A Diamond District jeweler took one of weed culture’s most temporary objects and tried to make it permanent. The finished piece looks like a luxury object. Getting there was not.

Reported with Cesar Soriano

Ahead of 4/20 last year, a bag of cannabis showed up at a Diamond District jewelry shop, and according to the crew, none of it got smoked. It wasn’t a gift for the staff. It was raw material. “We didn’t smoke any of it, of course,” said Angel, a jeweler on the TraxNYC floor. “It was for production.” The shop had never tried what it was about to: taking a real cannabis nug and turning it into solid gold.

This was not a gold-plated flower or a nug sealed inside a shell. The flower itself became the model, packed in plaster, burned out with heat, then replaced by molten metal that hardened inside the cavity it left behind. The weed disappeared. The gold kept the form, down to the texture.

For Maksud “Trax” Agadjani, who founded TraxNYC as a teenager in the early 2000s and has since made custom pieces for a long list of rappers and athletes, appeared in Uncut Gems and, this past January, went viral for a Diamond District brawl that ended with two rival jewelers under arrest, the pull was simple. “The fact that you could take a real flower and turn it into gold is amazing,” he said. He has a simpler word for the reaction it got: magic. “What catches people’s attention is magic,” he said.

The idea came from Cesar Soriano, who publishes under the name T.H.Caeczar and brought the concept to TraxNYC. He’d seen cannabis jewelry before, and credits two makers who sell under the handles @RasBoss_ and @BlingYourBud with getting there first. Their pieces relied on thin plating over a real flower, which could wear down and need refinishing. Soriano wanted the shape of the flower reproduced in solid metal instead, with no maintenance and nothing to wear off. He supplied the flower, from crosses he bred himself. He estimates he dropped off about three ounces, New York’s legal possession limit, though Angel remembered a bigger bag. Soriano stayed involved as the shop worked through the early failures, and later recorded the conversations that form the reporting backbone of this story.

The finished piece looks ready for a luxury showroom. Making it was considerably messier.

Soriano sat down with the TraxNYC crew to walk back through what happened, and High Times reviewed those recorded interviews. Nobody in them pretends the thing came easy. “Honestly, it wasn’t an easy process,” Angel said. “It took us, well, like two to three months.” They were chasing a 4/20 deadline and working blind. “That’s the first time I ever had something like that brought up to me,” he said.

Then the casts started popping and breaking apart. “I think the first five that we made kept popping on us,” Angel said. Once the nugs went into the metal, they came apart. Danny, the designer who took on the casting, watched most of the first run fail. “The first casting, when it was like ten pieces, only like three came out good,” he said. “It was like unique, one-of-a-kind shit really.”

The trouble was density. A nug packed too loose left air pockets, and air pockets wreck a cast. Most attempts failed before the team found flowers dense enough to cast clean. “It was super hazardous,” Angel said of the failures. When one finally held, he said, “it was like a caveman discovering fire.” Even then the yield was brutal: of four good candidates, he said, only two came out the way they wanted.

Moisture turned out to matter too, which answered the question that filled the comments once the shop posted video of the process: why use old weed? Because fresh flower doesn’t cast. Danny said his research pointed the other way from intuition. Drier, staler flower holds its shape in the mold. Wet flower ruins it.

The basic method was familiar to any jeweler. The material going into the mold was not. Instead of a carved wax model, the team used the actual flower. “The piece is dipped in plaster, the plaster hardens, and then you pour the molten metal,” Agadjani said. “It burns out the flower. It vaporizes it and takes its place with gold.” Anyone hoping a little of the plant survives inside is misreading the temperature. “If you’re burning it with a lighter, how do you expect it to be there after melting it with gold?” he said.

“This is way cooler. This has never been done before,” Agadjani said, and he’ll go further, calling it a first in human history. What the interviews establish is narrower. Casting real organic material into metal is an established technique, and Danny said he borrowed the approach from a casting contact who does it with real leaves, usually in brass. Nobody at TraxNYC had attempted it with cannabis before.

