Marijuana mega-fair expected to draw 30,000 to Wine Country

Longtime marijuana event producer Tim Blake has sober advice for first-timers partaking of newly legal pot at the Emerald Cup, a cannabis county fair in Santa Rosa expected to draw 30,000 people this weekend. While a little pot can fight nausea and anxiety, eating too much can make folks queasy and uneasy. The world’s largest cannabis competition and expo will be chock full of such cannabis-infused sweets, savories and beverages Saturday-Sunday, Dec. 10-11 — so much so that the event’s host, the Sonoma County Fairgrounds, has required new rules to cut down on overindulgence. “The fairgrounds makes us give out only low-dose edibles, so nobody gets too high,” Blake said. [...] in its 13th year and breaking records for entries and attendance, the state’s biggest pot celebration since the general election is enticing a bumper crop of new guests. Legalization initiative Proposition 64 passed with nearly 57 percent of the vote Nov. 8, making cannabis legal in California for adults 21 and older. [...] 2018, you still need a medical card to legally purchase the drug. [...] there’s been an uptick in first-time medical cannabis recommendations, and Blake said the Emerald Cup’s popular “medication area” — a vast bazaar where you can sample and buy bud in countless forms — will be bigger than ever. The Emerald Cup honors California cannabis farmers and their products with a judged competition, expo, lecture series and a slew of entertainment. A record-breaking 1,100 contest entries were submitted this year in categories that include cannabis flower buds, extracts, topicals and edibles — up from 850 entries last year. By 2013, it became too big for the rural county and moved to Sonoma County, drawing 6,700 attendees that year, 14,000 in 2014 and 22,000 in 2015. In addition to awards, the Emerald Cup features all-day lineups of speaker and music headliners like Bob Marley’s son Damian Marley. North Coast Assemblyman Jim Wood and Lori Ajax, chief of California’s Bureau of Medical Cannabis Regulation. The closest hotels to the Sonoma County Fairgrounds sell out months in advance of the event. Get a medical cannabis recommendation to enter the Emerald Cup’s must-see medical marijuana bazaar, where people smoke, dab, vape, eat and buy the botanical. [...] bring your paperwork and valid identification to get a wristband for the bazaar. Bring cash for food, bud, seeds, pipes, books and clothing; it’s all cash-only, and ATM fees are a buzzkill. Pose for a photo with the marijuana entry display case. Meet famous cannabis growers in the medication area and score some deals on the hottest cannabis brands. Whether it’s called oil, shatter, wax, budder or good old hashish, they are all concentrated and, therefore, more potent, forms of cannabis. Butane, propane, hexane, CO2 and other gases, chemicals and compounds used to extract cannabis oil. Born out of the Emerald Cup’s refusal to allow solvent extracts, cannabis entrepreneurs invented a method of heating and pressing raw cannabis to extract oil. [...] known as light deprivation, it’s a farming technique that uses tarps to mimic autumn light and force plants to flower earlier and more often.