He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother: Siblings in the Plant
“It’s been a long time coming,” Aram Damirjian says of his brother’s brand Serge Cannabis. “A lot of people can work better with outside partners than with family, but we’ve tried that. Little by little we realized that anytime we work with family, it’s been the best of all.”
Aram, who founded the popular Gas No Brakes brand, and Serge, known for co-founding Cookies Maywood and Fiore, are two-thirds of a legendary trio of cannabis tastemakers. Their youngest brother Shant pioneered the modern hash hole through the brand that bear’s his nickname, Fidel’s. Now, after what seems like a lifetime in cultivation, the siblings are getting the chance to work together in the legal industry, as Serge’s eponymous company brings new opportunities for them to take on the universe.
When they sit down to speak with Honeysuckle, Aram and Serge are just coming off a fantastic collaboration at Spannabis between Serge Cannabis and Sensi Seeds, the world’s oldest cannabis seed bank and producer. It was a project over a year in the making, one that’s involved Sensi gifting their most classic seeds for Serge’s intense pheno-hunting process, discovering exciting new crosses that might lay the foundation for a new era of landmark genetics.
[The Sensi team] has a love for cannabis that dates back to Ben Dronkers starting the company before I was born,” Serge states. “It was an honor to work with them. This was the initial kickoff of things that we have in the pipeline… I’m hoping to put some new stuff with their old-school funk, staple strains like Jack Herer, and find something super special that can stick around for years after I’m gone. Whatever we can contribute to the game, keep the culture of the plant moving forward, that’s my goal.”
Plant culture has always been a deep cut for the Damirjians. The sons of Armenian immigrants from Lebanon, Aram, Serge, and Fidel grew up in Los Angeles drawn to weed in its most natural state. They watched their father, once a prominent drug dealer who hit rock bottom, rebuild his life between California and Lebanon, as he secretly curated a cannabis stash.
Serge’s love for cultivation sparked at age 15, when he germinated his first seed with a small desk lamp behind a drawer in his bedroom. He got the plant to the point of harvesting and drying it, but his father found it before the boy could taste the fruits of his labor. After receiving what he describes as “a nice ass-whooping,” Serge says his dad threatened to throw the cannabis out. But when he and Aram searched the trash, they realized their old man had smoked the weed himself.
“That’s how we broke the ice with Pops to start smoking,” Aram recalls. A few weeks ensued of the brothers siphoning off bits from their father’s stash in revenge, with their dad becoming increasingly suspicious until he found a joint on the window sill. “He said to our mom, ‘I told you it was my weed!’ and we said, ‘Why don’t we all smoke together?’ It was a wrap after that.”
In 2006, as California’s medical market developed and legacy market flourished, Aram and Serge took inspiration from their network of NorCal connections and started an L.A. dispensary. “It hit us that we can be the wholesaler and retailer as well,” Aram explains. “We have some great strains on our hands, we love to smoke. We want to share these strains with other people who don’t have access to any of this… We designed [the shop] from the ground up.”
Their success led to the opening of subsequent locations with grows and retail, and bringing on a partner in commercial cultivation expert Mike “Big Tuna” Bouchanian. Life was good… until one of their stores got raided in 2009, and a second raid occurred just months later as the entrepreneurs were preparing to fight the first in court. The owners all faced serious prison sentences; the District Attorney’s office even threatened to deport Aram and Serge’s father and cousin, who had been tied to the business and weren’t naturalized citizens.
“We were forced to take a plea deal at the end of it,” Serge says. “Aram took the heat for the whole family. He went down for three years. Mike ended up getting a year. I got one month and five years’ probation.”
“What I did was for the good of the family,” Aram adds. “Having [my brothers] in my corner was the biggest blessing. If one person’s down, the other two are helping them come back up. It’s always been that way.”
“While Aram was down, we couldn’t have any involvement in cannabis, so we started the hydro shop,” Serge continues. “But we were like, ‘Fuck that!’ We love the industry. We’re neck deep in everything from budtending to bringing down product, serving other shops.”
The hydro shop is where youngest sibling Fidel would gain his reputation, turning a small location into a superstore. Meanwhile, Serge pursued his own ambitions, learning more about licensing from his friend Edwin Movagharian. They got lucky, meeting two men named Steve Lobel. One, an attorney and judge in Glendale, suggested the pair pitch recreational cannabis to various city councils. Following a period of pitching over 30 cities, Serge heard a positive response from the town of Maywood. He embedded himself in the community, organizing toy and food drives and endearing himself to locals. Soon enough, he had a license.
Enter Steve Lobel Two, a Grammy-winning hip hop executive whose artists ran the gamut from 3-6 Mafia to Fat Joe and Sean Kingston. At the time, this Lobel was managing Scott Storch, whose latest album was co-produced with Cookies founder Berner. Circles connected, putting Serge, Edwin, and Big Tuna (who had come on as a co-owner) face-to-face with the icon and his cultivation partner Jai.
But the trailblazers weren’t fully sold on the idea of Cookies Maywood until Serge presented them with his own in-house cultivars. “Then they were blown away,” he shares. “They were used to doing business with more corporate entities that didn’t have knowledge of genetics. We were the total opposite - we’d been in the game 15 years already, growing… [Eventually Cookies Maywood] was a huge success. That put the spotlight on our growing skills because [Berner] trusted us with the Cookies menu.”
By this point, Aram had returned from prison and was often collaborating with his brother. He notes that Serge debuted many of the Cookies Maywood phenomenon strains, such as Cereal Milk, Gary Payton, and London Pound Cake 75. However, after a few years, various issues drove the dispensary’s original founders to other projects. Serge would help create the Fiore brand with some of the same partners, but a number of disputes over bad practices drove him and Aram to leave the company.
“I’m the type of person who sees through bullshit faster than most guys,” Aram asserts. “I told Serge, ‘Something fishy’s going on. You ought to start walking away.’ I started Gas No Brakes and haven’t looked back.”
For Serge, it was a chance to return completely to his first love. “My happy place is just being in the garden,” he enthuses. “Almost every day for the past 20 years, I’ve touched the plant… I love speaking plant language. I love… creating the fruit that hasn’t been shared with the world. You’re in charge of picking the right one and [presenting] it to all your peers, ‘Look what I found.’”
“The coolest thing is walking through the hundreds of thousands of people [at an event like Spannabis],” Aram says, “and then somebody comes up to you. ‘Serge! Gas No Brakes! Look what I have.’ You’ve got this jar in your face, some dude who grew [a cross of our seeds] in Europe. God-knows-where and what conditions, but he did it and he brings it to you. And you’re like, ‘Would you like to smoke this with me?’ It hits different. You’re on a whole other continent with somebody that’s bred your stuff and you have the ability to share that with him right there and then. That’s epic. That’s what we live for.”
Serge Cannabis and Gas No Brakes are currently available in California’s adult-use market, and will be expanding their footprints in Massachusetts. the rest of the year, fans can find them at pop-ups across the globe.
Serge continues rhapsodizing about the aesthetics of the plant, the nuances of trimming, the subtleties of flavor. With Serge Cannabis, he’s finally maximizing his passion. And the whole family is helping. From collaborations with Aram and Fidel, to packaging personally handled by their parents, the future is truly all relative.
For more info: @serge_cannabiss on Instagram and gnbfashion.com, @gasnobrakes_ceo on Instagram.
