“It’s not THC. THC is a mild stimulant, but there are essential oils in cannabis that can really jack that stimulation, probably through some kind of synergy or interaction. But go ask anybody, ‘How’s this work?’ and they don’t have the answers. Probably the closest is Raphael Mechoulam’s group in Israel. They’re doing the most study on the more obscure cannabinoids, and now they’re starting to study some of the other essential oils—starting to get some sense of the interaction.”
Michael took a bite of his granola before continuing. “But it’s early days. That’s something that’s wild to think about—that after all this time we haven’t advanced a lot.”
“Well, the plant has been repressed,” I said, which is true. One of the biggest problems with cannabis prohibition is the U.S. government’s ban on human research. Here is a plant that offers so much in terms of medical application and yet thorough scientific examination is illegal.
“But also we’ve gone down some dead ends,” Michael countered. “First they thought that CBD [cannabidiol] was psychoactive. Then they thought it wasn’t psychoactive. Now they think it modulates the psychoactivity. In other words, they don’t know. And that’s just one of the major cannabinoids. You’ve got CBC [cannabichromene], CBG [cannabigerol], CBN [cannabinol]—there’s a lot of these. It’s early days.”
Michael took a sip of coffee.
“But what’s cool, what got me interested, is that I wanted to figure out if there could be more predictability so that we could develop a breeding program that wasn’t ‘Wow, this gets me really stoned’ crossed with ‘Wow, this gets me really stoned.’ ”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“No, there’s not. But there’s more to it. People chronically overmedicate with cannabis.”
“They get baked.”
“The reason they get baked is because it comes from a time of scarcity. It’s like binge drinking. Right? I can’t get it when I want it, so holy shit I’m gonna take in as much as I possibly can until I can’t take anymore. What’s interesting is the UC San Diego pain study on cannabis showed that there was something else going on with cannabis that we should pay attention to, even if we’re using it as an intoxicant. Which is: There’s a sweet spot of dosage. So when you find that there’s a sweet spot of dosage for pain, couldn’t there be a sweet spot of dosage for inebriation?”
I nodded.
“So wouldn’t it be nice if we could do the same thing with marijuana and dose precisely? The tough part with alcohol is hitting that sweet spot and keeping it there, but I think that’s easier with cannabis.”
I don’t mean to brag, but I can hit the sweet spot with alcohol easily. It takes exactly two margaritas. But, I’ll admit that it took me years of trial and error to hone that kind of precision dosage.
Michael continued. “Say you want to write but you’re a little anxious. You want to rid yourself of the anxiety but you don’t want to interfere with your short-term memory or your recall in general, so what strain do you pick? You might have some ideas. A light sativa, something like that. What if you could really just dial it in? Like literally? You knew that this strain did exactly what you wanted. That’s tough right now. It’s a crap shoot, and I want to change that.”
Michael is an enthusiastic speaker. Words tumble out of his mouth like machine gun bursts and I can see that sometimes his brain gets ahead of his mouth, causing his words and thoughts to overlap and collide. It’s at these moments where he stops, midsentence, and reframes what he’s trying to say.
“As a rule, most of the super-high-THC meds, you just go past the sweet spot so fast you’re on the other side before you know it. The thing about it is, you know, we’ve got Everclear and 151 out there but we don’t often choose them as our drink of choice. Okay? And really, effectively, some of these marijuanas now that are getting up in the midtwenties in terms of THC percentage, it’s really hard to dose them.”
“One hit and you’re baked.”
Michael smiled. “The problem we’re suffering from is the fact that a lot of the marijuana we have access to, its cultivation is driven strictly by prohibition, therefore it’s easy to grow indoors while a lot of the stuff that’s most interesting are these tropical strains.”
I think about Michael’s menu at Cornerstone. Thai Haze, Cambodian sativa, Kilimanjaro: These are all tropical sativas, and they’re varietals that you just don’t see on other dispensary menus.
