The hard part is over: licenses, fees, taxes, and finding a kitchen. Now the women of Santa Cruz-based Higher Edibles—Donna Price, her daughter Kirstie Price, and Kirstie’s aunt Jenni Grillo—are having fun.

What began as a pipe dream two decades ago has blossomed into a legit and thriving canna-confectionary. Customers throughout the state are clamoring for Donna, Kirstie and Jenni’s cookies and their new line of savory crackers.

It takes a lot to stand out in the rather saturated market for cannabis edibles, but the family has consistently proven they have what it takes.

Higher Edibles’ proprietary blend of brown-rice-based gluten-free flour, zero processed sugars and ingredients, and minimal cannabis taste, make their brand of canna-treats-and-snacks unique. Numerous dispensaries around the Bay Area now stock a full line of Higher Edibles in their shops, giving the upstart company its biggest exposure yet.

Donna Price is an O.G. in the cannabis industry—growing, trimming, and cultivating cannabis for most of her life—and can take credit for coming up with the original concept of Higher Edibles. As an army vet who overcame ovarian and endometrial cancer, “Momma Donna” started making cannabis treats for her family and friends after the passage of California Proposition 215 in 1996. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that she turned Higher Edibles into a business.

Donna saw a gap in the edibles market, based on her own experience. Through numerous surgeries and medical procedures, Price found that her body felt the least amount of pain and inflammation when she adhered to a strict, pure diet, and avoided heavily processed grains and sugars. Her collection of edibles recipes had always been gluten-free and healthier than a lot of products in the cannabis market. She set out to perfect her line of edibles, and to show the industry that you don’t have to compromise flavor for health-consciousness. And she invited her family along for the ride.

Weed has always been a big part of Kirstie Price’s life, too. She started smoking cannabis at age 12, and quickly graduated to trimming and growing as an early teen. As co-owner of Higher Edibles, Kirstie has joined forces with her mom—who “as long as I can remember has always been making edibles.” Her fond memories of her mom baking, mixing, and laboring over cannabis-infused treats in her childhood home inspire her. Today, she, her mom, and her aunt work as a tight-knit crew, rubbing elbows and donning matching aprons in a modern, spacious kitchen—with the occasional gluten-free flour fight.

The three owners of Higher Edibles live together communally above Soquel’s Land of the Medicine Buddha. “My mom, my aunt, and I live in the mountains. We get to tap into a unique and magical energy,” Kirstie says. “The best part of my life is working with my family—kindred souls. Women who believe in higher vibrations, manifesting.” Then she laughs. “All of that hippie shit.”

Cannabis is the glue that holds the trio together as business partners. The plant has allowed them to peacefully coexist, communicate, solve problems, mend occasional differences, and forget the fact that they are with each other nearly 24/7. They wouldn’t have it any other way. “Being woman-owned-and-operated, it’s a different energy. We have a tight flow together. It’s unique and something I’ve never experienced before. Like-minded souls who finish your thoughts and sentences for you,” Kirstie says.

The trio spent a nervous year in 2016 waiting for a license from the state, and looking for a local kitchen large enough to house their fledgling baked-good empire. There were many obstacles along the way, but by the end of 2017, Higher Edibles was starting to take shape as a legitimate business. After months of disappointment, the women finally found their kitchen–a space shared with other small-ish canna corps Cosmo D’s Outrageous Edibles and Dollar Dose—and “we got to start having fun,” says Kirstie. “We’ll always have the regulations and licensing, but we could finally start to focus on the product.”

The first product from Higher Edibles—their flagship—was inspired by one of Donna’s earliest recipes: a 20-calorie gluten-free “Cinnamon Crisp” cookie. With 100% unprocessed maple syrup, and none of that gunky high-fructose corn syrup, the little-cookie-that-could began to attract a buzz and attention from local dispensaries. The Higher Edibles team knew they had the start of something special.

“Kind Peoples was the first dispensary to pick us up. They have a heavy focus on local products like ours. Santa Cruz Veterans Alliance, too. They serve veterans that are dealing with pain. Those dispensaries started carrying us because our edibles are different from other companies,” Kirstie says. “If you’re putting high fructose corn syrup in your body it will increase pain and inflammation—counteracting the very effects you’re using edibles for.”

After a few successful pitches and a bunch of “hell yeah, these are so good … can I have another?” comments, Kirstie, Donna, and Jenni were manufacturing Cinnamon Crisp cookies nonstop. Success came quickly, and Higher Edibles soon developed a devoted following and local foothold. But why stop there? To take their biz to the next level they needed a distributor—and a partner who had their own license and ability to take the business statewide.

