“I helped her start her, so I was honored by that,” Haq says. Inspired by her efforts at UCLA, Anette Recinos, a student at archrival USC, sought out Haq’s guidance. Today, there are Cannaclub chapters at 31 colleges and universities in 14 states with some 7,000 student members, but it was the founding of just the third chapter - in 2019 - that may have cemented Haq’s legacy as a cannabis community connector. “We had a UCLA botany professor speak about the history and botany of the plant and we had someone from the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative get involved.” “We had Cat Packer teach one of our classes,” Haq says. Lifestyle They came out of the ‘cannabis closet’ to help other Asian Americans do the sameĬalifornia cannabis brand owners wrote a beginner’s guide to weed and translated it into 11 Asian languages, including Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Urdu and Tagalog. “I kind of like tested out”), she headed to college - first to Pasadena City College, then UCLA and finally the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, where in 2021 she earned a master’s of science in pharmacological sciences with a focus on medical cannabis sciences and therapeutics. Her career in cannabis had begun.Įventually, with high school firmly in the rearview mirror (“I didn’t go back,” Haq says. The next year, four days after her 18th birthday, Haq started a budtending job at a dispensary. Haq says her report was so convincing that her mother invited her to present it again - this time to her colleagues and their patients at the City of Hope cancer center. So I wrote this whole report for her, and she was like, ‘Oh, you did homework!’ because at the time I was a high school dropout who had been avoiding homework.” “Instead, because she was a scientist, she wanted to know why what I was doing was OK and made me write up a report. “She didn’t punish me though,” Haq recalls. That’s when she caught her only child smoking weed. Her mother, a clinical researcher, would play a more direct - and formative - role in her daughter’s cannabis career 17 years later. “But she chose the old Arabic feminized version of the word that means ‘counselor or advisor.’ Which is kind of crazy because that’s what I do.” ![]() “Maha has definitions in different languages,” Haq says as she rattled off the translations from Hindi, Urdu, Farsi and modern standard Arabic. But she gives her mom kudos for choosing what turned out to be a wholly appropriate first name. Haq says that her last name, which is pronounced “huck” (as in Huck Finn), translates from Arabic to mean truth. area (“Palmdale at first,” she says, “and later all over the Antelope Valley and San Gabriel Valley”). To fully understand Haq’s cannabis career arc, one needs to start at the beginning, which was officially 2012 - the year she landed her first cannabis job - but if you’re a believer that your name can chart your destiny, then the seeds were planted much earlier than that.īorn to an Indian father (who isn’t part of her life, she says) and a Pakistani mother, she spent her early childhood in Houston before moving to the Greater L.A. That’s what I’m trying to do with Dabby Hour. “For the past 11 years,” she says, “I’ve been busy building up other people and helping them find their brand identity, build their businesses. It’s an important distinction, Haq says, because of why she entered the social media space in the first place. But I’m not sponsored or paid by any of the brands I talk about.” I try things, I go places and I comment on them and talk about them. On more than one occasion, when introduced as a cannabis influencer, she’ll smile her wide Cheshire cat smile and gently interject: “I don’t consider myself an influencer. … Her reviews of things on her livestream and on her Instagram really matter, not only because of her educational background but because of the big influence she has.”Īt the mention of the i-word - influencer, in this case - Haq seems to almost flinch. She not only seeks out women but also that are sustainably sourced. As a person with a social work background, I’m all about best practices, and she is too. “She does so much networking and she knows so many different brands. ![]() ![]() “We met when she was studying sociology at UCLA,” Barajas says. What happens when your dog eats your weed? Where are the boomer stoners at? Here are some of your burning weed questions asked - and answered. Lifestyle Can you smoke a joint at the Hollywood Bowl? And other burning weed questions answered
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