Buzz About Women in Cannabis: Breaking the Green Ceiling

Women cannabis activists struggle not only against society’s anti-marijuana laws but against a male dominated industry. Yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle explored the subject in depth. Here’s a small section featuring a Humboldt woman ganjapreneur, Karyn Wagner (featured earlier on RB here.)

As Californians prepare to vote on legalizing weed as early as next year, the ladies are quietly hatching two plans: to help women have more power in an incredibly lucrative industry, and to break through what some are already calling that industry’s “green ceiling.”

While women are being targeted with new products in the booming $2.7 billion marijuana market, many female weed entrepreneurs are frustrated that their voice is muted in a business that — much like those in the original Tupperware party era — is male-dominated.

Karyn Wagner, whose Humboldt collective created Sexxpot, said dispensary buyers scoffed when she pitched them the strain aimed at the female libido with the marketing tagline, “the flowers she really wants.”

“That’s because all of the buyers at these dispensaries are men,” Wagner said. “How do they know that there’s no market for it? But we hear that all the time.”

As an aside, the story shows the shift in attitudes towards pot people–as what local grower Casey O’Neill calls the “deviant label”  is no longer being applied to cannabis growers and marketers. Instead, the Chronicle writer compares the female ganjapreneur’s meeting to a tupperware party which is a far cry from the image of dangerous drug cartels which used to pervade every mention of anyone associated with the marijuana industry.

Read more here.