That said, the cannabis industry has been booming since long before the legalization push began — meaning that know-how and trade secrets aren’t intrinsically linked to what’s on a person’s resume.
So it goes with Felix Murry and Kingston .
“I was with a friend of mine that lives in Georgia, we were smoking a joint one day and it was really, really good product.
In seven short years, GasHouse has gone from a fully underground grow operation in the suburbs of Atlanta to a six-time Cannabis Cup winning weed brand operating in multiple states.
Long story short, a guy showed me a grow room and life has never been the same! I was so intrigued by cannabis, I had never seen it in that form before, I always only saw it right before smoking it, getting ready to break it down.
We had to be secretive and undercover, you couldn’t tell the closest person to you about it, that’s the culture I came from, that’s how I was taught.
Trying to hire lawyers… the frustrating part is that rules are still coming out, the lawyer might get the statute on Monday, but everyone got it on Monday, so the lawyers didn’t really know anything.
Once a new statute drops everyone wants to get in, the lawyers are reading and learning, it’s just one of those things you have to be so passionate about you have to seek out the knowledge.
Felix: One of the first things we did when we came to California was hire a young group of guys that we brought into the facility we were opening in Oakland.
I remember doing this back in the day, the first time I felt fear, maybe it was in 2003.
How could I get in trouble for growing a plant? So now, you put in all that sacrifice for that many years, you keep things going, you share that medicine with all these people way before a celebrity even thought about touching it.
Laughing, singing, even playing sports, it always takes someone to be involved in a business to make that thing successful.
Because of the people that were involved in introducing that strain to the world and the respect and authority that they’ve had — that’s what made that strain a success.
Kingston: I think it worked when cannabis was illegal, Snoop Dogg, Wiz Khalifa, even Bob Marley, those were the faces of cannabis back then.
Snoop Dogg isn’t big in cannabis.
Felix: There was a time in cannabis when it was all about money and growing stuff so people would use things that were bad to ingest just to have a bountiful crop, but me and Kingston were not with that.
You can have 50% THC, what you’re going to smoke is not enjoyable, you’re just going to fall on the couch and go to sleep.
The ones we know about are Delta 9, THC, CBD… everybody knows those but there are over 100 and they all give you a different feeling, and they need to have a balance.
When we have a strain, we try to take two strains that have characteristics we like, then we think about who our customer is, what kind of terpenes they are looking for.
We have a whole green movement going on on the planet, we have vegans and people who don’t want to eat meat anymore because of sustainability reasons and greenhouse gases and these sorts of things but nobody seems to care where the cannabis comes from.
You also hear a lot of “Organics is trash, it’s not good, it’s garbage product,” which makes no logical sense to me at all.
What I have seen other states do is let private corporations come through and create monopolies and the local citizens aren’t benefiting off of it at all.
It’s hard for a regular person to come up with a million dollars or even $200 for an application fee, whether they get it or not and I think that was put in place to keep certain people out.
The city of Oakland tried with their social equity program, they had to iron out some kinks though because what you realize is you give people a social equity chance but they don’t have business or finance skills to run that social equity license.
So many people in South Florida have been going to jail for cannabis since God knows when and they knew nothing about this licensing thing for medical marijuana, the state just snuck it in, did it, and it was over.
I would say as of right now, it’s still not heavily regulated so that is the reason so many growers and brands are expanding into Oklahoma because the taxes and fees are a lot cheaper.
Felix: We are currently in expansion, opening up in Michigan, Maryland, Arizona, we are rapidly expanding the brand in other states and working really hard on our hemp and CBD products, that’s been our baby for the last couple of years.
Kingston: We started out the brand at the right time so we have that brand recognition to win cannabis cups and certain things and people talk about us, word of mouth, we continue to come with the quality because we take the high road.