Big Weed

by Christian Hageseth

  I told myself it was a smart thing to do for the business. We weren’t just a bunch of start-up newbies anymore. We had won the Cannabis Cup, for heaven’s sake. Ed and I had booked the trip earlier, so my calendar was clear. I packed my bags, bade my wife and daughters good-bye, and headed to Amsterdam in the company of the biggest name in weed. Our Cannabis Cup win was only forty-eight hours old by the time we touched down in the great city of the Dutch.

  Amsterdam lived up to its reputation as a beautiful, progressive city. On our first day, Ed wanted to initiate me by taking me to one of the city’s best marijuana cafés. He rushed along the sidewalk, traipsing past the canals and bridges that define Amsterdam, passing one café after another. We were not far from the famous Herengracht, the historic “Gentleman’s Canal,” where Amsterdam’s elite had lived in centuries past. I tagged along after him, peering into the windows of one inviting café after another. I saw bars and comfortable seats and fetching artwork on the walls.

  “What about this one?” I said. “Or this one? Or this one?”

  “No,” he snapped without turning around. “It’s not the best. I know it’s right up here somewhere.”

  I don’t know, I thought. The ones we’re passing look pretty nice to me.

  And of course, when he finally spotted the café he was looking for, it was a closet with a window. We crammed ourselves inside the legendary Grey Area, its walls covered with bumper stickers and decals in tons of different languages. There were only a few tables, and people were known to sit, half in, half out, in the café’s front windows. The clerk presented us with a couple of menus. One listed soft drinks. The other was divided into weed and hash options. Incredible.

  While we studied our choices, the clerk stared at Ed for a while, then stepped away. When he came back, Ed gave him our order. The café offered a range of rolling papers so we could roll our own and smoke right at the bar.

  You don’t just read a menu when you’re with Ed. Reviewing the list of options sparked a monologue. He held forth on each of the strains, spelling out for me who had bred each, when it was first presented to the public, what awards each had won, and which other strains used this particular one as a successful breeding pair.

  “How much do we owe you?” Ed said offhandedly to the clerk.

  “Nothing, Mr. Rosenthal,” the clerk said. “We’re very happy to see you again.”

  “Thank you, it’s nice to be back.” Ed said.

  “I can’t charge you,” the clerk said. “I just phoned the owner that you were here in person, and those are his instructions. He’s coming over right now to meet you.”

  We would get the same reaction everywhere else we went. Everyone seemed to recognize Ed. Ed explained that some years ago, he had become one of the most visible faces in the Netherlands during a court case regarding marijuana. That, and the fact that his cultivation handbooks had sold more than a million copies worldwide, ensured that he was likely to be recognized anywhere he went in the kingdom of marijuana.

  I can’t tell you how many of those cafés we visited that week. At a certain point they all melded into a wondrous blur. I was falling in love with the city. It was liberating to be able to sit in a café and watch people come in, sip a bottle of mineral water or an espresso coffee, all the while enjoying a joint or a bowl from a glass pipe, then get up and go on their merry way. There was no shame to it. It seemed sophisticated, urbane, and freeing.

  Sometimes Ed would introduce me as the recent American winner of the Cannabis Cup, a fact that engendered a lot of curiosity from Amsterdammers and others. They were fascinated at the notion that cannabis was slowly becoming legal in America, and they had lots of questions. I was beginning to realize that, even in such a progressive place as Amsterdam, what was happening in the United States was nothing short of revolutionary.

  It is not obvious to tourists, but cannabis laws in the Netherlands are quite strict. You could still get busted if you smoked weed or hash outdoors in public, beyond the safety of a private café. It is still illegal to grow cannabis in the Netherlands. Growers were routinely busted when discovered. Cafés, I was told, were permitted to keep only 100 grams—a mere 3.5 ounces—on the premises at any given time. By contrast, my Colorado dispensaries routinely kept 20 pounds of buds on site at all times to meet demand. Amsterdam’s strict regulations begged the question: How did all these marijuana cafés keep from running out?

  One day I learned the truth. As soon as a café depleted its stock, a courier on a bicycle mysteriously appeared at the door with a fresh, 100-gram infusion of weed and hash. I assumed someone in the café had made a surreptitious phone call, but it happened so seamlessly that if you didn’t know to watch for it, you’d never notice it at all.

  One day as we wound our way through Ed’s whirlwind cannabis tour, we encountered a thin man whose dreadlocks seemed to run all the way down to the ground. He stopped short and greeted Ed warmly. They chatted briefly before Ed introduced us.

  “Chris, this is Soma.”

  No fucking way, I thought.

  Soma was the founder of Soma Seeds, which sold cannabis seeds to growers all over the world. Soma’s past is somewhat shrouded in mystery. On his website he tells how he first smoked marijuana back in 1967, when he was working as a mail clerk at an IBM office in New York City. Back then, he was a straight shooter who went off to work each morning clad in a three-piece suit and tie. But the first puff of marijuana changed his life. He ended up devoting his life to marijuana when it was still illegal throughout the United States. At one point he was growing in Vermont, presumably trying to stay one step ahead of the law. By the time he fled to Amsterdam and started going by the name Soma, he had come to regard marijuana as a sacred, versatile plant. He wore clothes fashioned of hemp and smoked regularly. Today, like Ed, he is another international legend in the world of cannabis.

