Living the Dream: Shawn DeNae

This is coincidentally my 61st written-for-publication piece and my 61st year on this planet. Numerical coincidences are fun to acknowledge but I stop there on creating conspiracy theories around them.

But it’s a good time to update on some of the past topics shared here since 2015 about this legal cannabis trip we ride.

“Green Gouging” was my fourth Living the Dream column in November 2015. Gouging continues to this day although our banking fees have decreased from $500 to $350 per month. Still seems excessive and extortionary to me.

“Race to the Bottom” was published in January 2016. Price pressures continue, especially for concentrates and ingestible products. An oil concentrate for dabbing was recently offered at $1.50 per gram wholesale. (That correlates to a consumer price near $6, including the almost 50% taxes.) I believe this is a direct result of the illegal practices of some who claim to be “innovators” by taking CBD isolate from hemp and chemically converting it to THC D9/D8 isolates. They dumped these cheap Frankenweed cannabinoids into an unsuspecting market without full disclosure, and the market for whole plant extractions tumbled. Our state stopped the practice in early 2021 but is now considering allowing it within the regulated markets with a proposed 2022 bill.

There is also talk of mitigating the low costs on dab oils by adding even more taxes to them. Cannabis is the cheapest intoxicant there is — five people can stay high for hours on what one round of beers would cost. I support high taxes on concentrates if countered by lowering taxes on flower. And I abhor any allowance for creating or converting cannabinoids in a non-pharmaceutical lab. Seems fair.

“Quacks like a Duck” came out in June 2016: “There’s a saying that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Applying that logic to cannabis cultivation, if it roots like a plant, grows like a plant and is harvested like a plant, then it must be a plant — unless it’s a marijuana plant!”

Our state still does not treat legal cannabis cultivators as conducting an agricultural activity. Okanogan County is again talking about banning legal grows. How many years is going to take to change this? I just don’t know.

Marijuana Venture published “Grow Clean” in March 2018. We continue to grow clean, and we test every harvest to prove it, though Washington state has yet to establish mandatory pesticide testing. The revised rules set for this vital testing were presented to industry on December 8, 2021. It still relies upon self-selection of samples. There are established agricultural protocols for collecting samples for testing of contaminates and self-selection is not among them. Again, when are we going to be treated as agriculture by Washington state?

There are so many more updates from the past Living the Dream columns, but I’ve already exceeded my word count for this month. Now, I’m going to check if JFK Jr. has really shown up in Dallas; the numbers apparently are favorable!