A new breed of home marijuana grower

Medical marijuana patients can legally grow their own plants, and many are happy to tend their semi-secret gardens. Businesses such as Otherside Farms and Golden State Greenery help set up grow rooms at residents’ homes.

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As marijuana dispensaries close, some patients take up a new kind of gardening. (Ellen Weinstein, For The Times / September 28, 2010)

Joanne Clarke, a legal secretary in her late 50s, leads the way down a pale green hallway in her modest Costa Mesa home, past a small guest room on the right and a blue tiled bathroom on the left. At the end of the hall, she opens a door, pushes aside a thick black curtain and ducks inside.
“Isn’t this wild?” she says, gesturing to the high-tech marijuana grow room she and her husband recently installed. “This used to be my daughter’s bedroom.”
Wild is one word for it. Bright is another. Unexpected, yet another. What had been a teenager’s tropical-themed room is now a beaming, humming, indoor plant laboratory complete with silver reflective bubble wrap on the walls, blinding grow lights, ventilation ducts hanging from the ceiling and marijuana plants in various stages of development neatly labeled with names such as Platinum Kush, Purple Diesel and Blue Cheese.
“They are like our children,” Clarke says, gazing proudly at the elegant fronds that look familiar and exotic all at once. “We talk to them.”
Clarke’s grow room is legal — in the state of California, anyone with a doctor’s recommendation to use marijuana can grow it in limited quantities — yet it still feels clandestine. Although she’s open about using pot (crushed and placed in capsules) to help manage the pain of rheumatoid arthritis, she and her husband haven’t shown the room to any friends. “Ninety-five percent of the people I know are fine with it,” she says, “but it’s that 5% that I worry about. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”
Just as California has seen a rise in small-scale backyard vegetable gardeners in recent years, marijuana activists and growers cite a similar, if much quieter, rise in medical marijuana patients growing pot for themselves.
The reasons are varied: Buying medical marijuana at a dispensary can be expensive and uncomfortable for those who don’t identify with marijuana culture, and now that the city of Los Angeles has declared that just 41 of the remaining 169 dispensaries are eligible to stay open, finding a convenient place to buy marijuana is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for those with a debilitating illness. The organically minded are concerned about chemicals that might be in marijuana they don’t grow themselves, and still others worry about where their pot came from. “I don’t want to fund terrorism,” one home-grower says.
Some gardeners — and many do see this simply as a form of gardening — say they get the same soothing pleasure from tinkering with grow lights, temperature controls, fertilizers and additives as others get from nurturing prized rose bushes or carefully pruning bonsai trees.
“My husband can spend hours a day in our grow room,” Clarke says. “For him, it’s fantasy land.”
The new breed of home marijuana grower comes in all different forms, whether it’s a 25-year-old rooftop gardener taking as much pride in his first harvest of okra as in the marijuana that grows alongside it or a 75-year-old retiree cheerfully growing cannabis on her senior-village balcony. Pony-tailed boomers are geeked out on the fact that it’s actually legal to grow this stuff, and at least one new grower called up the UC Cooperative Extension Master Gardener help line for Los Angeles County to ask for advice on growing “grass.” (The master gardener on duty misunderstood the question and recommended a drought-tolerant grass. When the caller explained he was talking about grass, she told him she couldn’t help: Master Gardener policy.)
