What is Lifted Spirits? Its a fair question to ask but also a difficult question for us to answer. If you ask us what we want to be, the answer is simple. We want to be a cannabis company that attempts to disrupt the market place and change the way people think about cannabis and what the cannabis industry could be. We want to be a cannabis company that celebrates not only what cannabis is today, but also celebrate the cannabis and culture that was synonymous to growing up in Ohio in the 90s. We want to be a cannabis company that celebrates the breeders who put their heart, souls, and often their freedom into the cultivars we grow rather than re-write their history for our own gain. But unfortunately for us, what we want to be is not who we can be at the moment.
Just like in every state that has legalized cannabis in one form or another, Ohio’s medical program was designed to keep all of the licenses in the hands of wealthy private equity firms and multi-state operators. As a result, no new cultivation licenses have been approved since 2017 which has kept everyone else who wants in on the sidelines…including us. While we understood how difficult it was to get licensed in Ohio, the sheer corruption and greed of the legal cannabis industry was something we didn’t understand until now.
While we have certainly been done dirty by the industry, it really is nothing compared to what other’s have been through or are going through right now. Whether its legacy breeders having their work stolen from them and their names erased from history, cultivars being renamed and genetics being lost forever, small farmers being priced out of the industry due to calculated oversupply & over taxation, hourly employees being woefully underpaid, etc., there is a hidden underbelly of the legal cannabis industry that people just do not know about and need to.
Just like the knowledge of blood diamonds changing the purchasing behavior of consumers to conflict free diamonds, we want to bring to light the problems that are plaguing the legal cannabis industry in hopes of forcing the industry to change through similar means. In industries such as fine dining, craft beer, and bourbon, consumer knowledge has forced restaurants and distillers to explain where they source their ingredients from, the processes in which they are made, and ushered in a push for locally sourced sustainable ingredients/inputs. The cannabis industry should be this way but it isn’t because the consumer does not have the same knowledge and the industry does not want the consumer to have this knowledge. But that is all going to change!
While we may feel powerless at the moment in getting a license, we surely aren’t powerless in making our voices heard and the voices heard of every legacy breeder, seed maker, small farmer, and cannabis employee who has been taken advantage of by the industry. So until we are allowed to provide people with the dope cannabis they deserve, we are going to deliver dope news instead.
Until then, stay lifted my friends
-Lifted Spirits Team