A Call for CaliSensi-certified Flower as the New Standard of Quality in Craft Cannabis

Coming up as a cannabis smoker in the 90’s was key to understanding the distinct value of the highest-grade sinsemilla flowers grown in CA.

When I first started smoking weed it was all “swag” seeded, Mexican brick-weed that had a good high, but one had to smoke a few bowls or a large joint to get the effect. The flavor was generic and left a lot to be desired.

During the Christmas season, we would be blessed with some greener flower sometimes with “poco semillas” and a better high, but the swag was what we accepted normal cannabis to be. Fast forward a few years to the mid-late 90’s… we were exposed to cannabis flowers that were coming down from the Emerald Triangle, enter “The Dank” California-grown sinsemilla!

At first, I was highly skeptical of the dank. How could cannabis be worth $20 per gram? That is crazy when I could get a fat quarter of swag that would last for a week or more. This was my opinion until I tried, Big Skunk, and my mind was blown. Two hits and I was higher than I had ever been and in the best way! I fell in love with fine cannabis at this point.

Soon came Orange Skunk, Chocolate Thai, Blueberry, and so on. Every single variety and every shred of each bud was highly valuable, oh-so-good to taste, and consistent in effect. A single bowl in a pipe could get 4-5 of us lifted beyond our wildest dreams.

Fine “dank” flower was all we enjoyed until around 97’ or 98’ enter the “Beaster’s” aka BC bud. Copious quantities of less than high-grade were introduced to the marketplace at $50 per 1/8th price point. The quality however was far less than half though some folks liked paying $40-50 and 1/8th versus $60 for domestic. The Beasters did not taste good like CA-grown cannabis – the high was weak, and sometimes they were prematurely harvested and didn’t get you high at all, making it a true rip-off at times.

Looking back now after growing cannabis all these years it’s clear what makes the difference from fine cannabis to mids or boof as it is called these days.

It is how the flower is cultivated.

The cultural practices, the timings, the environment in late flower, and the harvest/dry/cure are what create the final product. Fine cannabis can be executed using organic or conventional fertilizers; however, it is the biology in the rhizosphere or organically grown cannabis that is what truly sets the flower from CA apart from hydro-producing regions like BC or Amsterdam.

We built CaliSensi certification and founded the CA Sinsemilla Growers’ Association (CSGA) to help farmers create more good cannabis and to have a space to meet and assist each other to get to the next level.