We Don’t Want Legalization—We Want Decriminalization ft. Luna Stower

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Bryan Fields: What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, and with me as always is Kellan Finney, and this week we've got a very special guest, Luna Stower. Luna, thanks for taking the time. How are you doing today? Luna Stower: Excellent. Can't complain. I mean, I could, but who wants to listen? Bryan Fields: I love it. Kellan, how are you doing? I'm doing really well, really excited to talk to Luna, really excited to bring some East Coast energy into this conversation — I think Luna's got deep West Coast vibes, so I'm excited for the whole thing. But more importantly, how are you, Bryan? Yeah, I'm stoked. There's a lot we're going to learn today. Luna has a long history on the West Coast, but I think when we talk about where your roots are, it's really important to understand your parents and where they grew up and where they originated from, because that really sets the tone for where your heart falls first. So if you had to choose, East Coast or West Coast, Luna, which one are you choosing? Luna Stower: Oh, West Coast is the best coast, but I'd be nothing without my New Yorkers. My mom was smoking weed in New York City in 1961, so this is my birthright, you know? But we really can't — we're yin and yang. There is no West Coast without the East Coast. Tupac and Biggie — you can't compare them. I love them both so much. And I'm on the East Coast all the time. Bryan Fields: Perfectly, perfectly said. So for our listeners, can you give a quick background on yourself and how you found your way into the cannabis space? Luna Stower: Absolutely. So I am born and raised in the Bay Area. In 1996, I was in sixth grade, so I've been smoking, selling, and growing weed since middle school. It was never a drug to me. I didn't really know until college that I was using it to self-medicate, but it was always just this ubiquitous thing that was all around. It wasn't a big deal — there wasn't this concept of the gateway drug and DARE. The culture in Oakland and in the Bay Area was so positive toward cannabis that it never really hit me — I didn't get that stigma. It was very normalized. So when I became a public school teacher — I got my master's in urban education and social justice and a teaching credential — I really saw how giving these kids Ritalin and all these other drugs, when what I really wanted to give them was CBD and other things like that, really politicized me. And I decided to leave teaching and get into cannabis full-time in 2014. So I've been selling vapes in this space — started with Jetty Extracts as their first employee back in 2014, so it's my 11th anniversary in the cannabis space. I also just surpassed my five-year anniversary at iSpire, where I was also their first employee, and both of those companies I was able to help bring public, which is pretty cool considering I never got an MBA and never really worked in the private sector before. I've only ever been an advocate and an activist. I helped decriminalize entheogens in the cities of Oakland, San Francisco, and Santa Cruz, and worked on the early equity language that was copied and pasted around the world to make sure we gave back to the folks who were hit hardest by the war on drugs, specifically in Oakland, California. So radical activism, social justice, and really safe access and responsible use are really important to me. Obviously I've worked on the business side of it too, and I want to make sure operators are able to do business — but there's also definitely a public safety and social responsibility element that goes hand in hand with that. My role has been to marry those things, to make sure that love can be lucrative, that we can move the industry forward, and still have a movement underneath us that we can be proud of. Bryan Fields: I want to stick with those first 11 years, because first of all, congratulations — that's basically a lifetime in the cannabis industry. That's like dog years, right? When you first got in, I'm assuming there was a massive amount of optimism and assumptions that the industry would change and the environment would look a certain way in maybe two to five years. Take us through that first perspective, and then where you are now, as a whole. Luna Stower: It's rose-colored glasses. It's like if you've ever planned a trip to the airport and assumed every light would be green and there'd be no traffic, and then you missed your flight — you know that feeling of realizing you really should have assumed every light was going to be red. And what was so sad about that rosy outlook is it wasn't cautious optimism, it was blind optimism. Unfortunately, the impact was that we had garnered a lot of investment and interest from mainstream markets and institutional investors, and our friends and family who really spent their entire savings believing, to your point, in two to five years. We've been saying two to five years for two decades now. And it's become — even now, with the new administration — everyone thought they were going to do it, and they're just the same fearmongers using outdated terms like "gateway drug" and "devil's lettuce" to describe this plant. In California, really — Prop 64 was never — I think this is something we need to do as an industry, the same way we're trying to move away from indica and sativa and move more toward terpene profiles or effects-based marketing, because the indica/sativa split is a misnomer anyway. It's like Republicans flip-flopping — the names just aren't useful anymore. The word I really try