5 Minutes with William Breathes

He is probably the most famous person you’ve never seen. And he’d like to keep it that way. To see him, you’d never know he was one of the most powerful voices in the Colorado Cannabis Community, but that he is. His words can cut like a precision blade, eviscerating the under par dispensary with a mere waive of his pen. Conversely, his elegant locution can raise even the most ordinary dispensary to epic heights if he finds the bud presented therein to be of exceptional quality. He is William Breathes, Westword’s weed critic. I had Mr. Breathes over to the office the other day for a long conversation. It was the first time that either of us has met. Now at least I know what he looks like…

Are you from Colorado?

Originally, no. But I grew up here…in southwest Colorado.

Where in SW Colorado?

Near Durango. I love the area. I wish I could find a way to still be down there.

How long have you used cannabis? What was your introduction to it? First time story?

I do have a first time story. Two things; OK, so I was always of the school of thought, and maybe I did get high my first time, but everyone always told me you can’t get high your first time. You gotta smoke once, and then the next time you smoke you might actually get high. So I smoked once with friends and swore I wasn’t high…but, um…I got busted that time.

My friend and I had a joint that we had gotten from his older brother. We went to the neighborhood drug store and got tweezers and matches for it. ‘Cause that’s how we thought you smoked “roaches,” whatever. That’s the traditional…Cheech and Chong thing. So my friend left that shit in his pocket and we go back to his house and went swimming and we saw the neighbor’s mom kinda pick up after us. And of course she found the matches and the tweezers, which we all know now would clearly smell like weed. But we were like, “how did she know that?” So I remember her calling us over, she had a big flowing skirt on, and she was like, “boys, I gotta talk to you now.” And she goes, “what is this?” And my friend says, “we were…we were…we were burning bugs!” ‘Cause you know, roaches and stuff. And that was it for that. I didn’t smoke weed for a while after that.

How old were you?

Thirteen? Yeah, and by that Christmas I had turned 14 and my cousin met me at my grandmother’s house and he brought herb with him. I should probably thank him for giving me one of the most exciting times in my life. And I was like, “yeah I wanna smoke tonight. And get high..bla bla bla…” And he was like, “we’re gonna get you high. We’re gonna make a BONG!”

And I was like, “What’s a bong?” So he finds, you know one of those plastic bottles with the retractable noses? You take the nose off of it and it makes a perfect stem piece. So my cousin says now we just need a container. And we got a [shampoo] bottle. And I cleaned it, so we thought. So we make this bong and we start taking bong hits. And it starts to get filled with all these bubbles in there. And they start popping smoke. And I’m hanging out my grandmother’s window smoking weed, and I remember coming back in and being like this did not even make me high. So this is why it’s one of the most exciting times in my life. I learned to make a bong. Ten minutes later, I realize I’m stoned. So I’m stoned for the first time. How I realized I was stoned is I was sitting in a chair listening to headphones to Peter Tosh’s Legalize It, and I didn’t realize it but I was singing along at the top of my lungs. “LEGALIZE IT!” And my cousin comes over and punches me square in the chest and says, “Shut the fuck up!”

So I had all these valuable lessons in one experience. You know, Peter Tosh, making a bong, shut the fuck up around authority. Yeah, so that pretty much shaped me. That’s the first time I ever got high.

So how long have you been writing for Westword as William Breathes?

Since November 20, 2009.

And how did you land that job?

So Westword put out an ad, I think it was on Craigslist and maybe on their own website looking for someone to just review marijuana dispensaries. And that was the whole thing because all of these marijuana dispensaries had just popped up around the summer of 2009. Broadway became kind of a strip. So anyway, they pitched to have someone review these shops kind of like restaurants or clubs or any type of other big thing in the city that Westword normally reviews, I don’t know, film…you know they’re a cultural magazine. We cover health and wellness. So it made sense.

So they put out this ad, and that kind of made headlines. And a lot of people thought it was hysterical. And I saw it, and I was an out of work journalist at the time. I had been laid off. I had been writing around Colorado for about 10 years.

Anyway, my friends were like you need to apply to this. You need to do this. This is you. Come on you’re a medical marijuana patient. I mean all the stars are in line. And I’m just like, “no.” Because I thought Westword was going to be kind of snarky about it, because it’s Westword. I work for them, but it’s Westword.

So about three or four days to the deadline, I went on line and I submitted it. And I kind of forgot about it because it took them forever to make a decision. We’re talking I submitted my application in August and I didn’t hear back from them until after Halloween weekend. By the time I got the email from them, I was in Los Angeles and I was driving. Well, my wife was driving. And I got an email and I was like, “Holy Shit!” And my wife nearly takes the car off the road because she thinks something’s wrong. And I had gotten an email back saying that they had really liked what I wrote. And would I go to a dispensary and send them a review. And I did! And they hired me and another girl who wrote reviews originally.

