Lauren Yoshiko and what's next with weed

The expansive Portland weed reporter somehow manages to be both the last of a dying breed and the future of cannabis journalism

This week we make our first incursion into the realm of people whom I know mostly from their work and reputation.

Portland rock star pot reporter Lauren Yoshiko first came to my attention as a podcaster. Her Broccoli Talk podcast, cohosted by Mennlay Golokeh Aggrey, was an incomparable blend of warmth and weed insight, circa 2019. Really dope. Since then, I’ve come across the name Lauren Yoshiko in most places where credible reporting on weed is being done.

Then there’s her Sticky Bits Substack, which offers cannabis news and analysis in both print and podcast form, and Green Scenes: A Guide to legal cannabis destinations across the US, her forthcoming book. (March 2024, Hardie Grant)

At this point it’s useful to note that until 2018 Portland was an uncommonly thriving alternative newspaper town. In the city’s myriad coffee houses, people had their noses stuck in the Portland Mercury or Willamette Week. Sometimes the two in sequence. I cannot think of the second-best American alt-weekly market of the twenty-teens. That’s how far out in front Portland was.

And that’s the writing world that this native southern Oregonian entered into after college, a stoner with no contacts and a terrible urge to write. Her initial byline was Mary Romano, and the rest of the origin story I’ll let Lauren tell.

But I’ve come to consider her as perhaps the last pure product of West Coast alternative weekly culture. Lauren and I are both former residents of the same Southeast Portland. We were just chopping it up via Zoom when I pushed play on my recorder. I actually start the conversation with a statement, regarding the premise of this Substack space.

The whole premise is that I like living on the West Coast. If you treat it as one colossal entity it’s a really interesting place.

I agree. In my own identity journeys, I’m a fifth generation Japanese-American, but I was raised in a super-white community and I speak Spanish more than I speak Japanese. So, I like to say that I identify more as a West Coast individual that’s got this amalgamation of Hawaiian culture and Mexican culture and White Pacific Northwestern culture much more than I identify as a Japanese American.

Where are you from?

I’m from Roseburg, in Southern Oregon.

Oh, my goodness.

An hour south of Eugene. Have you ever been?

No. I did a UPS gig in 2010. I paid for my kids’ Christmas presents by doing UPS. And the driver I was with was from Roseburg. We had an amazing conversation every day. And he was like a regular dude—it was UPS, for goodness sake. But we talked about music and movies all day. It was great. That’s my only impression of Roseburg.

It’s a small town. I like to think of it as too small for Trader Joe’s or some of those standardized [businesses] I had never had, like, Chick-fil-A. It was really exotic when we got a KFC. Had a pretty much all-white small town-background, but I did have a pretty idyllic childhood. Uncles grew weed and we played in the river all summer. It was very innocent and sweet.

What’s the river over there?

The Umpqua. It flows into the Klamath… I think. [Note: Lauren later clarified, via IG, that the Umpqua River actually flows into the Pacific Ocean!]

My first “recreational” legal weed experiences were [in the Pacific Northwest] I’m thinking very specifically about the [2014] bus up to Vancouver [Washington]. I went to Main Street Marijuana when it opened.

Same. It was an experience. I had my medical card, so I was able to do it in Oregon, but it was different. It was different being able to just walk into a rec shop. I’d wanted that experience, too.

Tell me what you remember about that day. The highlights?

I remember that I had the context of Oregon medical marijuana shops in my brain and I was very aware of the differences and all of that pre-packaged stuff surprised me? You know, not having them weigh it out in front of me. And it felt more chaotic and less professional than a lot of medical shops that I’d experienced in Portland.

So, I remember feeling kind of overwhelmed at the chaos of it all. Long lines, lots of people, lots of packaging everywhere and grab-and-go stuff. And I want to say that one of the bud tenders wasn’t wearing shoes, was kind of being that guy who says, I’m a hippy cool guy and I want people to see that I’m too cool for shoes. And I was like, “Guys, come on. Let’s give a slightly more professional vibe to these new people coming in for the first time.”

