Cannabis as a People’s Movement: A Story of Community

A titanium dabber company called Happy Daddy flew him to Denver. He found a megaphone, picked it up, and started talking to the crowd. 90 minutes. Batteries died. They invited him back for a bigger show with a real megaphone. Then High Times Denver — “10,000 people in one booth.”

The message that drew the crowds was not about getting high — it was about economic mobility.

“We got to a board where everything was taken,” Tacoma says, reaching for an analogy that has followed him across a decade of events. “There was a hotel on steel, there was a hotel on cotton. And all of a sudden, Park Place is cannabis. And while it’s federally illegal, no big guys will touch it. It was an opportunity for so many people of all different colors, ethnicities, and backgrounds to suddenly have economic mobility.”

The joke in the industry, as Tacoma tells it: “We’re all surfing a wave that everyone else is paddling to catch.”

The business model was counterintuitive. Tacoma taxed the companies making money off the community — “Hey, you’re making your money off the community. What do you want to give back?” — took their product, and gave it away. The giveaways went viral and drew investors.

His first pitch: “I have the kind of numbers that make people rich. I need a rich person to make it happen.” A man in the back of the room raised his hand. Series A money from New York. Almost a million-dollar valuation at the start.

Dutch investors followed, connected through a colleague. Tacoma says his Dutch investor “bought half of my company.” The investors at the Seattle High Times show, seeing the energy firsthand, told him to give everything away.

“As soon as they caught the vibe, they said, ‘Jonah, just give it all away.’ And they let me just do my thing.”

Since then, Dabstars has monetized business-to-business. The company has been operating for over a decade, confirmed across multiple industry publications, including Ganjapreneur, Cannabis Now, and Oregon Leaf.

Tacoma was recruited to the Hawaii Cannabis Expo at the Emerald Cup in Northern California 11 or 12 years ago. He has been coming back since.

The throughline of his story, stripped to its simplest form: “No one gave us cannabis. We took cannabis back. They didn’t want us to have this. We just stopped being the minority and became the vocal majority.”

“We don’t get loans from banks. We get help from each other.”

Getting a Second Chance

Sean — Microbros LLC, out of Iron River, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula — tells his origin story in a single sentence before the details fill in.

“I did two years in prison for cannabis.”

One pound. Not craft flower. Not indoor-grown anything. Swag — “the old brick weed that came from Mexico that was black. It wasn’t even green. It was horrible.” One pound of it, in Wisconsin, was enough for a two-year sentence.

“When I was in prison in Wisconsin, medical went legal in Michigan,” Sean says. Michigan voters approved Proposal 1 on November 4, 2008, with 63 percent of the vote, making it the 13th state to legalize medical cannabis and the first in the Midwest, according to Ballotpedia.

“When I got out, I seen an opportunity to not have my life and my freedom on the line.”

That opportunity required breaking the rules. Sean was still on parole in Wisconsin. He refused to change his residency for two and a half years while growing cannabis in Michigan. “I broke all the rules,” he says. “I continued to grow cannabis in another state.” It was a calculated risk — the kind that, in his telling, felt less like recklessness than necessity.

“Everyone around me was like, ‘Man, Sean’s kind of off his rocker. He did 2 years; he thought way too much in there. He’s coming out, he went crazy.'”

He had money tucked away. He bought property in Michigan. His brother said, “Bro, I’m with you. Just show me the road.” It took five years to build. A 4,000-square-foot building, then a 1,500-square-foot addition. “We did the concrete, we built it, we roofed it. We grow it, we process it, we do it all.”

Then the family followed. “My sister, my mom, my brother — our whole family relocated to the UP, four hours away, to continue to pursue this dream of mine.” Sean calls it the family motto before it was a motto: “A family that grows together, stays together.”

Microbros operates under Michigan’s caregiver model — a provision of the state’s medical cannabis law allowing registered individuals to cultivate cannabis for qualified patients. Under the program, a caregiver may grow up to 12 plants for each of up to five patients, as confirmed by the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs. One of Sean’s patients, a woman with multiple sclerosis — a qualifying condition under Michigan’s program — traveled with them to the expo.

“We don’t have investors,” Sean says. “We don’t have to bend to anybody else’s rules. We can still produce craft cannabis and not worry about profit over patients.”

