Big Weed (11 page)

I'm a law-abiding person. I wouldn't be in this business if it wasn't legal. So I tried to understand the position of everyone I was coming in contact with—cops, judges, bureaucrats—and tried to see the situation from their point of view.

When you do that, you can't help but empathize with their plight. Imagine if you have spent your entire career hearing only one message about marijuana. Imagine if you have busted thousands of people with this drug and heard nothing but excuses and professions of innocence. Imagine if you've witnessed firsthand what violent drug users and criminals have done to our cities.

You'd be suspicious if the law suddenly said marijuana was okay.

You'd feel as if the rug had been pulled out from under you.

Maybe you'd even feel betrayed by politicians and the justice system that employed you.

I empathized with them. I knew how hard the United States had worked to stem the growth of the drug trade. I had grown to adulthood in the age of First Lady Nancy Reagan's Just Say No to Drugs campaign. I had seen police officers address classrooms following the precepts outlined by the D.A.R.E. America program, which was designed to empower kids to resist the lure of drug culture.

But I was now far more educated about the history of marijuana than I had been as a teen, a young adult, or even the young father I had been just a short time ago. Because I was willing to look beyond my country's pat pronouncements about marijuana, I believed that I actually had more information at my disposal than the authorities I was meeting.

I was now more convinced than ever that our national policy on marijuana was the product of distortions, poor judgment, and injustice.

President Nixon resigned the presidency in 1974, but his hard-line legacy on marijuana has lived on and been expanded on by subsequent administrations. It's an embarrassing, appalling record. Back in 1965, only 119,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana offenses. Today, that number averages more than 800,000 Americans annually. In all, we've arrested 22 million people since the Nixon era. Today, half of all arrests are marijuana related. Not all people end up prosecuted, of course, but sentences, when they are handed down, are disproportionately harder on minorities.

Most arrests are for mere possession, and federal, state, and local governments often portray the resulting sentences as slaps on the wrist. But even if you're not imprisoned, the penalties for marijuana use and possession are often life-changing and harsh. You're fined. You end up in court. You are forced into drug rehab programs. You're saddled with a criminal record for life. You can lose your license, your kids, your home, your job, and even your right to vote. If you step out of line, you can go to jail. In his research, the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser has found that in some U.S. states, the penalties for marijuana trafficking can be harsher than the penalties for murder.

In the civil sector, the advent of drug testing has made it harder to evade punishment for occasional use. Because traces of marijuana remain in your system far longer than alcohol—as much as a month, in the case of heavy users—it's easy to paint someone as a stoner with a random test. You could end up losing your job or losing your
chance of being hired, while habitual alcoholics will come off as squeaky clean until someone notices alcohol on their breath.

If we can be cynical for a second, the point I made earlier about certain industries thriving by having hemp out of the way is true for our justice system as well. As long as marijuana stays illegal, our jails stay full. Our courts stay busy and can more easily justify their expense to voters. When law-abiding people are manipulated by alarming drug arrest statistics, law enforcement agencies get funded and stay funded. Federal drug czars get to look like they're accomplishing something. Tons of rehab centers get more bodies thrust through their front door.

When you look at it this way, it's smart to bust people for marijuana. It's the best way to get the largest number of people into the revolving door of the justice system for the smallest possible infraction.

But recently, something snapped with the public. Americans slowly became more savvy about marijuana and demanded a change. In 1996 voters went to the polls in California and Arizona, demanding the right to use marijuana for medical use. When this happened, the feds overreacted, requesting money from Congress to make sure marijuana stayed illegal. Congress spent $1.5 billion between 1998 and 2011 to teach a new generation of people that marijuana was bad.

But all the legal marijuana movement needed to turn the tide was more people with more experience under their belts.

More people to realize that this much-maligned herb had legitimate medical uses.

More people to realize that responsible use of marijuana was possible.

More people to hear out the data and understand that the herb was safer in most hands than alcohol.

Some of the people who learned this firsthand were state regulators and law enforcement personnel. They needed time to start replacing their personal experience of legal marijuana with the
disinformation that had been handed down as gospel for more than forty years.

It was happening right before my eyes. The paranoia was dying.

The longer I was in the legal cannabis business, the more MLDS was disappearing like a puff of smoke in the breeze.