not to use is "legalization," because unfortunately, when voters are voting and they see it on the ballot, they just see it as "weed, yes or no," and people go, "yes." They don't realize that it's actually commercialization — tax, control, and regulate. What they actually want is decriminalization: making gifting, gathering, growing, and maybe some regulated sales legal. But the problem is the lack of sophistication among voters, and the way the semantics professionals are actually writing this language into the laws to specifically be misleading. Plus, they only get one sentence — it's like a tweet, they don't get much space to really explain. So there's a lot of work we have to do as an industry, as educators, and in public relations, to make sure people understand what they're actually voting for. This is why Amendment 3 didn't pass in Florida — people looked at it and thought, "whoa, this is a corporate takeover, I'm not going to be able to grow at home, I don't know what this means, I don't want it." There's a lot of fear and misinformation out there. I'd also say the false starts came from certain businesses like MedMen, and people who came out the gate very corporate — their entire marketing campaign was anti-stoner, literally crossing out stoners. They had a very negative approach: in order to build something, you don't need to step on or trash someone else, and that's exactly what they did. In order to normalize and mainstream cannabis, they abandoned the activists, the patients, and the culture of cannabis, and that was not a smart move. Look at what happened to them. Adam Bierman can write his book all day and rewrite history, but everyone knows he's almost single-handedly responsible for some of the worst economic situations we've seen in legalized cannabis — mainly because when you destabilize a market, it allows Canadian companies to consolidate, buy up, and roll everyone into their systems. It really hurt, as a patient and an activist, watching that — we had to vote for SB 34 just to put compassion back into cannabis, because you couldn't donate product without paying the excise tax on the cost of goods. Having to advocate just for veterans and sick people... We're working with Cannabis Aligned, if you guys haven't heard of it — we're trying to repeal Prop 64 right now in California. It's led by Salwa Ibrahim, former owner of Cookies and Bloom, who has moved into politics now. Nina Parks, who was instrumental in starting Supernova Women, and Isak Ali, who started Halal Hemp, are banding together to try to overturn this, because it's been one economic extinction event after another. And we as Californians are watching the rest of the world and the rest of the country take off our backs, using our SOPs and our frameworks, and we never got to reap the benefits. It hasn't become more accessible, more affordable, or even that much safer — we're pretty good about testing, but we've regulated businesses out of business. I always joke that we're in the business of doing no business in California. What do you do? Nothing. What do you do? Complain, loophole, jump, try to shimmy. And this is why hemp has gotten so big — people wonder why hemp is such a big deal right now, and it's like, talk to Prohibition about it. People don't want to make D8 and D9 and HHC out of isolated CBD using silica bleaching clay — no one wanted that. It's because we can't get our act together on decrim. So where's the balance? Because words matter, and when certain words are put on the ballot, that influences people who are unfamiliar with the issue and shapes the decisions they make. Bryan Fields: So where is the balance? Does it start with activism like yours, trying to convince — or excuse me, trying to work with lawmakers to explain that this word isn't the right approach, we should use this one instead? Luna Stower: We're not a fan of "recreational." I personally believe all use is some form of medical use, and I think "recreational" just sounds frivolous, pleasure-seeking, and extraneous — not necessary. So we really like to use "adult use" instead. And I'm seeing a lot of these bills and a lot of language treating recreational and medical as separate markets, and hemp and cannabis as separate categories, and it really doesn't serve us. The movement is really trying to consolidate and show that cannabis is one plant. Just because the government arbitrarily set 0.3% as the differentiating factor, that's silly — it's arbitrary, like Gulf of Mexico versus Gulf of America, like borders. These are all things we've created, and we can also renegotiate them. I think it's a grassroots-and-grasstops combination. It's going to be us talking to lawmakers. And by the way, you don't have to be a professional lobbyist to talk to a lawmaker. Your city, state, and federal representatives work for you. You can walk into their office anytime and get a staffer's ear — even better, make an appointment a few days ahead and you can actually get in front of them, especially if you're a veteran or a constituent. They are literally paid to listen to you. And a lot of times, they can't change the laws unless they hear your anecdotes — how your friend got shot as a security guard outside a dispensary because there's no safe banking and there's cash being stashed in the back, or how your nephew has to move state to state as a medical refugee to find good medicine for grand mal seizures. Lawmakers cannot change laws unless they have anecdotal evidence and stories from real people about why they need to change them. I can't stress enough how important it is to call and show up — emailing isn't nearly