Creator sPOTlight: Davonraymond

Hailing from the east coast US, Davonraymond has been an active creator on TheWeedTube for over a year. His content covers a wide array of genres, from vlogs to reviews and recently to music. Unafraid to speak his mind, I sat down and talked with him about overconsumption, cannabis community clout, the stoner image, mental health, the trials and tribulations of content creation and more.

RJ: So, how long have you been creating on TheWeedTube? 9 months [ago], I think, was your first upload?

Davonraymond: I wanna say November… I'm looking at my WeedTube page right now… it says joined August 4th, 2018. Oh shit! We made a year!

R: Yo, nice. Congrats!

D: Thank you very much!

R: So you had a video in April that you uploaded called Why Davonraymond Uses Cannabis, and in that you said, “The image of the cannabis community must be a righteous one.” So I wanna hear you elaborate more on that and where you see that image being compromised from time to time.

D: Well, I certainly make it known. I think, to start, the image of the cannabis community, it should be a righteous one. Most of the things that i heard about cannabis from before I started smoking up until now [is that] it brings people together… it’s all positivity, it’s all love, it’s healing and trying to make people have a better day. That’s what people are bringing cannabis into their lives for, so why not keep it the gold seal of awesomeness? Why do we have to poison it with bad behavior and overconsumption and promoting that? I was just looking at the Trending page on TheWeedTube, and a lot of people are freaking awesome and they’re doing their thing, so I'm really not attacking people anymore. I used to be real aggressive about people who would overconsume and then I started to kind of back off. Now, I still am not a fan of that, and I still don’t like how people with a bigger following can post something that’s kind of ridiculous, in my opinion and many other people’s opinion, and that will pull the attention away from other things. And that’s fine, that’s what they choose to do, but I disapprove!

D: I was looking on the Featured page, and again no disrespect to anybody, but there was somebody to posted a video that says “Warning: Smoking Nonstop For 8 Minutes Straight (Too High)”. So that’s on the Trending page, and that’s okay because it’s trending and people are choosing to look at it, but it gets to the point where you’re like, “that’s not what should be trending… that’s not what this is about.”

R: Do you feel like overconsumption is, for large swaths of the cannabis community, just something that we don’t really talk about?

D: Well, I do, but y’know what, I recently saw Stoned Alone’s [video] about his overconsumption and it made me feel good because he’s my friend, or at least I’d like to think we are, and he made a video that I was bothered by. Again, I don't like the overconsumption and he makes really awesome shit so I really have much love for Tim. and it took me a while to fully accept his “100 Hits” video… it wasn’t like everyone else’s 100 hits video, I feel like he had a bunch of different pieces of glass and stuff so that was really cool, but still the idea of sitting down and taking 100 hits for a video bothers me because to me, again, not what cannabis is about. Why are we doing that?

R: So where would you say is the line? Because, at the same time, you have to think about [how] these people are creators; they’re trying to create captivating content and the algorithm happens to show that that sort of content is what will get you on the Trending page so where—

D: But ‘why’ is the question. Why is it that we are looking for those video? What is so attractive about that?

In March of this year, Davon uploaded Represent The Cannabis Community !, in which he shared a then-lesser spoken of opinion about cannabis overconsumption. In it, he says “you owe cannabis a positive look when it comes to those who might want to take it away or those who don’t have a good idea of what cannabis truly is.” His connection with marijuana’s medical properties is deeply rooted, as someone who lives with cyclothymia, a relatively mild mood disorder. With cyclothymic disorder, moods swing between short periods of mild depression and an elevated mood, or hypomania. “The true end result, what it’s really about,” he continues, “is your impact on the cannabis community. Young people like myself are watching people like me now on [TheWeedTube], learning how to use cannabis.” 

Davon described his content best by saying, “What will I bring to the table? You can already check out my videos now, here on TheWeedTube. We’ve had seshes talking about life, mental health and things that the cannabis community, as well as everyone else on this planet, need to care about. And when they think about those things, they have a chance to have a better life, more growth and more learning. That’s what my channel is about.”

“No matter how many followers I have—1, 10, 50, 500 or 50,000—I’m going to try to do the right thing, and I’m going to try to do what’s right for not only myself and the cannabis community, but for everyone.” - Davonraymond