Portland Hempstalk 2015 Hampered By Prohibitionist City Officials and Tobacco Users
Hempstalk in Portland on the waterfront this year was a tough experience for anyone who's familiar with cannabis and it's growing popularity and industry inertia. You'd never know it by hempstalk. It's the same shoddy headshop vendors and people amble through pretending that they haven't seen everything before. You literally would never know Oregon legalized cannabis.
The most overriding factor with hempstalk is that public ingestion of cannabis is prohibited and literally no vendors signed up from the huge consortium of dispensaries and extractor companies that have been vending at the other industry expos. You can't give away samples, you can't openly offer samples live at the tables. Consumption was partitioned to a small area with tents with black roofs.
Due to this tight control, every tobacco user was incessantly smoking in every cranny of the riverfront park. Cigarette butts were littered across grass, dirt, rocks and hardly a place could be found where the stale smell of tobacco could be escaped. No one took the time to hassle the cancer-inducing hand-to-mouths about their consumption and clearly no one was holding anyone accountable about butt flicking.
Late afternoon Saturday, we noticed that a booth of a company that just showed up on our radar and recognized from the previous weekend at Hemp Expo was packing up and the owners seemed flustered. GI Grow Biomedical Farms slash Quantative GI-netics was being hassled out of the festival by the city and the cops. They were selling seeds to people and showing off their line of "Cryonic" Ultra Sonic Waterless Resin Extraction cannabinoid tinctures in small bottles and jars of cured flower. Apparently the city is OK with seeds being sold in the Expo center but not on the river front when the same state rules apply to both places. GI Grow had every right to execute commerce of seeds at Hemp Fest. Seeds are being sold all over the city and all over the state in dispensaries, headshops, and through social networking sights like Craigslist, Instagram, and Facebook. They did nothing wrong by showing samples of their full line of products and the city was completely out of line for hassling them out of the venue.
Was the city consistent with their policy? Not that I could tell. Two seed vendors packed up and left and one stuck around like nothing happened at all. Why? Were showing brochures of seeds and genetics the extent of the activity of the third booth that stayed? The city, by proxy of hempstalk organizers hassled Ken Kovash, the owner of Quantative Ginetics, about selling some product other than seeds and had him pack up his booth that he paid 1000$ for.
The ironic thing is that a lawyer puts on the festival and all the cannabis lawyers and accountants attend the festival yet no one was summoned when the city descended upon the GI Grow booth to let them know they should shut down. The lawyer/host took the money for the booth, he would have vetted the legality of their activity, no? Did anyone attempt to stick up for the booth owners? No. Was there any definitive proof that something was sold that shouldn't have been? No.
In the end, nothing was done, and the vendors left. The city official did not stick around to be questioned and stayed on the outside of the perimeter of the park with a cop before disappearing from the scene.
GI Grow BioMedical Farms is a family-run operation in Deer Island, Oregon and have just started hitting the industry circuit with their genetics and their uniquely concocted cannabinoid tinctures now that Prop 91 has taken effect and seed sales re legal and edible/tincture/concentrates will be available to the recreational market sometime in 2016.
We will be following up with them about details of this prohibitionist experience they had to endure in our fine progressive city of Portland. We will also interview them about their breeding and growing activities and the background to their extraction process.
Please stayed tuned for that but in the meantime, write to the city of Portland and the lawyer host and let them know that the constituency has voted prohibition away and the city should not enforce itself where it does not have jurisdiction with regards to seed sales, and should allow people to openly consume cannabis due to it's over-arching safety and bursting popularity. Let them know that all other festivals for vices get their open consumption rights respected - wine, beer, cigars….lets have equal rights for cannabis users.
Email address to send to:
Portland Mayor:
mayorcharliehales@portlandoregon.gov
City Info General:
cityinfo@portlandoregon.gov
Paul Stanford - Lawyer/Host:
crrh97286@yahoo.com
We would also like to bring up the fact the Hempstalk is all about music and weed, so naturally there will be lots of smoking of tobacco since it's an outdoor venue. Nowhere did we find any of the speakers or panelists in the talks offering information for people to understand that hemp is a derivative of cannabis and that differentiating between hemp and marijuana as live plants is completely ignorant of the reality of the plant family and of nature. Hemp is the bioaggregate or byproduct that comes from cannabis as well as other plants. Cannabis grows in many shapes and forms and has been mis-organized by narrowed sighted taxonomists and their not being able to know about the vastly varying types of cannabis found around the world. Hemp is not always cannabis, cannabis is not always hemp. No one at this festival was educating people about the mass-distortion in our vocabulary that the government has and will continue to take advantage of. Marijuana is a pretend thing. THCa grows in most all cannabis.