Probably my biggest takeaway was the sticker shock of Washington sales tax on top of cannabis sales tax, from my medical zero tax experience.

Buying my first adult-use, legal weed coincided with writing my first real cannabis stuff, for Leafly. That makes me have to ask how you became the kind of cannabis journalist you are today?

That was all thanks to Willamette Week. I actually was struck, reading your newsletter today, by your lamenting the power of what was the alt-weekly world. That’s what gave me my whole world, Willamette Week in Portland.

When I moved here in 2013 I loved reading it. The tone, the coverage. It was like a local Rolling Stone to me. It was fucking everything. I saw that they had a writer going by Willie Weed that was doing the weekly weed column. He was just doing strain reviews from medical shops. The medical boom was just happening. I was a recent grad from UC Santa Cruz, where I picked up my flower habits. I came here with zero weed connections, but a huge weed habit. That was my drive to get a medical card, ’cause I was not going to sit around waiting for my sister’s friends—like: let’s go; I gotta do stuff.

So, I saw these columns happening. At the same time, culturally, Broad City was airing and we were having these conversations about women’s representation in media, women’s representation in bylines, more audibly for the first time. And I felt, Okay, I have the right to point out to them, “You’ve only got one dude writing about weed right now. If you’d like to have a female perspective in the mix, I have my card and would love to contribute.”

I had a lit degree. I didn’t know how that would relate to my life yet. But I knew that I wanted to write and I loved the concept of the magazine and newspaper worlds. It was having my card that gave me the balls to email Willamette Week and say, “I would love to write for you.”

I had a beer with the editor that week. He said bring me a strain review and I typed one out at my office desk job that day—I was doing light sales paperwork for a generator company. He was like this will run next week. Let me set you up with [accounts payable]. I got paid like, 10 cents a word.

[Laughter]

Classic, but it just went from there.

[UC Santa Cruz cannabis] was like a currency. It was making friends. It was study groups. It was finding yourself. It was passing time between class. It was like a fairy land every day: The idea of leaving a little gram in this branch for someone to find outside of the lecture hall was like a normal part of my life. A little joint in the library on this one shelf another day, at UC Santa Cruz.

As I got more in the city, I decided I’d want to write about this legislative thing that’s happening that’s affecting all stores, and they were like, “Go for it. Do it.”

Willamette Week was my launch, so I was very established just in the writing world, just through, like, local reporting, paying attention to the businesses in my town, getting to do face-to-face interviews and all of that.

Your work seems more serious than some—not all—of the cannabis journalism I see. How did you come upon your aesthetic?

It’s very much the Willamette Week. I have so much pride in writing for a publication that had really high editorial standards, even though you can swear and we had ridiculous writing like the food writer living on beer for a week and writing about it. We really had fun with gonzo concepts, but the integrity of the paper was rich and we had copy editors. We had fact checkers. Nothing could fly without multiple sources. And their claim to fame is being a Pulitzer prize-winning alt-weekly.

I wanted to trust what I was reading and I loved that this newspaper was breaking stories and helping to bust bad-doers of Portland and shine a light on the fucked-up things happening. I very much had a pride and sense of we’re so lucky to have people who care. Like, if I’m going to be in this world, then I better fucking care and give people trustworthy news sources. Watching the internet evolve and the blogosphere evolve and influencer news cycles, it’s scary to feel like news and trustworthy information is hard to come by—and harder to come by for free. So I just take it very seriously. I do.

I just realized that I asked the same question two different ways, but I’m really glad I did because your second answer augmented the first one.

Let’s go back. You told me about your first experiences as a cannabis journalist, but what was going on down there in Santa Cruz, where you developed that nice cannabis habit? Are you obliged to come out of there a serious stoner?

A thousand percent. It was like a currency. It was making friends. It was study groups. It was finding yourself. It was passing time between class. It was like a fairy land every day: The idea of leaving a little gram in this branch for someone to find outside of the lecture hall was like a normal part of my life. A little joint in the library on this one shelf another day, at UC Santa Cruz.