Otherside Farms, a marijuana information and education center founded by Chadd McKeen in Orange County, teaches medical marijuana patients how to grow their own pot and also helps people install grow rooms at home. McKeen says half the people who take the weekend-long class on growing marijuana, which he teaches twice a month, are older couples.
“My market isn’t the 18- to 25-year-olds — they already know everything,” he says. “My demographic is 50- to 60-year-olds.”
When he first started installing grow rooms in homes, McKeen was constantly worried that each job was a setup.
“I thought everyone was a cop,” he says.
But over time he’s become accustomed to the embroidered-sweater-wearing, lighthouse-poster-hanging, older pot smoker who makes up the majority of his clientele. “This is what the marijuana user looks like,” he says.
The grow rooms that McKeen installs are generally replicas of the rooms he has in his storefront headquarters in Costa Mesa, even down to the bright orange Home Depot utility buckets he puts mature plants in. Most of the rooms he installs are in second bedrooms, which he usually divides in half to create two different environments — a “veg room” where the plants grow and a “bloom room” where a change in lighting and temperature encourages budding. He said the rooms generally cost about $15,000 to set up.
Golden State Greenery, another company in Orange County that helps novices build grow rooms at home, offers the “California 5-by-5 special,” a 5-by-5-foot grow tent that can be set up in a living room or garage. The tent is black on the outside to keep light and heat from escaping, and to keep the structure as discreet as possible. But inside, it’s lined in reflective silver to maximize the light source. For $2,500, the company says it can have new clients ready to grow their own cannabis within four hours.
All this fancy (and expensive) growing equipment isn’t technically necessary. It is possible to grow marijuana outdoors in Southern California. If planted in the spring, a seed or clone will generally produce one harvest in early fall. Many people have had success with simply sticking a plant on a balcony or tucking one among the tomatoes in the backyard.
“Pot is actually easier to grow than tomatoes,” said one man in San Diego, who like many people contacted for this article has a doctor’s recommendation and is growing legally but still asked to remain anonymous. “There’s a reason they call it ‘weed.'”
But for many home growers, the best place is inside. An indoor growing system offers environmental controls that would be impossible to get outside — no snails or caterpillars, less chance of powdery mildew. It also offers the possibility of four harvests a year rather than one. Another reason: Marijuana plants, even just a few, are still magnets for trouble even though medicinal pot has been legal since 1996.
“We tell our students it’s kind of like before: You don’t plant it in your front yard or your front porch, and you don’t show it off,” says Jeff Jones, a prominent marijuana activist who teaches grow classes in Oakland and Los Angeles. “There is still the home invasion issue, and your neighbor to the left or to the right might want to steal it from someone who has a VIP pass to grow something that is not legal for others.”
At a recent “traveling party,” when neighbors went around to one another’s homes to check out new additions or garden makeovers, a friend asked Clarke if she and her husband would be showing off their new grow room. Clarke declined.
“It’s still hard for people to understand this is legal,” she says. “So now when people ask about our new hobby, we just laugh and say my husband is growing a few plants for me. People know we’re doing it. They just don’t know the full extent.”

