San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Four Black gardeners reflect on their journeys into cultivation
De’Janae Evins’ childhood was not filled with gardens. “It was gang territory,” she says of her ’90s upbringing in South Central Los Angeles. Her mom kept Evins and her sibling within a twoblock radius of the house for as many years as she could, hoping to preserve their innocence. It worked. So well, in fact, that Evins thought the earthy aroma wafting from her dad was his cologne, not the weed he dealt to help put food on the table for his family.
Though Zev Nicholson had much more cultivation exposure growing up in Minneapolis — his parents were bigtime gardeners — he could have happily done without. “I absolutely hated working out there,” he recalls.
There was another “garden” in the basement — weed grown under lights. He wasn’t supposed to know about that one, but he did. And he knew that, despite his dad’s fulltime job and his mother’s disability benefits, he’d go without birthday presents if it weren’t for the weed money.
Today, both are among a growing number of Black cannabis gardeners aiming to sort out their relationship to the plant. Legalization has done little to fix the deep racism in the cannabis industry. For one thing, it’s hard to even talk about legality when 44,000 people — the majority Black and brown — remain behind bars on cannabis convictions. Meanwhile, the legal cannabis industry forges ahead, expected to employ 630,000 Americans and generate around $40 billion in annual revenue by 2025. In that legal market, nearly 96% of businesses
are owned by white men.
Neither Evins nor Nicholson took an interest in the plant until college. For Evins, the documentaries she’d seen at the YMCA were enough to spook her. In Nicholson’s case, he’d had a handful of cousins and a smattering of friends sent to prison for possession.
“It wasn’t the plant I was scared of; it was how it was used against us,” he says. Indeed, it was the height of the war on drugs, a collection of policies that led to the number of people behind bars for nonviolent drug law offenses to increase from 50,000 in 1980 to over 400,000 by 1997.
During college Evins was ready to experiment. Back then she discovered that cannabis had a positive impact on her mental health — a realm of life she wasn’t taught to explore. “Where I’m from, we focused on going to work
from 9 to 5 and making enough money to keep the lights on. We needed a running car, food in the fridge and food stamps,” she says. “There was no room for mental health. We didn’t have the luxury to think about that.”
She was so into the plant that, with the pendulum swing of legalization, she decided to carve a place out for herself in the industry back home in L.A. It’s not been easy. First, she launched Green Goddess Glow, trying her hand at “a YouTube beauty blogger approach to cannabis,” she says, reviewing products. After working at a dispensary, she started a tour company, offering participants dispensary trips alongside hikes, meditation and yoga. It worked for a while, but the overhead was high, as was the insurance, and her business partnership fizzled. She’s refocused Green Goddess Glow several times, using the website to celebrate the intersection of wellness and cannabis through newsletters, photos and articles.
“It could be about putting on a mask and smoking a blunt or using topicals with CBD,” she says. “It’s basically about what I like to do when I’m smoking weed and that happens to all fall under the realm of selfcare.” Featuring Black women is the most important part. “I hadn’t seen myself represented in this space,” she says.
Rectifying the inequality in the cannabis industry will take expunging of criminal records, increased equity and startup capital, but visibility matters, too.
“In sports, you hear quotes like, ‘You can’t be what you can’t see,’ ” says Ernest Toney, founder of BIPOCANN, an organization that aims to make the legal cannabis industry more accessible and profitable for BIPOC communities. He points to Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters. “You need to see people look and relate to you in places of success and influence,” he says.
With cannabis, that can be a tough order. Used as a tool of oppression, arrests for possession remain four times higher for Black people than white people, despite similar usage rates.
“The war on drugs and systemic policing of this plant have destroyed lives in many Black communities,” Toney says. “That probably creates some skepticism about being part of the legal industry.”
Jamal (who asked to be identified by his first name only), a Bay Area native who’s been growing cannabis since the early 2000s, would have loved to go legal. “Legalization completely stratified the market into tiny home grows and big corporate ones,” he says.
Jamal counted himself among the ranks of
midsize growers who didn’t have the capital — at least $1 million — for permits and taxes. He was working at the wellknown hydroponic supply shop Berkeley Indoor Garden at the time cannabis went legal.
“There was definitely a feeling of resentment when people would come in saying that business must be booming,” he says. “It sucked to have people for whom this wasn’t their livelihood assuming that since things were better for them, they were better for everyone.”
Jamal found an upside, though. As the price of cannabis plummeted, he focused less on growing flowers to sell and more on breeding, his true passion. He grows outdoors now, freed from huge electric bills and the financial pressure. He started a seed collective in 2018. With a group of growers, he’s aiming to produce and preserve a seed library of rare cannabis cultivars. And ultimately, turning toward his passion might prove profitable, too, as he plans to launch his own seed company, Aili Seeds, which will focus on genetics grown from that collective.
For all the inequity, legalization has opened up channels of communication. Nicholson — resentful of his parents’ secrecy around their own cultivation — finds himself healing his childhood traumas by growing outdoors in his Portland, Ore., garden and talking openly with his two kids about the plant he now considers to be medicine. By growing his own, he feels he’s reclaiming knowledge that was stripped from Black people, and the act makes him feel like a more liberated Black person. He also no longer loathes garden work. “Weed made me love plants,” he says. He grows cannabis alongside a robust vegetable garden.
