Search Results: gold rush (52)

Rialto Cinemas

​​By Jack Rikess
Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent
The Weed Wars are on, and at stake are television ratings. In the next couple of weeks we’ll start to see the bounty of this year’s harvest of cannabis-centric TV hitting the airwaves. 
The ever-present Steve DeAngelo has his reality series starting on the Discovery Channel a la Kiss’s Gene Simmons: depicting a world class guy with the weight of the world on his shoulders yet he has time to take his kid to Little League. Just a regular guy and family man who happens to like to bang the gong at the end of the day. America won’t believe their eyes.
This Friday the National Geographic Channel is joining the Cannafest with the premiere of Marijuana Gold Rush. Depicting the many highs and a few lows of this past year’s emerging dream of bringing cannabis into the mainstream, going from the boardrooms of New York to our own Mendocino County’s Emerald Cup, with the participants not knowing what really is to come.

Golden Goat up close and personal. Larger photo below.

Want to know more about the herb you’re smoking? So do we, so we’ve asked Ry Prichard – a fellow Colorado cannabis nerd, grower, photographer and founder of the Cannabis Encyclopedia project which aims to create a central database on cannabis strain information – to help school us all, strain-wise. Each week in our new Cannabis Encyclopedia blog, Prichard will break down a strain from seed to buds. This week? Golden Goat.

Photo: Qwickstep.com

​​​By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent

“Angela” blames most of her problems on the economy. “I had a total of three houses, the one I lived in and two others I bought as investments in early ’04. After my real estate business stalled in ’08, I was basically sitting on three empty houses that I couldn’t move or even rent. That when I decided that maybe there was another way: I would grow marijuana.”
And that’s where all of Angela’s troubles started.

GOOD

​It’s been something approaching boom times on the California medical marijuana scene for the past three or four years now, particularly after the Obama Administration’s Ogden Memo, which seemed to open the door for medicinal cannabis providers in states where it is legal.

But following every boom comes a bust; that’s the way the pendulum swings, and that rule’s been around a whole lot longer than the nascent economy-saver that medical marijuana seems to have the potential to be.
When will that bubble burst? How will it happen, and whom will be hurt?

Photo by Jack Rikess
The environmental damage of a grow like this is hard to calculate.

​By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent

Here’s a story about unreal estate that could only happen behind the Green Curtain.

Only in Mendo, where your business is your own and few questions are asked on a good day, could a story like this happen. I thought only in Mendocino County could three tattooed guys rent 50 acres to legally grow marijuana from a guy who didn’t own the land. That is, until I found out how long this one guy’s been doing it. Now I can only wonder how many more are out there.

Photo: Jared Hamilton/The Saginaw News
Keith Beyerlein, left, and Christopher Krieger, both of Reese, Mich., are the owners of GrowMart, a new hydroponic indoor growing store. The store’s merchandise could be used to grow any plant indoors, but they said 85 percent of their sales are to people who grow marijuana.

​Getting their first retail business off the ground in Saginaw, Michigan’s untapped medical marijuana market made sense to two 20-something entrepreneurs from Reese.

High school buddies Keith Beyerlein, 25, who graduated from Reese High School in 2003, and Christopher Krieger, 28, a 2001 graduate, opened their new hydroponics business, GrowMart, in Saginaw in mid-July, reports Gus Burns of The Saginaw News.
The business partners are quick to point out that their store doesn’t sell marijuana or paraphernalia.

Photo Courtesy Stoney McStonerson
Stoney: “You can save yourself a ton of pain if you just SHINE.”

​Colorado’s Stoney Haze McStonerson is proof that not only can marijuana activists be intelligent and effective — they can also be quite easy on the eyes.

Stoney is many things, but shy isn’t one of them. A determined and influential ambassador for the movement, McStonerson is president and founder of the Colorado Chapter of American Cannabis.
Stoney’s the girl next door, if the girl next door were a beautiful, intelligent stoner.
“I am proud of my life and the wisdom I have gathered along the way,” Stoney told us. “I learned before most of the people I knew that changing who you really are inside to fit into the ‘normal box’ does not work!
“You can save yourself a ton of pain if you just SHINE,” Stoney said. “Whatever, whoever and however is not going to matter in the end if you are happy.”

Monroe Co., FL Sheriff’s Dept
Marijuana still equals money — but now nobody has to get arrested.

​With a recent softening in attitudes toward medicinal use of the herb, along with a more pot-tolerant administration, Colorado’s medical marijuana industry is going into high gear — and the increased profile of dispensaries has made them among the biggest newspaper advertisers, according to public radio station KUNC.

With more than 14,000 patients statewide approved to use medical pot — more than a 70 percent jump since last year — the dispensaries have a bigger customer base. And, according to Sensible Colorado member Brian Vicente, the pot outlets have money to spend.

As we move into our fifth year of retail marijuana sales, it’s virtually impossible to ignore the boom in dispensaries around Colorado. Although certain “dry” areas don’t allow marijuana sales — Amendment 64 gave municipalities the right to choose which types of pot businesses to allow, or whether to ban them altogether within their jurisdictions — much of the state signed on for the green rush and hasn’t looked back.

The list of licensed recreational pot shops in Colorado was less than four pages long when sales began on January 1, 2014, according to the Marijuana Enforcement Division; today it runs nearly thirteen pages. Recreational cultivations have seen even larger growth, with that list of licensees going from five pages to nineteen.

If you know cannabis in Colorado, you’ve heard of Jane West. Whether you’ve seen her on Nightline, CBS or NBC, read about her in Forbes, Time, Rolling Stone or, most recently, Playboy, she’s been the face of women in the industry since she started her company in 2014.

The funny thing, though, is that West fell into it almost by accident. For eight years, she ran ten-day experiential education programs for students who wanted to be doctors in thirteen cities nationwide. Then, after Coloradans legalized recreational marijuana, she started hosting cannabis event, and the Denver Post did an article about her new company. The paper ran her photo with the story, and she was sure someone at her work would see it and she would be fired — but nothing happened.

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