Big Weed

by Christian Hageseth

  I met three people in the sandwich shop, but none impressed me. They seemed too frenetic, too antsy, as if they thought this job possibility was just too good to be true and any moment the cops would bust in. One was a nice young man, twenty-seven years old, who had just finished eight years in prison for growing in his home. He was busted one month before he was about to start college. He never got to go; instead he spent twice the normal span of college years in a federal prison because he’d done what I was working so hard to get into.

  One day as I was waiting, in walked a man in his early thirties. He was about two doughnuts away from being perfectly round, and as he shuffled up to meet me, he was hiking up his pants.

  “You Chris?” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “I responded to your ad on Craigslist. I’m Adam.”

  We sat. We talked. Adam struck me as a kind of passionate, Zen-like sloth. His movements were slow and deliberate, and when I asked him a question, his eyes would mull over the words and rove around the room as he gave it thoughtful consideration. Unlike the other people I’d met, he wasn’t worried about a thing. He was calm as hell.

  “How long have you been growing?” I asked.

  “Fifteen years.”

  That didn’t compute. “Wait—how old are you again?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  “And you’ve been growing how long?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “That means you’ve been growing since you were sixteen years old. How is that possible?”

  He smiled. It turned out that he’d grown up in California, the son of a couple of hippies who grew weed for themselves every summer. He had helped his parents on and off over the years, then got into it on his own at age sixteen.

  Mostly he was into welding, and dreamed of building for himself an underground grow facility out of old shipping containers. A place where he could disappear from the cares of the world and commune with his most excellent buds. That seemed a little extreme to me, but I would soon learn that some of the best growers were genuine oddballs. Right then, the most important thing about Adam was that he’d been growing marijuana nearly half his life.

  I’d found my grower.

  My good friend Dax had been working hard to find suitable space for our grow operation. He had pulled some strings around town with other real estate broker friends of his who knew of commercial buildings for rent. He had helped me to locate a warehouse space that was just under 5,000 square feet.

  Now, this was 2009, and most of the landlords around town were still reeling from the collapse of the housing bubble. A lot of businesses had gone under, and a lot of people had lost their shirts. The word around town was that landlords were desperate to lock in new tenants with long-term leases.

  Well, apparently they weren’t desperate enough to lock in me.

  The going rate for warehouse space was about $4 a square foot. But when we started approaching people, we found that all these spaces could be ours for a mere $12 a square foot.

  In a “desperate” economy, landlords were perfectly happy to charge legal marijuana growers almost three times the going rate.

  I had expected this. I wasn’t surprised. That didn’t mean I wasn’t feeling bent about having to pay such a premium. Privately I started calling that premium “the vig,” which, in the criminal world, is the interest paid to a loan shark. In my world, the vig was the amount a legal cannabis grower paid above the going rate to get people with whom he did business comfortable with the risk of our industry.

  Landlords accept a risk when they take on new tenants. They want someone who’s going to be able to pay the rent on time for the length of the lease. If a tenant defaults, the landlord loses time finding another tenant. If a landlord has to retrofit the building, or undo what the last tenant has left behind in his wake, then the landlord might actually be deeper in the hole than he or she originally was.

  There wasn’t a landlord in town who knew what to make of the legal marijuana business. Yes, they’d heard it was now legal to grow and sell this product, but everyone was aware that it was still federally illegal. What if the state law was repealed and the feds seized these commercial rental properties? To protect themselves, landlords had to charge more.

  At least, that’s how they saw it.

  I had signed a lease on a handsome property on South Platte River Drive. You unlocked a street-facing gate and entered a nice courtyard trimmed with shrubs and about a dozen trees. This low-key elegance was costing me about $5,000 a month.

  Inside, the space had been subdivided with walls, windows, and doors in a way that had made sense when it was built. Since I was completely ignorant about my new business, I thought I would try to fit my grow into the existing spaces. History would later show that I should have demolished all the existing walls and finishes and rebuilt the whole place to suit my specific purposes.

  “We have to produce a good harvest,” I told Adam as we walked through the space, our voices echoing in the darkness.

  “No problem. We’ll be up and running in no time.”

  Easier said than done. In the great outdoors, Mother Nature takes care of everything. A seed falls on open soil, water gets the seed growing, and a tiny plant begins to grow. In its lifetime, that plant will need sunlight, water, and air (carbon dioxide) to grow. Marijuana likes full sun, and while it will grow when it’s exceedingly hot, it really prefers temperatures to stay between 77 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. It does well in humid environments, but it doesn’t really like when humidity climbs above 55 percent.

  Living outdoors may seem like paradise for a plant, but it’s also highly unpredictable. You never know when a predator or a thoughtless galumphing animal is going to tramp through your crop and crush it to the ground. You could have six weeks of great rain, then nothing. Temperatures and humidity fluctuate constantly, putting our plant’s life in peril.

  So it’s really no wonder that so many of the world’s commercial crops are grown indoors, in greenhouses, where their human caretakers can control every aspect of the plant’s life, from seed to harvest.