Enter Mammoth Distributing. Pretty much overnight, the market for small-fry Higher Edibles’ products expanded 50-fold. Kirstie cultivated a close contact at Mammoth, and the cannabis distribution giant promised to provide a full sales team and distribution across the state of California. “We have grown so much locally, but now our growth should be explosive in the next six months,” Kirstie says.

The women of Higher Edibles know that one can only take so many cinnamon cookies, so they are often in the kitchen creating new culinary treasures. “Getting to play around and constantly experiment with cannabis—like a scientist in my lab—makes every day fun and exciting,” Kirstie says. The Higher team recently unveiled two new creations: the Lemon Crisp Cookie and the Almond Crisp Cookie. Crispy, and made with the same basic ingredients as the Cinnamon Crisp, these two cookies should help propel Higher Edibles into the future.

When most folks think “marijuana edibles,” they envision ooey-gooey brownies, sumptuous cookies, sweet-lil gummies, and maybe a chocolate bar or two. Most of us don’t imagine more savory items, like crackers. The company’s new line of gluten-free canna-crackers, with “Rosemary Herb” and “Jalapeno Garlic” flavors, have thoroughly impressed local pot-consumers and dispensaries, and quickly found space on coveted shelves. Light, crispy, packed with flavor (with little-to-no cannabis taste), there’s really nothing like them on the market.

Conquering California—and then the nation—is the ultimate goal for the team behind Higher Edibles, but Kirstie, Donna, and Jenni hope to remain in Santa Cruz as long as they can. “More so than any other place I’ve been, Santa Cruz County is really into community. Dispensaries and cannabis companies are more open to working together, and partnering to create an industry where we can all succeed,” Kirstie says.

They didn’t really set out to be the female voice in the male-dominated cannabis space, “but as our business has grown,” says Kirstie, “we have come to cater to a lot of women customers. We now brand to women as a female-run company.”

Yes, these women do get high on their own supply. When they’re not consuming their own delectable creations, the Price’s are definitely “Indica girls”—usually smoking flower or using edibles in the evenings to wind down after increasingly busy days.

Whereas smoking a J will give you an almost immediate high, most cannabis edibles take a while to kick in. You’ll have to wait a bit, but the high that connoisseurs know that edibles just get you … higher.

Cannabis groups come and go, but NORML—the granddaddy of cannabis organizations—has been around since 1970, and is still going strong. Indeed, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws has never wavered from its goal of making weed legal in every state—and at the federal level, where the battle against the prohibition of pot has been woefully lacking, too.

And they may be on the brink of a big victory.

Keith Stroup, 76, who founded NORML 50 years ago, still gets pleasantly stoned, and still advocates for the rights of marijuana users. I met him in San Francisco in the 1980s at an event sponsored by High Times magazine, and have followed his career and his lobbying efforts ever since.

Stroup tells me on the phone from his home: “Right now, NORML is behind The Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment, and Expungement (MORE) Act, a federal bill that’s in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and that would remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, which reefer maniac Nixon signed into law in 1970.” Stroup adds, “We have big support from the recently founded Cannabis Caucus in Congress, though the MORE act won’t pass until we remove Trump from the White House.” 

Santa Cruz’s representative in Washington, D.C., Jimmy Panetta, is a co-sponsor of the MORE Act and the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Today’s pot problems are rooted in the past. Soon after Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, he called the abuse of drugs “public enemy number one in the U.S.” He promptly signed into law the Controlled Substances Act, which had been approved by Congress. Nixon also formed the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, appointed former Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer as the chairman and told him, “I want a goddamn strong statement that just tears the ass out of” cannabis supporters.

The report from the Shafer Commission, as it came to be known, recommended that cannabis be “decriminalized.” The president ignored the report and instead established the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as a federal agency tasked with battling drug trafficking. Today, along with the FBI, Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection, the DEA still wages the War on Drugs that has been an abject failure, as Stroup and NORML have long pointed out.

A self-defined “farm boy” from Illinois, Stroup was radicalized by the War in Vietnam and the threat of the draft. He became a public interest lawyer after meeting Ralph Nader, the consummate consumer advocate.

Stroup remembers that the marijuana future looked bright when Jimmy Carter became president in 1976, in part because his sons smoked weed. Stroup also remembers that there was a shift even before the Georgia peanut farmer moved into the White House. In 1973, Oregon decriminalized cannabis. Nebraska followed in 1978.

“Then along came Reagan, and there was no progress until 1996, when California legalized medical marijuana,” Stroup says.

