Warm and authentic Michael Koehn of the Brownie Mary Democratic Club of San Francisco gives the best hugs. Koehn and his partner David Goldman are longtime medical marijuana activists and always wear matching baseball caps with pot leaves on them. At a press conference in San Francisco announcing the upcoming arrival of SF Hash Week, Goldman tells me that wearing the hats has enabled them to meet like-minded people all over the world. Koehn and Goldman were the first people I met in the cannabis community at a protest for the rights of medical marijuana patients in 2012. Weed has brought us together for more than a decade, and after all the changes we’ve seen in cannabis policy over this time, it still feels like our hearts are aligned.
Cannabis is a powerful tool for building camaraderie, something that feels even more precious following the collective traumas we experienced during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Times have been particularly challenging for California’s cannabis industry in recent years. After the legal cannabis marketplace opened in 2018, sales showed their first drop from the previous year in 2022 and saw another drop in 2023. First reported by SFGate, recent data released by cannabis analytics firm BDSA shows that Michigan sold more legal cannabis products than California this March. Those companies that have managed to survive the transition from California’s medical marijuana program to the adult-use legal marketplace continue to have hope for the industry and search for opportunities to band together. The gathering to announce SF Hash Week on Wednesday felt like a hash-filled homecoming. Held at the headquarters of Meadow in San Francisco—a place stacked with memories, including a hash-making class I took with Frenchy Cannoli in 2015—the event was a preview of the week of events planned around …
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Author: Ellen Holland / High Times