The only part harder than turning a flower into gold is agreeing on what happened next. Soriano and Danny described the finish as PVD, a coating they said was intended to add durability and preserve the color. Danny was loose on the specifics. “What it stands for I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s basically just like another coating on top.” Agadjani wasn’t sure it was on the piece at all. “I don’t remember using PVD on this piece, to be honest,” he said. “This should have been electroplated.” The interviews never resolve which finish the sold pieces actually got.

[[ IMAGE: Angel_XRF_Gun_Nug.JPG ]]
Caption: Angel scans the prototype with the shop’s XRF gun, under TraxNYC’s YouTube plaques. Photo by Cesar Soriano.
Alt: A TraxNYC jeweler scanning the gold cannabis pendant with an XRF gun

The metal, at least, is not in dispute. During the interview, Angel put Soriano’s own prototype under the shop’s XRF gun, which reads alloy content and, he noted, had never been pointed at the piece before. It came back at 10.81 karat, which Angel rounded to 11: a shade above the 10-karat core the prototype was built as, under a 22-karat dip. The screen broke out the rest of the alloy too, 39% copper, 10% silver and 5% zinc. The pieces TraxNYC sold were made in 18-karat gold, Angel said, with green diamonds set in the bail. A video the shop posted to Instagram is what turned the experiment into orders. Angel estimated it drew around three million views in its first day and several million since. The first sold about two weeks after it went up. The last went to a longtime client.

At least one buyer walked in with more than looks in mind. Jeff, who found the nug in the TraxNYC display window, knew on sight. “My response was like our old friend Wayne Campbell from Wayne’s World,” he said. “She will be mine. Oh yes, she will be mine.” Holding it sealed it. “Wow, that’s definitely heavy,” he remembered thinking. “It’s like a daddy falling in love with his newborn the first time he holds him.”

For Jeff, the piece is less about showing off than marking what cannabis has meant in his life. “This piece for me is a trophy piece,” he said. “Over the years I’ve benefited in so many ways from the power of this plant, so now this piece is something to never let me forget that.” He sees the gold itself as part of the value too. “This particular one weighs out to exactly 1.5 ounces of gold bullion locked into the piece,” he said, “so for me it sort of doubles as an investment.” The price of a custom one-of-one piece reflects the design and labor as much as the metal, but the gold is real, and that permanence is the whole point for him.

Asked what he’d make next with no budget limits, Agadjani went somewhere stranger. “You could make a miniature grow farm where you could put a seed in, the pendant grows the bud and you grow it in there,” he said. It isn’t a production plan. It does say something about where a shop’s head goes after weeks of blowing up gold nugs to find out what was possible.

Cannabis flower is made to disappear. It gets broken apart, burned and gone by the end of the night. This one went too. What survived was the shape it left behind, fixed in a metal built to outlast everyone who handled it.

Editor’s note: Cesar Soriano (T.H.Caeczar) originated the jewelry project with TraxNYC, conducted the interviews and took the photographs used in this story, and has a commercial interest in the design. TraxNYC sells the pieces commercially. High Times owner Josh Kesselman saw the piece at TraxNYC before this story was pitched, and has appeared wearing it in TraxNYC’s own social media. High Times reviewed the interview recordings and written responses and verified the quotations before publication.

Source link

The cannabis industry spent years predicting flower’s decline. Grown Rogue CEO and co-founder Obie Strickler argues that the prediction said more about industry executives than it did about consumers.

When we started Grown Rogue more than a decade ago, I kept hearing about how new form factors were going to make flower extinct. Edibles, concentrates, vapes, and capsules were all going to replace flower as the primary way people consumed cannabis.

That prediction came mostly from new professionals entering the industry, bringing experience in consumer packaged goods, real estate development, finance, and investing. They often believed a new, improved consumer was going to take over the market. Think affluent newcomers with disposable income who had never rolled a joint in their lives. Many of these “experts” were not regular cannabis consumers, and they completely missed the reality of who was actually buying.