“Is it just because the tropical strains grow so tall? You can’t really grow a fourteen-foot plant in your closet.”
Michael chuckled. “They’re taller than that. Some of them get to be twenty feet high.”
That would make for an awkward houseplant. And then there’s the flowering time. I can’t imagine a professional marijuana grower like Crockett waiting six months for a single plant to flower, although the Cambodian was an amazing strain, and earning nine thousand dollars a pound might make up for the hassle and patience required to grow it.
Michael continued. “It’s the difference between Two Buck Chuck and Petrus. ‘Money is no object’ cultivation just isn’t popular yet, except for hobbyists and snobs. But that will change.”
“I hope you’re right. That Cambodian sativa was as close to dank as I’ve ever found.”
Michael smiled a knowing smile.
“It’s amazing. But nobody will grow it.”
• • •
Although he was a biology major at Indiana University, Michael isn’t a scientist by profession, but when he’s not running the collective he gets paid to spend his time thinking like a scientist.
He has been a creative consultant on several movies, including Iron Man and the Spider-Man series, collaborating with the writers, directors, and visual effects crews to create the fictional technologies used by the characters in these films. The trick, and it’s not as easy as you might think, is to take something as absurd as a scientist getting metallic arms permanently fused to his body, and make the science and technology that explains the phenomenon completely believable. Doc Ock’s cephalopodic mayhem, Tony Stark’s cold fusion pacemaker, and the DNA-concocted dinosaurs in Jurassic Park have all been graced by Michael’s science-centric imagination. I’m not surprised to learn that his specialty is creating the scientific technologies used by Spider-Man’s enemies.
It’s not just superhero movies that rely on his expertise. He also provided technical and scientific consulting for author Michael Crichton on his books Jurassic Park, The Lost World, and Timeline. That partnership led to him cowriting the Sean Connery film Rising Sun with Crichton and earning an associate producer credit on the mutant-apes-gone-wild film Congo.
Apparently equatorial sativas can make you very, very smart.
“Were you always a connoisseur of pot?”
Michael laughed. “I was the kind of guy in high school and college who would walk around with a dopp kit—remember those?—filled with little tubes of different kinds of marijuana.”
It was easy to imagine a young Michael walking the streets of Tucson, with a dopp kit full of samples tucked under his arm. But like me—and a lot of people—as he got older, he took a break from regular cannabis use.
“It’s funny. I didn’t smoke for twenty years. After college I stopped, got married, had a kid, and didn’t smoke for a long time. But then I came back into it.”
“Because the product had improved so much?”
Michael shook his head. “I found I was suffering from migraines and I didn’t like Imitrex and those drugs and I found that cannabis acted as a prophylactic.”
“Do you mostly smoke sativas?”
He nodded as he concentrated on getting the last few blueberries into his spoon.
“I specialize in sativas. We usually have a really good selection. We’re getting some Nano today, and it’s my favorite everyday sativa. The Nano is what I consider the current state of the art as far as perfect mood elevation with minimum impairment. It’s giggle weed, but y
ou’re not sloppy. And that’s what I want: I want precision and great laughs.”
I watched him eat the berries and decided not to tell him that the Nano gave me a headache. “Why do you think Californians prefer Kush? Is it just because they haven’t been exposed to Dutch genetics?” I asked.
Michael shoved the empty bowl off to the side and leaned forward.
“The light psychedelic sativas are going to be the future of marijuana. They’re great for posttraumatic stress. They’re great for anxiety and depression. What we need is cannabis to usurp some of the pharmaceutical inroads in treatment because the thing about it is, why should we take drugs at the loss of our affect? I think Xanax and a lot of these drugs cost you your affect. Also they make you less risk averse. There’s this whole theory about the financial crash being caused by antidepressants because with antidepressants, one of the side effects is you lose your ability to assess risk.”
“Wait. You’re saying that the entire worldwide economic collapse was due to the fact that too many brokers and bankers and Wall Street traders were popping Klonopin and Xanax?”
Michael nodded.
