Carol

Talcon 00:03All right, it's recording now. What's today's date? Today is February 19th?

Carol 00:10There's a calendar there, yeah, 19th.

Talcon 00:12Yeah, February 19, 2026. And I'm with Carol. Carol, do you consent to having this interview recorded today, and then later archived with the Cannabis Museum?

Carol 00:27Yes.

Talcon 00:29And do you consent to it being used for future projects, like podcasts or documentaries?

Carol 00:35Yes.

Talcon 00:36Great. Are there any stipulations with your consent?

Carol 00:40No.

Talcon 00:41Okay. So we talked before, like, you know, a couple months ago, about your experience with cannabis and working with it over the years. Overall, that's like, I think of it as being a very male-dominated industry.

Carol 01:07Yes, (giggling) that is correct. And, but you know, one of the best things you could do is be invisible, and in this case that was good, because being female, I was even more invisible than usual. People wouldn't think, oh, this is what she's doing. So it was actually helpful, and anybody that actually knew me knew I was competent and could do whatever, but people wouldn't assume that (giggle). So, so, in this case, that worked to my advantage.

Talcon 01:47Were there disadvantages to it also?

Carol 01:52No, not so much. In other areas it was, but in this to do with pot, no. Because, like, I said, it made you even more invisible and less suspect, so that was to my advantage.

Talcon 02:09Did you work with other women, or did you work primarily with men?

Carol 02:13Mostly with men. I can't think, actually, of any other, well, one or two, like women who helped here and there, but mostly it was men.

Talcon 02:24And what was that relationship like with them? Were they respectful? Did they, like, see you as an equal and a peer?

Carol 02:34Pretty much. I mean, like I said, they might make assumptions, but then once they actually knew me and knew what I could do. Then it was pretty much a peer relationship, and I didn't have nearly as much trouble with them as, like, with carpenters, for instance (laughs).

Talcon 02:56Oh, what were some of the issues you had with carpenters?

Carol 02:59Well, here's a good story. I was working on, Uptown on the Phoenix project? Where the buildings burned, but it kept the front of the building, is where the hardware store was, and a couple other things, and behind that facade they built new apartments. So I was on the finishing crew, working with a crew, putting up trim and doing finish work in these apartments, and and a guy on a different crew than mine, when I went into the room where we kept our tools, I went there to get something out of my toolbox, and he's like, "Oh, wow, that's like a really nice toolbox", like he was surprised. And I'm was like, "Yeah, they wouldn't all fit in my purse"' you know ? And and he actually did several other sexist type things. But in the end ended up like, "Okay, yeah, she can do what everybody else is doing, so I should cut her a break", but ..... So its little things like that, I found, you know, being a woman in the trades was a lot more problematic than working in pot. But I mostly dealt with it humorously, like that, you know, because, like, I said, I've had a pretty physical life, you know, I grew up with brothers, and some things were pretty rough and tumble along the way, and I could stand up for myself and be competent. So sense of humor is disarming and so that has worked out for me.

Talcon 04:54When you were working in the industry, you, it was like what the 70s? 80s,?90s? What was the cost of weed back then.

Carol 05:09It got up to around 4000 a pound, had become a pretty standard price for, you know, top shelf good stuff all trimmed pretty and everything. And it pretty much stayed at that level for a long time. It was less than that, like in the 70s, but but it stayed like that through most of the 80s, and I quit doing it at some point in the 90s, so.... and that's what it was then, and it stayed that way until fairly recently. With legalization, the price has gone down, and that is part of the reason why a lot of bigger growers weren't for legalization, because it is a weed, and it did indeed get cheaper. To where now it's like people are trying to give it away, basically. So, yeah, but you know, smaller growers, like I was mostly a smaller grower, you didn't necessarily get, you know, much more than 10 pounds, and you were sharing it with the crew and everything, so it wasn't like I was, you know, becoming real wealthy doing it. Some people were, but they were doing it on a bigger scale than I was. To me, for me, it was pretty much always a supplemental situation. I was still doing other work.