When I asked Stroup why the federal government still classifies cannabis as a Schedule I drug with no medical benefits, he tells me, “once something gets into the federal bureaucracy, it’s hard to get it out.”

Most Americans, he explains, are anti-prohibition: “They think that the marijuana laws have created far more problems than marijuana itself, which is increasingly used for a variety of medical reasons.”

In many ways, the U.S. is still in the Dark Ages when it comes to weed. Whites and Blacks smoke in equal proportions, but across the country Blacks are arrested 3.6 times as often as whites for possession. There are racial imbalances in all 50 states. In some Ohio and Pennsylvania counties, Blacks are 100 times more likely to be arrested than whites, according to an April 2020 study by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The MORE Act—which is sponsored in the Senate by newly minted vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris and co-sponsored by five other Democrats, including Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren—would expunge the criminal records of citizens arrested for marijuana offenses. It would also invest funds in communities of color that have long been targeted by law enforcement and protect immigrants from deportation when violation of the marijuana laws is their only offense.

Justin Strekal, NORML’s political director, told me that the MORE Act would “end the cannabis prohibition and create incentives for the development of the commercial cannabis marketplace, which would in turn lead to a decline in overall arrests as well as a drop in racial disparities.”

Like Stroup, Strekal is a civil libertarian and an advocate for the normalization of marijuana laws.

“It’s none of the government’s business who smokes weed,” Strekal says. “There’s nothing wrong with responsible marijuana use.”

Jonah Raskin is the author of ‘Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War.’

To Jesse Hughes, California is the ideal place to grow hemp. Not only is the state the top producer of cannabis generally, but particularly in Sonoma County and surrounding areas, “we have the land,” Hughes says. “And the climate is perfect, as proven by our agriculture industry.”

But California lags other states, such as Colorado and Kentucky. Hughes, a hemp and CBD entrepreneur who runs the Hemp General Store in Petaluma, says one historical reason for this is that during the decades when both hemp and marijuana were illegal, it was much more lucrative to grow marijuana—which is loaded with THC, the stuff that gets you high. Local restrictions on hemp growing, even after pot was legalized, also played a role.

But now there are new problems. After hemp was legalized federally under the 2018 Farm Bill, growers flocked to the market, and now there’s a glut. Until the market evens out, it’s unlikely that much more land will be given over to hemp growing. “About 18 months ago, I was brokering hemp at $7,000 to $10,000 a kilo,” Hughes says. After the price “plummeted” late last year, the wholesale cost stabilized at about 10% of what it was then. 

“There’s no incentive to grow that material, and there’s no incentive to process it,” Hughes says. “Think about it: If you grow tomatoes or corn and you have a warehouse full of hemp, what do you do with the hemp? You give it away to make room for other crops.” As it is, he says: “If I had a truckload of CBD in 2018, I’d be a millionaire now.”

The government doesn’t keep statistics on hemp, but experts say the amount of farmland devoted to hemp over the past few years has increased by about tenfold. Estimates vary widely, but Hughes thinks about 250,000 acres of farmland is taken up by hemp plants in the United States.

To the casual observer, it might seem strange that there’s a glut of hemp, given the CBD craze that was underway even before the Farm Bill was passed. CBD is a component of the cannabis plant that doesn’t get you high, but carries many potential health benefits, from relieving pain to preventing seizures to relieving insomnia, among many others (the proof for medical claims varies widely from ailment to ailment). Though it has only trace amounts of THC (less than 0.3%), hemp is rich in CBD cannabinoids, and CBD extracted from hemp is legal under federal law.

Consumers are still hungry for CBD, but the industry is hamstrung by the federal government. The Food And Drug Administration disallows the use of the substance in food and beverages, and marketers are not allowed to make any kind of health claims for the tinctures and salves that are allowed. Most observers, including Hughes, believe that such restrictions will be eased, but until then, a market that everybody thought would be going gangbusters by now has instead been stymied.

But Hughes, who runs a small operation selling hemp products and also works as a broker and marketer for the Colorado-based Hemp Depot, is optimistic. “Twenty-eight states say it’s OK to use CBD in food,” he notes. (In California, CBD-containing food and beverages may be sold only in licensed cannabis dispensaries, and those products must be made with CBD derived from pot, not from hemp). Big companies like Walgreen’s and CVS have expressed strong interest in selling CBD products, and there is room for expansion into food and beverages if a big brand like Coca-Cola gets on board. 

“I think the situation would have changed already, but Covid has put a damper on all things,” Hughes says. “But now I expect serious movement by the FDA by September of 2021.”