I do think they’ve tighten up a bit, but the 4/20 celebrations? It was like our Woodstock. Like, thousands of people descended on this random campus. Fire trucks are sitting there, making sure we don’t burn the forest down. Smartphone culture was there, but not so much about capturing constant content. There was much more living in the moment: Going on a barefoot hike and not actually knowing if you were going to make your way back. I got to taste a little of that radical, Bay Area hippydom. It was just a very magical experience.

And you’re just a girl from Roseburg.

Just a girl from Roseburg.

I wanted to ask/tell/remind you that I actually became aware of you when we were in the Forbes top eight podcasts list of 2019. You and Mennlay—I started listening to you then. Talk to me about how you know Mennlay and that whole experience.

The Broccoli-verse brought us together. The magazine’s a beautiful, design-minded approach to cannabis culture that covers music, art, and a lot of other things that people who love weed also enjoy. Anja Charbonneau is the founder, who formerly was the art director of Kinfolk magazine.

As I was working at whatever jobs to get by, I eventually landed at a medical farm that didn’t last, because the timing was terrible. They basically launched before REC went legal. I basically did two ill-fated, probably zero-profit medical harvests with them. But I got to have the experience of selling pounds to dispensaries and understanding that system.

It was at that point in the go-under when there were like 10 bags of trim that they want to make any tiny amount of money they can off of. I found a processor in town who appreciated how clean our flower was. He was like, “Yeah, I’ll take it all, I’ll take the rest.” As I’m handing off the last bag to this guy—he’s writing the check—and he says, “My girlfriend’s starting a weed magazine. Let me know if you’d like to talk to her.” His girlfriend was the founder of Broccoli.

Once we met we hit it off. She knew I was interested in all kinds of storytelling. Personally, I love movies, I love talking about movies. I love the fantasy worlds we create. My sister went to art school and would get stoned and talk about her classes every single day. So, I was into everything that Broccoli was doing. And [Anja] actually had someone write about me in her first issue and called me a cannabis journalist. That kinda spoke it into reality a bit, because I was still dealing with imposter’s syndrome like, “Am I ruining my career by writing about weed right now?”

She helped legitimize me. As she was writing and beginning to know writers and creators and observing more of the weed world, she came upon Mennlay doing cool things with her book The Art of Weed Butter and they featured her in one of those early issues as well. And Anya, she’s just an Internet person. She phrases it as being another weird kid from a small town who lived in Tumblr and lived in chat rooms. Didn’t go to college, she’s totally like this interesting, DIY human. She saw the podcast bubble before it really was blooming as well. I was just starting to listen to them. She was like, I want to do one. Do you think you could do it and I was sorta like: No.

So she said, “What about with somebody?” It was her who paired me with Mennlay. And we honestly did not know each other at all. We had met briefly. She put us together in a room. We hit it off and basically built a friendship. You are hearing a friendship happen and develop through those episodes of Broccoli Talk.

I don’t know if we had a year under our belts when Covid hit. But that was such a lifeline and a really interesting time for us to bond with and build an audience, because there was such a halt in content everywhere. In the early point of 2020 we were doing bi-weekly episodes every couple of weeks that was like the only sense of rhythm in that weird, quarantine time.

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Do you feel like every cannabis journalist should work on a grow operation?

I love that question so much. I asked a question like this to Alex [Halperin] and another weed writer at a panel a long time ago: “Does a weed writer have to love weed and consume it?” I think not necessarily. I do think everything does come down to this plant, and understanding how it works and how it comes to be, is always going to make you a stronger writer. There’s zero question there. A stronger writer, a stronger interviewer, a stronger subject identifier.

But I guess I’d push the question, Does a great food writer have to have visited farms—although the answer is probably yes.

[Laughter]

I think of it as the critic needing to be able to play an instrument—you don’t have to, but it helps so much. I’ve been a trimmer, but I’ve never really worked on a grow op. I got pretty envious when you talked about your experience. If anyone wants to give me a fellowship on your grow op…

Do you find it awkward to talk to entrepreneurs and industry figures about their days in the traditional market? How do you address it?