as effective. If you can get on the phone, they hate it. They have to address you, they have to take note of it, and they get annoyed — the more annoyed they are, the more you know what you're doing is working. Obviously you want to be polite and loving and represent well, but nagging is the American way — the squeaky wheel gets the oil. But it's also more grassroots than that, too. You want to be talking to your neighbors and friends. If you're a parent, be at the PTA looking at their cannabis policies. I, for one, was a 4.4 student, in advanced classes in high school — as a sophomore I was already in senior-level AP classes because I was so advanced. I had perfect attendance. And on a lunch break, I went and smoked a blunt with my friends three or four blocks off campus, and then went back to school. They got caught, and someone ratted me out as the fourth kid, and I was suspended for a week and a half. I wrote a letter to all my teachers, and one of them ended up going into the cannabis industry — we're best friends now, Anaya Vogue. She just launched Clea Midlife Wellness. She's the wife of Guy Rocourt, one of the founders of Papa & Barkley. It's funny that it came full circle, but it really bonded us, because I remember thinking: how does it make sense that I'm an excellent student, I did this on my own time, I didn't miss any class, and you're punishing me for it by taking me out of school? It's like this whole concept behind these kinds of policies. Luckily for me, I wasn't a Black student who got expelled or suspended — I was in Castro Valley, which was pretty progressive toward cannabis, like I said. And the principal who expelled me had actually been my elementary school principal — she'd known me since I was a little kid, and she still threw most of the book at me. Those are the moments that politicized me and activated me, and kind of made me an early, minor victim of the drug war, so to speak — not to diminish people who are actually serving time in prison, or who've lost their lives, their children, or their pets because of it. But these are ways you can intersect with and examine these policies. What happens if my kid gets caught smoking weed at school? How is DARE being taught in my kid's classroom? I'd like to see that curriculum, I'd like to make sure it's evidence-based. And those conversations are really only happening at the dog park, watching your kids play at Thanksgiving, at the PTA meeting, at church. These conversations aren't taboo anymore. Being a cannabis educator and being cannabis-aware used to be frowned upon, and now people — like my former high school colleagues — are hitting me up twenty years later saying, "I know I was really conservative back then, but I saw you on Facebook, and my wife has cancer, and I don't know what to do. I hear it works — can we talk about it?" And I'm thinking, dude, you were the football coach, you were the most conservative, mean-spirited guy, and now you're coming to me in this soft way saying, "I think we need plant medicine, it's taken me twenty years to get the nerve to ask you, I think we need help, my wife is dying." These are the seeds you plant that you don't know will ever come to fruition. You don't expect the jock-bully coach to come back and say, "you are the expert I need right now in my life to help me navigate something really scary." So don't ever underestimate your ability — even with a small amount of knowledge, just your confidence, your respectfulness, and your professionalism in communicating it can change your community, your family, and eventually the world. Bryan Fields: I think that was so well said. The conversation around cannabis is really challenging, because where do you even classify it? A lot of people might classify it as something that affects your consciousness. So then what is the general population already familiar with? They're familiar with alcohol, or with prescription drugs. So if you think about alcohol and alcohol consumption and relate that to cannabis consumption, that's where this whole adult-use, recreational, commercialization framing has come from. But then on the medical side, dosage matters, so you have this mixed concept where it's a medicine, but it's also used kind of like alcohol is used in society. It's a unique category. So how do you navigate those conversations with regulators when they're trying to understand it more like alcohol? Or is it more like ibuprofen, where I can go buy a certain concentration off the shelf all day long, but if I break my arm, the doctor says I need the really strong stuff, which you can't get off the shelf? There's a completely different comparison going on there — how do you help regulators classify it within their own psyche? Luna Stower: Well, I hate to sound cliché, but this is a magical, mystical plant that can't be quantified, and that's part of why it works. Not everything has a pharmacological equivalent or analog — there are things that happen that are greater than the sum of their molecular parts. We're seeing this with psilocybin, with DMT, with the MDA family and mescaline. It's incredible — we have 50, 60, 70 years of studies in the United States showing that some of these psychedelics can actually cure alcoholism and suicidal tendencies in one or two sessions. So we also need to back up a little bit and understand that this is an issue we're having in general with this technocratic, hyper-modernistic society we're in, one that forgets we are animals connected to Mother Nature. It's cliché for a reason, because it's so true at a cellular level — we've been co-evolving with this plant for thousands