields by traditional Jamaican farmers continues to eclipse these brands in terms of quality and potency aspects such as aromatics, smoking pleasure, enjoyment, burnability, and other esoteric elements that come into burning ganja. “We feel that right now, Jamaica is in the market with a product that is coming in at a price point that is of ultra-quality, but we are not seeing ultra-quality. Right now, the black market is outperforming world-class growing organisations that are coming here into Jamaica and getting licensed,” Burr, who is one of the principals of Enlightened Development and Enlightened Cannabis, said. “My hat goes off to the Rastafarian community because there is a level of quality that they are able to maintain compared to the people who have all the tools and the necessary things…,” he added. Because traditional ganja farmers have already established that they have a premium product and “want to have a place in the marketplace”, it is imperative that the Alternative Development Programme, enacted on their behalf by the Government of Jamaica, is successful because cannabis is a quality-driven consumer market in which ‘quality rules’. Burr, who has been travelling across Jamaica since 1994, said that the expertise found within the Rastafarian farming community, especially, has been recognised to be of immense value to scientists across the world. He said that many scientists with doctoral degrees in agriculture and cannabis experts have flown great distances to Jamaica to “sit with people in the bush” to be schooled by Jamaican ganja farmers, who, in tending to the plants, spend a lot of time touching them. “The hands-on, touching-of-the-plant experience is invaluable. Somebody who is actually growing herb, curing herb, working with different strains, physically working with them every day and has been working with them for 20, 30 years – your average Rastafarian farmer, 35 to 55 years old – basically has a master’s to a PhD in cannabis science,” Burr stated. He said that the problem of low-quality herb in dispensaries is not peculiar to Jamaica as the same thing prevailed in 2004 when dispensaries in west Los Angeles in California first came into existence. “We had the same issues in Los Angeles, California, when it just got started. You
could get to buy much better herb on the street at a much better price…,” he said. “We were all sitting back, thinking, ‘This dispensary thing is never gonna work’. We were all proven wrong because right now, if I were in Los Angeles and I needed to get a quality bag of herb, the first place that I would go is a dispensary… . Every person who was growing weed in LA illegally is now growing it legally and being very successful at it,” he said. Burr said that there is hope yet and that he is confident that the Jamaican situation will turn out the same as in California. He is predicting that within five years, there will be quality ganja at Jamaican dispensaries as Rastafarians and other traditional ganja farmers, through the Ministry of Agriculture’s Alternative Development Programme, will be allowed the opportunity to get their produce to legitimately enter the marketplace. He said that the Ministry of Agriculture has to ensure that quality is basis for the operation of any dispensary in the country in order to preserve the island’s reputation as the ultimate ganja destination, which is key to the success of Brand Jamaica. “When we go out into the country and we are buying stick weed and it is fresh and hasn’t been put into a bag and transported and oxidised, it’s a totally different product than when we find something that has been around for a while,” he explained. “Jamaica has a harsh environment. Two, three weeks of just sitting around in the Jamaican environment is enough to degrade herb, so freshness is definitely key,” he added. He said that as the market evolves globally and new, much larger countries, like Colombia, enter the cannabis arena, Jamaica will have to target the niche of premium quality, as the island cannot compete in terms of volume, but only on its unmatched standard. “That is what already distinguishes the Jamaica brand, and that is what they need to get on the global market: quality. Organic, sustainable, socially responsible, premium quality,” Burr said.