Many cultures condemn cannabis, but there’s something uniquely bitter about the battle that’s been waged against the substance by the South Asian community. As misguided as this is, many (especially older) members cling to their “model minority” status, and consuming weed is, well, not model minority behavior.
A child of immigrant parents from India, Handa grew up in the suburbs of Boston. Though her parents were open to having conversations about traditionally taboo topics, like cannabis, Handa couldn’t say the same about her larger, conservative brown community. “When there was a function or birthday party, I was very aware that, even amongst my Indian peers, I would never talk about cannabis. It was an assumption that, at best, they might also smoke weed, but then it would get back to their parents and then put me in some sort of category of being a bad influence.”
Handa founded Leune in California — more than 3,000 miles away from this community in Boston — with the kind of IDGAF attitude that would make her younger self proud. The stigma she grew up with lurked in the background at times; she acknowledges that the physical distance served as armor against the whispers of the community she had grown up in. Away from home, she was able to focus on navigating the industry’s complex supply chains and ebb-and-flowing legalization. Not to mention, as a BIWOC founder in the industry, she had to face the additional laborious hurdle of having to dismantle its predominantly male and white landscape.
Though it’s easy for South Asians to deem the plant and its users as “bad influences,” the community’s stigma around the plant feels inherently contradictory. For one, it’s the South Asian cultures’ reverence for Earth and its natural elements that have led some brown people to see cannabis not as an offender but rather as another terrestrial inhabitant. “The way that my parents were, they were very interested in preventative medicine, homeopathy, ayurveda. So, from where I was sitting, cannabis was a plant first,” Handa says.
Read the full article on HuffPost.
With the cannabis industry challenges in generating a larger audience, Prismatics provides cannabis marketing that exceeds industry standards. There are a wide variety of cannabis products and the market size for CBD and cannabis is becoming an essential business, promotion through social media and creating brand awareness is vital for business growth and opportunities.