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.

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When renowned US film director Paul Thomas Anderson and production designer Florencia Martin visited the Sisters of the Valley farm in California’s Central Valley, they were stunned. They were scouting locations and finding inspiration for their new film, and that work, the lush greenery, those open landscapes, those distant mountains… all that timeless mystique remained etched into their retinas.

“The connection was very organic,” Sister Karina readily acknowledges, amid the renewed attention surrounding One Battle After Another, the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring film that just won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Sister Karina was formerly with the Sisters of the Valley and is now with Sisters of New York, a separate organization with no affiliation or direct relation to Sisters of the Valley.

So who are the Sisters of the Valley? Essentially, an international community of women (and allies) united by a common purpose: to defend women’s sovereignty, honor spirituality, and protect the cannabis plant as sacred medicine. They say it’s not a traditional religious order, but an independent spiritual movement with its own lineage that, they claim, “predates conventional religious structures.”

PTA was already familiar with the work of the Sisters of the Valley and respected the cultural impact surrounding their movement. However, both Anderson and the Sisters of the Valley knew that the farm wasn’t suitable for filming such a production, but they continued the conversation and stayed in contact. There was “something” that drew him to the Sisters… Finally, they were invited to participate in the filming, to bring their ritual elements, and to be part of the ensemble that appears in the scenes filmed at La Purísima Mission State Historic Park in Santa Barbara County.

“It’s a historic site with colonial architecture and expansive grounds, which allowed us to create a larger-scale film set without losing that earthy and spiritual feeling that characterizes our spaces. Although they are different places, they share a similar energy,” explains Sister Karina, who at the time was involved in strategic communication, creative direction, brand expansion, and cultural vision around the Sisters of the Valley.

“From the very beginning, there was a dialogue of admiration and respect for our work and for a living culture that has been developing for ten years since our founding. And that is now reflected, albeit fictionally, on the big screen,” Sister Karina proudly states regarding her contribution to the film. In fact, the presence of the “Sisters of the Brave Beaver,” who are part of the film’s plot, is directly inspired by the Sisters of the Valley. “We were physically on set, acting and becoming part of the living environment that surrounds the story.”

In that sense, the art and production team was extremely careful and meticulous in constructing the space. “Many details and scenes that didn’t make the final cut aren’t directly visible on screen, but they feel palpable in the world built with such detail, so much so that we feel like we’re in such a familiar environment. The way the elements were arranged helped the place evoke the same energy we experience on our farm, only amplified for the screen,” Sister Karina acknowledges.

In One Battle After Another, a fable in which a fallen revolutionary lives in a state of paranoia and must confront his nemesis while searching for his missing daughter, cannabis emerges not only as a visual element, but stands as a living presence. Here, rebellious nature and activism begin to break down barriers. It is there, then, that the Sisters of the Valley truly feel at home. “What we appreciate most is how Paul Thomas Anderson weaves the presence of cannabis into the story organically. Not as a gimmick, but with the same reverence with which we relate to it, as part of a living ecosystem and community,” the activist emphasizes.

Of course, for the Sisters of the Valley, spirituality and the plant are deeply intertwined. Their use of it (including ointments, drops, and capsules) is “an offering of connection, healing, and grounding.” They firmly assert: “It is a sacred plant that has accompanied humanity for centuries as a tool for connection, healing, and expanding consciousness.”

Every step, from seed to harvest, is infused with their prayers, chants, and healing intentions. The reverence with which they cultivate and prepare their medicine is not a symbolic gesture: it is a deep and real commitment that they take very seriously. “Our spiritual practice is not an aesthetic or a trend: it is the heart of our community. Every ceremony, every planting, every harvest, and every preparation of our medicine is guided by the natural lunar cycles and by a deep respect for Mother Earth.”

For all these reasons, seeing themselves portrayed in Anderson’s feature became “a profoundly important experience.” Sister Karina notes that Anderson placed them in the spotlight “with great love and grace,” especially in the scene where Colonel Lockjaw, played by Oscar winner Sean Penn, arrives at the Chupa Cabra Mountains searching for Willa, DiCaprio’s daughter, and while questioning a worker, the man tells him that behind those mountains there is a “group of nuns who grow weed.” Don’t worry, it’s not a spoiler, just a hint. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

“We couldn’t have been in better hands. This nod in the film feels almost like a symbolic reward for having survived ten years in an environment that is constantly changing and that, many times, has tried to wipe us out. For us, it is an honor that our existence has inspired a cinematic universe that opens up conversations. Seeing it reflected in some way in a work of this caliber was a very significant moment.”

Regarding their relationship with PTA — now the Oscar-winning director of One Battle After Another, alongside a superb filmography that includes Boogie Nights, Magnolia and Licorice Pizza — the Sisters of the Valley are deeply grateful and hope their bond continues to flourish. “For us, this gesture means much more than an on-screen appearance: it’s a symbolic recognition of a history of resistance, autonomy, and faith in what we do,” says Sister Karina. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}

Meanwhile, this is the activists’ first appearance in a Hollywood-caliber film. They had participated in several documentaries, including Breaking Habits, directed by British filmmaker Rob Ryan, which portrays the genesis of their movement through the story of Sister Kate, its founder, and the path that led her to create it.

Now, they hope to capitalize on all the momentum generated by One Battle After Another, since their visibility “is” their activism. “We’re not your typical nuns. Boom! We’re not worried about media attention, since it’s a tool we use specifically to defend and amplify the voice of the plant, reminding everyone of the sacred connection we share as living beings.”

And, amidst all the lights, ads, and media attention, they hope the audience leaves the theater entertained and, in doing so, that this whole experience becomes a gateway for more people to learn about their work and, specifically, the reason for their existence. “We want people to understand that this fight isn’t just for the plant, but for a shift in consciousness. We want it to be known that our voice is collective, ancestral, and profoundly human,” Sister Karina concludes.

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