of years. We have an endocannabinoid system that isn't being taught to our nurses and doctors. There is a conspiracy against this plant: the only reason it's in Schedule I is because there's supposedly no medical proof or efficacy, but you can't prove medical efficacy because you can't test on a Schedule I substance. We're in this circle of hell we can never get out of. So I think sometimes I just back up and say the entire context in which we're discussing this is problematic. The entire lens we're looking through is a capitalistic, extractive, top-down, hyper-modernistic perspective that doesn't understand plant medicine or the existential reality of how we coexist with plants. That's a little woo and out there, but really, at the end of the day, we're just lacking an understanding of how the endocannabinoid system is the master regulatory system for every other system — nervous, immune, endocrine, hormonal — that's everything, that's our central nervous system. There's a reason you can't die from cannabis: there are no cannabinoid receptors in your brainstem, so it can't override your body's mainframe. These are things I don't think the average lawmaker knows. Meanwhile, with alcohol, you drink a fifth and you're dead within hours — you can literally die of alcohol poisoning in a matter of hours, whether you choke on your own vomit or your organs get overwhelmed. It's deadly, and there's no child-safe cap on that, no psychoactivity index like you get on mushroom or weed gummies — eat one and you have a little smiley face, eat three and you have a bigger smiley face, eat four and you've got a melty smiley face. That doesn't say that on your Bacardi bottle. So I actually put it back on the regulators to admit their own hypocrisy and the conspiracy around this plant before we even have the conversation, because I don't want to start that conversation already on my heels, defending cannabis. Bryan Fields: I think that's really well said, because you're right, you shouldn't have to defend it, and it would be nice to have medical research that just explains it. What exacerbates the problem is, one, we have generations of people who have the stigma cemented into their heads that cannabis is the devil's lettuce. And now there's an even wider problem, which I had to explain to a friend just today — the difference between THC and THC-A, because he was trying to figure out what he could order online versus what he had to go to a dispensary for. That confusion alone multiplies the problem. When you go speak to a lawmaker, they've got problem A, problem B, problem C, and they're like, "what do you even want to talk to me about, Luna?" Luna Stower: And I'm like, all of it. All of it is a problem. It should be organized, clean, and easy to understand, and we're not going to get there — but figuring out how we get there is the real challenge. Bryan Fields: Yes, that's the real challenge. Luna Stower: A lot of the time, this is why I love working with Vape Safer — we're a 501(c)(6) made up of a bunch of different vape manufacturers and terpene companies who really want to get in front of these problems before they become PR storms. We want to be the ones who understand that public safety comes first, but that you can also have a product that's safe for the public and still build an industry where people can be profitable. That really starts with good relationships and professionalism. Unfortunately — and this is coming from a loud activist hippie from Northern California — we're very emotional when we talk to these lawmakers, we're not as buttoned-up, there's a lot of anger and emotionality, and for very good reason. People have literally lost their entire livelihoods, they've had their dogs shot, had their kids taken by CPS. This isn't a joke — people are rotting in prison for this right now as we're recording this podcast. So there's a reason for that emotionality. But when you've got the Philip Morrises of the world and the major distributors coming in buttoned-up, rubbing elbows with politicians they've had decades-long relationships with — those are the kinds of relationships that groups like NCIA and CCIA, obviously trade organizations that some people love and some people are wary of, are built on. At the end of the day, we don't have that many people representing us in DC and in Sacramento. Everyone complains about lobbying, but no one wants to pay for lobbying, no one physically gets themselves to the Capitol, no one does the work. This entitlement — this expectation that cannabis is somehow just going to come to us without us working for it — is a lie. Even patients complain, "I missed the buy-one-get-one-free day," or "someone else got free gummies and I didn't." And I'm like, yeah, because you didn't show up to the city council meetings, you didn't show up during the Prop 64 hearings to talk about why it wasn't working, you didn't show up for patient rights. Really, it's just business owners showing up, and if I were a lawmaker and I saw a bunch of business owners arguing for themselves, I'd know off the top that they had ulterior motives — it's an existential crisis for them. If we don't have patients advocating and explaining that this isn't recreational, that it's medicine, that a 10-milligram limit doesn't work for someone managing seizures, we can't speak for you. What I've noticed since Prop 64 passed in California — and since these legalization, or commercialization as I like to call them, measures have passed worldwide and countrywide — is this sitting back on our laurels, like "cool, we won." It's like celebrating Martin Luther King Day and thinking