Take a tour of the massive facility where the buds that go into Monogram, the rap mogul's new luxury marijuana brand, are grown...

Jay-Z’s weed factory is a hulking 100,000-square-foot facility on a busy intersection in San Jose, California, so mammoth it dwarfs even the Walmart down the street. A steady procession of customers shuffles patiently in line at the front-room dispensary, oblivious to the whirring machinations behind closed doors. Only with an employee access card do those doors swing open to the inner labyrinth, where 11,000 pounds of cannabis are produced each year.

Behold the weed industrial complex in its terrifying glory: an endless maze of tropical nurseries filled with hundreds of cannabis plants, science labs where chemists extract terpenes from glass beakers to make vape juice, and glass jars of nugs whizz down conveyor belts. Workers in lab coats and hair nets scuttle around hallways lit in eerie hues of burnt orange or blue; some are even wearing gas masks, adding to the sterile, post-apocalyptic vibe. Under the skunky floral perfume, the air smells like money.

De flies to San Jose from Los Angeles once a week to do quality control and act as Jay’s man on the ground. His energy is a playful simmer, reddened eyes crinkling up into a grin as he punctuates his sentences with a drawn-out, raspy “riiiiiiight?” “I come in to look at the girls everyday,” he tells me, referring to the flowering female cannabis plants. “A computer never sold weed before, and the plant never grows the same. The tree might go left, and we have to be here to identify it.”

De tells me he smokes seven grams of bud a day, an ungodly amount (the average stoner might take a couple days to smoke 3.5 grams). Rather than using scientific metrics or corporate spreadsheets, he goes by feel and experience—and insists that the $50 weed cigars, known as the OG Handroll, that are Monogram’s signature product are indeed rolled by hand, even if this can be a costly production nightmare at scale. “I want to feel the earth. If my fingers get black [from the resin], manicure here I come,” he tells me with a twinkle in his eye.


The factory technically belongs to The Parent Company (TPCO), a publicly traded company —Wall Street’s current fashionable fund-raising vehicle—created with the intention of “rolling up” the California cannabis market, which Jay-Z and Roc Nation joined last year. TPCO consolidates the California cannabis giant Caliva—which processed 1.5 million legal weed transactions in California in 2020—with 17 other weed brands, including Carlos Santana’s Mirayo and Bob Marley’s Marley Natural. TPCO is also vertically integrated, which means it controls the means of production from start to finish—from the plant grow rooms to the package manufacturing to the final sales at the dispensary. The location is strategic, perched in the heart of Silicon Valley with the Emerald Triangle, epicenter of America’s cannabis farmlands, a few hours drive north.

My tour finally ends in a room where two young women are sitting at a long table, rolling the weed cigars by hand while a radio next to them plays pop tunes. In contrast to all the sterile factory machinery we’ve just walked past, it’s a far more intimate and cheerful scene. Yet, this is the part where I have to confess that, when I was first given the OG Handroll to try out at home, the joint looked lumpy and kept going out on its own—I couldn’t get it to stay burning for more than a few seconds.

“That’s the point!” he thunders. The OG Handroll, he explains, has been engineered to behave differently than the standard factory-produced, cone-shaped joints. Instead, the rolling papers are individually crinkled by hand so that they burn evenly—which he says is an old stoner trick—then rolled with quality buds the size of mini-pearls instead of ground into powder form. This allows the OG Handroll to be a drawn out, unhurried experience as you burn it, let it go out, then pick it up and light it again. “It’s not a cigarette. You gotta get the vibe and let it sit,” he explains. “You can even put it back in the tube and go to the club.” I realized that what I assumed was a defect in fact exemplified Monogram’s vision of turning underground stoner culture into an upmarket luxury.

De insists that Jay-Z enjoys toking behind closed doors and understands its culture, explaining that their vision for Monogram was to take cannabis back to its street origins—but make it luxury. “Jay wanted a good call-back to the days of nickel bags, when you bought weed in manila envelopes,” De says, leaning forward intently.

https://www.gq.com/story/jay-z-monogram-cannabis-tour

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Yeah

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Happy 420 to all stoners.

Mary Jane rocks!

Sometimes I have to get high just to put up with people who don't
Damien marley


Lights up my kpoli in peace

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If you know you know

am not a businessman,am business"man. #Hov my Gee

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God bless God for creating that wonderful plant

happy 420

In weed we Trust

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weed news don't hit front page

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weed is life

Omo... today's weed(AZ) gave me joy beyond control


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Rubbish drug addicts trash/scum

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Happy 4:20 fam

LIGHT MY KPOLI

Jay Z is the original OG.....no wonder his marriage with Beyonce is so strong, Because with the HERB OF LIFE nothing can go wrong.

Yeah man!! Weed up!!

Khd95:
weed reveals a lot of things to you, it reveals you to a lot of things too

the feeling of joy, light headed and calm when i puff my loud, the level of deep thinking and creative thoughts it takes me to, the huge appetite it gives me, kaai

God bless God for creating that wonderful plant

happy 420

Brother, u no go falter.

DonBenny77:
In weed we Trust

U a realest nigga.

fuckingAyaya:
am not a businessman,am business"man. #Hov my Gee

Mandela27:
weed is life

Lols..sure?