Big Weed (14 page)

“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 long 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
endo
cannabinoids (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
ananda
mide 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.