we won racism, that we can just sit back and have a parade. No — we're still fighting this, it's not easy yet. We're still seeing major extinction events, we're still seeing our favorite mom-and-pop craft brands go out of business. We need help continuing the fight for democracy, for bodily autonomy and sovereignty around cannabis and women's rights — we're seeing rights unraveling nationwide right now. Cannabis is an intersection — I've always been an activist, and I've always tried to activate other people to be activists, because cannabis touches everything. It's art, music, sex, the environment, history, culture — everything that matters to any activist, cannabis is part of that story. It's about safe access, it's about the criminalization of Black and brown bodies, it's about agroecology and closing the loop, about how hemp can help save the world, about de-centering big pharma and realizing we can plant something in our backyard that can heal me and my neighbor for thirty bucks in soil. These are the things I love cannabis for showing us — that we need to show up for democracy right now. We've been silent watching what the United States has been doing around the world for years, and once that turned on us — well, now everyone's up in arms, but I'm Jewish, and we learned: first they came for the Protestants and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Protestant, then they came for the socialists and I didn't speak up. Well, guess what — they're going to come for you eventually. Silence is violence, and if you see something, say something, and if something doesn't feel right, do something about it, because complaining about it after the fact isn't going to get you much — you'll just get, as my grandma used to say, the world's smallest violin playing for you. No one wants to hear your crocodile tears when your privilege was protected and now you can't access good medicine, or your dispensary is closing, or your favorite gummy manufacturer went under because the market's in the gutter right now. Now is not the time to start speaking up — we have to do it now, while we still have something to salvage, because it could go really south. The United States is hurting right now. This is a time for people to actually stand up and take action on what they believe in, not just post about it like armchair activists on their Instagram stories twice a week. Bryan Fields: If I dropped you off in DC and said, Luna, you get one magic wish, one single lever or switch or law you could change — is there something? Luna Stower: De-schedule. De-schedule, de-schedule, de-schedule. Take it off the schedule — it is not a drug, it is a plant. De-schedule, and safe banking, because the lack of that is so dangerous for our friends. We've lost so many people. Too $hort's brother was just shot and killed in Oakland — he was a security guard for a cannabis grow, in Oakland, one of the first places in the country to legalize, and we still can't secure safe employment for people in this industry. Bryan Fields: Those stories have to resonate when you're speaking to lawmakers, I'd assume, but it's not translating into action. So where's the actual bottleneck? Is it other lawmakers who aren't in that state and don't see it, or is it something else? Luna Stower: No, it's the prison industrial complex. Why would they want to stop locking people up when they can make money off it? California is the fifth-largest economy in the world, and we're number one in prisons and number 42 in education — and it's not our avocados that got us there, that's the reason. The prison guard association and police lobbying are among the most powerful lobbying organizations in California, right up there with the teachers' association. It's because they're making money off Black and brown bodies, and until private prisons and the private prison industry stop being a thing, we're going to keep seeing this. This is how you know it's a conspiracy — we've already put forth all the data. Cannabis is good for the economy. Look at California during COVID — cannabis tax revenue was one of the biggest things keeping the state afloat, it literally buoyed the state through a pandemic. We've already proven the concept. And look at the de facto decriminalization of cannabinoids happening through the hemp situation, with intoxicating hemp products in places like North Dakota and Idaho that don't even have medical programs — we've already proven people want cannabis, and no one is dying from it. So what other proof do you need that this is a conspiracy against us? They're going out of their way to protect the status quo because they don't know how else to make money — we've defunded public education, we're not innovators anymore, we've shipped our best jobs overseas, we're not the world leader in intelligence, innovation, or technology anymore. So how are we going to make that money? We're making it off — and I've seen this with my own eyes, I've been inside the two largest women's prisons in the world, Valley State Prison for Women and the Central California Women's Facility, in Chowchilla, in central California. The companies that employ incarcerated women there pay them ten cents an hour, and once they leave, they can't use that work as a reference or work experience — they could have been a woodworker for 25 years in there and it doesn't count. When I was a student at UC Santa Cruz, our bunk beds, our desks, our entire dining hall furniture, our fire-retardant curtains were all made by prison labor from California state prisoners — and a lot of those materials contain asbestos and other cancer-causing substances. This