[The following article is from our “High-Brr-Nation Cannabis Guide” which is packed with fun, interesting stories about surviving the winter with weed. Check ’em out here!—eds.]
When the pandemic lockdowns began, people started buying a lot of things. For some folks, it was sourdough bread starters. For others (mostly sadists), it was exercise bikes. And for people in Oregon, it was–to put it bluntly–a metric shit-ton of weed. Oregonians broke their own record, buying more than a billion dollars’ worth of recreational cannabis in 2020, with Multnomah County stoners leading the way, according to data from the Oregon Liquor Control Commission.
“For the first month, business was crazy. It was like people didn’t know how long it would last,” said Laurie Wolf, founder of cannabis edible company Laurie + MaryJane.
Through the long slog of 2020, Wolf watched as her canisters of cannabis-infused fudgy brownies, savory cheese crisps, and almond cakes flew off Oregon’s dispensary shelves. With the November 2020 release of her fifth cannabis cookbook, The Cannabis Apothecary, Wolf had a proposition for these snack-frenzied customers: try making them yourself.
“It is a process, and it takes several hours, but I like the process,” Wolf said. “It’s therapeutic.”