“Talk about drug abuse …”
One of the things that impressed me about the cannabis I’d sampled from the Cornerstone Collective was how well grown and cured the herb was. This, as you can imagine, is a real problem for many dispensaries. A lot of growers are forced to operate illegally, and not all are as conscientious as Crockett and the Guru in the Sierras. There have been complaints of bud sprayed with household pesticides to kill bugs, and heavy fungicides are sometimes used to control mildew and mold. Finding scrupulous growers is a big deal.
“How did you find your growers? Do they have to pass some kind of test?”
Michael leaned back in his chair and stretched.
“It’s been a process of about three years of cultivating patient cultivators. I have a very, very small group of cultivators within our collective who are on it. What we do is choose a range of chemovars, of chemotypes of cannabis, that have specific essential oil and cannabinoid profiles that have been tested at Steep Hill, and I just make sure we have a wide range.”
Steep Hill Lab is a state-certified independent laboratory in Oakland that tests cannabis samples for purity, THC levels, and cannabinoid profiles.
“For a while you couldn’t find good OG Kush. It was really rare. And you’d have these people come in and go ‘I’m growing OG’ and I’d say, ‘Technically you’re growing it, but you’re not growing it well.’ But that’s changing. Now people are showing up with bags and you open them up and go ‘Oh, wow.’ They’ve really got it dialed in. It just takes a lot of work and a lot of time. It’s interesting because it doesn’t really scale. The bigger these grows get, the more the quality suffers. It seems that you need to really baby these plants. And it’s that aesthetic difference again between Two Buck Chuck and a wine like Petrus or Opus One or whatever the benchmark for really good wine is, because the best-quality marijuana can’t be scaled. It’s going to remain small.”
This seems to be a recurring theme. “The best weed is artisanal,” I said.
“Exactly.”
And it goes beyond just growing the plants. For Michael, curing is just as critical to producing connoisseur-quality cannabis.
“You look at tobacco and it’s really interesting because the curing of tobacco is extremely well understood. The curing of marijuana is absolutely not well understood. In fact, tobacco has an advantage because it is poisonous, so a lot of things can’t grow on it while it’s curing. That’s not the case with marijuana.”
Curing is the final, and often most misunderstood, part of processing pot. In the Marijuana Growers Handbook, noted cannabis expert Ed Rosenthal devotes a large chapter to manicuring and curing buds. “Buds that are dried too quickly, without curing, retain more chlorophyll, which gives the smoke a ‘greener’ minty taste and rougher smoke, and often less intense odor.” It takes a few days for the harvested buds to metabolize the chlorophyll in their cells but the result, a better tasting, better smoking product, is worth it. Not that it’s easy. Curing is about finding a delicate balance between temperature, humidity, and air. Too much heat and the buds dry out and lose their flavor; too much humidity and you get mold.
“All the dangerous pathogenic molds are all cure problems,” said Michael. “You’ll hear about powdery mildew being a problem for cannabis, but you can smoke a bowl of powdery mildew and it wouldn’t do a damn thing to you. It’s not a pathogen. It’s not toxic. But aspergillus, fusarium, and penicillium are curing problems that are shockingly common on cannabis because people don’t know how to cure safely, or well for that matter. If there’s one thing that I’ve brought to Cornerstone, it’s well-cured cannabis.”
Like Lex Luthor, Dr. Otto Gunther Octavius, and other misunderstood scientists, Michael has plans that go beyond simply sourcing the best possible cannabis. He wants to change the way we think about growing and breeding the plant.
“What is really wild about cannabis is how fast it adapts. And that’s what I want to do. I want to get more control over the environment so that I can basically create a phytotron, which is an enclosed, completely computer-controlled environment. I want to control for more than just temperature and humidity. Here’s an interesting thing about plant physiology: Plants eat light.”
I admit I hadn’t really thought about plants as light eaters, but I could see what he was saying.