How did you decide that you want to be William Breathes?

Well Will is…so I was a big, well I still am. I love the band Phish. And so it’s just a nod to a song and an album…

I think you misunderstood my question. I mean what made you decide that you wanted to be The William Breathes that writes for Westword. What made you decide you wanted to actually go for that job?

Oh, I see what you’re saying. Part of it was…wow, I’ve never really talked about this. Part of it was because I knew that if I submitted the application I’d get it. It wasn’t so much an ego thing for me, as more, “you’re fucking good enough to get it. Just fucking do this.” And it’s something I’m passionate about so that’s when I finally submitted the application. That’s really what pushed me over. And then I kind of forgot about it.

And then when they asked me to write a review, which is the Walking Raven review, which is still up on line. That was my trial. When I went to that first shop, and I had been to several dispensaries at that time, I got it. I understood what Westword was going for.

You know like I said earlier I wasn’t sure if I wanted to apply for it before because I thought Westword might be a little snarky about it, “oh look at these stoners pretending…” But then I realized I could make it NOT that. All of those things kind of combined is really what did it.

The reason I was able to do that, and I can’t stress this enough, is because Westword was forward thinking enough to let me just do whatever the fuck I wanted to do. And then they had a freelance budget, something happened, and they were like you know you can cover more. So I started doing more news pieces and cultural pieces and stuff like that. And so from there, this whole thing has been sort of an organic development. I mean I hate to say that I just willed it into existence, but it started and it happened and I just sort of rolled with the punches. Because as cool as it is to be Will Breathes and all this shit and be known and all that, really my job is to follow what else is going on in the industry, you know? From that sense it’s been a real organic development. As the industry has moved, as the culture has moved we’ve just covered that.

What do you see as your roll in the community?

Honestly, I try not to look at my role as anything more than a reporter and a critic. But trying to do so– and a lot of people would say it’s with an obvious slant towards cannabis. But I think it’s with an emphasis on being honest and truthful about cannabis as something we should all take seriously and we should all laugh at and we should all be able to enjoy like the finer things in life. It’s so multi-faceted that it deserves the coverage that we give it. And I can laugh at myself quite easily and I think we can as a community too. But I’m not naïve enough to think that people don’t look to me for that and because I have that point of view. I think that’s my role now that we’ve developed it. But to me it’s just being honest. Obviously I support cannabis. But I support it like I support eating and exercising. It’s a facet of life that we can enjoy; we can make ourselves better with.

What does a typical dispensary visit look like for you?

Um…blurry. No…ha ha ha…

That is so awesome! That’s going right in the article!

Well you know, sometimes they are! And not because I’m high as a kite. Which, I will say this: originally you could smoke in dispensaries. And it was a lot harder then, because I would spend like an hour. I can remember going to the Ganja Gourmet and sitting at their bar and being like, “wow I’m so high!” And it was cool, but it was like an hour of my life—a big chunk. And I know, first world problems, right?

So now it’s made it a bit easier in that all dispensaries are basically the same thing, just like cars are all basically the same thing. You know for me. So I used to try to go in a lot on Fridays in the afternoon just to see what they did with a lot of traffic. Early on that’s when you could find the most amount of patients in a dispensary. Now I don’t need that as much. I’ve gotten a lot better at getting a feel for it. And I’m not as detailed in what I write. It’s more of a mood thing for me now.

So I go in. I try to get a feel for it. Then I go through the herb first and concentrates after that. Then edibles sometimes. But for me the average dispensary that I go to I don’t care what style it is. I’ve seen dub-step and flat-brimmed hats or people in lab coats. I mean it fits all different people. That’s what I try to put across. Like I’m not going to knock on one place just because they’re “professional.” I’ll let you know it; I mean I’ll let you know if they overdo it. So that’s my approach on that.

The herb is another thing. Just going through the jars. Is it clean? Is there mold? Is there something wrong with it? That’s obviously the first most important thing. After that it’s more the presentation on it in terms of how well it’s trimmed, is it chopped up in a machine, is it cured and dried really well, that matters to me. If it doesn’t matter for people then that’s fucking cool for them.

