Keven Hopkins is a store manager and budtender employed at Skunk Rx, a recreational dispensary located in Grants Pass.
A longtime consumer of Cannabis, he grew up in Utah, where he saw the impact of prohibition and the War on Drugs very early on in his life. He was adopted by a family in Oregon at age 13, moved to the PNW and eventually joined the Army at age 21.
Secondary to discharge from the military, Keven was prescribed a legion of medications to help support his medical symptoms. But after just a couple of years, he realized he wasn’t happy with the pharmaceuticals he was on and decided to go a different route, obtaining his medical card and starting to cultivate his own home grow.
In 2015, Keven was offered his first Cannabis industry job creating prerolls for a wholesale company, and by 2016, he had moved on to budtending.
“My (current) title is store manager, but I feel stores manage a lot better if the managers are budtending, too,” Keven explained. “I’m usually out there at least 2 1/2 to three days a week.”
While working with patrons, Keven asks how they are hoping to use prospective products, if they have any specific ailments they are trying to address and what kind of flavors they are into. He finds that those three questions help him provide more tailored recommendations.
As far as personal preferences go, Keven is mostly a flower smoker.
“I like flower over anything else, just because it’s full spectrum. I feel like it’s a lot easier to control my intake when smoking flower compared to dabs or cartridges,” he said.
In relation to strain selection, he has a special affinity for anything with Girl Scout Cookies in the lineage. Keven identifies Mac 1 as one of his favored selections that he could consume every day of the week, as well as Cap’n Crunch, a newer cross of Chimera and Cap Junky grown by Highly Cultivated, which has been one of his most purchased cultivars over the last year.
Outside of the Cannabis industry, Keven enjoys watching WWE wrestling and collecting Pokemon.
“I collect the cards, I work with the local card shop here in Rogue River to do PSA submissions and I play Pokemon Go with the community here at least twice a month.” He explained, “It’s one of the only spaces in the community where I see every walk of life be able to get together.”
He also fancies travel and attending live music concerts, including a recent Subtronics show he attended with his partner in Reno, Nevada.
When asked what he would want Leaf readers to know, Keven stated, “Don’t be afraid to ask questions, and don’t settle. There’s so many good shops and there’s so much good weed in the state, there’s no reason to not have a good experience.”
Just talking with Keven, it’s apparent that he puts an extraordinary effort into providing the very best experience possible for his customers at Skunk Rx, a huge credit to his passion for Cannabis as a medicine.
“It is really cool for a (client) to tell you how much they’re hating life, dealing with pain pills, this, that and the other. And then the next week they’re coming in, standing up straight and telling you how helpful you were,” he noted with a lighthearted chuckle. “I also just really love to get stoned, which helps.”
