Former WW coverboy Paul Stanford swept the annual Oregon Medical Cannabis Awards on Saturday night, winning the top three prizes for buds grown in his Felony Flats garden.
Stanford, who runs a growing chain of medical-marijuana clinics, took first place with his version of a strain known as Lemon Pledge, second with a strain called Train Wreck, and third with his Dynamite.
He accepted his glass trophies in front of 100 people who attended the awards banquet at the Ambridge Events Center in Northeast Portland. Stanford also won an honorable mention for best flavor with his Green Lantern.
“I’m amazed and humbled,” Stanford told WW after sweeping the field of 27 entries from Oregon’s top medical cannabis growers. “We did a lot better job mixing our dirt this year.”
Stanford has entered the contest before but has never broken into the top three. Top honors usually go to Long Creek grower David Verstoppen, who has won first place for the past three years with his Dynamite and Medicine Woman strains.
But this year Verstoppen had to settle for honorable mention for outstanding aroma.
“Competition is stiff,” said a deflated Verstoppen, who made the five-hour drive from his Eastern Oregon home to attend the awards. “These growers out there, and the genetics, it’s hard to say who’s going to win.”
But Stanford owes his sweep in part to Verstoppen. His third-place Dynamite strain was grown from a cutting from one of Verstoppen’s plants.
Stanford’s victory was all the more remarkable because his top two strains were “re-vegetated,” meaning they were the second harvest from the plant. Most growers harvest a plant only once, then chop it down, believing that a second harvest is not as strong. Stanford proved that perceived wisdom wrong. He also noted that his crops are 100 percent organic.
Stanford told the crowd the police visited his outdoor grow site in outer East Portland three times this year, but he refused them entry each time.
Besides growing some outstanding ganja, Stanford is planning a 2010 ballot measure to tax and regulate marijuana.
“The fight goes on,” he told the crowd, “and we’re gonna legalize it.”
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Regulate and tax? Are we talking about the same govt that failed at regulating everything else we need them for, including healthcare?
No thank you. I would rather it not be legalized, and just medically available.
I prefer to know what I’m taking is quality, not govt BS that has been given to federal medical cannabis patients for years.
Rescheudule, don’t legalize.
"Felony Flats" is a local slur on a crime-besieged poor area of town. I can’t see why there was any journalistic need to describe Stanford’s neighborhood that way. Once again, within the first paragraph, we see medical cannabis juxtaposed with crime.
Now, I met the reporter that evening and discussed my complaints of the pun headlines Willamette Week usually gives cannabis stories ("Working Spliffs", "King Bong", "Support for marijuana high in Oregon"), and he told me that is Willamette Week’s style — sarcastic and irreverent. And to be fair, many other stories in the WWeek do get these snarky headlines.
I believe the reporter to be reasonable and fair regarding this issue, so I can only assume that the "Felony Flats" description was an editorial choice or that the reporter just doesn’t see the crime bias in medical cannabis reporting because it is so prevalent in all mass media. "Felony Flats" wasn’t added for descriptive or contextual purposes; the location of Stanford’s garden is irrelevent to the story. It couldn’t have been chosen to add or reduce word count; "East Portland garden" works just as well as "Felony Flats garden" and "garden" by itself would’ve sufficed.
Otherwise, good article.