Big Weed (15 page)

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 Safeway 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.

But ye olde pot brownie is almost passé these days. You wouldn't believe the sheer variety of edibles out there. There isn't a marijuana dispensary in the country that doesn't offer hard candies, chocolate bars, gummy chews, cookies, drinks, colas, mints—you name it. You can also buy tinctures, oils, and butters that incorporate buds so you can go home and cook or bake your own concoction.

It's a brave new world of flavor, taste, and recipes. There's just one caveat: You've got to go easy on the edibles. When you're smoking, you know after one hit or two how the THC is affecting you. Your lungs pump that active ingredient into your bloodstream almost immediately. If you feel a strong high coming on, you can lay off the toking. If you feel that particular strain is too strong for you, you can choose a product with a lower THC level next time. But with edibles, you won't feel the THC until the food product is digested in your stomach and sent to your bloodstream. You could easily eat too much marijuana and have a bad experience. We in the industry owe it to our customers to standardize the amount of THC in each serving to solve this problem.

My mom played it safe with Bob. One night she presented him with a couple of lollipops. Her instructions were simple. Suck on one and wait. See what impact it has on you. Don't take another today.

Well, he quickly fell into a fine routine. He sucked on one lollipop immediately after each chemo session and found that it helped reduce his anxiety and helped him sleep. The following morning, he'd suck on another to quell any resulting queasiness and boost his appetite. He also found that he could get by on fewer painkillers, which had unpleasant side effects. He used lollipops as needed to treat himself for pain and nausea.

Bob's three-month life sentence turned into twenty months. When he died in 2011, I was sad for my mom and mourned his passing with his many friends and family. I admired him for a number of reasons, but I especially admired his courage in trying something he once so adamantly opposed.

10

Best in Show

I'm probably the only chief executive in the country, possibly the world, who will offer to let you smoke out of one of the awards that decorate his retail space.

When people visit, their gaze inevitably takes in the object that sits in a glass enclosure in our downtown Denver location. The glass trophy is about a foot tall, with a depression on the top and two glass necks extending from the central chamber. It's a beautiful piece of handmade glassware. The words etched into the side read:
Colorado Cup, Best Sativa 2012.
It will always be special to me for two reasons: It's the first award our company ever won. And it's a working bong.

How we won it—and how we started racking up awards for our cannabis products—is really a story about feedback.

All companies crave feedback. Most often it comes from customers. And some of those moments can be poignant as well. I know of one customer, an elderly woman in her seventies, who comes into our shop all the time to buy marijuana to help her with the pain she suffers from a debilitating muscular disease. She is always accompanied by her husband, who is a nonsmoker. But the two of them have become fixtures at our downtown location on Denver's Santa Fe Drive. When I was visiting recently, the woman made a point of coming
over to me and telling me how well she was being treated by one of our budtenders, Jen.

At first glance, you would not think the two women had much in common. One's an elderly woman who moves with difficulty. The other is a hip, healthy young woman covered with tattoos and piercings. But they have found common ground in their passion for marijuana. What started as a simple transaction has blossomed into a weekly ritual.

That's a beautiful kind of feedback that every business owner needs to hear and see. It reaffirms that you're creating a business—a culture and an environment—where all kinds of people feel welcome.

But if we're honest, entrepreneurs have to admit that we also crave feedback from our peers. We want people in our own industries to nod and say we've done a great job.

The marijuana industry may have been new in the United States, but now that it was out of the closet in a few states, it was losing no time organizing competitions. Our grow program had blossomed under Corey's leadership. Our harvests were back on track. Our confidence was growing. It was only inevitable that we would start to think about entering some of these new cannabis contests.
Rooster Magazine,
Colorado's edgiest arts monthly, was sponsoring something it called the Colorado Cup. There was no fancy exhibition attached to the competition. There would be no award ceremony. No partylike atmosphere in one of the state's convention centers. All we had to do was submit our entries—the best of our best weed—and wait to be notified.

Rather than a small group of us conducting a selection process at the office, we hit upon the idea of throwing a private strain selection party off the premises. That way, all our card-carrying guests would feel free to smoke in a relaxed setting, get high, and identify the strains they thought we should enter. It sounded like a great idea for a party. Naturally, we made sure to hire caterers who brought plenty of food.

You wouldn't believe the debates people would get into over marijuana. It's not enough when you're doing a selection to say, “Well, this weed got me high, so I'm giving it a thumbs-up!”

It's a little more complicated than that. I'll go back to the beer analogy I used earlier. Say you're the owner of a local microbrewery who does a great business in your neck of the woods selling IPA—India pale ale—to your customers. You're so proud of your beer that you decide to enter it in one of the million beer competitions that occur every year in the United States. You do okay, but you don't win. In fact, afterward, someone close to the judges pulls you over to give you some pointers. “Yours is a great beer,” the guy says, “but it's not totally representative of an IPA.”

This observation—
close but no cigar
—is probably heard wherever aficionados gather to judge the merits of whatever their passions are: beer, wine, chocolates, mustards, classic cars, and on and on. I'll bet right now there's someone who just lost a dog show who is hearing a similar thing: “Your schnauzer was wonderful, Mrs. Jones. She just wasn't the
quintessential
schnauzer. The
ideal
schnauzer. She didn't hit the
benchmark
all schnauzers must hit to be considered perfect.” There are subtle variations that creep into any product—or breed—that differentiate it from the standard. You might enjoy and celebrate those differences locally, but when it comes time to enter a competition, you have to nail the standard.

