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Few names in cannabis are surrounded with as much hype as the Jungle Boys. However, because so much focus has gone to the amazing pot they\u2019re producing, little time has been dedicated to learning the real backstory behind the top-shelf collective.<\/p>\n
We had the chance to talk with the Jungle Boys<\/a>\u2019 founder Ivan about their earliest roots, their journey towards running the TLC Collective<\/a> dispensary in Los Angeles in the midst of the Proposition D regulatory upheaval and the challenges of adjusting to California\u2019s new adult-use market \u2014 plus the strain he says is generating the most hype today.<\/p>\n Ivan says he started like any other cannabis enthusiast in his youth. He wasn\u2019t incredibly dedicated yet, but he enjoyed smoking good cannabis and would occasionally read through High Times. At that point in life, he viewed cannabis consumption as more of a hobby than anything.<\/p>\n \u201cYou know I had a plant or two in my backyard,\u201d Ivan told Cannabis Now. \u201cMy mom was actually the green thumb. She always had a cannabis plant in the backyard when I was younger and I didn\u2019t really know what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n When he got a bit older, Ivan said his mother started to help nurture his hobby a bit more. She was the one who taught him how to top plants to prevent any unwanted attention.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the funniest thing. I had this big tall sativa in the yard. She was like, \u2018Oh, it\u2019s getting over the fence you got to cut the top of it.\u2019 I said that sounds crazy, you\u2019re not supposed to cut it,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cLooking back now, I was young then. I was a teenager and I\u2019m 40 now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Some Wedding Pie A post shared by Jungle Boys<\/a> (@jungleboys) on Sep 16, 2018 at 6:46pm PDT<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n Ivan said he was really becoming interested in cultivating as he got a bit older, but life was taking him on a different path. He was working on large-scale industrial buildouts, including for big-name companies such as FedEx when it expanded its SoCal operations.<\/p>\n During this time, Ivan\u2019s dad was diagnosed with cancer<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had stage IV cancer,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cThey caught it late and one of the doctors was like \u2018Hey listen, you have stage IV cancer, it just becomes about living good.\u2019 We had tried the radiation and the chemo and it just wasn\u2019t working. The doctor said give cannabis a try.\u201d<\/p>\n The doctor wasn\u2019t even offering to write the recommendation himself, but just telling the family to look into it. Ivan recalled the limited options for his dad in those days, at that point in history when very few dispensaries had actually opened up shop.<\/p>\n Ivan looked into the situation. He got his own doctor\u2019s recommendation to use medical marijuana and, to get the ball rolling, he got his first batch of medication for his dad from the Toluca Lake Collective, otherwise known as the TLC Collective. The edibles and flowers really helped his father, Ivan says. Ultimately, Ivan\u2019s dad did pass away, but Ivan says the process of helping his father live the best life possible on his way out had helped reignite his enthusiasm for cannabis.<\/p>\n This new excitement came in the early 2000s, during the days when sketchy hydroponic stores and web forums were the premium source of information for anyone cultivating their own cannabis. Back then, a trip to the hydro store might mean switching cars, and of course, you couldn\u2019t even mention anything to do with cannabis.<\/p>\n \u201cYou had to tell them you were growing tomatoes or they would kick you out,\u201d Ivan said.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n It was at this point that Ivan also got exposed to the concept of vending at dispensaries for the first time. He fired up a couple lights in the garage and began to dip his toes into what would become the cannabis industry, but back then it was still just a movement since you were a lot more likely to end up in handcuffs. Nevertheless, Ivan says, his first run of some now-mystery Bubba Kush cross came out exceptional.<\/p>\n Ivan continued to work full time outside of the cannabis industry while he fell deeper in love with growing pot. He was regularly putting in 14 to 16-hour workdays and he says he was getting a bit burnt out while his passion project flowered in the garage. But there were bills to pay as he was supporting his growing family. Soon, two lights turned to four, and then eight.<\/p>\n \u201cI looked around and realized this was becoming something and every time I would take people my product they would buy it right up,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The cultivation forums Ivan had visited online agreed with his presumptions of the changes coming to the game. Back then, online cultivation forums were the only place one could actually explore the thoughts of other cultivators on various issues. Ivan says that many of those cultivators are still his friends.