Hello, my name is Irlanda, founder of the Almighty Buda Crew. Two years ago, I began the Almighty Buda Crew to help individuals involved in the legacy cannabis market successfully preserve their countercultural identity within the legal cannabis market through branding and marketing. Although I can help legacy market operators brand their products, my true strength lies in the development of cultural preservation initiatives for the legacy market and educating first-time consumers in all three socio-cultural uses of cannabis: medicinal, spiritual, and recreational.
My professional strength has emerged over time from both my life experience as a cannabis consumer and my academic education as a culturalist and an archivist. I hold a bachelor's degree in anthropology, a bachelor's degree in ourstory (history), and a master's degree in information resources and library science. I have held archival preservation fellowships at the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, The Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona Special Collections, and UCLA Special Collections. My specialization as an archivist is preserving countercultural communities, entities, and movements within traditional mainstream institutions. My studies focus on building cultural fluency through the cultural competency model in individuals, brands, and institutions.
My life experience with cannabis spans over 30 years. I began smoking marijuana when I was 9 years old. I stole my first joint from my dad. From the first moment that I took a drag from my stolen joint, I thoroughly enjoyed everything about smoking. What I enjoyed the most, however, is how creative it made me and how it expanded my senses. Whenever I could sneak a joint from my dad (without him knowing), I would. I continuously stole joints from my father until middle school, when I met who would become my connection to the plant, my drug dealer.
During middle and high school, my peers teased me profusely for being a hip-hop hippie. Parents and teachers saw me as a bad influence because of my consumption and devotion to the cannabis plant. As I grew up, I became more aware of this plant’s incredible depth and complexity, and my commitment to ensuring people understood the cannabis plant’s power only intensified.
I originally intended the Almighty Buda Crew to help individuals in the legacy market successfully brand their countercultural identity in the legal cannabis market. This OriGinal concept blossomed from several experiences working at my dream cannabis brand. For nine months, on numerous occasions, I watched culture be pushed and fall to its final depth. Individuals from the legacy market and their important cultural perspectives were slowly casted out, denigrating the importance of their cultural knowledge, and eliminating what made each legacy market individual unique. Just everyday corporate decisions that were made, which might have appeared to be good ideas from a corporate standpoint, in reality, drove culture away. Decisions that I, an executive assistant, had little ability to change.
Among the most devastating of these decisions was the firing of a budtender who had been working in trap houses since an undisclosed age. The actual placement of a plant, still alive, in a trash can. A cannabis man allowing a corporate man, who was a dentist, to instill doubt in his instinct. And walls that lacked cultural knowledge, aesthetic, and taste. Each of these incidents was a tragic blow to the culture of the legacy market, and an example of corporate culture carving counterculture away.
This devastation of culture haunted me. Compelled to do something about it, I began to develop the idea that the legacy market could preserve counterculture through marketing and branding. Now, I do believe that. I know that marketing can serve as a vehicle for preserving culture; however, I am not a marketer. I am an archivist, a consumer, and a teacher. I am good at what I do and have found that I can enhance what a marketer does. I can teach marketing firms how to preserve culture, but I do not have to do what a marketing firm does.
Thus, I have shifted the focus of The Almighty Buda Crew to be a cultural knowledge dissemination firm—an institution that values the legacy market, which was the precursor to our legal one, and which seeks to preserve and disseminate the knowledge found inherently in the legacy mind.
The Almighty Buda Crew values the knowledge and culture the legacy market carries. Therefore, it seeks to develop initiatives that secure the preservation of countercultural elements in the new emerging legal market to ensure the transmission of this legacy knowledge to future generations.
The Almighty Buda Crew also seeks to educate new cannabis consumers with accurate knowledge to help them understand and develop their consumption habits and thus help establish a strong emerging consumer base for the legal market to flourish.
I look forward to watching this seed that I have planted grow alongside you all. I thank you for your time, until next time.
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