Brave New Weed

Joe Dolce

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062499943
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Popkultur

The former editor-in-chief of Details and Star adventures into the fascinating "brave new world" of cannabis, tracing its history and possible future as he investigates the social, medical, legal, and cultural ramifications of this surprisingly versatile plant.

Pot. Weed. Grass. Mary Jane. We all think we know what cannabis is and what we use it for. But do we? Our collective understanding of this surprising plant has been muddled by politics and morality; what we think we know isn't the real story.

A war on cannabis has been waged in the United States since the early years of the twentieth century, yet in the past decade, society has undergone a massive shift in perspective that has allowed us to reconsider our beliefs. In Brave New Weed, Joe Dolce travels the globe to "tear down the cannabis closet" and de-mystify this new frontier, seeking answers to the questions we didn't know we should ask.

Dolce heads to a host of places, including Amsterdam, Israel, California, and Colorado, where he skillfully unfolds the odd, shocking, and wildly funny history of this complex plant. From the outlandish stories of murder trials where defendants claimed "insanity due to marijuana consumption" to the groundbreaking success stories about the plant's impressive medicinal benefits, Dolce paints a fresh and much-needed portrait of cannabis, our changing attitudes toward it, and the brave new direction science and cultural acceptance are leading us.

Enlightening, entertaining, and thought-provoking, Brave New Weed is a compelling read that will surprise and educate proponents on both sides of the cannabis debate.

PART I

THE OLD WORLD

Introduction

THE GIRLS IN THE BASEMENT

New England

Want to see my new hobby?”

It was 8:17 on a crisp Sunday morning in the autumn of 2012 when my cousin awakened me with a cup of coffee and that question. He was standing over my bed, practically panting with an anticipation that made saying no impossible. Little did I know that his new hobby was about to change my life.

I sipped my coffee, pulled on my clothes, and followed him downstairs through the garage, then behind a padlocked door that led me into a foam-insulated antechamber that housed plant food, smelled like Odor-Eaters, and hummed with machine-made white noise. He flashed me a broad smile as he unlocked another door, which led me into a basement grow room and the source of the new hobby: two floor-to-ceiling Mylar bags that, when unzipped, revealed six budding female cannabis plants, all basking in the hot yellow glow of one 400-watt high-pressure sodium lightbulb. The girls oiled the air with a skunky, grassy scent, and they looked very happy—as they should be, living in a cushy, digitally controlled 68-degree climate, bathing in a steady cloud of intoxicating CO₂, and guzzling the finest organic nutrients.

I was impressed by the simple technical apparatus, but I was far more impressed by the fruits of my cousin’s labor a few hours later, when I had the pleasure of sampling a strain called Super Lemon Haze. Finally, after some thirty years of smoking whatever pot came my way, I found something that seemed to complement—no, enhance—my biology. The aroma was citrusy and the taste was smooth enough. And the effect? Let’s say that my brain ticked away linearly, laterally, and happily with no soporific slouch. No paranoia. No cloudy thinking. It was energizing yet soothing at the same time, as if my body were radiating sunshine from the inside out. “I need to get reacquainted with this plant,” I told myself as we retired to my cousin’s man cave, where freshly harvested stalks were curing on wire hangers, and long, sugar-coated “colas” (the top buds of marijuana plants) were stored in Mason jars, as if on exhibit in a museum.

On a website called 420magazine.com, my cousin showed me some extremely cool electromagnified photos of mature cannabis flowers, each tiny leaf carpeted with glistening sacs filled with resins. These sacs are called trichomes, he explained, and they are equally responsible for the plant’s survival and its allure. Botanically, they produce the powerful chemicals that repel predatory insects, inhibit deadly molds, and bring humans and some animals intoxicating pleasure. In eight more weeks, the girls in his basement would mature into ladies and their sacs would be bubbling with sticky, stinky, gluey, wet resins—and that’s the moment they’d be chopped down and killed. Is it an accident that men have traditionally been the keepers of this ritual, given its unavoidable Freudian connotations?