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was the only way you could communicate with people,\u201d Ivan says. \u201cStill to this day, guys I know and met on there \u2014 like OG Raskal and Capulator \u2014 are still my friends. We came up through the ranks together and started in our garages. I remember getting my first warehouse and you couldn\u2019t really post it online.\u201d<\/p>\n In those days for Ivan and friends, the fear of having their IP address tracked was a big deal. The earliest online anonymity tools and tactics like the TOR network quickly became mainstays of people collaborating online in attempts to individually try and produce some of the best cannabis of the day. Ivan acquired above-average IT skills while learning he simply couldn\u2019t put himself out there.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n A room full of Jungle Cake & Gelato coming down from Jungle Boys x @losangelesfarmers_ full crush mode #jungleboys #playingwithfire #losangelesfarmers #alwaysimitatedneverduplicated<\/a><\/p>\n A post shared by Jungle Boys<\/a> (@jungleboys) on Aug 29, 2018 at 1:26pm PDT<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n \n\u201cAt the end of the day, I made some really good connections and I met some really good people,\u201d Ivan says. \u201cWe kind of bounced things off each other, like \u2018Try this product,\u2019 and this and that.\u201d<\/p>\n About 13 years ago, Ivan\u2019s new warehouse was also emerging in the Los Angeles scene, at the time the number of Los Angeles-area dispensary storefronts began to expand. So, Ivan began working with a couple of bigger shops. This included Downtown Patient Group,<\/a> or DTBG, and the Toluca Lake Collective. He quickly realized vertical integration was where much of the business would be heading.<\/p>\n \u201cI realized buying stuff off vendors was OK, but you couldn\u2019t control everything,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cI felt in order to have the best products on the shelf and have the best concentrates you had to do it yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n Ivan opened a dispensary called Nature\u2019s Green Cure in Santa Fe Springs, California to test his theory. At the same time, he got in a bit deeper with the folks at the Toluca Lake Collective as a partner. In his view, Nature\u2019s Green Cure was exceptionally progressive. While still in the cannabis dark ages, the NGC team reached out to police and municipal officials to ensure everything was above board. That sort of outreach was a very new idea at the time.<\/p>\n \u201cWe kind of had a cult following because people would come inside and we had a grow in the back,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t show it, but people knew we had a grow back there. At that time we had a hundred lights. And a hundred lights was crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n That NGC grow space was carved into five 20-light rooms. Ivan says the vision was always small craft rooms to produce small batches. This was also when the earliest incarnations of the large-scale seed propagation efforts that the Jungle Boys are now known for began.<\/p>\n An early find and still one of the most famous, Ivan\u2019s WiFi #43 turned into one of the more popular cuts of the decade after Ivan popped a thousand seeds.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody did that. I was insane back then,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n If you grow more than 100 plants, the sentences on the federal level<\/a> can reach up to 40 years. However, Ivan took the risk and grew out ten times that in search of one phenotype. It proved to be a gem.<\/p>\n \u201cI was so passionate about what I was doing. I believed it was for the right reasons,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cI\u2019ll always remember when older patients and folks with disabilities would go inside [our dispensary]. We would really do our best to take care of these people.\u201d<\/p>\n The team at NGC at this point had built a family of staff, patients and providers. But then, in the early 2010s, things took a turn for the worst.<\/p>\n In 2012, Santa Fe Springs City Councilman Joseph Serrano\u00a0pled guilty<\/a>\u00a0to shaking down the dispensaries in town. Serrano had been a vocal opponent of Ivan\u2019s efforts to provide medical cannabis with a business license and it turned out Serrano was on another dispensary\u2019s payroll. That dispensary was working with the FBI and they monitored meetings where Serrano took over $10,000 in payouts from the informant dispensary. He\u00a0demanded payments<\/a>\u00a0of $1,600 a month, which turned out to be the cost of his mortgage.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reason he worked against us was the longer he could prevent the shops trying to get business licenses from setting up, the longer the illegal shops could stay open,\u201d Ivan said.<\/p>\n It became clear that Serrano was voting against legal cannabis to keep the marketplace in the gray area, which would make it easiest for him to continue his corruption scheme.<\/p>\n \u201cHe would just talk so much sh*t and call us drug dealers and low lives,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cI would just sit there thinking someone that feels this passionately about something is pretty scary. The feds ended up wiretapping his phone and finding out he was trying to get $20,000 out of someone. This is all public information now.