By Mike, Master Grower
If you really want to know why Papers exists, it’s because I was chasing a ghost.
I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to find a specific feeling. I’m talking about the feeling you had when you were in Grade 10. You know the one. You’re in a basement, or a car, or the woods. Someone pulls out a bag, and before you even see it, the smell hits you. It stops the room.
You smoke it, and you laugh until your sides physically hurt. You aren’t analyzing the terpene profile. You aren’t checking the THC percentage on the label. You are just… there.
Somewhere along the line, the world got serious, the industry got corporate, and that weed—the “Super Weed”—disappeared. It turned into a spreadsheet.
I built this place to get that feeling back. Here is how it happened.
My education didn’t start in a lab. It started when I was 13, in a buddy’s basement.
We were musicians (or we thought we were), jamming in the garage. One day, my friend reaches up into the drop-ceiling tiles and pulls down this old, white tobacco canister. We had no idea whose it was—maybe his dad’s, maybe a previous tenant’s—but he popped the lid, and it was like opening a treasure chest.
It wasn’t about the money. It was free. It was shared. For the next four years, that canister was the center of our universe. It taught me that cannabis wasn’t a commodity to be hoarded; it was a ritual to be shared.
When the canister finally ran dry, the world felt a little colder. I’ve been trying to refill it ever since.
Years later, I’m growing my own. I’m obsessed. I’m reading everything, trying everything. But the real breakthrough didn’t come from a textbook. It came from a mistake.
I had a partner back then who, let’s just say, enjoyed the party a little too much. One night, in a state of near-blackout confusion, he stumbled into the grow room and messed with the reservoir. He mixed things that shouldn’t be mixed. He stressed the plants in a way that should have killed them.
I came in the next day, ready to tear the crop down.
But the plants didn’t die. They reacted. They armored themselves. They produced a structure and a resin density I had never seen before.
It was an accident, but it taught me a lesson that defines Papers today: The plant is smarter than we are. If you push it the right way, it doesn’t break. It evolves. That “mistake” became the foundation of our proprietary system.
Here is the truth about the cannabis industry right now: It treats the plant like a slave.
Corporations try to force it to grow faster, yield higher, and look prettier using shortcuts. They spray it, they rush it, and they blast it with radiation to pass safety tests because they grew it in a dirty room.
If you treat a living thing like a slave, it resents you. It gives you the bare minimum. That’s why so much modern weed looks great but smokes like cardboard. It has no soul because it was raised in a factory.
I realized that if I wanted the “Grade 10” feeling back, I had to do the opposite.
I don’t employ sensors to tell me how the room feels. I am in the room. Five times a day. I watch the leaves. I feel the humidity on my skin. If the energy in the room is anxious, the plant is anxious. If I’m having a bad day, I stay out, because the plant knows.
It sounds crazy to a businessman. It makes perfect sense to a grower.
I operate on what I call the Kobe principle.
While everyone else is waking up at 10 AM, I’ve already been in the room twice. While they are cutting corners to save a buck, I’m culling perfectly good plants because they don’t meet the standard of the “Super Weed.”
We don’t chase trends. We don’t grow what’s popular; we grow what can survive our system. I hunt genetics like a detective. I look for the weird ones, the ones with bad structure but incredible smells, because I know my system can fix the structure.
We are trying to create something that hits you in the chest. We want you to open the tin and feel like you just stepped out of a time machine into 1999, or 1969.
We call this company “Papers” because it’s simple. Tactile. It’s about the ritual of sitting down at a workbench, rolling one up, and taking a breath.
It is also a return to the authority of nature. We respect the wisdom of the plant because it has been here longer than we have. It understands the earth better than we ever will.
We aren’t chasing the hype of the month. We are building something that will stand for the next hundred years.
This is an Estate. A place where the craft is protected, where the truth is told, and where the only thing that matters is the burn.
If you smoke our flower and it doesn’t bring back the best times, if it doesn’t help you reclaim your rhythm, then I haven’t done my job.
Welcome to the family.