That comment elicited little more than a shrug from my cousin. Like many growers, he was more interested in talking about plants than my snarky observations on gender stereotypes. The resinous heads of the plants, which are plump with THC, plus powerful essential oils called terpenes, flavonoids, and hundreds of other compounds, are revered by breeders, who have, in the last forty years, created the strongest strains ever known. “You harvest the plants just as the trichomes start to go cloudy,” my cousin explained. “That’s when they’re at the height of their powers.”

My cousin, who once told me I couldn’t write one word that would ever teach him anything, has never shown any propensity for higher education in the traditional sense. But he has always had a green thumb and a taste for this plant. That, plus his excessive desire for privacy and mistrust of law enforcement, has driven him to cultivate his pursuit in well-guarded secrecy. Even his family is seemingly unaware of what grows below its living room. He once broached the topic with his wife, a religious Christian, and the conversation went something like this:

“I have a new hobby, dear. Do you want to hear about it?”

“Not really.”

And that was that.

I hadn’t smoked much in the last fifteen years—as with many people in my generation, I found that weed had become too strong, too unpredictable. There were too many nights spent paranoid and unhappy, or asocial and cocooned in self-absorption, or just a blink away from sleep. If I was going to alchemize my consciousness, I wanted to go up, not down, so I moved on to other pursuits: wine, sport, meditation, yoga, single-malt scotch. But that day it struck me: If my cousin in rural New England could learn about strains, obtain the high-quality seeds and the equipment to cultivate them, and then educate himself, mainly through the Internet and in conversations with the guys who ran his local gardening store, about growing prime, organic, pesticide-free bud indoors, then a revolution of sorts had occurred in my absence. Maybe it was time I investigated more deeply.

My timing was auspicious. My great sixteen-year relationship had just ended. We had tried spackling over the problems, addressing, therapizing, ignoring them, whatever it is two people do when they sense things falling, inevitably and irretrievably, apart. We tried because we loved and respected each other, but ultimately we called it quits. It was the same with my career as a magazine editor. For years, I had been pretending to be excited by a profession that once brought me torrents of pleasure; but now it just seemed like work, with all of the drudgery and deadlines and none of the creative charge. I was, for the first time in two decades, adrift, primed for change, ready to dance, drink champagne, recharge my sex life, and reinvent the way I worked. My entire life was in need of a rethink, my vices included.

My headiest pot-smoking days had occurred in college. In the 1970s it was easy to blaze joint after joint and never become too scarily high. When I look back I wonder how it was possible to inhale that amount and still graduate from Northwestern University with a 3.5 grade point average. As it turned out, it was possible because the pot I was smoking then was baby-ass weak compared with today’s varieties. The weed I smoked in high school probably averaged 3 to 5 percent THC. By the time I hit college, highly potent sinsemilla had debuted in North America, and the average THC content doubled, then tripled. Today’s crops clock in at between 15 and 29 percent THC. That is a significant change, one brought about intentionally by growers and unintentionally by Ronald Reagan. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Once back in New York, I dipped further into this subject. There are hundreds of blogs and Instagram accounts authored by all types of cannabists (a more refined title than “pothead” or “stoner,” don’t you think?)—people who devote themselves to the plant and its many mysteries. Endless words are spewed on techniques of growing. Topics range from soil nutrients to the most powerful and energy-efficient lights to use indoors, from the quietest ventilation systems to the ongoing debates over the benefits of sun-grown versus indoor cultivation or soil versus hydroponic. There are sites devoted to the politics of pot, hash making, oil production, rare strains, cooking with cannabis, curing cancer with cannabis, and other obscure corners of connoisseurship. The most arcane are the real-time videos of grow rooms—cameras trained on the plants and just left to run, with no irony intended. You’d have to be really zonked to watch this, I remember thinking.

The more I explored, the more I discovered that the world of cannabis was in flux. There were new products that intrigued me: shatter, CBD, wax, the incongruously named butane honey oil. And there were hundreds of strains, some with evocative names like Tangerine Dream and Super Silver Haze, and others with scarier monikers such as AK-47 or Green Crack. I originally presumed these offerings were just new wrappings on age-old products, but that assumption too turned out to be just another indication of my ignorance. I read about medical marijuana, but initially thought it more of a rouse than a legitimate course of treatment that had been used for centuries in Asia and the Middle East. And then there was the surreal history of prohibition and the demonization of a plant. Once I learned that cannabis has accompanied man in his travels for as long as history has been recorded, I began pondering the larger purpose of such a magical, medical substance that grows in the earth. I had a lot to learn.

