With Warren Moon—the Houston Oilers Pro Football Hall of Famer—as its spokesman, you can bet that Sweet Earth scores big-time with cannabis consumers. Like many aging as well as active athletes, Moon, once a star quarterback, uses Sweet Earth’s CBD products, including a muscle rub that relieves aches and pains, and that’s applied as easily as an underarm deodorant.
For 23 seasons, Moon was bruised by defensive linemen. “I have personally seen the effectiveness of the products,” he says in a testimonial.
Moon isn’t the only ex-footballer at Sweet Earth, which cultivates cannabis on a 100-acre farm in Applegate Valley, Oregon and sells its organic hemp products in the U.S. and around the world. And, yes—hemp is cannabis, minus the THC.
The company’s CEO, Peter Espig, played pro-football in Japan, earned an MBA at Columbia University and shined on Wall Street. At Goldman Sachs he raised billions. He’s still raising big money and pushing Sweet Earth to be a leader in the intensely competitive CBD field.
“I don’t use THC,” Espig tells me. “I don’t smoke THC, don’t want to promote THC and I would never work at a marijuana company.”
Sweet Earth is best known for its rubs and skin- and body-care products for men and women. The products include a CBD hydration cream, a CBD salve and a hydrating lavender, oat and honey facial cleanser. Plus, there’s a CBD rejuvenating eucalyptus mineral salt soak.
If your body isn’t purring now, it probably will be after both the soak and the salve, which “takes about 40 minutes to get beneath the skin and into the muscle,” Espig tells me.
The same 1960s folks who craved “instant gratification” now want “instant effect.” Sweet Earth aims to give ’em what they want.
Like Espig and Moon, I’m an ex-footballer who made the all-star team in Suffolk County, New York my senior year of high school. Later, I played rugby for the Columbia Blues. I have a bad knee and arthritis. I’ve used the Sweet Earth CBD salve and found that it takes away the pain.
Sweet Earth also makes organic hemp cigarettes without pesticides, tars or nicotine, that contain only 0.3% THC. Espig doesn’t smoke anything except the occasional cigar, when he wants to celebrate. “People who want to quit smoking tobacco, turn to our cigarettes,” Espig says. “They’re rolled like cigars, have brandy added in the curing process and don’t smell like marijuana. They’re the same price as a pack of tobacco cigarettes.” Sounds to me like they’re made for Wall Street and Main Street, too. I’m an ex-pipe smoker. I think the CBD cigs are cool. They give me a buzz.
Jonah Raskin is the author of “Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War.”