Sean chose that path on purpose. He watched the broader industry shift in a direction he didn’t follow. “It was all about the money, and they stopped caring about the product and the medical benefits.”

His live resin carts use no propylene glycol, a synthetic liquid commonly added as a thinning agent in cheaper vape cartridges. His standard: terpenes from the same plant, not imported from a different strain or synthesized.

“All the terpenes from that plant, not from a different strain or some artificial stuff.” He calls it “bro science,” then corrects himself. “We really do have some real science going on — with our wax, it’s all thermodynamics.”

The most dramatic reversal in Sean’s story is not the prison-to-brand arc — it’s his father. “My dad grew up in a Christian-based family, and he was always like, ‘It’s the devil. Cannabis is the devil.’ That made me — maybe some uncovered trauma — I had [more] to prove to my dad.” Now: “My dad’s calling me like, ‘Hey, what can I get for my back spasm?'”

Real Stories: Healing without Permission Through Cannabis

Hansel Andres Aquino

Hansel Andres Aquino, a cancer survivor and MMA fighter, grew up believing cannabis was a gateway drug. At 17, he was diagnosed with epithelioid sarcoma — a rare and aggressive soft tissue cancer constituting less than one percent of all soft tissue sarcomas, with five-year survival rates ranging from roughly 50 to 75% depending on disease stage (Jawad et al., 2009; Cleveland Clinic) — and given three months to live. He refused amputation and chemotherapy. His doctor recommended cannabis for pain and appetite.

Approximately 18 years cancer-free, Aquino has drawn a distinction in other interviews: “I don’t want to say that cannabis cured my cancer, but I do want to say that it worked in cooperation with my cancer treatment.”

Ajunelle Spishawn Simmons

Ajunelle Spishawn Simmons arrived at healing through a different compound and a different branch of service. A Marine Corps veteran who served in North Carolina before reenlisting at Kaneohe Bay, Simmons struggled with cocaine, then depression, then discharge under difficult circumstances. The period after, he describes simply as “drifting.”

A friend introduced him to blue honey — psilocybin mushrooms infused in honey, a preparation method documented in forensic literature since at least the late 1990s (Bogusz et al., 1998). Simmons microdosed every third day for two months, following the Fadiman protocol. The protocol was outlined by psychedelic researcher James Fadiman in his 2011 book The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide and has since been studied in peer-reviewed settings, including a 2019 systematic study published in PLOS ONE.

He started Mana Mushroom Honey to share the product. Each jar comes with a pamphlet outlining two dosing schedules: the Fadiman protocol, which uses a one-day-on, two-days-off cycle, and the Stamets protocol, named for mycologist Paul Stamets, which uses a five-days-on, two-days-off cycle combined with lion’s mane mushroom and niacin. Simmons acknowledges operating in a legal gray area. Psilocybin remains a Schedule I substance in Hawaii, though Governor Green’s Breakthrough Therapies Task Force, established in August 2023 through the Office of Wellness and Resilience, has begun exploring therapeutic access pathways for psilocybin and MDMA.

James “JT” Trice

James “JT” Trice came to Hawaii at 19, in 2004, as a military medic. Taught first aid. Then transferred to Fort Bragg, worked emergency and trauma, and deployed to Iraq as a combat medic. Got out on disability, came back to Hawaii.

In 2017, a Vietnam veteran named John committed suicide in a Chinatown building where Trice and his co-founder, Theo Alexander, a Navy veteran, were working. It became the catalyst for CAMO — Complementary and Alternative Medicines of Oahu — a nonprofit serving veterans and their families with herbal therapies including cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms, horticulture therapy, music therapy, equine therapy, massage, and acupuncture. CAMO’s work has been covered by Hawaii News Now, MidWeek, ThinkTech Hawaii, and Cannabis Business Times.

Trice’s military medical credentials — his NREMT certification, the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians qualification earned during service — were not recognized by Hawaii’s civilian system, a documented nationwide issue affecting veterans transitioning to civilian healthcare roles. He went back to school, earned his CCMA — Certified Clinical Medical Assistant — and is now pursuing music therapy certification.

“I’m 42,” Trice says. “I smoke my weed up there and stuff, make music sometimes. And grow. That’s it.”

Aquino, Simmons, and Trice built parallel care systems because institutional medicine — the VA, the hospital, the D.A.R.E. program, the Schedule I classification — either failed them or never offered what they needed in the first place.