It was with an expected boom in mind that Santa Rosa Junior College launched its Hemp Agriculture program last year, devoting about a third of an acre of its 365-acre Shone Farm to growing the plant. At the time, Benjamin Goldstein, dean of the college’s agriculture department, said he thought hemp had potential to move even some wine growers into growing hemp on their land, since the price of hemp at the time commanded prices that were “dramatically higher” per acre than wine.
The fact that the market has collapsed hasn’t diminished student interest, he says. Mainly, that’s because the skills they’re learning are essentially the same ones needed to grow pot for the medical and adult-use markets. “The techniques are very similar,” Goldstein says. “We don’t control what students do after they graduate, and if they want to go and grow pot plants, more power to them.”

Still, the situation has stymied the school’s plans to market its hemp and recover some of the costs of the program. “We’re still looking for local partners to do the extraction and marketing,” he says. “The economies of scale just don’t exist right now for big extractors.” There are several big cannabis processors in Sonoma and around the North Bay, but they are severely limited when it comes to hemp. “They’re not allowed to run hemp through their extraction machines, and the processes must be kept separate,” he says. “That would be a huge cost.” But it might prove to be worth it if prices rebound in the next few years.

Meanwhile, selling to out-of-state processors to extract the CBD from the plant means “we lose the local connection to agriculture.”

Another big loss is the marketing opportunity afforded by location. “Sonoma County is a brand,” Hughes says. “People buy wine because it’s from here. We’re purveyors of really cool shit. Why not add hemp to that?” 

However much we may think we know about cannabis, the truth is that the science around the world’s most misunderstood plant is still in its infancy.

Most everyone is familiar with the psychoactive power of THC (tetrahydrocannabidinol) and the soothing nature of CBD (cannabidiol) by now. The well-known compounds have developed cult-like followings and are the chief reasons why cannathusiasts diligently trek to their local dispensaries to get high and chill out.

But there are close to 150 other cannabinoids in each and every cannabis plant, most of them still mysterious and full of potential.

“New” cannabinoids—chemical compounds that mimic compounds found in the human endocannabinoid system—like CBG (cannabigerol), CBN (cannabinol) and THCP (tetrahydrocannabiphorol) aren’t really new. Heck, they’ve been important cogs in the marijuana machine from first sprout. Until recently, though, they’ve remained under the radar of the mainstream.

But a large contingent of scientists, gifted growers and industry innovators have begun to study, tinker with, isolate and develop products based around a fresh crop of cannabinoids. It’s the Wild West of marijuana research–and the cutting edge of cannabis science.

There are reasons why very few of cannabis’ almost 150 phytocannabinoids have been isolated and comprehensively studied. Because marijuana is still deemed illegal on a federal level in the U.S., research–and securing funding for that research–can be a tricky endeavor. And because most varieties of cannabis are CBD- or THC-dominant, the isolation and study of “minor” cannabinoids can be challenging.

Take CBG, for example. Discovered by researchers in the 1960s, CBG is the compound from which all other cannabinoids are synthesized. As a non-psychoactive cannabinoid typically most bountiful in low-THC and high-CBD cannabis strains, its potential health benefits are vast. CBG has shown great promise as a cancer fighter, potent neuroprotectant, effective antibacterial agent, anti-inflammatory, antidepressant, therapy for psoriasis, and as a mood regulator (thanks to its ability to boost anandamide–the human body’s native “bliss” molecule). Those who have tried CBG say it has a mind-clearing, energizing effect.

But because the hemp plant produces a much smaller volume of CBG (and most “minor” cannabinoids) than it does CBD and THC, extraction challenges are considerable. It literally takes thousands of pounds of biomass to create tiny amounts of CBG isolate.

In recent years, scientists have begun working to hybridize a plant that doesn’t synthesize all of its CBG so that greater amounts of the molecule can be isolated. The first CBG products burst onto the consumer market in 2015, when AXIM Biotechnologies introduced a line of cosmetic beauty creams and toothpastes. The first CBG tincture was introduced by Steve’s Goods a year later. Both firms struggled with production costs and securing large enough stockpiles of hemp biomass to meet their demands.

While most companies are on the fence–hesitant to enter what is seen as a relatively risky and expensive segment of the cannabis industry–they understand the promise and potential of CBG and other understudied cannabinoids.

“I’m excited about the emergence of other cannabinoids besides THC and CBD,” says A.T., budtender and assistant manager at Santa Cruz dispensary Central Coast Wellness. “Every individual plant is a little different. CBN, CBC, CBG, THCB. All can potentially be isolated in topicals, flower, tinctures, and sublingual tablets. There is a ton of science to it that people don’t really understand.”