Weeded bliss begins with the nuptials
By Carolyne Zinko, Style Reporter
Updated April 30, 2017 5:55 PM
With apologies to ’80s rocker Billy Idol, forget the white wedding. Weed weddings are where it’s at in a post-Prop. 64 world.
Organizers of the Cannabis Wedding Expo, which is based in Colorado, brought their conference to San Francisco on Sunday to show brides and grooms that weddings with cannabis can be discreet, “classed up” affairs, rather than all-out stoner smoke-fests. And they found there were plenty of people interested in this particular brand of high style.
Among the ways that cannabis can be incorporated into weddings: weed-infused foods, wedding gowns made from hemp, and bars with “budtenders” on hand to recommend specific types of cannabis to smoke, instead of pouring drinks with alcohol.
“I had to come — who wouldn’t want to check it out?” said Lala Santolla, 33, a life coach and personal trainer from Walnut Creek who is planning a wedding in spring 2018 and has smoked cannabis since age 17. “There are too many weddings where people are sloppy drunk and cause a scene. I’d rather people be mellow. If you’re relaxed from cannabis, you’re not going to go for that fifth or sixth drink.
The passage of Proposition 64 last November allows adults over age 21 to use cannabis for recreational purposes, but only on private property, not in public. Sales of recreational marijuana are not expected until January 2018.
At the expo, some 50 vendors were on hand to show their wares — sans cannabis, for the conference — including Sonoma’s Garden Society cannabis edibles, which makes medicated chocolate truffles; San Francisco’s Madame Munchies, which makes medicated French macarons; and San Diego’s Bedibles (pronounced “B edibles”) which makes cotton candy with cannabis.
My Bud Vase of Charleston, S.C., showed off its antique glass bud vases that can double as bongs or wedding centerpieces. Flowers on Flowers, from Los Angeles, was there to offer up floral wreaths for brides to wear, with silk flowers or real flowers and dried cannabis buds woven into the design. And Beauty by Lisa handed out flyers for cannabis-friendly hair and makeup services that require a 20 percent deposit and proper ventilation while on the job.
It was the fourth Cannabis Wedding Expo conducted by Denver’s Philip Wolf, who owns Cultivating Spirits, a wine tour-style cannabis tourism company, and Bec Koop, owner of Irie Weddings & Events, who organized 15 cannabis weddings in 2016 and has 20 scheduled this year. The inaugural expo in Denver last year drew 35 vendors and 300 attendees. The second was held in Denver in February and the third in Portland, Ore., in March. To Wolf’s knowledge, it’s the only expo of its kind in the world.
The expo was held at Bespoke, an event space on the fourth floor of the Westfield San Francisco Centre on Market Street, and cost attendees $10 a ticket. No cannabis consumption or smoking was allowed.
The expo drew far fewer brides and grooms than it did wedding industry and cannabis industry workers.
“What I’m finding today are a lot of people in the wedding industry trying to understand where the cannabis industry fits, and people in the cannabis industry trying to see how they can break into the wedding industry,” said Karli Warner of Garden Society edibles.
Warner recently partnered with Nurit Raphael, the founder of Ona Life, a cannabis delivery service, to create Ona Events, an event service that features cannabis products.
“What you see oftentimes is a group of people sneaking off to a corner outside the venue to smoke,” Raphael said of gatherings where a portion of the guests are cannabis users. “Now that it’s destigmatized, the question is, how can we incorporate it in a beautiful, elegant, nondestructive way?”
One of her solutions was to begin offering customers new ways of presenting cannabis to their guests, during the events or in gift bags to take home. At the expo, she showed off rolled joints with lace wrapped around one of the tips — for a feminine touch — and stored in sleek glass tubes with cork caps. Vintage silver medallions glued to the other end of the tube added decorative flair.
“I went all Etsy on it,” Raphael said, a reference to a popular website featuring vintage products often made by hand.
For grooms and groomsmen, she rolls large joints the size of cigars and presents them in custom tubes.
The other kind of green beauty
“We got the idea from cigar bars at weddings,” she said. “People bring those out after dancing, during the wind-down time.”
Not all vendors were cannabis-minded. There were DJs hawking their services, and businesses offering silent discos, where guests wear headphones while dancing, to alleviate noise. Lovebirds Boutique advertised its vintage organic wedding services, while Bi-Rite Catering, a branch of the San Francisco grocery, served up wedding appetizers including crab salad on cucumber rounds and mushroom carnitas with salsa verde and radishes on taro tacos.
Bride-to-be Betty Chalabi, 34, a student and mother from the Sacramento area, was browsing for ideas for her wedding in September 2018, which she said will be a cannabis affair. She and her fiance met through cannabis, which she uses for post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety and a chronic shoulder injury she suffered four years ago when she rolled her car driving in the snow in Minnesota.
“There will be no alcohol — I don’t want drunk driving or things getting messy,” she said.
She said she would be employing the services of Top Shelf Budtending, one of the vendors at the expo, to keep the cannabis organized in one place, rather than encouraging guests to bring their own stash, pipes or bongs.
“I don’t want it to be a high school party,” Chalabi said. “I want it to be a classy wedding.”
