From Wraps To Riches: Steph.V And The Rise Of Certz

Steph.V Before Certz: The War On Drugs In New York's Spanish Harlem Neighborhood

For the first time ever, the industry veteran opened up about his trauma from the War on Drugs in an exclusive interview with Honeysuckle. A native of Spanish Harlem, Steph.V endured poverty in an area beset by substance abuse. “The scent of crack was normal where we was at,” he remembers, and children regularly grew up seeing broken crack bottles litter the floors. Noting that “I come from the struggle for real,” he explains taking it upon himself to be the family breadwinner at a young age. He recalls working at the supermarket as a bag boy from just 10 years old in the early 1990s, making around $30 a day to bring home to his mother – which he viewed as “a lot back then.”

The entrepreneur claims that young men in his neighborhood saw drug dealing as an avenue for wealth. “That’s what the system first showed us: ‘This is your way out,’” Steph.V observes. “You could’ve been a doctor, a lawyer… anything else. But the way they portrayed it to us minorities was either be a dope-ass drug dealer who got the jewelry and the cars but lived with his mother, or you nice in basketball. [I] broke out of that early as a teenager, started selling weed [because I saw] the profit margin… the coolness you get from it… I was drawn to the weed and I never sold anything else.”

Steph.V's Journey Into Cannabis And Hip Hop

It was a short trip from groceries to grass; the ambitious hustler dropped his first job and entered the legacy cannabis scene at age 14. Quickly he became ensconced in the heart of the market, working himself into an organization run by Jamaicans in the neighborhood who were cooperating with an Italian group from Harlem to funnel West Coast greenery to East Coast pockets.

“They were smuggling weed from Tijuana, flying it to San Diego,” Steph.V describes the operation. “Drive it to the borderline near Tijuana, drive it back. Saran Wrap it from all these combos, put it in bins. I was responsible for [shipping] ‘em out. I had to do 25 boxes in two days in multiple towns to ship to come here, and then I had to pick ‘em all up with my team in New York. That was my job and I was [a teenager] and I organized it all. Not everybody’s that fortunate, you know what I’m saying?”

On one hand, the young businessman was certainly fortunate. He prospered financially in this new track, and his savvy for understanding both quality strains and brand-building allowed him to parlay his skills into the hip hop space. Just as the underground music market intertwined with cannabis, Steph.V created a name for himself as a producer with PIFF Unit Productions. Making hit records with some of the era’s most enduring artists such as N.O.R.E. (Noreaga), Juelz Santana and the late Black Rob, he believed this was living the dream.

Troubles In New York's Legacy Cannabis Market

But even if a certain reverence for the plant helped Steph.V to distinguish himself mentally from the drug dealers he’d seen as a kid, he realized the law still considered them the same. “There was no glorifying that shit,” he states succinctly. “We were like straight drug dealers at the time. If you want to say a drug dealer for cannabis, whatever, [but our purpose] wasn’t to be showing off.”

Yet the underground life took its toll. Steph.V got used to hiding from the authorities and developed a stoic shell so that he could get by without showing emotion. Run-ins with police were a regular occurrence, to the point that when he once got caught with ten pounds of illegal cannabis, he asked police to let him go quickly, fearing that he might be late to fill an even bigger order. His seeming nonchalance was the mask for a man suffering from intense PTSD.

More on the story of Certz Brand Here