  He invited Ed and me to visit with him at his apartment, and a short time later we found ourselves in the most bohemian flat I had ever seen in my entire life. Those tall windows that grace so many of Amsterdam’s historic buildings imbued the living room with sunlight. I learned that every time friends visited Soma, they brought him rocks from their homeland. The floor was covered with rocks of every type of size, color, and origin. Interspersed among them were bright pillows. That’s how he entertained us: We sat on the floor amid the pillows and rocks, smoked our weed, and talked about our common business.

  I suppose if anyone had seen us, they would have been struck by the juxtaposition of a best-selling author, a dreadlocked outlaw, and an American businessman enjoying each other’s company. Ed and Soma were undoubtedly the more courageous; they had taken risks that had made their lives difficult over the years, all in service to the herb.

  In 2002, Ed had been arrested by federal agents when he was found to be managing a marijuana nursery in Oakland, California. The feds threatened him with twenty years in prison, but Ed refused to take a plea. The way he saw it, he was in the right and the feds were wrong. First, he had been growing those plants with the blessing of Oakland’s municipal administration and its city attorney. The plants in that nursery were earmarked as starter plants for the city’s medical marijuana patients. (Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996.) Ed had been working on behalf of his local government, and now he was on the hook for felony charges and looking at a long prison sentence. He and an attorney from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) fought the charges in court. The judge ultimately took Ed’s side, sentencing him to time served plus one day in jail. I could not help thinking how courageously Ed had faced that nightmare. Most people would have been afraid to take the case to court. They would have allowed the federal government to intimidate them; they would have taken the plea agreement and done the time.

  Each of us—Soma, Ed, and I—had approached marijuana in our own way. I was thrilled to be
in the presence of these pioneers. It was one of the most enlightening times I’ve spent in this industry. Without their sacrifices over the years, I would not have been able to pursue the business I was in.

  One day Ed took me to one of the Green House Seeds cafés in Amsterdam. The café was large and nicely appointed. When we arrived, Soma was sitting at the bud bar, smoking away. Turned out he was dating the budtender, a beautiful, much-younger woman who had been at his flat the other day. While sitting there smoking with Ed and Soma again, I saw displayed on the far wall not one but twenty-one Cannabis Cups. (The firm has won more than thirty-five Cannabis Cups for strain excellence under the tutelage of Arjan Roskam, who is known as the king of cannabis.) I was blown away. Humbled, actually. Wow, I thought, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do.

  You cannot think of Amsterdam without thinking of those pretty canals and small boats and cyclists everywhere. Every home appears to have been built at a time when aesthetics still mattered. Every canal you see has been dug by human hands, so the Dutch could float their goods and possessions gracefully down waterways instead of hauling them overland. I admired the sorts of minds who could build a city with such intention. The Dutch didn’t seem to sweat the small stuff. The whole nation, so far as I could see, got around on beat-up bicycles. If one was swiped from its stand, I couldn’t see them fretting about it. They probably just went out and bought another beat-up bicycle. One night, while Ed and I were smoking in a café, I happened to look out the window to see a family of three—father, mother, and daughter, all tall, all blond—pushing their bicycles home with their groceries tucked in their baskets. Their calm, accepting expressions as they passed a busy marijuana café spoke volumes to me.

  In Ed’s company I would later stroll along those canals, drinking in the city’s relaxed atmosphere and hitting every marijuana establishment we could, and a few museums too. The owner of Sensi Seeds, Ben Dronkers, also owns the world-famous Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum. We were guests of Ben’s and were staying in his apartment directly above this museum. One of the reasons Ed had come to Amsterdam this specific week was to attend to the Cannabis Culture Awards, and he brought me along with him.

  That event was an eye-opening experience for this naive if otherwise worldly American. Here I was with people like the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, Sir Richard Branson, who had served on the United Nations’ global commission on drug policy, which was calling on world nations to institute sensible drug policies and admit that the decades-long “drug war” had not worked. The commission on which Branson had served was receiving the Cannabis Culture Award from the museum for its work. The former foreign minister of Norway, Thorvald Stoltenberg, was accepting the award on the commission’s behalf. That award was being presented by Dries van Agt, the former president of the Netherlands.

  Titans of industry and heads of state hobnobbing together, happily gathering to accept an award from a marijuana museum? In what kind of bizarro universe had I just landed?

  What was happening around me forced me to rethink the culture I had left behind in the United States.

  On one hand, the laws governing legal marijuana in Colorado and California were far less restrictive that what was going on in the Netherlands. But for the life of me, I could not imagine going to a marijuana award event in the United States and discovering, say, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, former president Bill Clinton, and both of the former presidents Bush in attendance.

  Imagine that they had all served on a committee that found marijuana drug policy to be a waste of time, money, and effort. Imagine if they were telling world nations to relax their policies on this plant because the evidence showed it to be relatively benign compared to, say, alcohol and tobacco.