“Plants are a little more advanced than we think because they can take light and effectively convert it into energy. And the systems by which plants respond to light is really interesting. There are these things called ‘signal transduction pathways’ in the plant, and if you hit the plant with a particular frequency of light, a gene will begin to express. What’s cool is, it’s kind of the control panel for the plant and if you start to learn what frequency of light to hit the plant with you can tell the plant to do whatever the plant is capable of doing and maybe a little beyond. And that’s going to change this game forever. Because if you walk into a plant physiologist’s office and say, ‘Hey, explain to me the mechanism of flowering in plants,’ they’ll go, ‘Well, there’s a notional enzyme in plants.’ You’ll say, ‘What do you mean, notional?’ ‘Well, we know that the plant is using an enzyme to flower. We just can’t find it. We call it florigen, but we haven’t really found it.’ They don’t know what’s going on.”
Michael leaned forward conspiratorially, as if someone at one of the nearby tables might overhear him. “There’s some guys in Japan that say they’ve found it, but …”
He made a face that indicated he was skeptical of the Japanese botanists.
“What’s the difference if they find this enzyme or not? Does it matter?” I asked.
“What it means is that we can hit the plant with specific frequencies of light. A few of these frequencies are beginning to be understood, but apparently many frequencies have yet to be determined. It’s possible that there are frequencies that stimulate cannabinoid production to the genetically determined maximum for a particular strain. Or not. We don’t know what the switch is, but that’s what I want to find out. And that just changes the game.”
I couldn’t imagine your average pot farmer suddenly adjusting light frequencies to get notional enzymes to change the chemical composition of the plant.
“Farmers don’t have the capacity to do that.”
“An enlightened farmer does.”
“What’s an enlightened farmer?”
“For me, an enlightened farmer is somebody who knows how to use a liquid chromatography and PCR machine.”
“What’s a PCR machine?” It sounds like something he fabricated for Tony Stark’s lab.
“Polymerase chain reaction. It’s a DNA amplification device. So you can take a little DNA and make a lot more DNA and then find out what it is and then sequence it. It’s basically chromatography for genetics. It really does allow you to do amazing stuff. I mean right now we’re
at ‘Well, that plant looked good’ and ‘That plant smoked good’ so let’s put a bit of pollen on it. And that’s cool. That’s how a lot of great agricultural strains are developed.”
“Like the pluot.”
“Exactly. So it’s not to knock the farmer. I just think the farmer can be supplemented by some science and it’ll make the farmer’s job easier. Look, by accident we bred CBD out of marijuana. Big mistake. Next week we’re getting some cuts of a high-CBD, low-THC plant from a breeder in Santa Cruz, and I’m just going to open source it. I’m going to give cuts to every breeder I know in L.A. I just want people to start playing with these high-CBD strains and breed them into their OG Kushes. Because you’ll get a much more interesting effect, for sure. The first time you smoke a really high-CBD strain, it’s shocking how different it is. It’s a really interesting hit. It’s like our experiments with Delta 8 THC at Cornerstone. We’re the only people who have Delta 8 because it’s found in such minuscule amounts that you never get exposed to enough of it to be a significant dose. So it’s fun to provide it to people and see what their reaction is.”
“Do you really think this manipulation of the plant, by enlightened farmers or whomever, is really going to happen?”
Michael tapped the table with his knuckles.
“I think the next five years will really show us what we can do with cannabis. The LED lighting thing has just now started, and the LED revolution will be a real revolution in how cannabis is cultivated indoors. There are definitely certain advantages to indoor cultivation, but the environmental footprint is so horrifying that we’ve got to go to a more energy-efficient model. The carbon footprint is insane. And they churn out a lot of effluent, too. What do they do with their dirty water? They pour it down the drain. And a lot of that is filled with very, very high nitrogen and phosphorus loads. My line for a while has been cannabis is not a houseplant. If you want a houseplant get a ficus. I think greenhouses will be the future.”
“Do you really think you can override a plant’s genetics by controlling the light rays?”
Heart of Dankness Page 17