KT, one of the behind-the-scenes organizers, has a way of cutting through the usual trade-show language to explain what the expo actually is.
“This is about cannabis, but it’s about community because it’s a fucking plant at the end of the fucking day.”
The plant is the occasion. The community is the point. The expo supports smaller cannabis events statewide. It brings mainland vendors to an island market that remains medical-only. It gives seed breeders, influencer marketers, veteran nonprofits, and grandmothers with skincare lines the same square footage. But the thing that holds all of it together is the people who show up for each other around it. “This is the largest event for the state, for anything cannabis really,” KT says. “There’s a bunch of smaller ones that we help support, but it’s all a community of people just trying to help support each other.”
Hawaii legalized medical cannabis through its legislature in 2000 — the first state to do so through legislation rather than ballot initiative. Despite that early move, the state has not passed adult-use legislation despite repeated Senate efforts; the House of Representatives has blocked legalization for years. In that environment, mutual support is the operating system.
Tacoma walked in with no table, no product, and no brand. “I went to school for computer science,” he told the organizers. “I will work for free, use me somewhere.” They put him on social media. He had weed to photograph and a platform to build. That was 2013.
The brand that emerged, Dabstars, started with a sticker. A $2.50 sticker that nobody bought — cupcakes moved, stickers didn’t. Halfway through the day, Tacoma took the stickers off the table and started handing them to people he admired — growers, extractors, advocates, the people he considered the rock stars of the community. “Please, will you take a picture?” They held the sticker like a mugshot — “the instinctive pose because of the shape.” He took the photos home, wrote a paragraph on each person, and created a Facebook page.
“Within 48 hours, we had a thousand followers,” Tacoma says. By the time the page reached 100,000, “people started really treating us different, ’cause they wanted access.”
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.”
“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?'”
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.”
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.
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.
“We’re just two best friends who have a podcast,” Nicole says. “Both grandmas. Breaking the stigma regarding cannabis.”
Two Oklahoma grandmas with compliance certifications and charity galas, selling reef-safe sunscreen at a cannabis expo in a medical-only state. The people in this room make the stoner stereotype hard to sustain.
Marcel, a 64-year-old staff member who hasn’t smoked in 24 years, shows up because his friends are there — the most powerful testimony that cannabis community transcends cannabis consumption.
Sean from Malt Shop Bongs — upcycled antique vessels turned into hookah-style bongs for two, handcrafted in Hawaii — carries a different version of the stigma. “Being Gen X, I come from when this kind of thing would get you in big trouble.”
His solution: a YouTube channel where puppet characters named Crisco and Rosie demonstrate the products, a creative workaround that has become the brand’s signature.
The bongs themselves are art objects hiding in plain sight. Music boxes refurbished and working underneath. Pieces sourced from auctions, their histories researched. A love story at the origin — he and his then-girlfriend made bongs from found items forty years ago, lost touch for a lifetime, reconnected, and she moved to Hawaii.
“Remember that pipe we had?” She inspired the restart and the design improvements: “Could you get me a long one so I don’t even have to get up?”
Cannabis normalization through craft. Prohibition trauma metabolized into puppetry and vintage ceramics.
Marvin Horton opened up over lunch the moment someone offered him food. A country boy at heart who works at Arancino in Waikiki, sitting with strangers of all ages, talking about what comes next. He found community instantly.
A glass-blowing vendor from Kailua made pieces in real time on the showroom floor — art happening live while the expo moved around it. Doc MJ set up at the expo to help people sign up for medical cannabis cards on site — functional access to the program, not a seminar about it.
Monicah, a model connected to the expo, texted afterward: “Vendors from the mainland told me it is actually the best expo compared to others. They said they felt more welcomed and that people were friendly.”
That help looks like a 64-year-old man who hasn’t smoked in 24 years, showing up because his friends are there. Two Oklahoma grandmas selling reef-safe sunscreen at a medical-only state expo. A veteran nonprofit born from a suicide in a Chinatown building. A family that packed up and moved four hours north to the Upper Peninsula so one of their own could build something after doing two years for a pound of swag.
“At the core, it is a people’s movement,” Tacoma says. “It’s a revolution.”
The revolution has no bank loans. It has the people in the room.
When a cannabis plant germinates in one of Hawaii’s eight licensed cultivation facilities, it receives a globally unique 16-digit identifier — a digital birth certificate that will follow it through every phase of its existence in the regulated market. That identifier records each plant phase, every additive applied, every employee…
