A popular cannabis brand is teaming up with New York dispensaries to provide free cannabis to low-income cancer patients.

Jetty Extracts is the brainchild of brothers Nate and Rob Ferguson, Buffalo natives who ran an underground cannabis business. The duo moved to California and started Jetty Extracts in 2013 with an emphasis on providing quality cannabis to their customers.

“We saw a lot of people using cutting agents and just lower quality ingredients, lower quality cannabis, and we really set out to be high quality,” said Nate Ferugson. We’re very clean. We can’t say we’re USDA certified organic, but we are certified by the same third parties that certify a USDA organic farm and manufacturing. We’re just very focused on clean quality cannabis.”

Early on in the business, Ferguson says that the brand had a focus on cannabis as medicine. In their customer base, Ferguson told amNewYork that those who are seeking medical marijuana are more often looking for a lower dose compared to recreational users, though it does come down to user preference.

“Some medical [customers] I know that really want high doses as well, but I think generally, you see people that want different types of cannabinoid ratios on the medical side, where the recreational side is more strain and flavor,” said Ferguson. 

The CEO of Jetty Extracts had a friend at the time who was suffering from a brain tumor, and though they couldn’t guarantee anything medically, the Jetty Extracts team developed a custom cannabis plan to help relieve his pain. After seeing how friends and family wanted to rely on cannabis for pain relief but couldn’t fully trust the ingredients in certain products at the time, the team wanted to create a program to help those who need cannabis for medical pain relief.

The result was the Shelter Project, a program started in 2014 in which Jetty Extracts teams up with local dispensaries to give free weed to cancer patients. 

“We called it the Shelter Project and it’s a little play word with Jetty because we’re providing shelter from the storm and just providing healing,” said Ferguson. “It was a fun little kind of compassion angle that just kind of spawned from giving away cannabis for friends and family medicine.”

Those who are granted access to the Shelter Project work with the team to develop a medicinal cannabis plan to best aid their symptoms. With their emphasis on wellness, Jetty Extracts continues to provide the cleanest possible cannabis products for their users.

The Shelter Project is a compassionate cannabis program that fell under Prop 215, which permitted the use of medical cannabis in California despite the lack of FDA testing on marijuana. Ferguson says that in California, when the state legalized recreational use, it inadvertently made operating a compassionate cannabis program illegal.

The Jetty Extracts team had to temporarily shut down the Shelter Project, and lobbied for Senate Bill 34, which allowed cannabis businesses to donate cannabis and cannabis products tax-free to low-income medicinal patients and thus, allowed the Shelter Project to start up again.

“For a lot of the patients, it’s hard for them to jump through all the hoops given their illnesses. Unfortunately, we’re serving less people than we were in the medical days. Now we’re expanding into other markets in New York being one of them,” said Ferguson.

So far, the Shelter Project has helped over one thousand people. Recently, Jetty Extracts brought on Happy Days Dispensary (Farmingdale, NY) and women-AAPI-owned dispensary Buffalo Dreams into the Shelter Project fold, working as a home base for patients in New York (the Shelter Project also works in California and Colorado currently). 

For Ferguson, it’s been great to bring the Shelter Project back to New York and give back to the cannabis community here.

“We couldn’t be happier to be able to get back to the community that helped raise me. There’s so many good things there, that’s the company’s mission to get as much cannabis out to the world for people that want to use it,” said Ferguson. “Whether it be medicinally or recreationally, we think that it helps people in so many ways.”

Prospective patients and dispensaries who wish to take part in the Shelter Project can apply online on the Jetty Extracts website. Open enrollment for patients is now through June 30. For more information, visit jettyextracts.com.