Hi there, and welcome to The Dealers Diary - my musings on the cannabis industry in California, New York and Washington, and building Halara.
If you missed past emails, I recommend checking out the Dealers page where you can see the past emails I sent.
In today's entry: three AIOs nobody has seen | what 29 recalls actually show | the cart you can never find
The Dealers Desk
Hey Dealers,
Three new High THC AIOs are going out in California in September. Washington and New York shortly after.
Our own lab director Debbie shot this
What i love is our sales team hasn't seen these and neither have the stores, so the people who'll be putting them on shelves in a few weeks are behind y'all on this one.
All three are our THC distillate line.
The yellow one with the pink stripe is Pink Lemonade Haze, a sativa, limonene forward in the way you'd hope from the name. Fresh-squeezed pink lemonade on the front, sweet with a light tart edge, then ripe cherry and juicy raspberry through the middle, finishing floral and herbal with a little Haze spice sitting underneath, and it runs uplifted and creative.
^I love this one.
Red is Strawberry Sugar, also a sativa. Fresh strawberry and strawberry candy on the inhale, then berry jam and candied fruit, with a floral, herbal, lightly funky undertone sitting underneath that keeps the sweetness from going one-note.
This one returned due to popular demand based on the surveys.This also goes to show if you want a strain, you should probably write in to Nick or text him on the back of the package. This is how we landed on these strains
Green is Northern Lights, and y’all have probably already seen this in our 510 cartridges so the AIO is the new part. Indica, sweet and piney, linalool on the back end. Also look at that pattern on it is fire
Also stay tuned: there's also a bigger AIO coming, because New York asked for it.
If you're walking into a shop this week, tell your budtender these three are landing in September and ask them to let you know the day they show up. Most of them have not heard a word about it yet, iykyk.
Onwards and upwards,
-Malcolm
What We're Seeing
California hasn't ordered a vape recall in almost two years, and I don't think that means what it sounds like it means. We compiled every California vape recall we could find, 29 of them, and the last one the state actually ordered was August 2024, with all 22 since coming voluntarily from the brands. The count keeps falling (17 in 2024, 9 in 2025, 3 so far this year) and I'd love to tell you that's the category cleaning itself up, because I sell vapes in this market and that reading is good for me. The trouble is the 2024 spike started right after the LA Times pesticide investigation ran, which makes me think a recall count mostly tracks how hard somebody is looking. The whole record, all 29 of them.
Dealers Choice
We ask people in a survey how we could compare better against other vape products and what we could do better. This one came back last November and I still think about it.
Nothing in there is about the product. They're telling us they can't find it, which is a different problem and honestly a harder one, since it lives out in the stores and their reorder habits rather than with us. That's the same reason the budtender ask above is worth doing, since shops tend to order what they already know is coming.
Quick Hits
The Justice Department just made it a lot easier for cannabis consumers to keep their guns. DOJ adopted a rule saying marijuana no longer counts as a "controlled substance" for the federal firearms ban, following a Supreme Court decision that found prosecuting a cannabis consumer over it unconstitutional. The new rule, explained.
The federal hemp THC ban got pushed back a month, and it still isn't law. The Senate moved it from November 12 to December 11, with synthetics still banned on the original date, but it needs the House and the president before any of that is real. Where it stands.
Weekly Munchies
A Mediterranean chickpea and kale salad this week, twenty minutes, feeds four, and it's still too hot to turn the oven on.
Refer a Friend
If somebody you know is stopping by a shop this weekend, send them this so they can tell their budtender too. Three of them, September, and the shops still don't know.
Halara · Emerald Triangle, CA
P.S - My Weekly Bops
I was at a wedding in Park City this past weekend and they had a ten piece band. Best wedding band I've ever seen. These are three of the throwbacks they played.