  But since marijuana is probably the world’s most maligned and targeted plant, it’s safe to say that for the last seventy years in the United States, it’s been grown largely indoors in cinder-block spaces not unlike the one I’d just rented. If you’re growing an illegal substance, your risk of being detected by law enforcement will increase dramatically the more you put your plants on view. All American “experts” on marijuana cultivation were outlaws before the state laws started to change, and they mostly grew indoors.

  I wasn’t married to the idea of growing my precious harvest in a giant cement box, but all the current wisdom on the subject said this was the only way to go. So I stood by and started writing checks as Adam went to work, subdividing a room within the warehouse into four smaller spaces each with four 1,000-watt high-pressure sodium lights and a wall-mounted air conditioner in each room.

  I was surprised, maybe even shocked, to see what a resource-heavy crop indoor-grown marijuana really was. One requirement for plant growth quickly demanded another. First you start with the given that plants need light. So you install powerful lamps that deliver 3,500 foot-candles of light, which sometimes feels like enough light to illuminate every business on the average American Main Street. But powerful grow lamps produce not only light but also heat. Too much heat is bad because it starts to raise the temperature of your grow room. As plants heat up, they transpire, releasing moisture from the minuscule openings in their leaves called stomata. Now your grow room is both too hot and too humid, which marijuana plants don’t like. To reduce the temperature and dry up the air, you install air conditioners, which suck that much more power from your local grid.

  One power-suck inevitably leads to another power-suck.

  Growing marijuana this
way is like driving your grandpa’s gas-guzzling Chevy Bel Air from the 1950s. It’s a sweet ride, but you’re paying through the nose to get anywhere.

  But there was an upside. If we calibrated all these factors just right, we could manipulate the plants to grow exceedingly well. Instead of starting every plant from seed, we could start a “mother” plant and take cuttings from that plant. When we dipped each cutting in a rooting hormone and stuck it in some growing medium, each cutting would sprout roots and grow into healthy clones of the mother plant. Clones saved us time; we didn’t have to wait to grow from seed. From clone to harvest was still a good thirteen weeks, but we could stagger our crops in such a way that every few weeks or so we were harvesting something.

  It was a humbling experience for me, seeing those first few plants poke their heads out of the soil and reach toward the lights. Seed-grown or clone, plants grown in this manner were utterly dependent on the care of humans for their survival, but they stubbornly stuck to their own clock. They would not be rushed.

  That was a lesson I had to learn, because so much of my life had been about trying to do things quickly. In college, I could cram for exams if I needed to. Stay up all night reviewing the notes I’d taken all semester in class, walk into the exam room at 8:30 the next morning, regurgitate everything onto paper—and ace the test. In my business life, I could cram for a presentation if needed. I’d walk into a room and nail the meeting because I had stuffed every factoid needed into my skull, and I could do it quickly.

  Humans are good at cramming. Good at speeding things up. Forcing things to happen ahead of schedule to hit some arbitrary target. Americans, in particular, are experts at this.

  But plants don’t cram. Within certain parameters, they stick to the clock nature has imprinted on their genes. Like it or not, bro—the plant’s schedule was its own, and nothing we could do would speed it up.

  But there were things we could do to shape them, nurture them, nudge them to do what we wanted them to do. Every day I’d go to the grow to watch Adam work. If he wasn’t building a lamp bracket or fixing some piece of equipment that had gone on the fritz, he liked to talk to the plants and stroke them as he pruned off their excess leaves. By pruning, he was not-so-subtly instructing the plant to put all its resources into growing fat, healthy flower buds.

  I’d pick one of those fan leaves off from time to time and inspect it carefully. When I was a boy, I’d see images of the marijuana leaf emblazoned on posters and record albums and T-shirts and human skin. Artists poured their hearts and souls into creating works of art in honor of this ancient plant. Even today there’s a whole subculture devoted to marijuana leaf imagery on everything from key chains and socks to women’s undergarments. This stuff is all great fun, until you come eye to eye with a real marijuana plant. That’s when you realize that the true artistry is Nature’s alone. A single leaf typically sprouts five, seven, nine, or thirteen smaller leaflets—mostly odd numbers—and depending on the strain, those leaflets will have slightly serrated or more pronounced serrated edges. They’re a rich, glossy green, and handsome in a way that other plants from which humans draw sustenance—corn, wheat, sugarcane—are not.

  Wow, I’d think, they are so beautiful.

  Sometimes I’d think back to the teenager I once was and how we made such a big deal about scoring some weed on a Friday or Saturday night. Those tortuous, furtive adventures paled in comparison to this. I was now standing in a room surrounded by more marijuana than I’d ever seen in one time or place in my entire life, and it didn’t feel wrong, or dirty, or illegal. It felt wonderful. I was standing in my own private garden. Yes, the lights were humming. Yes, I was ensconced in the belly of a cinder-block building. But still, the outside noise of traffic, the grind of the everyday, the artificial world of business, was blotted out.

  For the first time in my professional life, I was aligned with Nature, something I had always longed for. These plants were part of Nature. We were taking care of them, and they in turn would take care of us in what was ultimately a beautiful, mysterious transaction between two living things.

