Ball Family Farms' founder thinks L.A.'s social equity program could take a page from the sports scholarship playbook.
Chris Ball walks through the cavernous supermarket-sized warehouse space with the purpose of an athlete ready to hit the field. He’s wearing a gray tracksuit with black-and-white checkerboard accents, a pair of black-and-white checkerboard Old Skool Vans and a black ball cap with the brim facing backward.Ball Family FarmsThe athletic way the 43-year-old moves through the room is no accident; football skills earned the Rialto, Calif.
He explained that during the offseason, some of the football players would supplement their incomes by bringing weed into the U.S. from Canada. “I became very popular doing that because I was able to undercut the market here [and] because I was getting it so cheap,” he said. “That’s when my status started to rise.”
Ball said the DEA agent on the other end of the line wanted to meet and talk, assuring him that he was not the target of the investigation. “We set up a meeting at my attorney’s office right off Slauson and La Cienega,” Ball said. “But when I get there, they’ve staked out the lobby, and I never made it up [the elevator] to meet my attorney before they arrested me.
There’s no way they’re going to give a guy with a felony for selling weed a license. I disqualified myself back in 2010.”“But honestly, cannabis was just calling me back,” he said. “After all the things I’d learned up north in Canada about growing, I wanted to try my hand at cultivation. I knew there was a way for me to do it.
Eric Goepel, founder and chief executive of Veterans Cannabis Coalition, worked with Ball Family Farms to create the latter’scompassionate care program, which provides free medicinal cannabis products to veterans. “We’ll put 150 grow lights here,” Ball said with a wave of his hand. “We’ll have our manufacturing space down here. We’ll have a distribution center and a conference center too.” Although he’s been in the building for about three years, he’s only recently expanded into the downstairs space.
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