Talcon 06:45And did you have to travel with it? Like, how were you able to? How'd you find your customers?

Carol 06:53Well, like I said before, I mostly sold to individuals who were actually doing the sale, so I was pretty much the wholesaler, somebody else was the retailer, so I didn't like go around looking for customers, I knew, you know, enough people for a long enough period of time that it was safe and relatively easy, and I would sometimes make deliveries and drive with it, and that sort of thing. But once again I was taking it to the retailer, I wasn't taking it to the ultimate customer. And once again, being a woman, less likely to be stopped, less of a suspicious character, and so me being the person who drove stuff around, plus I have a clean driving record, never been arrested, etc. So I was the choice for that job.

Talcon 07:55Were there precautions that you took with driving, like in getting prepared to take this stinky herb somewhere?

Carol 08:05Yeah, if it was going anywhere, it went in those turkey bags that keep the odor in, and then sealed inside buckets. And also I had diversion things, like I almost always had dog-related things in my car, including open bags of dog food. Which is a distraction for drug sniffing dogs, which never came up, but that's what it was there for. So, there wasn't any odor, there wasn't anything visible that was suspicious. Usually, it was in a truck, you know, pickup truck, so it was in the back of the pickup truck, and it was a bucket or a box or something innocuous.

Talcon 08:55You mentioned that some of your top shelf product would find its way to musicians, who were some of those musicians.

Carol 09:05Well, I mentioned one the last time, and, and there were others, but I'm really bad at names, and most of them I only knew by their first name, and also they didn't necessarily know it was from me. So I can't really help you there, you know? I mean, like I said, we’ve seen each other at parties, we've chatted a little bit, but he probably wouldn't remember me, and I could barely remember him, and he did not know that that's where the donkey dicks were coming from (giggle). So you know, and the people that were the ultimate customers, they weren't getting it from me, they were getting it from whoever I had sold it to, so they had no reason to think that anything came from me or that I had anything. Do with it, I just like take the joint and go, "this is really nice", but nobody knew it was for me. So, and that's the way you want it.

Talcon 10:17We talked before about a weed drought that was happening in Hawaii. How did that come about? Like, what was it that sparked weed from not being able to be grown for a period of time in Hawaii?

Carol 10:38Well, at some point they did some spot checks at a few small country post offices, where they discovered that a lot of the outgoing packages had pot in them. And I don't know if that came about because one got accidentally opened or somebody smelled something, or how. But anyway, they became aware that pot was being mailed around through the post office, and so they had a big statewide crackdown on it, and and it became really hard to grow pot. I have friends that live in Waipio Valley, which is flat on the bottom of the valley, but really steep sides that go up like a couple 1000 feet, and to climb up those hillsides is quite a chore. It's steep. And so my friend was on his farm out in the flat part of the valley, and a helicopter was up above him - and and he was upset about that, because they're supposed to stay offshore, they're not supposed to come up into the valley - but they lowered a guy down on a rope who hacked down a pot plant growing on this steep hillside, and was like, "How did anybody even get there to plant that?". But that's the way they cut it, because that was the only way they were going to go there was from a helicopter. So it became a severe drought. There was growers weren't like, if whoever planted that plant couldn't even grow one plant on a hillside in a wilderness area, then they were pretty down on it, and so there was no pot in Hawaii. So the folks here said "We see the need, we'll take care of ya", and we grew what we called 'Ohioan'. And shipped it, palletized it, and shipped it in new food grade buckets, all packed in turkey bags with a label that I can't remember what it said, but something lightweight, because it wasn't real heavy.

Talcon 12:49Yeah, it wasn't peanut butter.

Carol 12:50Yeah, right, it wasn't peanut butter. I can't remember now what it was. But anyway, that got shipped to Hawaii to a business that a friend of mine was associated with there, and they picked it up and distributed it,