I guess I have a different perspective on this because I am from SF, and because I was part of the old california medical cannabis community. I’m a chronic / terminal medical cannabis patient with a slowly progressing illness that will slowly debilitate me, potentially kill me, or weaken me until a cold of flu kills me. I have recently lost the ability to speak, and not sure if it’s ever coming back.
I am now almost 30 years old. I nearly died at 22. I have been a medical cannabis patient since I was 15, and a licensed grower since I was 18. For half of my life, cannabis has been the most effective medical treatment keeping me alive.
Yeah and this is why the whole thing bums me out. bodhi is one of the last vestiges of the charitable altruistic attitude of the old california medical community. Berner was one of the major commercial forces that broke up the med community, and monopolized the rec scene preventing all the small collectives from getting a piece of the pie. Berner likes to act like an underdog and say he worked his way up in the canna business.
Not really true. Whereas other medical collectives and dispensaries followed the very fair rules of the prop 215 prop 420 medical system, Berner was also selling shit weed on the black market, and sending shit out of state. That’s according to Berner, if we can take him at his word.
People in the cannabis industry like to throw around a lot of big talk about business ethics. I don’t have any problem with black market growers. But gaming the medical system to establish a toehold in the industry while consolidating power on the black market, and publicly advocating for legalization to destroy the medical system, well that is something different altogether.
It’s worth mentioning I actually appreciate Berner’s contributions to music, he has given forgotten artists new exposure, and paid for studio time for a lot of amazing musicians. I do not appreciate how he has operated within the cannabis industry.
I can respect his hustle in the music industry. But I can’t respect the way he brought that attitude to cannabis, and fucked the medical system while stomping out the old collectives and valuable medical lines.
And why did bodhi have such a hard time getting a license? the fucking california legal system that berner advocated for. Everyone else in the bay area medical community, and in the bay area rap community like Equipto, were all against proposition 64. Berner’s success came at the detriment of the medical cannabis community.
trust me, for the community of seriously ill medical cannabis patients, cookies is fucking worthless. It does very little for pain relief, and increases tolerance making dosages less efficacious. In the bay area we used to have consistent availability of a diverse genepool of proven reliable medical strains that could be prescribed for specific symptoms or illnesses.
The old bay area medical lines that people depended on to maintain their quality of life while living with chronic and terminal illness have either been hybridized with cookies, or have disappeared from the legal market due to the saturation and demand for cookies and its hybrids.
And trust me, the hybrids are just as useless for patients as the cuts. Medical patients depend on a variety of strains to target different symptoms, while keeping tolerance low.
If all you smoke is polyhybrids made with the same genetics, that have same terpene profile, the effectiveness of your meds will rapidly diminish. it really doesn’t matter how many different names they give it if it was all made with the same genetics.