Chiah Rodriques, Cannabis Farmer

Ellen Lee Scanlon (00:00):

This podcast discusses cannabis and is intended for audiences 21 and over.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (00:07):

Welcome to How to Do the Pot, a podcast demystifying cannabis for women. I’m Ellen Scanlon.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (00:15):

Buying weed can still be an intimidating thing, and I hope these stories give you a boost of confidence that comes from knowing you have a friend to help you out with all you need to know before you go.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (00:27):

We would love to hear your story. Send us a voice memo with your three to five minute story to hi@dothepot.com. That’s H-I @dothepot.com.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (00:39):

Chiah Rodriguez is a California-based cannabis farmer. She was featured in the 2021 film called Lady Buds, which tells the story of six courageous women who have come out of the shadows of the cannabis underground to enter the legal market. These trailblazers risk everything to make their American dream come true. Lady Buds is available to stream on Amazon, YouTube, iTunes, and other spots. Hope you check it out.

Chiah Rodriguez (01:12):

I live in Mendocino County, California, and I’m a second generation cannabis cultivator. For me, buying cannabis legally for the first time in a dispensary was more of a novelty for me. I just wanted to see what a dispensary looked like on the inside and how the experience was going to be. I always like to look at other people’s flowers that they produce. Being a farmer myself, I’m just more researching and checking out what other people have going on out there, maybe what the popular strains are.

Chiah Rodriguez (01:52):

Back in the days of Prop 215, when you went into a medical dispensary here in California, they had large jars of weed, and you could literally pick out any bud that you wanted from the jar and then purchase it that way.

Chiah Rodriguez (02:09):

Nowadays, after Prop 64 passed in California, everything has to be pretested and prepackaged, so you don’t get to have that experience in the same fashion as you did before, where you could actually just pick out a bud.

Chiah Rodriguez (02:24):

My husband and I had gone into a couple dispensaries in the Bay Area just to see what it was like. Every time we go on a road trip, we try to do the same thing. We go into dispensaries in the little towns that we visit up the coast of Oregon, for example, or in Portland, and every experience is quite different.

Chiah Rodriguez (02:45):

That’s my dispensary experience. I always end up talking to them about regenerative cannabis and sun-grown cannabis. I ask for our brand, our friends’ brands depending on where we are and to see if they know anything about small farmers, legacy, and heritage cultivators, craft cannabis, and test the bud tenders, their knowledge, and see what they know about the history of cannabis cultivation. Especially in California and the region that we come from as a producing region in the Emerald Triangle in Mendocino County, there are quite a bit of dispensaries around. So it’s fun to go in and see which local brands get into these dispensaries here and a novelty to go buy weed for me, which makes it sort of fun in a totally different way than probably most consumers do when they go into a dispensary.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (03:52):

Thanks for listening to this episode of How to Do the Pot. If you’d like to share your story about the first time you bought legal weed, please send a voice memo to hi@dothepot.com or DM us at @dothepot. For lots more information and past episodes, visit dothepot.com. That’s also where you can sign up for How to Do the Pot’s newsletter, which comes out every other Friday.

Ellen Lee Scanlon (04:14):

If you like How to Do the Pot, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show. Thanks to Madi Fair, our brand manager and our producer Nick Patri. I’m Ellen Scanlon, and we’ll be back soon with more of How to Do the Pot.