I saw this play out in real time. In 2017, I took a family member to a dispensary for the first time. She was exactly the new consumer everyone was hunting for: disposable income, no prior history with cannabis, and curious about the whole thing. She spent the visit talking about how amazing the lamp near the entrance was while I was in the back inspecting the quality of the flower on the shelves.

When we left, I asked her what her preferred form factor was. Vapes, she said. Great, I said. How many vapes do you go through in a month? She laughed. Oh, maybe one or two a year.

That was the aha moment. Here was the consumer so many in the industry had bet on, and she was buying one or two vapes a year. The volume assumptions built around that new consumer were simply wrong. The people buying flower week in and week out, the ones actually driving category revenue, were the consumers everyone in the industry seemed to be writing off.

The Market Never Moved On From Flower

Flower and pre-rolls still command a huge share of the legal cannabis market, although the exact mix varies by state. Headset’s current industry data puts flower at $9.6 billion, or 39.4% of sales across 16 tracked state markets, for the 12 months ending June 2026. Pre-rolls accounted for another 15.8% and were the fastest-growing major category, increasing 10.1% year over year.

The 2026 State of the Pre-Roll Market Report, using Headset point-of-sale data from 15 states, found that pre-rolls generated nearly $3.6 billion in 2025. Infused products represented 47% of pre-roll revenue, leaving a little more than half of the category to non-infused formats. Headset has also observed that flower tends to begin with a higher market share in newer markets before declining as those markets mature and more product categories become available.

Concentrates and vapes have real audiences, and edibles have carved out their own category. None of that changes the fundamental reality that regular cannabis consumers keep coming back to flower.

A Flower-First Education

I grew up in Southern Oregon, born in a cabin with no electricity or indoor plumbing to parents who were true hippies. They had left the city to live something more humble and simple. The region sits at the northern edge of the Emerald Triangle, and, for good or bad, cannabis was as much a part of the fabric of those communities as anything else. People had relocated there in the 1960s and 1970s to live on their own terms, and growing became part of that history.

As I got older, I started “borrowing” flower from my big brother, who was probably “borrowing” it from my dad. Pretty quickly, that turned into growing my own once my habits outpaced anything that could go unnoticed.

That was when I started developing a real taste for quality flower, and that early curiosity turned into a genuine obsession with genetics. I wanted to know what had the best flavor, what produced the best experience, and why the same strain could taste completely different depending on how it was grown.

Sarah, my wife and co-founder, and I were both deep in this from a young age. We were growing our own flower in the hills, entering Oregon’s medical program to add a layer of safety and legitimacy, and spending a lot of time with friends who were just as serious about the plant as we were. We talked genetics, tried new strains, and kept working to get better. That history and commitment to flower are why we went all in when legalization created a path to build something real.

I never bought the predictions about flower’s decline because I knew what regular cannabis consumers looked like. I was, and still am, one of them. The people I grew up around did not switch to vape cartridges when concentrates hit the market. They were smokers who cared about the strain, the cure, and the way it burned. Those consumers did not disappear when dispensaries opened. They finally had somewhere legal to shop.

Sarah and I do not smoke like we used to. An eighth a day to myself was pretty much standard back in the day. That is not where we are anymore, but flower is still pretty much all that we smoke. Whether rolling our own or grabbing a pack of pre-rolls for convenience, it is what we keep coming back to. You cannot replicate the experience of high-quality flower, and we hear the same thing from most of our friends.

What Flower-First Means in Practice

There is a real and growing market for convenience products and new form factors. We are not ignoring them. But when operators build their entire strategy around the assumption that flower is fading, they risk underinvesting in cultivation quality, cutting corners on genetics, and alienating the regular customers who sustain the category.

To me, a flower-first business strategy means specific things in practice. It means putting serious money into your genetics program instead of licensing whatever strains are trending. It means treating post-harvest handling with the same discipline as the grow itself because a great plant can be ruined in the dry room.

It means being straight with retail partners about what your product actually delivers. It also means resisting the temptation to discount quality simply to chase volume.

