Ramon Herrera
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Sales manager
Prismatic Brands
Ramon Herrera once sat face to face with Taliban leaders at a remote base in the Afghanistan mountains. From serving in the Army to working in pest control, Herrera has taken a wildly divergent path into the cannabis industry.
As a member of Apsáalooke Nation, Herrera grew up on a small reservation near Billings, Montana, before joining the Army and serving as a specialist in the Afghanistan War.
“It was just me, my team leader and our interpreter on a small French/Afghan base in the middle of the mountains from 2011 to 2012,” he says. “The base we were at was closed down two months after we left because it was too dangerous for troops.”
After leaving the Army, Herrera joined the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a police officer and later as part of its drug enforcement department. Leaving the military and law enforcement life behind, Herrera moved to Tacoma, Washington, working in pest control and co-founding a national veterans group with the Washington State Pest Management Association. Through that veterans group, Herrera met the former CEO of Puyallup Tribal Cannabis Enterprises, who ultimately recruited him to work in cannabis. He eventually took on the role of sales manager for Prismatic Brands, a company owned by the Puyallup Tribe and has been actively working to connect tribal cannabis companies across Washington state.
“I dove into the deep end pretty quickly and learned from everyone around me,” he says. “One of my goals is to unite all the tribal cannabis in Washington into an alliance.”
Herrera hopes that together the alliance can bring new opportunities to smaller tribes in more remote areas like the reservation he left in Montana.