Big Weed

by Christian Hageseth

  As you may have guessed from our talk with my daughter’s teacher, my wife was still uncomfortable with the notion of her husband being in the marijuana business. She was intrigued that the law was changing. She was interested in how such a decision would impact her home state. But she didn’t want her husband in the business, let alone smoking the stuff. She’d grown up in a fairly conservative Colorado family.

  “I am not telling my parents what you’re doing,” she told me early on. “It’ll just upset them.”

  Well, I expected that. But as the months passed and I was struggling with those first few harvests, I lost track of time on the home front. It was getting awfully close to the holidays.

  “Look,” I said, “you have to tell them something. We’re going to see them for Christmas!”

  Well, she did. The news went over like a lead balloon. A big, ol’ marijuana-tainted lead balloon. The holidays were tense. And by the following Easter, her crusty dad got up the nerve to ask me a single question during our time together. “So—how’s that pot thing going?”

  Interestingly, my experience with my own parents was remarkably different. I suppose you could say that we have become a closer family because of marijuana.

  How is that possible? Well, I said earlier that the story of marijuana policy in this country is a little like the personal evolution of a human being. We form opinions, we enact rigid policies, we suffer consequences because of those policies, and we relent and grow to a higher state of being. I’d argue that both of my parents went through those phases.

  My dad, for example, recently had a life-changing experience. A friend of his in South Dakota had a grandson who suffered from a lifetime of intractable seizures. This grandfather reached out to my dad after seeing Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s report on CNN that touted the medical aspects of marijuana and focused on a little girl with symptoms similar to those of his grandson. My dad suggested his friend begin reading up on cannibidiol (CBD) tinctures to see if this marijuana-derived product might be worth trying on the friend’s grandson.

  Most people never look past tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in marijuana that gives humans that high. But THC belongs to a larger family of compounds found in marijuana called cannabinoids. One of the other compounds is CBD, and it has become recognized in recent years for its ability to treat numerous conditions, including pediatric epilepsy. There’s no high associated with taking CBD. It’s usually administered as an oral liquid formulation.

  As I write this, a drug made with this compound has been granted orphan drug status with the Food and Drug Administration and is slated for clinical trials. “Orphan diseases” are ones that affect an extremely small percentage of the human population, so small that it often doesn’t pay for a drug company to invest its resources in developing treatments for them. One incentive the U.S. government offers drug companies is the ability to fast-track the development of these designated “orphan drugs.”

  In the South Dakota case, the grandfather was able to research CBD and talk it over with his family. They decided to buy some CBD and try it out on the boy. The child, who had had fifteen to twenty seizures every day since doctors discovered a tumor in his brain when he was only three, began taking the CBD tincture. After ten days of taking the tincture, the grandson went seven days without having a single seizure. Those were the first seizure-free days in his young life. After a month of taking the tincture, the absence of seizures allowed the grandson to resume a regular life. As I write this, he is getting ready to begin home schooling for the first time.

  Emboldened by his friend’s story, my father began immersing himself more enthusiastically in the medical literature surrounding marijuana.

  Because of my business experience, I’m often asked for financial advice by friends and family. Shortly after I got started in the marijuana business, I got an urgent call from a longtime friend that I’ll call Bruce. “Can I come by to talk with you? It’s kind of important.”

  “Sure,” I said. We made a date, and I put it out of my mind.

  He showed up a few days later, and I could tell when he came in the door that he was agitated. Papers tucked under his arm. Concern in his eyes. “Is there someplace private we can talk? I think we’re going to need a computer.”

  I led him into my office and closed the door. He started opening his files and laying sheets of paper on my desk. Tons of financials from his current living situation. His bank statements. His house. The car. Everything.

  “Are you having money problems?”

  “I think so,” he said with a sigh.

  We started working on a spreadsheet together, and as we did, he loosened up a little and started to talk.

  “All we need is about $3,000 a month,” he said, “if we sell the house to live comfortably in a senior community. But how long can we make it last at that expense?”

  “You’re gonna move?”

  “I don’t have a choice, I don’t think. Look at the numbers.”

  I looked and fiddled and clicked around. I love spreadsheets. They’re the quickest way I know of drilling down to the facts of any financial situation. As the rows and columns click into place with every little change you make, you start internalizing the numbers, seeing patterns, and you can get a sense which numbers are the most critical.

  “You know,” I said, “you’re barely seventy and you guys are still in good health. I don’t think you need to move out.”

  “It’s just tough coming up with the money.”

  I clicked around. Sifted through his papers.

  “You’re telling me you need $3,000 a month,” I said, “but what I’m seeing is, if you can come up with $3,600 a month, you can keep the car and the house and you don’t have to move anywhere. Your life stays exactly the same.”

  “Sounds fine, but where’s the money coming from?”

  At the time he had Social Security, a retirement account that had been decimated by the market crash, and a part-time job that he enjoyed.

  It was obvious to me what he should do. But I knew it would be a struggle to get him to accept it.

  “You know what I do for a living, right?”

  “Marijuana. I know. What’s that got to do with anything?”