isn't some crazy conspiracy-theory stuff, this is factual. The state of California can't afford, mentally or in their own minds, to reckon with the fact that this country was built on slavery, and that we need to figure out how to make money without oppressing other people, especially Black and brown people, who are only 20% of the country's population but 70 to 80% of the prison population — and it isn't because they're naturally bad people. This is why I appreciate cannabis as a lens for looking at white supremacy and institutionalized racism more broadly. This is just one of many lanes tied to why everyone is racking their brains about what's going on, when really, no one is zooming out to realize maybe it's because we're a country built on slavery and we need to stop profiting off other people's misery, because that's not good for karma either. Look at the wildfires in California — five years ago we were imprisoning indigenous fire practitioners for doing controlled burns, and now CAL FIRE is hiring them as consultants to help us not burn our state down. In just a matter of years we went from that to realizing maybe the indigenous people who've been doing this for thousands of years know something and could teach us something. We're just now coming around to the fact that we don't know everything. Bryan Fields: There's a ton to unpack there, but I want to focus on the challenges in California specifically. You mentioned AIOs earlier — can you explain that acronym, and then walk us through those challenges? Luna Stower: AIOs, aka all-in-ones or disposables, are being looked at very heavily for a ban right now — there's a bill being put forth that would create a statewide ban on any disposables. If you've been out in the streets in California, you've seen them, but 99% of the time what you're actually seeing are nicotine vapes. I was part of the response when the vape crisis hit — the EVALI crisis — and that also wasn't caused by regulated cannabis vapes. Those were aftermarket, underground vapes using vitamin E acetate as a carrier oil, made by unregulated manufacturers, which meant off-gassing from nickel-plated brass and other materials. When you heat a volatile compound like terpenes alongside something with a metal post containing heavy metals, it immediately breaks down and you're inhaling that. A lot of people got very sick, and the legal industry got blamed — the baby got thrown out with the bathwater, and we're seeing that risk again now. As Vape Safer, we're actually more likely to take a position in alignment with this ban — not because it makes sense for our business model, but because we know our responsibility is to figure out how to create safe access to these products. Our whole philosophy is that it's not about what the product is, but how we regulate it — because right now, it's still functionally illegal in some ways. We know someone who just got fined for trying to recycle their cannabis vape hardware as a producer, by a hazardous-waste organization. This whole approach is very pearl-clutching, very "save the kids," without actually thinking through what happens down the road — because guess what happens when you ban legal products? People go to the underground market. That's the last thing we want, another EVALI crisis. It's like abstinence-only sex ed instead of giving teenagers condoms — they're going to be having sex regardless. Don't be so Pollyanna-ish as to think this won't happen. What we're asking lawmakers is: we get it, I'm a Californian too, I don't want to see e-waste, I don't like AIO misuse either — but if we had a real pathway that made sure this didn't just drive people underground... That's what we're trying to do, create nuance instead of black-or-white thinking, because it's actually a very gray area. We do believe vapes are an important intervention. I'm a huge fan of vapes personally, because as a public school teacher, if you're having period cramps and you want to throw up, and you've got a room full of thirty eleven-year-olds screaming at the top of their lungs, you need to go take a break — you need your lunch period, or a hall pass, so you can regroup and go back to being a teacher. Everyone who's ever been in public school knows a day with a substitute is a lost day — it's bad for the kids, the parents, the sub, the teacher, and the school, it's destabilizing for everyone. So if I can take fifteen minutes, come back not nauseous, and be present for a room of screaming kids, I'm a better teacher, a better human, and a better citizen — and I'm well within my legal rights to do that if I'm off campus on my own time. I've still held my California teaching credential this whole time, even as a public cannabis figure — they never came after me, because I wasn't doing anything wrong. I try not to demonize this, because I have friends whose grandparents have arthritis, and all they can do is lean over in the middle of the night, not screw anything on, not click a button seventeen thousand times to figure out what color the light is — they can just inhale. From an access and patients'-rights perspective, that's paramount. Everyone has their own priorities — some people put the environment first, some people put profitable business first. For me, it's safe access for patients. That's the most important thing, even at some expense to the environment or to business profits, because I believe getting people safe, easy access to these cannabinoids matters more than anything else. Human suffering — pain, depression, suicide, overwhelm, domestic violence — a lot of these issues can genuinely be eased just by hitting