Two men involved in Connecticut’s cannabis scene are now branching out by also planning to grow the plant in Puerto Rico.
Jason Ortiz, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and past president of the Minority Cannabis Business Association, said he had “been growing cannabis illegally in my home for many years” and had considered applying for a cultivator license in Connecticut.
“I looked for money to try to get to be a cultivator,” he said. But Ortiz said he “was unable to find a significant enough investment to do so.”
Luis Vega has been granted several licenses in the state. “We have an adult-use cultivation license in Connecticut,” he said, and will be opening two retail cannabis locations in the state.
Another business partner, Wesley Jackson, is also part-owner of a dispensary in Middletown.
Ortiz was born in New London, but his parents are Puerto Rican and he has family on the island. His sister was “born here but raised in Puerto Rico,” he said, “and my grandma has been there for 50 years.”
That allowed him, under Puerto Rican law, to apply for a cannabis license. His sister owns 51 percent of the venture, called Top Flor. The name incorporates the Spanish word for flower, flor, which is also the term used for cannabis plant material.
Recreational cannabis is not legal in Puerto Rico, but medical cannabis is. As in Connecticut, the law specifies that all cultivation must be indoors.
“We have a 13-acre plot that is on a hill, I would say that’s couched in a bit of a residential community,” he said. “We’ll have a translucent roof. That means that sunlight can come through the roof and reach the plants. It’s a bit of a mixed-grow environment where you will have sun coming in, but also some lights as well.”
Vega, who owns Wepa! Farms, is working with Ortiz — whose facility will both grow and process the cannabis. But he is also launching his own separate cultivation site elsewhere on the island.
“Jason and I have become friends over the last 10 years here in Connecticut based on cannabis and activism and everything else,” Vega said. “As that happened, it was, ‘Hey, I’m going out to Puerto Rico to do some things, will you be out there?’ ‘Hey, I’m gonna be out there, too.’ One introduction goes into another introduction, to another introduction, and now there’s two people doing it.”
Vega credited a low-key meetup for their new plans.
“If I had not taken Jason up on the offer to have lunch in Puerto Rico, because we were both out there, I probably would not be in this position,” he said.
Ortiz said he found the process of applying for licenses “relatively straightforward” in Puerto Rico.
“Anybody can apply in Puerto Rico and there’s no time limit. There’s no limit to the number of operators that can exist,” he said.
His and Vega’s operations should start growing cannabis in May, if everything goes as planned. They were granted preapproval, which enabled them to purchase land, insurance and equipment.
“The tone of the government is much more inviting and supportive than it is in Connecticut and most other places, where there’s just so many different restrictions and folks are still treating it as a bad thing that needs to be controlled, rather than an opportunity,” Ortiz said.
In Puerto Rico, Vega said, cannabis operations are “a little bit more straightforward, and a lower barrier to entry as well, where here in Connecticut, it’s a little bit more formalized,” Vega said. “But we kind of see that in most industries in the Caribbean versus up here on the mainland.”
Ortiz, whose facility will also process cannabis for use in edible forms, said he plans to keep the offerings specific to Puerto Rican culture. by offering such items as cannabis-infused flan, for example.
“You give my grandma a brownie, she’s like, ‘all right,’ but it’s not really something that she feels is part of her culture,” he said. “We’re really trying to make sure that the products that we make are for a Spanish-speaking audience very specifically.”
Puerto Rico allows cannabis only for medical purposes, but it also offers reciprocity, meaning a U.S. resident with an active medical card could buy a cannabis product. Many of the larger companies market their cannabis to tourists.
“On the island, you’ll see a lot of those same mainland brands, because it’s focused on tourism. And where do most of the tourists come from? From the mainland,” Vega said. “So that marketing is carried over.”
But Ortiz and Vega plan instead to market their wares to the island’s residents. “Our target audience is really Puerto Ricans and Spanish-speaking folks across the country.”
That’s a sensibility Vega said he hopes will carry over to his cannabis businesses in Connecticut. He said cannabis marketing in the United States is not often targeted to minority communities.
“I believe that a lot of the products in this state are very commercialized and they don’t hold true to the cannabis culture itself,” he said. “I’m a social equity applicant. So, hopefully, the social equity applicants are able to infuse some more of the culture here and that piggybacks off of what Jason is hoping to do in the island.”
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