Last weekend, as smokers across the world sparked up to celebrate marijuana’s high holiday, an ardent group of cannabis connoisseurs were getting high inside a nondescript warehouse on Scott Avenue, buried among the industrial ruins of northern Bushwick. The meeting was “MARY Fest 2024,” a trade show being put on by the titular “Mary Media Group,” a marijuana lifestyle brand that was started by Adrian Farquharson in 2015.
“We’ve done infused dinner parties throughout the country,” said Farquharson, whose group also occasionally puts out a novelty print magazine and runs a small blog online.
The company had sold tickets for their event in Bushwick for $50 a pop, and the hundred or so people seeing milling about the event were gifted with tote bags filled with cannabis products, various rolling papers, blunt wraps made of rose petals, mimosa-flavored THC oil cartridges, among others.
“This market doesn’t need the education,” Edina Sultanik, a Mary spokesperson, told me. Instead, Sultanik says that ‘the market’ is craving more sophisticated and cutting-edge ways of getting high.
Sultanik’s company had catered the event with hemp-derived CBD-infused culinary condiments made by a startup called Aroma Culinary, while a company that got its start turning out all-glass gravity bongs called GRAV distributed hits, dabs, and THC-infused espresso drinks. Elsewhere, employees from an outfit called Marijuana Farms New York had trekked down from their climate-controlled greenhouses in the Hudson Valley to dole out edibles, pre-rolls, vape cartridges, and concentrates. Even a mainstream brand like Samuel Adams could be found handing out their non-alcoholic IPAs (“Just The Haze”) to lure those curious toward a back room with a silent disco.
Sultanik says her company sees Bushwick as a sort of cultural capital for cannabis society.
“It starts in Bushwick, and then it rolls out to the rest of the world,” Sultanik said, before lightly swatting away the cloud of smoke that had pushed toward us, from the joint of a man sitting nearby, in between sips of a THC-infused matcha latte.
Photos taken by Sam Rappaport for Bushwick Daily.
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