This Saturday, July 10, is Dab Day aka "Oil Day" (because 710 upside-down looks like OIL) so in honor of the cannabis concentrate enthusiasts' answer to 4/20, I'm finally publishing excerpts from the interview I conducted earlier this year with Bluma Wellness CEO Brady Cobb. Bluma's One Plant medical marijuana dispensaries offer the best full-spectrum live rosin oil pen cartridges I've found in the state. The son of a notorious 1980s drug smuggler, Cobb lived in Winter Park and studied law at Orlando's Barry University on his way to becoming a pro-pot lobbyist, and later co-founded Liberty Health Sciences before purchasing Three Boys Farms and turning it into one of Florida's fastest-growing weed vendors.
SK: How is your solventless live rosin different from more commonly available concentrates?
BC: We launched with distillate, [which is] cannabis flower that we run through an ethanol distillation process. And we were selling cartridges using the same botanically derived terpenes that you're going to see in just about any food coloring or drink flavoring, so you're not getting a lot of the benefits. We started that way, but being a premium company and having a premium focus on high quality flower, the goal was always to enter the solventless game, which no one was really focusing on in Florida.
The difference between distillation and live rosin is that [live rosin] is full-spectrum, and there's no solvents; there's no cutting agents, there's no ethanol, there's no butane. The only way that we can do that is the flower quality has to be good. The reason you don't see a lot of the others offering solventless at scale is their flower quality is not of a level that they could do it, because when the sample is processed you can't hide imperfections in the flower; they directly show through your rosin. When you look at a lot of the other rosin offerings that are out there, they're either dark brown or orange-ish ... it should have a kind of a toothpaste or peanut butter-ish consistency, and it should be very light in color. So when you see stuff that's brown and greasy, that's flower that hasn't been stored properly.
If you were to put a live rosin cart [cartridge] up against a distillate cart, your THC percentage and total cannabinoid package in the rosin cart is substantially higher because it is full-spectrum. They are cannabis-derived terpenes, so you're not using mechanically derived terpenes. And then ultimately you're having the ability to have something that's solventless, that's pulling all the benefits of the plant without introducing any outside chemicals in live rosin carts, versus something that is being run through an extractor and is not full-spectrum.
In my opinion, after you use a distillate cart it's a bit hazy, kind of unclear; a rosin cart, it's a very clean uplifting up, and then a clean down.
Why do One Plant's products have lower THC levels than some competitors?
We've got a lab problem in Florida.
Each individual lab uses a different wet-weight conversion to calculate THC percentage. We use Green Scientific. In my opinion, they have the best science. They're not the highest THC percent testers; those usually come from ACS. There's lab shopping going on — I think that's the simplest way to say — because there's not a uniform standard just yet.
We let the flower speak for itself. I'll put our 18% ChemD as far as potency up against anything anybody else produces in the state of Florida, all day long. As far as quality of the genetics, I'll put [it] up against GrowHealthy Wookie Girl or Trulieve Papaya Cake. One's going to get you to where you want to go very quickly, and with the other you're going to go through half your eighth to get there.
I'm not looking to play a ticky-tacky game with lives, to try to go shop for a higher THC percentage. That's not the way we do business.
Do you support legalized cannabis home-grow?
I'm a big fan of the idea of home-grow. If a constitutional amendment on recreational adult use in Florida is going to be successful, I think it'll have to include home-grow, and it should.
Do you have a personal favorite product on One Plant's menu?
I'm a huge fan of our ChemD flower, I'm a huge fan of our Mac1 flower, and a big fan of a new one called Marshmallow OG. Our solventless ice hash is some of the best in the country. I'm a huge fan of our live rosin and the fresh press rosin as well.
What would your outlaw father (who died in 2010) think of your legal marijuana career?
I think he would be completely spellbound. He was alive to see the legalization efforts in California succeed and Colorado get started. To see it happening in Florida, with me involved in kind of a leadership position, I think it would just blow his mind.