  Of course, being humans, it was probably inevitable that we would fuck it up.

  In late fall 2009, I was marching happily down the Green Mile in downtown Denver. The large black nylon duffel bag on my shoulder was emblazoned with the logo of the professional sporting team that had given it to my wife as a gift. Inside the bag I had about three pounds of weed in large Ziploc bags, my first official harvest. We’d grown thirteen different strains with names like Dutch Treat, Lemon Skunk, Northern Lights, Bubblegum, Chronic, AK-47, and more, and I was eager to share them with the world.

  I admit that I was a little giddy about the whole thing. My first harvest! Awesome. I had brought these living things into the world. The harvest was small, but I was a player in the burgeoning marijuana market. But now, as I wound my way through a few of the dispensaries on the Green Mile, I was getting only so-so feedback from potential buyers.

  They’re nice, but they’re not great. Come back when you have something else.

  No, but thanks for thinking of us.

  Bring something different if you ever come back, okay?

  I squelched my pride and listened carefully to the feedback. We hadn’t dried the buds long enough. We hadn’t trimmed them tightly enough; they still had bits of leaves sticking to them. As a result, they didn’t present well. Despite what I was hearing, a few people did make me offers on what I was selling. In fact, I sold all of my harvest before reaching the end of the Green Mile.

  That was good and bad.

  Although what I’d grown wasn’t ideal, people still liked it enough to buy. I just didn’t have enough of it. Consequently, I wasn’t earning nearly enough money to cover my operating costs, and I was far from being able to make good on Mr. Pink’s investment.

  Now, granted, new businesses plan for this. You don’t expect to hit it out of the park on the first round. That’s why your start-up costs allow for a few months of low or nonexistent earnings. But still—the clock was ticking. Mr. Pink’s money was not going to float us forever. When was I going to see some fat profits?

  Looking back, I can see that the handwriting was on the wall the whole time. I was just too blind to see it.

  Entrepreneurs are fond of talking about the mistakes businesses make. One of the classics is the business that grew too fast. Its owners pump too much of their capital into growth, the organization doesn’t know how to absorb the new paradigm, the system becomes top-heavy and then crumbles. But there is also the phenomenon of not sizing your start-up appropriately. In our case, starting out small wasn’t our only problem. We started out small, inefficient, naive, and paranoid.

  Adam and I were both naive. As the boss, I should have known to ask better questions. Show me a sample of your weed, for starters. But there were others: What’s the biggest grow you’ve ever run? How would you size a facility to grow 1,800 plants? What would you do differently when dealing with so many plants?

  We were sizing ourselves out of the market from the very beginning. For example, a modern, state-of-the-art indoor grow does indeed divide its space into smaller rooms, but not as small as Adam had done. And because we had simply moved into those existing rooms in our facility, we hadn’t started a large grow per se but several very small grows. That was a huge mistake out of the gate.

  Instead of hiring an electrician to come install a new electrical system that would allow us to switch on the lights and equipment in each room from a central box, we relied on Adam’s labyrinthine system of running cheap lights and extension cords connected to lightweight consumer lighting timers. Our electrical outlets looked like the ones fire departments warn everyone about at Christmas time, when foolish people stuff eighteen plugs into the same outlet to keep their holiday decorations going.

  Because we were doing things cheap and small-minded, we had un
wittingly introduced glaring inefficiencies into the system. Four small grow rooms meant needing four different air conditioners, each running at the same time. Had we designed the warehouse to have one large grow room, we could have gotten by using the one large, efficient AC unit already situated on the roof. But we didn’t know better at the time.

  If your equipment is redundant, then you’ve introduced too many moving parts to your simple ecosystem. You know the old rule: Too many parts equals that many more breakdowns. Adam wasn’t so much a grower or master gardener as he was a handyman. Much of his time and energy was spent running around trying to fix broken equipment. At that point, you’re just killing plants because your system is getting in the way of the product’s growth cycle.

  To be fair to both of us, the looming disaster wasn’t all our fault. As our second harvest was coming close to fruition, our roof sprang a leak. The landlord summoned a roofer who swooped in to patch the leak with tar and pebble. But the blowtorch he used to seal the tar set fire to the roof’s insulation.

  Smoke started pouring into our workspace.

  Other than the roofer, no one was on site at the time. Even though they managed to suppress the fire, the smoke damage was extensive.

  Plants breathe through their leaves. Too many of ours got a lungful of smoke. They were goners in a matter of days. Our second harvest was as disappointing as the first.

  I had private talks with Mr. Pink where I’d express my frustrations, and he was always a good listener, a true mensch to deal with. He’d let me go off on tangents, and then he’d bring me down to earth. “Okay,” he’d say, “you’ve been fucking this up, so how are we going to turn it around? Here’s what I’d do . . .”

  I have always appreciated his advice.

  I took Adam aside one day and tried to make sure he understood how serious our predicament was. “We have to hit our numbers next time,” I said, “or we can’t pay our rent. Do you get that? We’re not fucking around anymore. It has to come in high.”