\u201d<\/p>\n Photo Jared Delello<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As Serrano\u2019s activities heated things up for Santa Fe Springs operators, the first wave of the Department of Justice\u2019s\u00a0famous landlord letters<\/a>\u00a0made their way out across California, wherein the federal government threatened to send landlords to jail if they had any property being rented to a retail cannabis entity.<\/p>\n At that point, Ivan\u2019s NGC had turned into a sizable operation. As to not risk their freedom and lives given the quantities of cannabis they were dealing with, the dispensary\u2019s management team decided to shut down the storefront for a couple weeks to take the pulse of the situation. During this time, Ivan was still helping out in Toluca Lake and working a full-time regular job.<\/p>\n \u201cI was sleep deprived, it was getting to me,\u201d he said. \u201cI realized at that point cannabis was my passion. I decided to quit my regular job and I did. I said to myself this is what I want to do whether or not it works out or not. I\u2019m just going to gamble and put it all on red and take my whole entire life savings and really make a run at this and open up a shop in Los Angeles.\u201d<\/p>\n So, Ivan took over the TLC Collective in Los Angeles in 2013 \u2014 the night before the city\u2019s famous Proposition D<\/a> passed, which granted limited immunity to the first 168 cannabis clubs that had opened in the city, essentially grandfathering them into hazy legality while the city sorted the rest of its cannabis policy out.<\/p>\n \u201cIf that law didn\u2019t pass, TLC wasn\u2019t worth anything,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cIt would have been just like every other shop. We were really committed to it.\u201d<\/p>\n At this time, TLC moved to 23rd Street in Los Angeles<\/a>. This was also the beginning of their longtime lawsuit with the City of Los Angeles. For 13 years, the case stretched out as the city claimed the new TLC location was not compliant with city cannabis laws. However, Ivan had filed the proper permitting paperwork at a municipal satellite office of the city\u2019s office of finance in Van Nuys, California.<\/p>\n \u201cThe office is there so residents don\u2019t have to drive to downtown Los Angeles,\u201d he said. \u201cThey took our paperwork, accepted it, stamped it and then send it to downtown.\u201d<\/p>\n The city came back and said they could only file the paperwork downtown, despite it being already stamped and approved.<\/p>\n \u201cWe end up in court fighting them for 13 years,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cBack and forth, back and forth. We won the appellate, but it got overturned and went up to the next court. It just went on and on. Literally two weeks ago, it finally got dismissed.\u201d<\/p>\n Ivan said that the craziest part was that after they had jumped through the hoops of the municipal and state licensing process to be able to stay open since January this year, there was still someone on the city\u2019s staff who was trying to shut them down. Ivan says many of his most stressful days revolved around the case. He knew he was doing everything right, and as compliant as possible or beyond, but the pressure of the situation still weighed heavily on him.<\/p>\n During this prolonged drama playing out with the city, Ivan said he predicted that getting word he would be permitted would be \u201cthe best day of his life.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe have something special,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a pretty amazing place and we\u2019re proud of what we built.\u201d<\/p>\n With everything finally squared away with the City of Los Angeles, the Jungle Boys and TLC now face the challenges of California\u2019s adult-use cannabis market. Today, a staff of hundreds works to keep up with thousands of lights producing cannabis strains that are not necessarily the best-yielding phenotypes, but each batch is still magic. That quality makes it difficult for the Jungle Boys to keep the shelves stocked with their flower.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were already busy when we were medical, we just couldn\u2019t keep up with the supply,\u201d says Ivan. \u201cNow we turned rec and medical, and now we\u2019ve basically doubled our flower production. But we\u2019ve also doubled the number of people that come through the door every day.\u201d<\/p>\n A big bottleneck across the state is laboratory testing<\/a>, affecting everyone, including the Jungle Boys. Currently, it takes weeks to get results back on a given product. Like many other producers, this bottleneck is regularly adding two weeks or longer into the Jungle Boys\u2019 timeline of getting the flower to shelves. But once they get it out to testing, they feel comfortable pre-packing since they say that nothing is ever going to get denied.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been testing like this for the past two or three years,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cWe were ready to be tested, so we already know we\u2019re good.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, the Jungle Boys have two storefronts: TLC and the Los Angeles Farmers<\/a> dispensary, located near the Staples Center. At any given point, these two cannabis retail stores stock between two and 10 of the Jungle Boys\u2019 most popular cuts. Once the laboratory industry figures everything out a bit better, Ivan said they should have 20 different flavors available.