None of that means ignoring other delivery systems. We look for ways to carry some of that genetic expression into vapes and concentrates through products such as live resin and rosin. But our legacy, our culture, and our focus have been, and will continue to be, putting great flower first.

That is still the bet we are making. The death of flower has been greatly exaggerated. It was never going anywhere. The people saying otherwise just were not the ones doing the consuming.

Images courtesy of Grown Rogue.

Content Disclaimer: Obie Strickler is CEO and co-founder of Grown Rogue, a multistate cannabis operator whose business includes flower and pre-roll products. This article reflects Strickler’s personal and professional perspective on the cannabis flower market and may align with the commercial interests of Grown Rogue. It was submitted as an unpaid contribution and does not represent independent reporting by High Times.

Source link

The California Department of Cannabis Control (DCC) recently posted a voluntary recall notice for a Baddies Worldwide Flower cannabis product by Backpackboyz after officials determined the product violates cannabis industry packaging and labeling regulations by being too attractive to children.

The packaging contains 3.5 grams of cannabis flower and a small figurine offered as part of a brand partnership with Natalie Nunn, a California reality television star who first appeared on the Oxygen show “Bad Girls Club” and now executive produces the show “Baddies” on the Zeus Network.

“DCC determined that the packaging and labeling used for the affected product contains imagery and design elements that are attractive to children and therefore does not comply with California cannabis packaging and labeling requirements.” — Excerpt from the voluntary recall notice

While the DCC notice does not express concerns about the cannabis flower itself, the agency recommends that consumers who still have the product either dispose of or return it to the retail location where it was purchased.

The product was sold on or after May 15, 2026, at retailers in Alameda, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Clara, and Sonoma.

Ganjapreneur: Offering daily insights since 2014, the leading digital business journal for cannabis industry professionals. Subscribe to the newsletter to join our community of over 40,000 ganjapreneurs.

Source link

THCA Flower and Federal Law

Federal legality (as of 2025)
Under the 2018 Farm Bill, hemp-derived products containing less than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight are legal. Since THCA is not delta-9 THC, THCA flower typically qualifies as hemp — until it’s heated and converted into THC.

The gray area:
Some states (and proposed federal updates) regulate based on “total THC” — counting potential THC produced after heating (decarboxylation). This means legal status depends not just on current THC levels, but on what the product could become.

State-by-State Breakdown

Permissive States (THCA flower legal under hemp laws)

• California
• Colorado
• Florida
• Maine
• Maryland
• North Carolina
• New Mexico
• Nevada
• Oklahoma
• Virginia

THCA flower can generally be sold and shipped, provided it complies with the 0.3% delta-9 THC rule and includes COAs.

Gray-Area / Restricted States (THCA flower legal but regulated or under review)

• Texas – THCA flower legal under hemp rules, but lawmakers are proposing bans or “total THC” regulations. Enforcement is inconsistent.
• Tennessee – Legal until January 1, 2026, when THCA will be redefined as marijuana.
• Georgia – Legal if delta-9 THC <0.3%, but smokable hemp faces enforcement challenges.
• Indiana – Legal but smokable hemp is restricted.
• Kentucky – Legal, but new legislation aims to regulate total THC.

In these states, THCA flower is available but could face future restrictions or varying interpretations by law enforcement.

Prohibited States (THCA flower banned or smokable hemp illegal)

• Arkansas
• Idaho
• Louisiana – Smokable hemp banned; total THC must be <1%.
• Minnesota
• Oregon – Smokable hemp banned to prevent confusion with marijuana.
• Rhode Island

Avoid buying, selling, or shipping THCA flower into these states to prevent legal consequences.

Key Legal Risks

THCA converts to THC when heated — In many states, this makes THCA flower indistinguishable from marijuana in the eyes of law enforcement.

Drug tests — Heated THCA produces THC metabolites that will trigger positive test results.

Changing laws — States like Texas, Tennessee, and others are considering or implementing stricter controls on THCA products.