  Sadly, I could not imagine such a thing happening. Not for a long, long time.

  I left the event that night having two powerful feelings.

  One: What the hell am I doing here among these people? Three years ago, I wasn’t even in this business, and now I’m sitting with presidents and foreign ministers of various countries, talking about weed!

  Two: How bad can marijuana be if these corporate presidents and foreign politicians see value in easing up laws restricting it?

  I’ve always been an early riser. Each morning, I’d leave our flat above the museum early and walk the streets of Amsterdam well before people were heading off to work. It struck me that Amsterdam is a little like Europe’s Vegas. When young men from the UK want to celebrate a buddy’s bachelor party, they head to ’Dam, and spend a couple of nights making fools of themselves amid the hookers and clubs and marijuana cafés.

  But now, as I watched in the early morning hours, I was amazed to see the waves of street cleaners go about their business, carefully erasing all evidence of the previous night’s debauchery from Amsterdam’s streets. By the time I was thinking of grabbing a newspaper and my morning coffee, last night’s puke, trash, and broken bottles had disappeared. The city of canals had been transformed into a pristine city once again.

  What did that say about the Dutch, I wondered, that they were so comfortable having both sides of human nature—debauchery and civility—dwell so intimately beside each other without getting bent out of shape about it?

  High has to be one of the most overused words in my profession, but I assure you that when I returned home from my trip, I was brimming with a natural sort of elation. The Amsterdam trip had opened my eyes. I had seen how other cultures embraced our little plant. I had bonded with one of world’s top cannabis experts, whom I now counted as a friend. And I had seen how our Cannabis Cup win back home could open doors abroad.

  No doubt about it—I was a happy SOB.

  Soon after I got home, I took a trip out of town with my wife. While we were away, I got an anxious call from my grow team. At the time, we were still mired in our legal issues with two of our dispensary partners. An emergency appeal had been filed with Colorado’s Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division, seeking to sever our relationship.

  Once that emergency severance went into effect, we could not lawfully continue to grow all the plants covered by our partnerships. Three enforcement officers from the Department of Revenue had shown up at our grow and rounded up all the plants that had been tagged and earmarked for those two dispensaries. The officers used shrub clippers to hack all the plants from their growing mediums. They bundled up all the butchered plants—nearly half of our stock—stuffed them in giant plastic bags, and whisked them away.

  As soon as I got back to town, I rushed down to the offices of the MMED to find out what I could. The officer I met with welcomed me into his office and told me to take a seat. “Hey,” he said with an awkward grin on his face. “I just came from burning your plants.”

  They had rented an incinerator from the DEA not far from the airport to do the deed.

  I felt sucker-punched. Those plants represented about $100,000. I took it well, I thought. I reminded myself that I could have failures but still not fail. The Cannabis Cup win was a good barometer of our place in the business. Still . . . $100,000 lost? That was a big loss to come back from.

  My award-winning plants had just gone up in smoke. I had gone from so high to so low so quickly.

  12

  Marijuana on the Ballot

  The clock was ticking.

  I pulled my iPhone out of my pocket and checked the front page of the Denver Post.

  My eyes flicked down the headlines.

  Nothing yet.

  I stuck the phone back into my pocket and tried to get on with my day. But it was a little tough. I had a meeting that morning, and right after, as soon as I got back to my office, I pulled up the browser on my computer screen to check the news again.

  The fate of my business—and so many others—rested with three counties in the state.

  Still nothing.

  It was Election Da
y, November 2012.

  The citizens of our state had a big decision to make today, well beyond the battle for the presidency between the incumbent, President Obama, and the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney. No, every marijuana activist and enthusiast in the country was dying to know which way voters would swing on the matter of Colorado Amendment 64. Would they approve it or give it a pass?

  Until now, marijuana sales in the state had been restricted to medical use only. Anyone who wanted to buy had to jump through the same hoops I had when I’d first gotten my medical red card years ago. But the question before the voters today was whether to permit the sale of marijuana to adults age twenty-one or older for adult recreational use. The precise wording of the referendum went like this:

  Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning marijuana, and, in connection therewith, providing for the regulation of marijuana; permitting a person twenty-one years of age or older to consume or possess limited amounts of marijuana; providing for the licensing of cultivation facilities, product manufacturing facilities, testing facilities, and retail stores; permitting local governments to regulate or prohibit such facilities; requiring the general assembly to enact an excise tax to be levied upon wholesale sales of marijuana; requiring that the first $40 million in revenue raised annually by such tax be credited to the public school capital construction assistance fund; and requiring the general assembly to enact legislation governing the cultivation, processing, and sale of industrial hemp?

  To my mind, the clunky legislative wording shook down to a couple of critical yes/no questions:

  Should law-abiding grown-ups be allowed to buy marijuana the way they bought cigarettes and tobacco—yes or no?

  Should those law-abiding grown-ups be allowed to grow up to six plants of marijuana in their homes, within reasonable restrictions—yes or no?