I’m sensitive to it. Because my early days were in the medical world, pre-REC? My first strain reviews were anonymous sources. They didn’t even want their farm to be mentioned. It was so… so sketchy still, and it’s hilarious to think about now. Now we’ve got press agencies and everybody wants visibility—”tag me” or whatever.

I’m always sensitive because, frankly, that shit is real. They were really actually scared at one point of going to jail. Mothers losing their kids. It’s one thing to honor them and respect it, but it’s also honoring the very real terror of that time of being a grower before legalization. Every knock at your door froze your fucking heart with fear at a certain point in time. So I’m very respectful of their right to be uncomfortable at just casually talking about it. It’s not the same as me having smoked it up in the UCSC dorms. It’s so wildly different.

It sometimes requires a journalist to have a more fine-tuned touch and be more thoughtful about how you communicate. One of my favorite stories I’ve ever written—I did it for an independent local mag, The Buckman Journal, last year. They said write us anything about local weed you want to. I wanted to interview a handful of growers who had grown prior to legalization and after legalization. I wanted to draw out: What’s different? What do you miss? What’s better?

It was such an interesting exploration. The biggest takeaway was… the fuckin fear. At the end of the day, no matter how different they have to do things, how hard it is, how expensive, whether they make more money, half of those growers were like, It’s absolutely worth it to be able to talk to my kid about what I do without fear, to be able to talk to my parents about what I do without ruining their idea of me. It’s much bigger than I had perceived before.

Give me just a minute on the SAFER Banking Act?

It will make a difference. I hope it passes. It doesn’t guarantee a difference though, which I don’t think everyone understands. It will give banks the right to provide services, but it’s not going to force anyone to provide services to cannabis businesses. That may not be the game-changer that people hope, but it’s progress and I know it’s good overall to open up those pathways for more legitimate operations to work with cannabis businesses.

Yes, the safety aspect alone I think is great. I know our colleagues and a lot of entrepreneurs like to nit-pick about its deficiencies and what it doesn’t do, but it’s a really significant step.

What gets you excited about weed? Pure joy?

Pure joy? I love the West Coast. It’s where I found my culture, it’s where I think a lot of weed culture is centered around. But all the little pockets that pop up do get me excited. Getting to hear about farmer culture in New Mexico being very rich and very grower-forward. Hearing about things like Maryland, Vermont, maybe even Maine—they’re able to bring jars into stores to refill fresh flower from—

Oh my goodness.

—right? Why isn’t that allowed everywhere? It’s just understanding that I love the West Coast weed and you may still have to fight me on whether there’s anyone who grows better weed than Oregon growers, but—

I’m not going to fight you. I could get thrown out of California for saying it, but… it’s a treat to go to Oregon.

[Laughter]

Please go on.

It’s the truth. I’m excited to try other products in these other markets all over and discover these new corners. There’s so much different personality in these different states and cultures. Detroit’s social scene is fucking amazing.

How so?

This one Airbnb has anchored a lot of cool stuff. Copper House? I don’t know if you’ve been familiar, but it’s a couple of very cool women who have half their house as an Airbnb. They started doing weed-friendly shoots, but just evolving to what the community needed: Hosting photo shoots for weed brands, hosting celebrations for art-centric weed gatherings. And now they’re huge parts of the Detroit scene. One of them gets tapped for social equity initiatives from all of the big companies.

Then there’s a chef—Chef Nikki, she’s based in Ohio. She works with Dave Chappelle as a personal chef, often. But she also loves weed, and separate from that has also done some really high profile weed-infused things. She’s kind of a history nerd and does these history-themed dinners. At one point she went through the meticulous research of renting out one of those old Detroit millionaire mansions. Like, the founder of K-Mart—one of those old Detroit families—rented out one of their mansions, hired actors to dress up and play the period part, and made infused appetizers that her grandma would have made for a soiree back in the day. Oysters Rockefeller and canopies—an infused Roaring Twenties party, from the ground up.

That’s so creative and exciting to me—tying into the local history. Those kinds of things get me hyped, Don—where we can go from here, for all the different sectors.

That’s amazing to hear. I think a lot of us coastal cannabis elites assume there’s nothing going on special in flyer country, and this just isn’t the case.