Confessions of British bhang-eating

In 2006, Britain’s Home Office reported that 8.7 percent of residents of England and Wales used cannabis. This is an unexpected downward trend; in 2004, when the penalty for possession of cannabis was reduced from five to two years in jail, most believed that consumption would increase. (In 2009, the penalty reverted to five years.) Nevertheless, cannabis remains the most popular illicit drug in England and Wales, mostly used recreationally, though its medicinal use is rising. After a century of research aimed at discovering the drug’s dangers, the British Medical Association described it as ‘remarkably safe … with a side effects profile superior to many conventional medications’.

Far Out: Parvati offering bhang to Shiva


Three centuries ago, the British only knew of the related industrial hemp, cultivated to make cordage, clothing and paper. Today, over 30 countries, including Great Britain, grow hemp for these purposes but also to manufacture biodegradable plastics and biofuels. The British encountered cannabis, or rather bhang, during their initial interaction with the Subcontinent in the 17th century. Sailors, soldiers and merchants no doubt witnessed the sacred as well as recreational use of bhang – smoked by swamis in a chillum, inhaled from a hookah, or mixed in thandai, a drink prepared with almonds, milk, sugar and spices during Holi. Perhaps they also witnessed its therapeutic use in curing fever, dysentery, gonorrhoea and, purportedly, even lisping.
The Oxford English Dictionary indicates that bhang was first mentioned in English in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): ‘Another [herb] called Bange, like in effect to Opium’. In fact, however, this reference was lifted from another book – in all probability the first European book printed in India – called Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) by Garcia da Orto, a Portuguese doctor practicing in Goa. The Portuguese, leading in the colonial scramble, had already stumbled upon bhang.
Thomas Bowrey’s A Geographical Account of Countries Round the Bay of Bengal 1669 to 1679, written in the 1670s but not published until 1905, provides the earliest record in English of the recreational use of cannabis. The incident occurred in Bengal and involved Bowrey, a merchant seaman, and a handful of his kind. He writes of the preparation: ‘Sometimes they mix it with their tobacco and smoke it, a very speedy way to be besotted; at other times they chew it.’ But he advises that ‘the most pleasant way of taking it is [to] Pound a handful of the seed and leaf together, which mixt with one pint of fresh water, and let it soak one quarter of an hour, then strained through a piece of calico, and drink off the liquor and in less than half an hour its Operation will shew itself for the space of four or five hours.’
Of course, a central part of the preparation instructions includes how to deal with the concoction’s effects. Bowrey cautions that the ‘Operation’ will be executed according to ‘the thoughts or fancy of the Party’, so that if someone is ‘merry at that instant, he Shall Continue So with Exceeding great laughter, rather overmerry’. But ‘if it be taken in a fearfull or Melancholy posture, he Shall keep great lamentation and Seem to be in great anguish of Spirit.’ Bowrey is grateful when the cannabis begins to take effect ‘merrily’ upon him and his friends, save for a few, one of whom is so ‘terrified with fear’ that he ‘run his head into a great Moryavan Jaree [earthenware pot], and continued in that Posture four hours or more.’ Others ‘lay upon the Carpets complimenting each other in high terms, each fancying himself an Emperor.’
17th-century score
The first medicinal use of cannabis by Britons was documented during the 1670s in Ceylon. Robert Knox, the son of an East India Company ship’s captain, was confined to the island’s independent Kandyan kingdom for 19 years. In An Historical Relation of Ceylon (1681), Knox discusses how, between 1673 and 1679, he and a shipmate journeyed towards the Dutch-held northwestern coast in a bid to escape. It was during this journey that they came across the substance, when they were ‘sick of violent Fevors and Agues’ from drinking rainwater that was ‘so thick and muddy, that the very filth would hang in our Beards when we drank’. They learned that the antidote to counter the ‘venomous water’ was a mere ‘dry leaf’ called banga in Portuguese, which they ate with ‘some of the Countrey Jaggory Morning and Evening upon an empty stomach’.
Knox eventually escaped and returned to London in 1680. His reintegration with English society began when he visited London’s fashionable coffee shops with his brother James, a talented limner (painter of miniatures). During this period, he was acquainted with eminent persons such as Robert Boyle, Edmund Halley, Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke – and thus he came to the notice of London’s intelligentsia. By the time An Historical Relation of Ceylon was published, the story of his confinement and escape had spread, partly accounting for the book’s success.
During Knox’s absence from England, Robert Hooke had risen to fame as a physicist. In 1678, he introduced the ‘inverse square law’ to describe planetary motions, which Isaac Newton later used in modified form (though Hooke always complained that he was not given sufficient credit for this). During this time Hooke and Knox first met, and the former gave invaluable assistance in the editing and publication of the latter’s book. This marked the beginning of a friendship that endured until Hooke’s death 23 years later.
A notorious spendthrift, in his diary Hooke noted down his expenses at coffeehouses. From this we can gather that there were three coffee-shop meetings within a fortnight – almost a decade after Knox’s return from Ceylon – at which bhang was mentioned. The first two record its effects:

Sat [26 Oct 1689] At Jon. Cap. Knox choc. ganges [ganja or bhang] strange intoxicating herb like hemp, takes away understanding and memory, for a time frequently used in India with benefit.
Tu. 5 Nov 1689: Capt Knox told me the intoxicating leaf and seed, by the Moors called Ganges, in Portug. Banga; in Chingales [Sinhalese] Consa: ‘tis accounted wholesome, though for a time it takes away the memory and understanding.