How to Stay Compliant

Always provide COAs — Certificates of Analysis verifying delta-9 THC <0.3% are essential.

Know your state’s current rules — Check official hemp program websites or consult legal professionals.

Avoid psychoactive marketing claims — In gray-area states, don’t advertise THCA flower as a way to get high. Focus on compliance, wellness, and raw uses.

Be cautious when shipping — Carriers like USPS and FedEx may have policies regarding hemp shipments. Label packages clearly as hemp with accompanying lab results.

Final Thoughts

THCA flower offers exciting possibilities — but legality depends heavily on where you are. In permissive states, you can buy and enjoy it with relative ease. In gray-area or prohibited states, it’s vital to tread carefully, stay informed, and prioritize compliance to avoid legal issues.

As laws evolve, check frequently for updates, and always buy from reputable, lab-tested sources.

The post Is THCA Flower Legal in Your State? CA, CO, FL, NV, OK… first appeared on Cannadelics.

Source link

What Is a COA?

A Certificate of Analysis (COA) is an official lab report from a third-party testing facility that verifies the chemical composition and purity of a cannabis or hemp product.

For THCA flower, a COA confirms:

• THCA content — The main cannabinoid in the product.
• Delta-9 THC levels — Must be <0.3% to comply with federal hemp laws.
• Safety — Absence of harmful contaminants (pesticides, heavy metals, mold).

Why COAs Matter When Buying THCA Flower

Proof of legality
A COA shows that your THCA flower contains less than 0.3% delta-9 THC by dry weight — the legal threshold under the 2018 Farm Bill.

Assurance of quality
COAs verify that you’re getting what’s advertised — no fake potency claims, no hidden toxins.

Protection from legal and health risks
If law enforcement or employers question your product, a COA provides evidence of compliance.

How to Read a COA for THCA Flower

Here’s a step-by-step guide to decoding a COA:

1⃣ Check the Lab Name and Date

• Make sure the test was done by a licensed, third-party lab, not the product seller.
• Look at the test date — fresh COAs (within 6-12 months) are best.

2⃣ Review the Cannabinoid Profile

Look for a table that lists all cannabinoids (usually in % or mg/g). Focus on:

• THCA % — High THCA levels are normal (10–30% typical for premium flower).
• Delta-9 THC % — Should be <0.3% to be federally legal as hemp.
• Total THC (sometimes listed) — Adds potential THC from THCA (after heating). States with “total THC” laws may consider this number for legality.

Example:

3⃣ Scan for Contaminant Testing

Quality COAs also show tests for:

• Pesticides
• Heavy metals (e.g., lead, arsenic)
• Mycotoxins (mold)
• Residual solvents (if extract-based)

Look for “PASS” or levels marked as below the legal limit.

4⃣ Verify Product Details

• Check that the COA matches the product’s name, strain, and batch number on the packaging.
• This ensures you’re looking at the correct test results for what you’ve purchased.

5⃣ Confirm Compliance

Many COAs will summarize compliance (e.g., “Complies with 2018 Farm Bill hemp standards”).
Save a copy (digital or printed) in case you need to show proof during shipping, at work, or to law enforcement.

Red Flags to Watch For

No third-party lab listed — Could indicate internal testing or fake COA.
Outdated tests — Lab results from over a year ago may not reflect current product quality.
Missing data — A COA without contaminant testing leaves questions about safety.
High delta-9 THC — Any product with >0.3% delta-9 THC is illegal at the federal level (and in most states).

How COAs Protect You

Legal protection — Prove your flower is hemp-derived, not marijuana.
Health assurance — Avoid harmful contaminants.
Better value — You get what you pay for — no inflated potency claims or poor-quality flower.

Final Tips for Buyers

Always buy THCA flower from reputable brands that provide clear, easy-to-access COAs.
If a seller can’t or won’t provide a COA — that’s a big red flag.
Take time to review COAs, especially if buying for shipment into a gray-area state.

The post How to Read a Certificate of Analysis (COA) When Shopping for THCA Flower first appeared on Cannadelics.

Source link

Source link