Legalization has drawn in new growers, too. Take Calvin Walker, who hadn’t touched cannabis since his college days in the 1970s. Turning his attention to his career, he didn’t think about cannabis again until 2018, when recreational use became legal in California. Completely uninterested in smoking, he purchased a tincture on a whim from a dispensary to see if it might help with his arthritis pain. Sure enough, he found relief from stiff, sore joints. “I liked everything about it except the cost,” he says. “So I decided I’d figure out how to grow it myself.”
His approach to weed gardening matches his career in programming. He’s disciplined and methodical, and takes meticulous records. He
tests his harvest for cannabinoid and terpene makeup at a local lab. His finished crop becomes cannabutter, cannasugar (sweetening everything from oatmeal to simple syrup), tinctures and topicals.
Concerned about ash and toxins from this year’s fires, he’s testing a threepart washing technique, dipping buds into a hydrogen peroxide and water bath, followed by a lemon juicebaking soda and water bath, and finally a clear water rinse. A few plants yield far more than he needs, and he shares the bounty with friends undergoing chemotherapy.
While Walker shares vegetable gardening with his wife, the cannabis garden is all his (“Though she helps with the consumption,” he says). “Thank God for the internet,” he says, as it’s where he’s learned how to grow. That is, until recently, when one of his daughters revealed she’d been attending classes at Oaksterdam University, learning how to cultivate. “It’s really nice to have someone to share this with,” he says.
He thinks often about the opportunities that exist in the market. His family still owns 40 acres in rural Arkansas — the birthplace of his parents (Walker was born in Little Rock, and his parents relocated to Berkeley in 1959 to escape segregated schools). He thinks hemp farming could be quite lucrative for his daughter, but getting her to move to rural Arkansas is, thus far, out of the question.
Land has also been on Evins’ mind. “Black people’s relationship to cannabis predates the war on drugs,” she says. “We were the ones cultivating hemp for the colonists, and yet we
own less than 2% of the farmland in this country. Even cannabis brands belonging to people of color aren’t from weed grown by people of color.”
When she started working as a brand educator for Aster Farms, a sustainable cannabis farm in Lake County, she took a trip to the farm. Surrounded by giant cannabis plants, Evins thought more about her relationship to cultivation.
And that’s when it hit her that she had to grow her own. So, in the backyard of the house that’s been in her family for three generations — the one she kept so close to for all of her childhood — she got to growing. It hasn’t been easy, battling gophers and caterpillars, and overwatering. But she’s persevered and even started growing other fruits and vegetables. “I like being barefoot in the grass, listening to Florence and the Machine, picking lemons off the tree.”
Her current fulltime job is working as a brand manager for Viola, the largest Blackowned multistate operator, but she hasn’t given up the dream of her very own business. Her next vision involves using the house to create a cannabis content hub for the community, complete with photo studio, acupuncture and yoga classes, raw cacao workshops, gardening classes and more.
“No more (leading tour groups) through the trendy part of town,” she says. “I want to stay close to home and serve the people who need to be served.”
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.represent collaborative.com.
In 2018, two years after California voters legalized recreational cannabis use, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the first socialequity cannabis measure in the United States, the California Cannabis Equity Act. The law attempts to bridge the racial divide in cannabis use and business opportunities. Cannabis use among racial groups is essentially the same, but throughout the burgeoning industry, people of color and women are significantly underrepresented in ownership and leadership.
A 2017 Marijuana Business Daily survey found that just 4% of cannabis business owners were Black, and minorities held just 17 percent of executive positions at cannabis businesses. Yet minorities are statistically overrepresented among people in prison for cannabisrelated offenses. A 2020 ACLU analysis found that Black Americans are about four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana offenses as whites.
According to San Francisco’s Office of Cannabis, “San Francisco’s Cannabis Equity Program is designed to lower barriers to cannabis licensing for those hardest hit by the War on Drugs.” Oakland’s 2016 Equity Permit Program, the first of its kind in the country, stipulated that half of the city's cannabis permits would go to constituents affected by outdated cannabis law enforcement. These programs have offered the opportunities intended when they were created, but they have also suffered the same often litigious complications that exist throughout the industry as the commercial potential of cannabis expands.
Seven other local jurisdictions have approved their own equity ordinances, including San Jose, Sacramento and Humboldt County. Opening the doors to a legal cannabis dispensary requires investing significant amounts of cash (most estimates are around $1 million), and they will not see any return for several years as building plans are approved and zoning requirements fulfilled. Few small vendors have the financial resources to operate this way.
“The biggest thing for me coming back was taking the blunt force of being able to pay for rent — first, last and deposit — of a commercial space, which can be upwards of $50,000 or $60,000 for just a down payment,’’ said Josh Chase, an Oakland native who started working in cannabis in Washington state. “No small business can really afford it.”
Despite the difficulties of implementation, most in the industry agree that equity needs to happen before cannabis becomes an elitesonly investment opportunity. Legacy cannabis entrepreneurs, from cultivators and farmers to retail operators, fear that large corporations will come to control the industry through their financial muscle, with little regard for product aesthetics or community responsibility.
In the Bay Area, social equity advocates throughout the cannabis industry, along with municipalities, are trying to write a different story. Here are three cannabis entrepreneurs who have both benefited from and contributed to social equity in the industry.