a vape pen a couple of times. You don't have to roll it up, the smell isn't everywhere, you don't get caught traveling with it, it's far more discreet. So I want to be careful — when we talk about loving the environment, we don't have to throw patients under the bus to support it. We can do both. Bryan Fields: Do you have any hesitations about the long-term safety of vaping over extended periods, or does it fall into the category of anything done in excess having the potential for long-term negative side effects? Luna Stower: I believe that inhaling burning ash — and this is supported by the science — is far more harmful. Now, granted, people do use vapes a bit more often, because, like I said, they're more discreet, you can use them indoors, they taste better, they don't have that ashy flavor. So there isn't an equal number of puffs on a joint versus a vape. But coming back to that nuance and gray area: a bad vape can kill you, or hurt you, over time. A good vape shouldn't harm you at all if you're taking small puffs and not overheating the coil — a lot of people take these long "blinker" hits. Most coils are only rated for three, four, five seconds, not fifteen-second blinkers. You're not meant to use it that way — it's the same way a tampon can cause toxic shock syndrome if you leave it in for eight hours without following the instructions; you could be dead within 24 hours. That's not the tampon's fault, you just have to use it correctly. There are a lot of everyday products that could kill us if misused. With vapes, it's really about whether it's a GMP-certified manufacturer, whether they're following ISO standards. We're even trying to move as an industry toward EU-GMP standards, where the packaging isn't foam-based, because microplastics can get in and contaminate the product. We've developed self-sealing technology that lowers contamination risk because there's no capping process involved. I do think that if you're getting good vapes and using them responsibly, according to the manufacturer's recommendations, through a regulated channel — like in California, where they test the cartridge, the oil, and the cartridge-with-oil after 30, 60, and 90 days to check for heavy-metal leaching and cannabinoid stability — you have no reason to be worried. When I buy a vape in California, I'm not worried at all, because I know it's been quadruple-tested and time-tested. For those who don't know, in California and most regulated markets, testing covers residual solvents from processing, so no leftover butane; microbiological contaminants like hair, skin cells, or debris; pesticides, to make sure it was grown without things that can cause cancer; heavy metals; mold content; and moisture content, to make sure flower isn't too wet. We're hyper-regulated, and honestly, the testing regime is the one part of regulation I actually like. If you're doing it the right way, you shouldn't be worried about consuming vapes daily. If it's burning your throat or making you cough a lot, that's probably the formulation — I personally don't like anything with more than about 8% terpene content. Most strains should be flavorful and potent enough at 8% or less to still taste great; if not, you're probably using the wrong strain for that formulation. I've judged the Emerald Cup in the vape category for three years, so I've tested hundreds of the world's best and most rigorously tested vapes, and I've seen it all — I know there's good stuff out there and bad stuff out there. It might cost you a few bucks more, but the flavor, the high, and the peace of mind knowing you're not hurting yourself or anyone around you is unbelievable. Bryan Fields: Where's the best weed in the world that's not from the US? Luna Stower: Honestly, South Africa — Cape Town is popping. Colombia fire, Brazil fire, too — they have such amazing cannabis in those places, partly because they're equatorial and get that benefit. I think something like 70% of California's classic strains came from hippies going down to Santa Marta, Colombia, and bringing back genetics like Santa Marta Gold. We owe so much to Barranquilla and La Guajira — basically the pirate capital of South America was Santa Marta, and we got almost all of our best strains from there. We owe a lot to those equatorial regions. In South Africa, their version of light-dep or greenhouse growing — they call it "green door," because it's greenhouse mixed with indoor — I think that's so precious. They don't need a ton of pesticides, and being in Africa, they get gorgeous sun. And honestly, I like weed that's grown by indigenous people, people of color, and women — that's my favorite. Obviously most of my hippie friends who taught me how to grow are all old white guys in Northern California, and I love them too, but there's something — Bryan Fields: We can cut that part out. Luna Stower: Yeah, that's right, we can totally cut that part out. I personally like to promote buying weed from women — that's kind of our thing, we women in the industry try to support women-owned and women-grown businesses. One of my friends in Colombia, when she waters her plants, puts an amethyst crystal near them and sings to them under the full moon. I don't know how many other people are doing that kind of witchy stuff, but hey — we're seeing more and more plant science showing that plants communicate, that they have something like emotions, that they feel things and communicate with each other and with us. So a little singing and a little love and extra support can't hurt. We're all just talking on a giant piece of rock anyway, you know? Bryan Fields: Literally just a piece of