  I smiled. “Have you ever considered growing pot?”

  His face changed. He looked disgusted. His head was shaking even before I could get another word out.

  “Hear me out.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Bruce, you can do this. It’s not rocket science.”

  “I’m not growing marijuana.”

  And here he went into a long diatribe. He admired what I was doing in my business. He wasn’t against marijuana per se, now that it was legal, but setting up shop to grow it seemed like taking this legal pot business a little too far.

  “Are you saying I should come work for you?”

  “No—I’m saying get yourself some lights and set up shop in your basement.”

  He was silent for a little while.

  I have no idea what he was thinking. Maybe he was considering how I’d been willing to take the risk. Maybe some part of him was tuning in to the obvious joy I was having at the helm of a new business. If I could do it—

  “How would I even do that? I’m not skilled at . . . at that.”

  “I can teach you. You’ll grow as a Caregiver. You’ll grow specifically for patients who you will then sell it to. That part is all legal. You have a good head on your shoulders. You’ll figure the rest out, and I can help.”

  He was shaking his head again.

  “It’s completely legal, and you’ll make decent money.”

  He went silent again.

  Thinking.

  Eyes roving over the papers.

  Thinking.

  After a lo
ng while he shrugged. “How much money are we talking?”

  I wouldn’t want to give the impression that it’s difficult to grow marijuana in your home. Certainly millions of people do just that all over the world, often illegally. It’s the same old story: If you want to keep your illegal activity a secret, you grow your plants in a place that’s out of sight.

  Now it was legal in Colorado.

  But that doesn’t mean it was a cinch. If he was going to do this right, Bruce would need lights, fans, and a dedicated air conditioner. He would need some instruction in the finer points of plant nutrition and cultivation. He would need to quiet his negativity and learn to be a good student again.

  He would read and take notes and talk to my growers and see what he could pick up on his own. I was hoping to “teach a man to fish” rather than giving him a fish.

  One of the hard things for home growers to realize is that once you go down this path, you must be committed. It’s not like sprinkling a few houseplants around the house and then going about your business, occasionally missing a few waterings here and there.

  No—if you’re gonna grow, you have to expect that it’s like supervising a child or a couple of pets. They must be fed. They must be watered. Their environment must be carefully monitored. And you must do this every single day.

  It wasn’t long before Bruce’s basement was fragrant with the smell of ripening buds. I walked him through his first harvest and had the privilege of sharing his delight when he delivered that harvest to local dispensaries. I watched as he counted up his earnings.

  He was incredulous. “Five thousand dollars?”

  It wasn’t going to be easy. It’s tough work. But needless to say, his money problems were over. He and his wife were able to continue living in their home. They were happy and relieved. The crisis had passed.

  But that wasn’t the end of it. Now, every time I ran into Bruce, he nattered on about some new method of marijuana cultivation that he’d found on the Internet. Or something he had read in a book. Or gleaned from a conversation with the guy in his local grow store.

  Suddenly, the guy who was afraid to build his own home grow was an expert. He had learned to fish.

  Meanwhile, my mother had been struggling with a problem of her own that was not so easily solved. Her boyfriend, Bob, had been diagnosed with liver cancer and given about three months to live.

  Bob was a kind and open-minded man, and my mother had always been supportive of all my business ventures, including my marijuana business. So I wasn’t surprised when she broached the subject of Bob possibly using some marijuana to alleviate the symptoms associated with his chemotherapy.

  Sad to say, chances are high you know of someone who has undergone this type of treatment. In the United States, one in four people will battle cancer in their lifetime. Not everyone who undergoes chemo experiences side effects, but many do. Those effects range from loss of appetite, nausea, and difficulty sleeping to hair loss, fingernail loss, loss of sensation in the extremities, and many more. Cancer patients typically take additional medications to manage these symptoms. They might use sleeping pills and antinausea meds, for example, to combat problems brought on by the chemo. This is a common pattern with modern medicine: We’re prescribed one medication to treat our disease and a host of other meds to treat the symptoms brought on by that medication. The pills-on-top-of-pills pattern is so ubiquitous that no one seems to question it anymore.

  Anytime I hear an idiot politician or media pundit dismiss medical marijuana legalization as a ploy to give stoners their plaything, I cringe. If I could point to one disease that hastened the adoption of medical marijuana in this country, I’d point to cancer. These people are suffering, and marijuana helps. A lot. I’m proud that we’re finally waking up to the therapeutic power of this little plant.

  Now, yes, you will find plenty of activists who argue that marijuana can in fact treat or cure cancer. I’m not going to go there. I’m not a physician. I’m not a scientist. But I will say that numerous scientific journal articles observe that cannabinoids—the active compounds in marijuana—have displayed cancer-fighting properties in lab experiments. They have been shown to impact various types of cancers, from brain and breast cancers to those afflicting the pancreas, lungs, and others. In studies where scientists have investigated the health of marijuana smokers and of non–marijuana smokers, the marijuana smokers have been found to have lower incidences of cancer. But let’s say you don’t believe the claims that marijuana’s cannabinoids can zap tumors. Let’s say you insist the drug deserves closer study. Fine.

