For the past 10 years, Graham Farrar has served as the boy-next-door-poster-child for Santa Barbara’s now significantly weathered cannabis industry. With eight acres of cannabis operations in Carpinteria and Camarillo coupled with multiple retail outlets, Farrar and his Glass House Farms have ranked among the biggest cannabis players on the South Coast, thriving while many in the industry have sunk from overproduction or the increasingly hostile political winds their industry has attracted.
Early this Tuesday morning, Farrar and his Glass House empire did something no California cannabis operator has ever done. He and his company were selling corporate stock on the New York Stock Exchange, to which Glass House had been “uplisted” just the previous week.
“It’s kind of surreal. I feel like a 10-year overnight success,” he said from the Sea of Cortez. “I’ve always dreamed of becoming a real business, and today we’re being treated like a real business.”
Glass House has been on the Canadian stock exchange since 2021, but the volume on the New York exchange, he said, is much bigger.
“We did about five times the sales, and the stock went up a little — not a lot, but some. That’s the right direction. And on the first day.” (Glass House is the second U.S. cannabis company to make the New York Stock Exchange; Florida-based Trulieve was the first this June.)
As Farrar tells it, this is just the start. The next step, he said, is selling overseas — Germany would be the likely start. After that, he suggested, marketing throughout the 50 states that he likes to say define the United States of America. Texas would probably be first.
“If you live in New Jersey, does it make sense to drink only wines that are made in New Jersey and not wines made in Napa?” Farrar asked.
From the beginning, this always was the vision — to burst past the confines of the California market. But none of it, ironically, would have been realized were it not for the interventions of President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. Last December, Trump issued an executive order in the Oval Office declaring that cannabis was of medicinal benefit. Medicinal marijuana needed to be reclassified, he said, a “Schedule III” drug under the federal hierarchy of controlled substances. This is key. Since the Nixon administration, cannabis has been listed as a “Schedule I” drug, meaning it’s dangerous, it’s addictive, and of no medicinal value. Schedule I drugs are illegal merely to possess.
Glass House has always been licensed for both medicinal and adult-use consumption. Farrar said federal regulators are currently debating whether all cannabis should be reclassified. Leading the charge for the reclassification, he said, was the federal government itself. One federal witness for the change testified that cannabis was less dangerous than alcohol.
“We always knew that,” Farrar said, “but to hear the government say it is something else.”
The reclassification went into effect April 23, and Glass House immediately applied for the Schedule III designation.
Making all this even more surreal, it was a year ago that federal immigration agents swarmed Glass House operations in Carpinteria and Camarillo in a military-style assault. They were reportedly serving federal warrants. By the time the smoke cleared, 361 Glass House employees would be detained or arrested. One would fall from a height of 30 feet while attempting to flee and would die the next day.
Five hundred protesters gathered in Camarillo; one reportedly fired a shot at ICE agents. No one was hit. Another 150 protesters assembled in Carpinteria, including Congressmember Salud Carbajal. Non-lethal armaments were deployed, such as tear gas, smoke grenades, flashbang grenades, and rubber bullets. Santa Barbara’s district attorney, John Savrnoch, would denounce the use of force as gratuitous overkill.
“It’s been a roller coaster,” Farrar said.
Federal officials would later explain they were serving warrants on wanted criminals and people exploiting underage workers. Fourteen of those arrested were minors. Later, Farrar would issue a statement explaining that nine of those detained worked directly for Glass House; the rest, he said, had been hired by labor contractors. He has since hired different contractors and instituted an identity verification system. Many of those detained last July were later deported. Many opted for voluntary deportation. One was a woman with three children.
The coincidence of events here is striking. More striking still, Farrar has donated generously to Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom — $100,000 — combatively outspoken in his denunciation of Trump and seen as all but certain to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in two years.
To qualify for the fine print outlined in the final rules by the DEA, Glass House had to legally reconstitute itself as an exclusively medicinal cannabis corporation. Accordingly, the company split into two separate but clearly related corporate entities, one exclusively medicinal, and the other — with the addition of new investors — adult-use only. The one uplisted for the New York Stock Exchange is exclusively medicinal. That classification is critical for threading the regulatory needle allowing Glass House to export its cannabis products overseas or to other states.
He’s not there yet. But close.
In the meantime, however, Farrar is still rooted in Santa Barbara County and dealing with Santa Barbara County problems. When he started out, Farrar spoke movingly of not wanting to become “the guy who farts in the elevator.” Today, he’s persona non grata with many of the Carpinterians fed up with the industry’s persistent odor issues. The county revoked his operating license on the grounds that he hadn’t installed the state-of-the-art carbon-scrubbing odor eaters they demanded. He appealed that revocation, arguing the Board of Supervisors unfairly denied him the extension to which he’s entitled under county ordinance. Farrar stressed he was the first operator to install the Infinity scrubbers at one of his two locations. At the other, he said, SoCal Edison simply can’t deliver enough juice to power-hungry devices.
“I can’t tell you how much time and money I have spent trying to solve this problem. And not having anything to do with the New York Stock Exchange, I think you’ll see this problem resolved fairly soon.”