silica. Pretty wild. I want to go back to something — when I asked you that question earlier, you kind of whispered your answer like you were about to drop a massive secret. I loved that. You were like, "South Africa, fire." Luna Stower: It is surprisingly wonderful. And honestly, the consumption lounges there are the best I've ever seen — multi-level, DJ booth on top, full kitchen, minimalist soundproof walls, you can rent any rig, and it's really affordable and gorgeous. It looks like something out of a design magazine. We're talking stunningly gorgeous, multi-level, free to enter, unbelievable customer service, thoughtful and educated budtenders. Nirvana — if anyone's in South Africa, go check out Nirvana and their sister lounge, Alibi. They're the most beautiful consumption lounges I've seen. I've been to Vegas, I'm in San Francisco, we have some of the most gorgeous consumption lounges here — and it's still levels above, because here you still can't smoke outside, there's no rooftop, everything's blacked-out windows, even in the legal cannabis space. It's still very much indoors. There, there's a little bit of open-air on the roof, there's no security guard at the front, none of that fearfulness of feeling like you're sneaking into an underground club, like you have to in parts of Europe. It's more like South America — Uruguay, Argentina — very friendly to cannabis. You don't hear people going through horrible experiences there, unless you're doing something illegal like trafficking — we still have friends locked up in Uruguay, even though it's one of the most progressive countries, because the way they were moving product wasn't within the guidelines. But if you're above board, getting licenses and working with licensed operators, there's a lot of opportunity south of the equator. Bryan Fields: Do you think we'll ever get a dispensary or consumption lounge paired with a safari? Luna Stower: That would be — I don't know about the paranoia of being high around lions, I mean, you're in a truck, but it would be spectacular. You'd get cottonmouth out there in the savanna, which might add to that whole drying-out feeling. Bryan Fields: Fair. Luna Stower: I mean, we can workshop that, but I think that would be two of my favorite things combined at the same time. Bryan Fields: I'm not mad at it. What I'd probably say is do edibles instead, so you don't catch the savanna on fire while you're smoking. Luna Stower: Yeah, yeah — or bring a vape pen, right? Bryan Fields: Yeah, Vape Safer in the Safari. Luna Stower: Oh, sponsored by Vape Safer. Bryan Fields: Dream vaping session, three people, dead or alive. Luna Stower: Maynard James Keenan and Ani DiFranco. Maynard James Keenan, by the way, is the lead singer of Tool — if you don't know that, we can't be friends. Just kidding, I still love you, but check him out. Ani DiFranco was my baby feminist idol. And alive or dead — Hunter S. Thompson, he's my guy, that's my number-one pick. I'm so glad he didn't have to be here for this leg of the journey to the heart of the American dream, because it's an ugly one, and he basically prophesied most of this back from the Nixon era all the way through to now. He was also very involved with the Hells Angels, and with cannabis and drug education, if you want to call what he was doing "drug education" — it kind of was. I learned what mescaline even was from him. So yeah, those are my three, and honestly the three of them together would probably get along famously, because they're all rabble-rousers, warmhearted rebels with a cause, all writers and poets and performers, really — people who are there to draw out feelings from other people. Having cannabis with artists like that in a room would just be epic. Bryan Fields: Last question — what question do you wish more people asked you? Luna Stower: What can I do to help make cannabis more safe, accessible, and affordable? Bryan Fields: And what would your response be? Luna Stower: What we talked about earlier — grassroots and grasstops. Are you having these conversations in your intimate relationships? Are you calling your representatives? Everyone always says, "yeah, yeah, I should call my representatives," but no one actually Googles it, or uses AI to help. You can just say, "I live in this zip code, what are the phone numbers, and what are the best times to call so I don't have to wait on hold?" AI will tell you how to be an activist. You don't even have the excuse anymore of not knowing where to find it online — ChatGPT will find it for you, even the free version. Just care, and do something. I think the dreamers are usually dreaming and the doers are usually doing, and you don't often get dreamers who also do. I'm a dreamer and a doer, and I want other people to embody both — their doing and their dreaming — and actually coalesce them into something potent and movement-oriented, something forward-moving. Bryan Fields: I love it, that's perfect. So, Luna, for all the listeners who want to get in touch and learn more, where can they find you? Luna Stower: Lunastower.com — L-U-N-A-S-T-O-W-E-R. I'm at Luna_Stower on Instagram, you can also find me on LinkedIn, I'm a LinkedIn influencer. And I'm out at all the shows — I'll be in Spain next week for a couple of weeks, speaking at ICBC. You can always catch me at Benzinga, MJUnpacked, Hall of Flowers, all the good shows, MJBizCon. And just shout out to everyone keeping this movement alive and remembering that it was a movement before it was an industry. Bryan Fields: I love it. Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. Much love to you. Luna Stower: Thank you for having me.