Did you catch that headline? I’ve been writing about cannabis for over a decade and am not a fan of weed puns, but this time it just felt doubly appropriate. That’s because last Friday, for one night only, the Oakland Ballers baseball team capitalized on a joke and became the Oakland Blazers. For cannabis culture—most specifically for Oaksterdam, the cannabis college that sponsored the night—the game was a win for normalization.
RELATED: The California State Fair’s newest drink trend isn’t alcohol-based
Jerseys with “Kush” written on the back weaved between crowds of families with kids. There were crowd games, beers, and a hot dog toss from the bullpen. Canadian geese staged a flyover in the seventh inning. A Grateful Dead cover band jammed behind the bleachers. Oh! And there was also baseball on a warm summer’s night. The Blazers defeated their opponent, the RedPocket Mobiles, by a score of 7-2.
”What’s wild is we’ve received such little pushback,” Casey Pratt, the Oakland Ballers vice president of communications and fan entertainment, says of the cannabis-themed promotion. “We almost expected some, but it hasn’t really come. I think that the cannabis industry and weed and everything has become a lot more acceptable and a responsible way for adults to partake if they so choose to.”
Blowing Smoke
You couldn’t smoke or vape weed at the Blazers game during the cannabis-themed night, but the winks and nods were all there. Players mimed a joint-smoking gesture when they reached first base, an in-between-innings audience-participation game referenced the munchies, and a PA announcement advertised Purple City Genetics.
RELATED: Puffco scores big at 7/10 World Cup watch party
The way the event worked as a family-friendly evening at the ballpark and a celebration of cannabis involved the Emerald Farm Tours shuttle taking visitors on a crawl of Oakland’s cannabis lounges to smoke weed before the evening at the ballpark.
“This is a recreational night for the cannabis industry, our families, and our community,” Oaksterdam’s executive chancellor Dale Sky Jones texts me before the game. “We’re not asking anyone to pretend that cannabis and kids mix. We’re showing how an industry holds both things at once: adults doing adult things in adult spaces, and a baseball game everyone’s family can enjoy.”
A Stolen Team
Both Oaksterdam and the Ballers have stories that build from a loss.
Founded in 2023, the Oakland Ballers are an independent baseball team formed to keep baseball culture alive in Oakland. The B’s came together as Oakland’s major league baseball team, the Athletics, aka the A’s, left the city for Sacramento in preparation for a planned permanent move to Las Vegas.
I grew up going to A’s games at the Oakland Coliseum, and I was there at the final game in Oakland in 2024, smoking weed at the way, way top back of the stadium because what were they going to do, kick me out?
The Ballers games are a celebration of the legends of the Oakland Coliseum. The mascot is Scrappy, the rally possum, and there’s a mural of Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson. Vendors who used to work at the Coliseum, like Kendrick Thompson, aka Ice Cold Kenny Bo, now work for the Ballers.
But while traditions from the A’s seeped over, there are also new characters like Mike Davie, aka the Hot Dog Mayor, who inherited a hot dog steamer passed down from Hal Gordon, aka Hal the Hot Dog Guy at the Coliseum.
“I love it,” Davie tells me of the Blazers Jerseys as my group of friends buys his last two hot dogs of the night. “I’ve seen the jerseys; they’re so ridiculous on the field, but I like it.”
RELATED: A new generation of Mellowz: Compound Genetics expands a fan favorite
The Oakland Blazers came about from a misunderstanding: the audience chanted “We love blunts,” but they were really chanting “We love Butz” for pitcher Reed Butz. What was an April Fool’s post featuring the Oakland Blazers uniforms became reality when the response was so positive.
“We just try to do fun things for people that they can enjoy,” Pratt says. “[The Blazers] was one of those things where we obviously loved it and thought it was great, and the response was so overwhelming that we’re just kind of doing what the people demanded.”
A District of Old
In 2025, Oaksterdam founder Richard Lee passed away from complications of cancer in Houston, Texas. Before the feds raided the Oaksterdam campus and his home in 2012, Lee had quite a run of success as a cannabis activist.