Like this shop I went to this last week. It was clear they harvested way early. And it was still wet and it was in a jar. And there’s no fucking way I like that. So things like that I’ll call out. Summer nightmare I call it, instead of summer dream. I mean I know it is, and I hate to fucking harsh on them. But I have to do this every week. The reality of this is that I can’t spend…it just has to feel right to me in terms of everything has to click. You know like I said, it doesn’t matter to me whether they’re really professional or a bunch of hippies. It’s more like, are they paying attention to me as an individual? Are they asking me as a medical marijuana patient, “what do you usually use it for?” Those things are really important and I still think there’s value in that. Even when it goes recreational I think, even more so, bud tenders should be asking people, “hey what are you looking to get out of this?”

Are you excited to review recreational retail stores?

I am. I’m really excited. I think for several reasons. One because I want to see if anyone changes. The reality of the medical marijuana market is that obviously people are reselling. But that is such a small percentage and it still doesn’t account for that big of an increase. What I’m getting at is you have 109,000 patients. That is the base for all of these shops in Colorado right now; plus whatever people are reselling. That means a shop that was in the Highlands for example that was before getting by selling cheap-ass ounces ‘cause you had to draw people up to your shop. Now all of a sudden you can open it up into a smaller boutique and sort of cater to your local neighborhood. Cater to a smaller percentage of the clientele, but which is a much larger number of people. Down the line, like in a year if you were asking me this, it would be my hope that we’d see a lot more boutiques and they’re being supported by people who really want good cannabis. Because their market isn’t being determined by weight for people who just want to turn it into oil.

How do you think attitudes towards cannabis have changed over the last few years, particularly after the passage of Amendment 64?

Specifically here in Colorado? I think it’s become a much more acceptable thing to talk about openly, publically, in general in this community. And obviously for people like you and me that is not a big deal. But at the same time, it kind of is. We grew up, if you’ve been smoking cannabis for some time, in a society, say you’re out with friends over dinner at a restaurant you wouldn’t necessarily talk about growing cannabis over the table; because it’s a security thing for you. It would be just a little strange. So that sort of acceptance for us to be able to talk about it more openly, for example.

But on a greater level, I’ll never forget election night when 64 passed and there were more posts from people in Colorado that I know that never, ever posted anything about marijuana before. Ever since then, people are sharing articles. Like, I’ll catch them even sharing my articles sometimes. You know, people that I never even thought would read Westword. That’s a trip to me. But I think it shows to people that there’s this normalization happening. There was this huge bubble up and now everything is kind of settling.

Yeah, I can see that. And I’m hoping the rest of the country will follow suit. So the last question I have for you is what is your position on Proposition AA?

Fuck it, I’ve said it before. I think our politicians were very clearly not listening to the beat of the community. And it almost seems vindictive. It’s too high. It’s like I said a few weeks ago, someone said it’s like our politicians saw this big chunk of meat and said “let’s eat it! All of it! Yargh!” However, there are two sides to everything. One being that everything that they’re doing was authorized in 64. It was there that the 15 percent excise tax; we knew it could go up to that. We knew they were going to do that. We fucking gave them permission to do that.

The other thing is, the excise tax; that is technically supposed to all be the wholesalers. It is supposed to be from the wholesale of cannabis from the grow operations to the dispensaries or from dispensary to dispensary or whatever. That’s my understanding of that. Now I know that gets passed onto the consumer through prices. But when people say it’s a 25{2b4a1a3f3bbc9c5a43771f34362679a3afcf9df24c0d9f4fe2fa80a69d802033} tax it’s a little bit misleading because it’s not a 25{2b4a1a3f3bbc9c5a43771f34362679a3afcf9df24c0d9f4fe2fa80a69d802033} tax applied right there at the point of sale. Even with all that said, I think it’s too high and that they need to go back to the drawing board with it and propose something a little more reasonable. And I wrote about this in several Westword articles now.

My biggest problem, is that if you look at the way alcohol is taxed in this state, it is taxed by volume. And I looked into the history on this. I think it came out to (don’t quote me on this) about 8{2b4a1a3f3bbc9c5a43771f34362679a3afcf9df24c0d9f4fe2fa80a69d802033} if you were buying the most expensive kind of alcohol. At the lowest it’s maybe something like 0.7{2b4a1a3f3bbc9c5a43771f34362679a3afcf9df24c0d9f4fe2fa80a69d802033}? So what are they thinking coming at us and being like, “that’s only 25{2b4a1a3f3bbc9c5a43771f34362679a3afcf9df24c0d9f4fe2fa80a69d802033} total, plus whatever your city wants to tack on, by the way.”

The tax code they’ve presented us is just outrageous. I’m not a super political guy. I understand both sides, but when you look at it comparatively to other things that this was supposed to be like, it’s not at all. It’s just a big money grab from politicians.

(c) The Daily Doobie – Read entire story here.