<\/p>\n In order to grow more strains, the Jungle Boys are firing up new facilities on a weekly basis. All located in the confines of Los Angeles, as they\u2019re sticking to what they know.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been offered better deals with lower rent and lower electricity \u2014 but Los Angeles is just what we\u2019re doing right now,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cFor the most part, we\u2019re staying in downtown LA.\u201d<\/p>\n Another factor their storefronts are coping with is that many vendors who made the cut to get on TLC\u2019s shelves back in the day are not around anymore. Ivan believes a lot of folks didn\u2019t have faith that Prop 64<\/a> was going to pass, so they didn\u2019t have their ducks in a row to mount a fight in the marketplace.<\/p>\n Another thing that surprised Ivan about many of those old vendors was their lack of an attempt to take part in Los Angeles\u2019 social equity program, which is aiming to award business licenses directly to the communities hardest hit by cannabis prohibition.<\/p>\n Strawberry Shortcake from the Jungle Boys (Photo Jared Delello)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Despite the production challenges that the Jungle Boys are currently facing, Ivan and the team don\u2019t want to take in any outside capital. He said they don\u2019t want to have to answer to anyone else\u2019s throne.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re one of the few companies that can say they are 100 percent family and friend owned,\u201d Ivan said. \u201cMy daughter is the manager of TLC, my nephew runs cultivation for TLC and my wife runs Jungle Boys Clothing<\/a>. So it feels good to know we never took on big money and we don\u2019t owe anybody anything. The only person we owe every month is our landlord.\u201d<\/p>\n Ivan says the following the Jungle Boys have built of people who enjoy top shelf flowers allows them to grow whatever they want. They can grow strains that may not produce high yields but have amazing profiles, and they don\u2019t have to worry about a shareholders\u2019 bottom line. The short-term turn and burns are not for them.<\/p>\n Other things about the adult-use market also worry Ivan, particularly the legal threat to breeders and their intellectual property now that many new faces hope to patent the strains of yesteryear and take legal action on anyone else producing them.<\/p>\n \u201cI pheno-hunted somebody else\u2019s seed that they bred, but I don\u2019t own that strain,\u201d he says. \u201cI own the pheno that I found, but I don\u2019t own the strain. Like who owns Blue Dream? You can claim that you own it, but where did that originally come from? You\u2019re going to go trace down and try and sue some guy in Mendo that created the strain 20 years ago and say he can\u2019t grow it?\u201d<\/p>\n In their own battle with knockoffs, the Jungle Boys constantly work to remind folks where they can get the real thing, as opposed to attempting legal action against every imposter.<\/p>\n \u201cAt the end of the day, I always tell people, there are a few growers out there that day-in and day-out grow quality cannabis and do it on our scale,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n At this point with so many facilities, Ivan says it\u2019s a challenge in itself to be the one growing the best pot in-house, as each employee in the cultivation department is vying for bragging rights. Ivan says the newest item pushing hype on the team is the Wedding Pie strain, which is proving simply incredible. He wouldn\u2019t say it was better than their Jungle Cake strain, but put it right at that level.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/b>, have you ever smoked Jungle Boys cannabis before?<\/p>\n The post Planting the Seed: The Complete History of the Jungle Boys<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Few names in cannabis are surrounded with as much hype as the Jungle Boys. However, because so much focus has gone to the amazing pot they\u2019re producing, little time has been dedicated to learning the real backstory behind the top-shelf collective. We had the chance to talk with the JungleContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":29376,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[148,50,2121,3794,5,5878,621,488,2111,2900,289,5879,5880,5881],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29375"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29375"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29377,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29375\/revisions\/29377"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Beginning of the Jungle Boys<\/h4>\n
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Really digging this plant got a few keepers #jungleboys #playingwithfire #losangelesfarmers<\/a><\/p>\n\n
Nature\u2019s Green Cure:\u00a0Thriving in the Face of Prohibition & Corruption<\/h4>\n
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<\/p>\n13 Years in a Lawsuit Against the City of Los Angeles<\/h4>\n
Adapting to California\u2019s Adult-Use Cannabis Market<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: Planting the Seed: The Complete History of the Jungle Boys<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"