  Many of our customers find marijuana helps them with the simple things. It kills pain. It’s a powerful anti-inflammatory. It helps reduce spasms and convulsions in people with epilepsy. It’s a bronchodilator that helps patients with asthma breathe better. It chases away nausea. Marijuana’s legendary ability to give you the munchies becomes lifesaving if chemotherapy has decimated your desire to eat a decent meal. Marijuana’s high banishes feelings of sadness. Its power as a relaxant allows many users to get a good night’s sleep.

  Part of the secret of its power lies in the design of the human brain. In the 1990s, Israeli scientists found that humans have special receptors in their brains that allow them to interact with and process THC and other cannabinoids. Why do we have those receptors? you ask. The answer is that the human body routinely manufactures its own CBDs—called endocannabinoids (eCBs). I’m simplifying things immensely, but it turns out that the eCB system is our body’s way of protecting our nerve cells from becoming overexcited. To quote marijuana horticulture expert Ed Rosenthal from his famous Marijuana Grower’s Handbook, “The eCBs act as negative feedback, to say, ‘Whoa! That’s enough input, now slow down!’”

  One of the cannabinoids our body makes is called anandamide, which some scientists have dubbed the “brain’s own marijuana,” though that term is admittedly simplistic. The first part of the word anandamide comes from the Sanskrit word for “bliss,” which is why anandamide is sometimes also called “the bliss molecule.” (Anandamide is found naturally in our brains—and in foods like chocolate.) Clearly, the eCB system is all about protecting the body, modulating our immune responses, and generating our feel-good responses.

  The science on this is compelling, deserving of further research. Yet researchers lament that they are frequently denied federal permission to study marijuana’s effects. It’s weird. Marijuana does all this good yet the United States has focused obsessively on the fact that weed gets people high. If the government truly believed that’s all marijuana was good for, it would have a leg to stand on.

  But the truth is, it knows better. Few people realize that the government itself actually holds a patent for medicinal use of cannabinoids. Or that the feds grow medical marijuana for research and compassionate use on their own farm in Oxford, Mississippi. And yet the government continues to lock down marijuana nationwide as a Schedule I drug, claiming that it is of no redeeming medical value. Instead, it prefers to allow large pharmaceutical companies to develop artificial cannabinoid products, which the government classifies as Schedule III drugs, those that have some medical use.

  That bias speaks volumes. Doctors have a preference for easily quantified doses that can be administered orally or injected. They become nervous when someone says they just want to smoke a plant. How will that patient control the dosage? How will they know how much of the active ingredient they’ve taken? Those are legitimate questions, but at the same time, we can’t ignore that fact that patients who use marijuana often can reduce the dosages of all those supporting medications they’re taking to combat their side effects.

  So I felt my mom was on solid ground proposing that Bob smoke a little weed. But he wasn’t having it. He was a conservative Colorado plainsman. He didn’t smoke tobacco, let alone marijuana.

  You know what? I get it. Like the cop who stopped me in the Saf
eway parking lot, Bob had spent his life under a system that said marijuana was wrong. When his elected officials and local police talked about putting away drug users, citizens like Bob couldn’t help but agree. Guys like Bob were law-abiding; marijuana smokers were criminals. Being a law-abiding citizen is a powerful part of many people’s identity. You don’t just shuck that belief system off because you’re dying of a terrible disease.

  So I think we have to applaud people who come around to trying what they have spent their lives avoiding. Bob tried marijuana. My mom, his caretaker during this time, set him up with a glass pipe and some weed, and showed him what to do.

  Bob tried. It just didn’t work for him. He didn’t like the smoke and the coughing sensation that went with it.

  “I can’t do this,” he told her.

  Smoking is the time-honored way to ingest marijuana, but it’s not the only way. In recent years, the industry has promoted vaporizers as a safer alternative. Vaporizers heat up the THC resins to the point where they become airborne. You then breathe the resulting mist. Vaporizers neatly sidestep the biggest issue of smoking: burning plant material.

  Smoking marijuana is not nearly as dangerous as smoking tobacco. That’s because to get their hit of nicotine, people are obliged to smoke numerous cigarettes and thus inhale a ton of tars that are the products of tobacco leaf combustion. Marijuana smokers tend to smoke less than tobacco users because marijuana is more potent. Some doctors have observed that one hit of a joint with a THC level of the patient’s own choosing might be enough to banish that patient’s nausea for several hours—and stimulate their appetite to boot. You don’t need much to do the trick.

  But my mom thought a vaporizer would be too complicated for Bob to operate. She thought of something else: edibles.

  I told you earlier that marijuana seeds have served as a nutrient-rich food for thousands of years. If you had visited certain drugstores in the United States in the 1860s, you probably would have been able to find “hasheesh candy,” described as a “pleasurable and harmless stimulant.” Such products disappeared when cannabis was banned in the 1930s. Edibles didn’t get a boost again until the appearance of the classic pot brownie in a 1954 cookbook by Alice B. Toklas.