Summer 2013. The burglar alarm went off at my grow facility on South Platte River Drive. By now, I'd invested nearly $600,000 in this facility. We didn't have theft insurance; at the time, no policy existed to insure a marijuana grow, legal or otherwise. A burglary would hit us hard; we couldn't afford to lose any product or equipment. No business can. The downtime and lost revenue would be devastating.

My iPhone rang. I answered in a daze. It was 1:44 a.m. “Yes?”

“Hello, Mr. Hageseth. This is Digital Safe. We have multiple alarms triggered at the facility nicknamed Platte River Garden. Would you like us to dispatch the police?”

I became fully awake in one breath. My head was completely focused.

“Which zones are alarming?” I asked, reaching for my iPad. I woke the device and launched the app through which I can watch all our security cameras.

“Zones 2, 7, 10, and 11,” came the voice.

A cold chill crossed my body. “Send the cops! Send them now. This is real!”

Zone 2 was our front door, 7 was an interior motion detector, 10 was a storage closet, and 11 was the mother lode—our vault. It held tens of thousands of dollars' worth of marijuana, all packaged and ready to go.

In less than thirty seconds, I was watching the view of our security cameras live in that facility. I was watching both the bad guys
drive away and the good guys—the cops—arriving. The first cop on scene radioed dispatch, and police dispatch called me moments later.

“Hello, Mr. Hageseth, Denver Police have responded to a burglar alarm at your business address on South Platte River Drive and have found evidence of a break-in. You need to go there now.”

It was a hot summer's night in Colorado. It was probably seventy-five or eighty degrees at 2 a.m. I pulled on my shorts, flip-flops, and the button-down shirt I'd been wearing the day before and ran out to my car. By then marijuana had been good to me, and I was driving the car of my dreams, a convertible Porsche 911. As I drove to the facility, I couldn't resist sneaking a peek at the security camera views appearing on my phone.

When I arrived at the grow, I was initially confused because there wasn't a single cop car in sight. But when I pulled into the parking lot, I saw five of Denver's finest standing by our front door. Two had guns drawn. The other three had their hands on their weapons, which remained in their holsters.

The first cop approached me as I pulled up. I imagined what this looked like to him: a guy in a flashy sports car with the top down, driving around in the middle of the night and dressed as if he's going somewhere . . .

“Are you the owner?” he asked.

“Yes.” I sensed I was about to hear another lecture about exactly how legal marijuana is, but that lecture never came.

His eyes flashed to the badge hanging around my neck. Its green background indicated that I was an associated key—an owner who worked in the cannabis business.

I could read his eyes. He was thinking, “He's legit.”

“Your front door has been broken open, and it appears you have been robbed. Because of the locked doors inside, we are awaiting a K-9 unit to come and clear the building.”

Well, shit, I thought. If these guys haven't figured out that this building is filled with weed, then the police dog certainly will. My body tensed.

“Do you know this is a
legal medical
marijuana grow facility?” I asked the cop, emphasizing both
legal
and
medical
. . .

“Of course we do, Mr. Hageseth. There is a whole bunch of your SkunkBerry spilled over there. We think the bad guys dropped it trying to get away.” He paused and smiled. “Smells really good.”

He asked me to stand behind my car until the K-9 units finished a search of the building. They wanted to be sure the bad guys weren't in there before they had me enter.

“It looks empty,” one cop said. “But I need you to stay here, sir, while we check it out.”

No problem, I thought.

Guns drawn, dogs at the ready, they swept the inside of the facility.

The rest of us waited outside.

A few minutes later, they emerged empty-handed and gave us the all-clear sign.

No bad guys inside.

Long story short: Some burglars had broken in. When our alarm sounded, they bolted, but not before snatching a few armfuls of harvested weed. In their haste, they dropped buds all the way out the door. The canine unit was sniffing these buds now, trampling them to such a degree that their handlers had to lead their dogs away and pick out sticky buds from their animals' paws.

The K-9 officers apologized to me for the loss of my product.

I couldn't help thinking: Wow, the world has changed!

The cops lingered in the area. Some radioed back. Some filled out paperwork.

Everyone was treating me with the utmost deference. Sir this, sir that.

“Hey,” one of them said. “A friend of mine sells medical marijuana.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, interesting business. I tell you what . . .”

And then he launched into the sort of chat you'd have with a friendly stranger in a bar.