The third reference is an innocent description of what today would be called a score, albeit without money changing hands: ‘Thu 7 [Nov 1689] from Cap. Knox. Konsa leafe and seed.’
Six weeks later, Hooke employed Knox’s information in a lecture – revolutionary for its time – to the Royal Society that described the social, psychiatric and therapeutic uses of bhang. Hooke informed his audience about its ‘very general and frequent’ use in India, and how his source (Knox) ‘hath made many Trials of it, on himself, with very good Effect’. This suggests that Knox had become accustomed to using bhang on his travels and could well have imported some for his own use.
Hooke instructed how the bhang was to be consumed, and described the onset of the ‘Operation’:

The Patient understands not, nor remembereth any Thing … but becomes, as it were, a mere Natural, being unable to speak a Word of Sense; yet is he very merry, and laughs, and sings … yet is he not giddy, or drunk, but walks and dances … after a little Time he falls asleep, and sleepeth very soundly and quietly; and when he wakes, he finds himself mightily refresh’d, and exceeding hungry.

Hooke also specifically mentioned Knox’s illness in Ceylon, ‘which troubled his Stomach, or Head’. Yet after the bhang, he noted dramatically, Knox had been ‘perfectly carried off without leaving any ill Symptom, as Giddiness, Pain in the Head or Stomach, or Defect of Memory’.

Useful for Lunaticks

Knox had informed Hooke of bhang’s sacred use in Ceylon – no doubt by Indian holy men participating in a pada yatra to a shrine such as Kataragama, some 200 km southeast of Colombo. A devout Christian, Knox was not impressed: ‘He saith “tis commonly made Use of, by the Heathen Priests, or rambling Mendicant Heathen Friars, who will meet together, and dose themselves with this medicine … talking they know not what, pretending after that, they were inspired.”’
In an historic demonstration that would be illegal in Britain by 1925, Hooke produced for his Royal Society audience a quantity of seed and some plants he had cultivated. He intended to sow the seeds to see whether the plant would have the same ‘vertues’ as the ones found in the Subcontinent, having found out after ‘Several trials’ that ‘it hath lost its Vertue, producing none of the Effects before-mentioned.’ The ‘loss of virtue’ is hardly surprising, for it was winter, and even if cultivated indoors the seedlings would have had insufficient sunlight for growth.
Hooke’s experiments the following spring go unrecorded. Assuming they were unsuccessful, though, Hooke must have been disappointed, for he was an insomniac and regularly took laudanum (an opium-and-alcohol solution), the drug of the era, as well as other concoctions. Indeed, it is clear from his diaries that he was quite drug-dependent and suffered unpleasant side-effects. In fact, drug dependency was rife during the Enlightenment period. Robert Boyle revealed that he never left home before imbibing a cocktail of chemically laced remedies, and Edmund Halley read a paper to the Royal Society on his experiences with opium.
Hooke saw great potential in the medicinal and psychiatric applications of bhang, and must have found it an agreeable alternative. He noted that it could ‘prove as considerable a medicine in Drugs as any that is brought from the Indies’, and suggested that it may be of ‘considerable use to Lunaticks, or for other Distempers of the Head and Stomach’ because it seemed to put ‘a man into …a Quiet Sleep’ and ‘in all Possibility would, cure them.’ Hooke’s proposals along these lines were ignored, however, by the medical community. It was not until the 1830s, when bhang’s therapeutic properties were investigated in India, that doctors began to use it as an alternative to opium. Curiously, modern campaigners for the legalisation of cannabis have searched medical texts for supportive references, but have missed Knox’s experience and Hooke’s obscure lecture to the Royal Society.