By James Matthews
A familiar name for West Coast football fans is the latest former athlete to get into the cannabis business across the border.
Marshawn Lynch, a star running back who featured in back-to-back Super Bowls for the Seattle Seahawks, launched Dodi Blunts on Feb. 3.
Though the retired football star is best known for his time in Seattle, his experience growing up in Oakland, Cali., played a major influence in the company – right down to its name.
According to the venture’s website: “In Oakland, we like to flip and twist shit into our own words. We basically create our own language. There’s ‘that stunk’ or that ‘Ooh-wee’ or ‘summa that good-good’—you know all types of names that they can call the tree, marijuana.”
Lynch and his cousin’s moniker was “dodi.”
“And from then it’s been dodi for me,” Lynch reminices.
In addition to his Oakland roots, the company cites the war on drugs as an influence.
“We are devoted to getting social equity ‘right’ and creating opportunities that The War on Drugs annihilated for Black and Brown people,” the company pledges, noting it has partnered with the Last Prisoner Project, a Bay-area non-profit organization dedicated to cannabis-related criminal justice reform.
Lynch, whose running back career has taken a toll on his physical health, also offers a first-hand testimony to the benefits of cannabis.
“After high school, I started to see how my body responded and reacted to the dodi. During my NFL career, my body took such a beating that on Monday it felt like I’d been hit by a Mac Truck,” he reflects.
Enter cannabis. “Hell yeah that’s when some dodi came in handy for me personally to allow my mind to go elsewhere while my body took its time to recover.”
Just like Lynch’s career on the football field, there are some intricacies that make Dodi Blunts stand out.
First, the company promotes that their product will be presented in recyclable, reusable containers and wrapped in palm leaves.
The blunts will also feature THCA crystalline, which is the purest form of THC – the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis – and comes from isolating the THCA content from a cannabis plant.
“… Once you light up this beautifully crafted blunt, you’ll inhale the full power of THC to level up your high.”
Dodi Blunts will hit Bay-area stores in March 2020.