In 1999, Lee opened an Amsterdam-style coffeeshop called the Bulldog in Oakland’s downtown, and in 2003, opened the coffeeshop SR-71. Next, he formed a PAC that passed a city ordinance, Measure Z, in 2004. Measure Z paved the way for more cannabis clubs to open by making cannabis law enforcement the Oakland Police Department’s lowest priority.
In 2007, inspired by a trade school in the Netherlands, Lee blended Amsterdam and Oakland into one word and founded Oaksterdam, America’s first cannabis college.
RELATED: A different kind of movement: Champelli fuses fine art, cannabis, and streetwear
By that time, Oaksterdam was also a cultural district, a little Amsterdam situated between 19th Street and Broadway, a triangle where uptown meets downtown.
When a 2020 fire destroyed what was left of Oaksterdam’s in-person facilities and adjacent businesses, Oaksterdam, as a district, lost its heart. Classes are now held online.
But on July 31, through their sponsorship of the Oakland Blazers, Emerald Farm Tours and Oaksterdam brought a piece of that neighborhood back.
Loungin’
I start the lounge crawl at the Roo’td in the 510’s cannabis consumption lounge. The lounge is a huge space at the back of the dispensary and has a wall of TVs broadcasting the major league game.
Friday is senior night in the lounge, and the Tokeland Seniors, a cannabis social club for seniors that meets there on the third and fifth Fridays of the month, is hosting a game night. Later that night, when I return, almost all the seats are taken, with about 150 seniors in attendance.
“It’s a giant party with a lot of senior members,” Devlin Francis, the treasurer for the Tokeland Seniors, says. “We have a lot of fun here.”
In 2017, Oakland became the first city in the nation to establish a cannabis social equity program. As part of the lounge crawl, Oakland cannabis equity businesses such as Oakland Extracts are providing samples. I grab a sample from Heavy Hitters field marketer Jorge Hernandez, who is filling up disposable cups with Blue Dream smoke from a vape pen using a Zenco device.
“It is amazing and important for communities to provide a safe place to consume a legal product,” Jones says. “Friendly reminder: we are re-legalizing cannabis consumption spots.”
Jones is talking about the consumption spaces that existed as Measure Z Clubs before California passed adult-use cannabis in 2016. One of the other lounge spots on the tour is NUG Oakland, which is located in the basement of Oaksterdam’s former main campus building.
“Back in the day, Oaksterdam had areas [to purchase and consume cannabis] from the Oaksterdam Student Union to the back of the Bulldog,” Jones says. “And so we’re finally re-legalizing what we have shown two decades ago was safe and responsible. Now, finally the new adult-use laws are catching up, and we’re just here to show other communities that this can be safe, successful, and a benefit.”
Jones celebrates the whole night as a victory for Oaksterdam, continuing to forge firsts in cannabis activism.
“Tonight is Seniors’ Night,” she says. “We’re talking about folks 55 and up coming here and being together. This is crucial. It’s critical for happiness and health as well. This is where we get our hit of hope in a really hard world.”
“Things have come so far…”
Back on the shuttle, Emerald Farm Tours owner Victor Pinho gives me a dab of Grape Cream Cake live rosin from Tall Trees Society, and I meet Mars Anderson, who works for Oaksterdam operations remotely from the suburbs of Chicago. She tells me Illinois “went craft” two years ago and explains that before that the state’s whole adult-use system was run by MSOs.
“There’s still no talk of social equity,” Anderson says.
RELATED: The wavelengths of weed: Fig Farms show the spectrum of cannabis is vast
The shuttle is full of people for the ride to the game at Raimondi Park, and once I get through the gates I spot Jeff Jones, a longtime cannabis activist and Oaksterdam horticulture instructor who is married to Dale Sky Jones.
Jeff Jones tells me he’s just returned from the cannabis smoking space at the California State Fair, something which he personally found remarkable because it took place in the same city where he received a federal jury tampering charge in 2003 for handing out pamphlets on the steps of the federal courthouse on behalf of medical marijuana grower Bryan Epis.
Jones says the fair, coupled with the recent news that San Francisco allowed cannabis lounges to serve food, shows that progress in cannabis is slow, but achievable. The Oakland Blazers hosting a family-friendly event is further proof of cannabis culture’s acceptance in society at large.
“Things have come so far,” Jones says. “[Cannabis] is such a non-issue.”