San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Cannabis companies with a conscience
Fewer than 5% of cannabis companies in the U.S. are Black owned. To lower barriers for licensing for those hit hardest by the war on drugs, the city of San Francisco developed a Cannabis Equity Program. Among the first few companies to come from the program is SF Roots.
“One issue for me was my criminal record,” says founder and CEO Morris Kelly. “I was fighting a trafficking case. One of the hardest things for me was having to put my trust in a system that has never really been for me before. And now we’re heavily involved in the community, mentoring, advising and supporting other equity applicants that are trying to come in alongside us.”
Kelly has built a popular line of flower, prerolls, tinctures and apparel, available at over 28 retailers throughout the state. He encourages cannabis consumers to be conscious of which brands they buy.
“Your purchasing dollar goes a long way. When you support a company like SF Roots or
After being sick for three years, seeing 22 doctors in two states and having no real diagnosis, Christine De La Rosa survived a lifethreatening pulmonary embolism back in 2010, and was finally diagnosed with lupus. For years, she was prescribed more than 10 pills a day, including opioids. Then one day a friend, chef Charleen Caabay, gave her homemade edibles to try.
had probably in the last two or three years because my pain was just so intense. When I woke up, I had actually had restful sleep. So that was my first foray into using cannabis as medicine. And I started to really be thoughtful about it,” says De La Rosa. But when De La Rosa and Caabay looked at the cannabis industry, they didn’t see anyone who looked like themselves: people of color, women, queer, disabled, veterans, formerly incarcerated, and living with chronic illness.
Together, along with a collective of community cofounders and supporters, they started the People’s Dispensary, a cannabis delivery service in Oakland, and plan to add their own line of products over the next few months.
“The cannabis industry is one of the only industries I can think of in the 20th century that was actually built by Black and brown people — as owners and operators, not only as laborers — in the informal market, and has been stolen in the formal market by white corporations,” says De La Rosa. “If you’re someone who supports BIPOC, women, LGBTQ+ people, and you support cannabis, then you should demand that there’ll be equal representation in the industry.”
Shop the People’s Dispensary: thepeoplesdis pensary.com
Dogwood Botanicals is a womanowned business in the Bay Area by way of east Tennessee. Its founders, Katie Pilgrim and Jamie Boling, have a combined 20 years of experience in the cannabis industry, but teamed up to bring hemp products to people across the country. Their offerings include a Calendula Rose CBD cream and flavorless CBD drops. The two friendsturnedbusiness partners are working to demystify CBD and promote its wellness benefits.
“I think that CBD has been a really great entry point for so many folks who maybe never had access to cannabis, never even tried it and were afraid to, and now are able to try a couple drops of something like our flavorless CBD drops and find that they’re taking care of their system in a way that they hadn’t before,” says Boling.
With a heavy focus on ethical practices, the Dogwood Botanicals product line uses hemp that is grown and manufactured on an organic family farm in Colorado. All shipping materials and paper products used are biodegradable and sourced from 100% recycled materials. They also donate 1%+ of all sales to grassroots organizations working toward cannabis equity, like the Cannabis Impact Fund.
Shop Dogwood Botanicals: dog woodbotanicals.com
Founded by David Bronner, grandson of the iconic Dr. Bronner, whose organic AllOne soap you may be familiar with, Brother David’s is leading the way for a more sustainable and equitable future for cannabis. It’s the first in the industry to donate 100% of profits to charity. It’s also the first to receive Sun & Earth certification, which means that the cannabis is grown under the sun, in the soil and chemicalfree, by fairly paid farmers.
“We’re focused on giving away all of our profits. But it’s specific to the cannabis industry. All the profits support smallscale family farms, cannabis farms, that are farming regeneratively and organically. But then as the income streams grow, we’ll tackle larger issues around criminal justice and drug policy reform.”
The Bronners have already donated over $60 million to activist causes, including over $5 million to fight prohibition of cannabis on the state and federal level. Their line of goods can be purchased in jars, 1 gram jars and prerolled joints. Shop Brother David’s: brotherdavids.com
This story was produced in partnership with Represent Collaborative (Rep Co), a San Francisco media initiative focused on racial and social justice. Rep Co works collaboratively with subjects to produce stories about Black and brown communities. Learn more at www.representcollaborative.com.
The first time I mixed up a cannabis drink, things didn’t go well.
In my head it seemed easy — I had bartending skills and a bottle of commercial tincture from my local dispensary. But the slick of tincture floating on my carefully crafted drink mocked me. My mistaken idea was thinking that waving the tincture dropper like a magic wand over my beverage would make it better.
Reading the new book “Cannabis Drinks: Secrets to Crafting CBD and THC Beverages at Home” ($19.99; Fair Winds Press) got me to give it another try with much better results.
Author Jamie Evans, Bay Areabased founder of culinarymeetscannabis blog the Herb Somm, offers primarily recipes for nonalcoholic drinks that incorporate cannabis, though her book does include a dozen boozy cocktail recipes with warnings of the combined effects. I mixed up one of the boozy recipes, called a Toasty Toddy, which is blend of toasted spices boiled into a tea spiked with whiskey and sweetened with cannabisinfused honey. It was good with the whiskey but was tasty enough that I could have easily skipped the booze. Everyone is different, but my preference is to enjoy my alcohol and cannabis at different times. Cocktails make me social, cannabis does not, and combined they just make me confused.
The book begins with advice on hosting and mixing the drinks, where to start if you are a complete beginner (“Start low, go slow,” Evans advises), and discussions of the phytocannabinoids CBD and THC and their effects. While Evans does caution that CBD in particular is not a cureall, the wellness and foodasmedicine angles show up in a few places. For instance, the section on terpenes highlights some of the most common components found in cannabis, their aroma and taste, and their purported beneficial properties.
The culinary information was much more interesting to me, especially when Evans frames terpenes as a parallel to wine, a unique approach that includes a series of exercises to help you parse and identify the aromas and flavors in cannabis flower.
The cover and name of the book imply drink recipes, but the information Evans provides on working with and incorporating cannabis into beverages is perhaps the best thing about the book. Even simple things like thinking about the base of the commercially made tincture you buy (alcohol versus oil based) can save you the fate of my first oil slicked disaster.
Reading “Cannabis Drinks” I realized that I had reduced my ideas about cannabis entirely to the isolated effects of THC and CBD. I know my preferred dosage in edibles and the effects I enjoy most in certain strains, but I had never considered how its smell and taste could enhance a drink. Even as someone who enjoys cooking, I never thought about using cannabis for its flavor. It’s like knowing a lot about caffeine but not about the taste of coffee.
While making a batch of cannabisinfused simple syrup from the book, I was struck by the aroma of the simmering liquid. It reminded me of the nice mint tea I brew at home, and I could