Carlos Santana Launches Cannabis Brand

Legendary guitarist Carlos Santana announced on Tuesday that he is launching a brand of premium cannabis products designed to enhance healing and spiritual well-being. Known as Mirayo by Santana, the new brand is a collaboration between the iconic musician and Left Coast Ventures of California.

The name of the brand, derived from the Spanish words mi rayo (my ray), serves to honor the ten-time Grammy award-winning artist’s Mexican heritage while inspiring consumers to follow the light they have inside themselves. Santana told High Times in a phone interview that the name “comes from the concept that God imbued you, me, and everyone with heavenly powers.”

The brand’s initial offerings include five-packs of half-gram pre-rolls and 7-gram jars of premium cannabis flower. The products will be available in three different sun-grown strains, or “categories of consciousness,” including Radiance (sativa), Symmetry (hybrid), and Centered (indica). Santana hopes the new line will help those who enjoy the products find peace and separation from a sometimes chaotic world.

“I want to be able to create a brand that gives you detachment,” he said. “Detachment means you don’t give a crap or you don’t give an ‘f’. It means you care, but emotionally, you’re not invested in bringing you down.”

A Brand Encompassing Years Of Personal And Professional Experience

Santana asserts that for decades, cannabis has helped achieve a mindset to create “music that is played with the influence of mine expansion.”

“In the past, when I took a toke, all of a sudden I was hearing with the same ears and feeling with the same heart like Jimi Hendrix or Jerry Garcia. And they would expand my imagination and expansion of how to utilize emotion, passion, and feelings to create a note that would hang outside of time with eternity,” he explained.

To create the product line for Mirayo, Santana combined his years of personal cannabis experience with the know-how of professionals at Left Coast Ventures “who have invested a lot more into that knowledge than I have.” For example, planned topical formulations will be based on home remedies made by his mother when he was growing up in Tijuana, Mexico.

“It was 50/50 hands-on,” Santana said of the product development process. “I invited them to create ointments and certain things like my mother used. My mother would grab a chunk of marijuana and put it in a jar with alcohol and let it simmer in there for a couple hours and then she would take it out and rub it in her hands or her joints, or her knees. And it would cure arthritis and pain.”

Profits To Support Indigenous Communities

With the launch of Mirayo in the largest market for legal cannabis in the United States, cynics might suggest that Santana is hoping to cash in for personal gain. But he insists that his motives are philanthropically driven.

“My goal is to share the financial proceeds of all this with American Indian reservations— Navajo, Apache, and Hopi, everyone—to help children all over the world. But specifically, I would like to pledge the majority, if not all of it, to American Indians to help education,” Santana explained. “Hopefully, we can invite sisters and brothers to become lawyers, which will be the new warriors of today, scouts to protect the rights that the White man don’t abide by. So for me, it’s just utilizing this energy for the highest good of my sisters and brothers.”

In closing, Santana suggested that a hedonistic motto popular during the early days of his professional career should be replaced with a more spiritual mantra.

“Timothy Leary said ‘Tune in, turn on, drop out.’  What we say today is ‘Enjoy your own light, and create miracles and blessings. Peace.”

Mirayo by Santana is available at select dispensaries in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California, with priority being given to Latinx-owned businesses. More information about the new brand is available online.