So the night of that selection party, as the haze grew and perfumed every corner of my house, people were debating the merits of our weed on this level. This is an awesome Super Lemon Haze, they were saying, but is it so typical of the Super Lemon Haze strain that the judges will love it? Did it have that taste of a smoky lemon meringue pie when you smoked it? Did those buds have that clean scent of lemon peel when you sniffed it in your hand? Because if not, let's pick a different strain.

And they'd pass around containers of different strains and smoke small samples of each from a little glass pipe or a bong.
Round and round we'd go. Those of us who weren't blasted out of our minds or absolutely giddy took some notes on the process. Come morning, we had our guests' written comments on every strain, and we made some decisions in the light of day. We filled out our application, assembled our samples, and dropped everything off at the location the magazine sponsoring the contest had designated.

And we promptly forgot about it.

We had a business to run. We couldn't waste time waiting by the phone.

Corey and I had become friends since he'd started working for us. I enjoyed hanging out with him and his family. Since there was no space to meet at the grow facilities, he and I had grown accustomed to hitting a local bar, El Diablo, where we'd hash out our plans over shots of chilled Patrón tequila and Dos Equis beer.

On one such afternoon I said, “Hey, what's the deal with the Colorado Cup? Shouldn't we have heard by now?”

We called the magazine the next day and got hold of the guy who had launched the contest. I could imagine what a great time the judges of this particular competition must have had working their way through the glorious abundance of weed that had poured into their office from every grower in the state. Their judging process had to have been ten thousand times more fragrant and hysterical than the selection party at my house.

The guy sounded like he was still coming down from that high.

“Oh, yeah!” he said. “I was gonna call you guys! You won!”

Actually, we won not one but three awards. Our Super Lemon Haze had come in third place for best sativa. Our Hells Angels OG Kush had come in third for best indica. The stunner: Our Jack Herer had taken first place for best sativa in the state.

The next day the magazine dropped off the glass trophy/bong at our downtown store. It had been hand-blown by an artisanal glass business, Kind Creations, in Fort Collins.

All of us were ecstatic. Holy shit, I thought, three years of this crazy business and it's finally paying off. The money was good. We were hitting our numbers, the company was operating smoothly, and we were getting great feedback from our customers. But this was something different. Outside recognition was hugely gratifying.

We were on the map!

Granted, the map extended only to the borders of our very square state, but we were on it just the same.

When the magazine issue touting our victory appeared, the publisher dropped off plenty of copies to share with employees and customers.

And then just a few days later, a couple of angry Hells Angels members walked into our downtown Denver dispensary.

Since it's probably been a while since you rode with a motorcycle crew, let me fill you in. Shortly after our budtenders opened shop that morning, in walked two burly biker dudes in “cuts”—black leather vests emblazoned with patches signifying their membership. On the other side of the glass door, my employees could see yet another biker waiting outside, his arms crossed as if blocking the door. As I've mentioned, you can't enter a medical marijuana dispensary unless you're a card-carrying patient. So I suppose I should be grateful that these two fellows were following the law.

The two men flashed their red medical marijuana cards and held up the magazine article I just mentioned. “It says in here that you guys sell the Hells Angels OG Kush. Is that right?”

“Uh . . . yeah?”

“Can we see it?”

My clerk, after checking them into our system, led them down the bar to a jar and showed them the buds.

There's a lot of marijuana history in that name. The strain is said to have been originally bred by Hells Angels members themselves. It became legendary, with wonderful scent of cotton candy and pine. We grew this bud in 2013, and it tested at more than 33 percent
THC—higher amounts of THC than any bud entered in competition, ever. As my budtenders tell our customers, it comes on like a freight train. It'll pretty much erase anything you're feeling—from stress to excruciating pain. The OG in the name has a mysterious origin. Some insist it refers to a now-defunct, Canadian-based marijuana website—
Overgrown.com
—and honors those pioneers who traded seeds and kept great strains alive, albeit illegally, until the Canadian government shut them down under pressure from the United States. Still others say that OG stands for “Original Gangster,” in honor of an early strain that was big in Southern California, or for “Ocean Grown,” because it was bred near the California coast. Either way, OG has come to signify a classic strain. And Kush refers to a major mountain chain that bridges India and Pakistan, where marijuana is thought to have originated.

The leaves of the OG Kush have a very distinctive “frosted” look, almost as if the leaf has sprouted a furry coat. If you look closely, you can see that the tiny hairs that give the bud that look actually secrete sticky resins. These structures are called trichomes. Dried buds will also have flecks of tan, light green, and dark green, which, combined with that piney resin smell, can pretty much persuade you that you're looking at the real Hells Angels OG Kush.

“Okay,” one of the bikers said. “That's it, all right. We're putting you on notice right now that you need to immediately cease and desist from using our name or logo in any capacity. It is protected by copyright. If you fail to comply, you will receive a letter from our attorney. We will file a suit to protect our trademark.”

One of my employees gave me a call.

“Wait,” I said. “You've gotta be fucking kidding me. The Hells Angels are threatening us with a trademark violation suit?”

“They say we can still sell it, but we can't use their name!”

It was the most absurd thing I've ever heard of. The sort of exchange you'd expect to see in a comedy sketch on the TV show
Portlandia.

I had read that the Angels had started cracking down on people and businesses that used their name and logo. I don't blame them. There are too many people in this world who glom onto any design or product to project to the world that they are cool. The Hells Angels mark was one of the most abused, in that respect. When we started growing and selling that particular indica, I thought we were honoring its history in the cannabis community by continuing to label it under its original name.

But okay. We had received their special brand of feedback, and we were ready to acquiesce to their request. From that moment forward, the product took on a new name: Hells OG Kush. It's still there in our dispensaries. Just don't ask for it by the old moniker. You don't want to piss those guys off.