Today we’d like to introduce you to Aram Stoney.
Hi Aram, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I have been around cannabis pretty much my entire life. I grew up at a time when the War on Drugs was intensified by the Reagan administration and the “Just Say No” campaign was in full effect. I knew even then that the laws around cannabis didn’t make any sense. I was brought up in a loving home around amazing people that did not reflect the Reefer Madness propaganda or the Reagan Era war on drugs. I was formally introduced to the finer points of cultivation at an early age and started several of my own grows in my 20’s and continued on for a decade or so.
I moved away from my home town in 2004 and when I came back in 2012 I had to start over, which is a fairly daunting task when you’ve just turned 40 and you have two young children… I got a job in hospitality as a valet to make ends meet but quickly realized that it paid the same as it did 25 years prior and that there was no way I could feed my family of four on that income. One day in 2014, my wife Nicole came home with a People magazine that had a feature article on adult use legalization of cannabis in Colorado. It made me take a look at what was going on locally. I had been out of the cannabis industry for a while so I really wasn’t paying attention to the scene, even though we still had numerous friends that were currently in the industry underprop 215. What I saw was that there were just a few delivery services operating in the area, but they were primarily coming from across county lines and not really local. I felt it was my civic duty to provide a service to my community that was owned and operated locally.
The first person I called was my friend John. John and I both had a history of growing cannabis, so our primary focus in the beginning was cultivation. We wanted to be sure we could provide the best available products to our community, and there is no better way than to grow your own and to source from our friends. That is something I miss about the Prop 215 days, being able to source the majority of your products yourself and from your friends. It really was a grassroots industry. That kind of leads to how we chose our name. John and I both grew in Big Sur for many years, and many of our friends still were at the time we started our business. We were sourcing the majority of our flowers from our Big Sur friends and from our own garden in Cachagua (Carmel Valley). We didn’t and don’t take using the Big Sur name lightly, so John reached out to some of the old guards that are still around and received their blessings.
So anyway, in August of 2014 we hired our friend Gavin Kogan, who was on the forefront of cannabis law at the time, to draft the legal paperwork to incorporate our endeavor. We secured a new cultivation site, built a website, rented an office, and enrolled on Weedmaps to get the word out that there was a new delivery option available.
Our area has a huge elderly population and we quickly began to realize the need and the desire our community had for an alternative to traditional pharmaceutical medicine. We formed a relationship with Dr Debra Malka, who was leading the way in recommending cannabis to her patients, to be sure that our recommendations about how to treat different ailments with cannabis products were in line with the latest research to better serve our community. Our delivery service quickly became more of a consultation service. It had a huge impact on me personally, watching the medicinal benefits of the cannabis plant go to work. I already knew it helped people in so many ways, but to be able to experience it through so many others was incredible and eye-opening.
At the time we were doing deliveries and tending to our own garden, Monterey County had enacted a moratorium on cannabis businesses in order to draft local regulations to keep in line with the looming Prop 64 vote to legalize cannabis for adults use in 2016. We became highly involved in the process and were given an exemption to continue operations due to our pre-existing status.
Fast forward approximately 18 months and we were approved for the first cannabis permit to be issued by Unincorporated Monterey County for our storefront dispensary which we opened in September of 2017. We are very thankful for our forward-thinking landlords at the time and could not have made it happen without them.
We continue to work with the local county agencies to find a path to get back the garden too. We look forward to the day when we can have our own products on the shelf again.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There have definitely been some bumps in the road, but for the most part, if you work hard and stay diligent then anything is possible.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
At Big Sur Canna+Botanicals our primary focus is customer service. Customers have so many choices now, so we want to be sure that you get what you need from us, whether it be a recommendation for a product that can best suit your need or just a friendly hello when you come by to pick out your favorite product. I believe a smile goes a long way.
That being said, pleasing everyone is a monumental task and pretty much impossible, but we do our best to make it happen and we learn from any mishaps along the way to hopefully make us even better as we move forward.
I am proud of the fact that we are among the first in our area to really help pave the way in breaking the stigma around cannabis. To be able to help educate our community and show that cannabis has a place in a healthy working society. The recognition that we have received from the community is a testament to that hard work and we will continue to do our best to maintain that balance. We have been honored with a number of awards from our local Chambers of Commerce including recognition for best Health & Wellness store, Rookie of the Year, and Business of the Year from the Carmel Chamber.
How do you think about luck?
Luck…that is a tricky one depending on the definition you use. One way to define luck is to say that it is more a matter of chance than of the actions you take. So if luck has played any part of our success then I would say that our timing was lucky…everything else has been achieved through hard work and staying the course.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.bigsurcannabotanicals.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigsurcannabotanicals/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bigsurcannabotanicals
Image Credits:
Ryan Rosene
