I started this company on accident.
Then I found out the plant I was selling could heal the soil it came from. That changed everything. What I did not understand until later was how it actually works, and what that means for what we sell. Full Moons is what came out of it: hemp cigarettes with no nicotine and no tobacco, made by people who care what the plant leaves behind.
I was living out of a truck in Salinas.
My name is Marion Brooks. Eight years ago I was transplanting cannabis on a farm in Northern California. I had a real story with substances. I was not pretending otherwise. I just did not call it a problem.
An older man I worked with talked me into moving to Los Angeles. Through him I met an underground chemist, and I started spending most of my days at his house learning to distill plant material. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he had me try CBD tincture in tiny amounts while I swam laps at the public pool. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, a mushroom tincture. He saw the way I was living before I did.
Slowly, things in me that felt clenched began to loosen. I was a cannabis person. I had never taken CBD seriously until it started to matter.
On my birthday, the older man handed me a binder. Inside it were the articles for my first company. He said I should do something with what was happening in my body.
If this plant works when I eat it, maybe it works when I smoke it.
We sourced hemp in Oregon. We drove it down to Los Angeles. We hand-rolled every cigarette. A pack of 20 cost thirty dollars. The economics never made sense and we kept going anyway.
I wanted the product to be accessible, because the only reason anything about my own relationship with substances had shifted was that I could afford to use every day. Most people cannot. That mattered to me.
In 2017 we opened the Full Moons Club Instagram. We used nudity on purpose. It was not shock. It was a point of view. People sent us photographs of their own bodies, our cigarettes between their fingers. We grew a following on the idea that a cigarette could be a choice instead of a habit.
A cigarette company that helps the ground recover is a different kind of cigarette company.
While I was building this I was learning what hemp actually is. It is a phytoremediator, absorbent enough that farmers plant it on contaminated industrial land to pull heavy metals up out of the ground. What I did not understand for a long time is the second half of it. Hemp does not destroy what it absorbs, it stores it in its own body, which means a crop grown to clean poisoned ground is poisoned hemp. It gets harvested and burned, and the metal-rich ash goes to a landfill. It never becomes anything anybody smokes. So the plant can heal soil, and the plant can be your cigarette, and it cannot do both at once. What is left is still a lot. Hemp opens compacted ground, shades out weeds so it needs less herbicide than most row crops, and in clean soil it leaves a field better than it found it. And because I know how absorbent this plant is, I care more than most people would about which ground ours comes from. Every batch is tested for heavy metals.
That is not a marketing line. It is the direct consequence of the thing I got wrong, and it is the part of this that keeps me awake.
Grown honest. Rolled clean.
Full Moons is made in Virginia today, with a manufacturing partner who is deliberately not on our packaging so we absorb more of the regulatory risk ourselves.
Shipped to people who are not trying to quit.
I would rather tell you a smaller true thing than a bigger one I cannot back. There is more coming on the soil side. When it is real instead of a promise, it will be on this page with a number attached.
Smoke less. Smoke better. Stay sexy. Find a way through.
Marion
