Jerry Garcia’s weed brand pulls out of California

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Jerry Garcia’s weed brand pulls out of California

Jerry Garcia was the lead guitarist, vocalist and main songwriter for the Grateful Dead, the most successful touring band in rock and roll history. He was one of the best-known weed advocates and consumers in California history.

In 2020, Garcia's family launched a weed brand named Garcia Hand Picked. The brand has pulled out of its birthplace, California, less than three years later, a spokesman told SFGATE.

In an email to SFGATE, Holistic Industries, the brand's parent company, said we're taking a pause in California. Like many celebrity weed brands, Garcia Hand Picked outsources its growing and manufacturing to other companies but now they say they're looking for a new cannabis supplier to stay afloat in California.

We want to make sure CA consumers have the highest quality flower for the long term, so we are choosing a new local partner for the cultivation, production, sales and distribution of Garcia Hand Picked in CA. California has a lot of weed farms struggling to make it as state taxes keep rising and regulations become unmanageable. A mass extinction event is predicted by SFGATE, with thousands of companies going under or pulling out of California this year.

Andrew DeAngelo, cannabis consultant and former owner of Harborside HBORF, one of California's first medical cannabis dispensaries, said the Garcia Brand most likely learned what all of California's cannabis companies are realizing. DeAngelo told SFGATE that Garcia was leaving and that a lot of people are leaving. It is a real shame that California is losing. We are losing jobs and economic activity and other places are benefiting from that. The majority of its operations in California, Colorado and Oregon were closed last week by Curaleaf Holdings, Inc.

California has a complicated cannabis regulations and high taxes that are sinking legal operators while illegal farms and retailers are undercutting legitimate companies. Limited access to banking is forcing cannabis companies to pay exorbitant fees for simple services. They have virtually no access to loans or insurance and no business deductions on their federal taxes, which puts some companies into a range where they are paying tax rates as high as 80%.

It is an understatement to say that the situation has become untenable.

At first, the small legacy cannabis farms began to fold, and now it seems that even the large multistate operators are leaving California.