One truth came through loud and clear: For aficionados, pot is more than just a plant. It’s a relationship, a commitment. Certain people—I’m thinking of growers in particular—develop a passion that borders on love for their crop. They don’t simply like or revere it, as you might a rose or an heirloom tomato. They obsess over it much the way vintners fixate on their grapes. They test the soil regularly to ensure it maintains the proper pH level, so that the right minerals nourish their plants’ roots. Indoor growers monitor the air temperature and humidity levels hourly. They baby their plants, inspecting them for molds or fungi that could decimate months of hard work in just a few hours. Some consult moon cycles to determine the optimal time to plant, feed, water, and harvest, and then they debate whether it’s better to chop their plants in the morning or evening. They forgive their plants when a crop isn’t up to snuff and extol them when it delivers. It’s full-blown plantophilia.

Although I had been in close communion with this plant for decades, it struck me that I knew almost nothing about it. And I wasn’t alone. Most of my acquaintances thought they understood pot, while in fact they knew nothing about how it worked in the mind or body; others blithely dismissed it as a been-there-done-that phase of their youth. Part of me harbored that attitude because I never deemed a mere weed to be worthy of respect. Because of its prevalence, I just assumed cannabis wasn’t very interesting.

In the ensuing weeks, I continued my halting reacquaintance with the plant, coming to a new acceptance of what I could and could not do in the enhanced state. I enjoyed watching movies but couldn’t read, as my mind would wander promiscuously around the page, off the page, and into deep vortexes of thought between the first and last word of a sentence. But music . . . ahhh, music sounded richer, deeper, more textured. Food became a revelatory sensory explosion, and sex deepened to an intimate exploration of my partner’s body and, at times, soul.

In those early days of Super Lemon Haze I smoked largely alone, because, as I’ve come to realize, I was in a cannabis closet of my own making. I guarded my secret exploration for fear of being judged as a pothead, which I was not. I used occasionally and moderately in the same way I drank, and as pretentious as it might sound, I liked to think of my usage as conscious consumption. But gradually I ventured out. I went to parties and other social gatherings where I cautiously invited certain guests to join me in a puff. To my surprise, my offerings were greeted appreciatively by men and women, friends and strangers, most often on my side of the generational divide. I assumed that I would be dismissed by my peers as a middle-aged guy desperately chasing his youth, but I was wrong. These were businesspeople, journalists, lawyers, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, and professionals, and they were delighted to partake. Even those who weren’t interested in smoking were intrigued and full of questions. Many recounted a familiar trajectory: they had smoked in their twenties, got paranoid in their thirties, and now that their bodies were falling apart, or their kids had left home, or their material success hadn’t delivered on its promises, they were ready to take another look at this plant. Often someone would pull me aside to discuss my rekindled pursuit in detail. Was it causing any harm? Would it help for this or that pain? Was it really an aphrodisiac? Can you get me some? To my surprise, almost everyone was curious about cannabis.

One afternoon, over lunch in midtown Manhattan, I was describing this epiphany to my lawyer, one of the best and most erudite in New York City, when, in between bites of my red snapper, he stopped me. “You know, Joe, one of my favorite things to do on a Saturday night is to come home after dining out with my wife and go into my study. I turn on some music, turn down the lights, and smoke a joint.” He never cared about single-malt scotch or potato vodka, and he finds the wine snob thing ridiculous. And, he added, the fact that some bureaucrats in Washington, DC, could dictate what substance he used to relax was one of the most flagrant overreaches of policing authority on the books. He told me of a party he had recently attended in LA. Most guests were in their sixties—and all of them were lighting joints or openly sucking on vaporizing pens, talking about strains and percentages of THC. “California is like a different universe,” he said. “In LA, everyone is smoking or eating these candies and cookies and it has completely changed the culture.”

He was, of course, correct. In 2012, before the Feds cracked down on Orange County, there were more dispensaries in Los Angeles than Starbucks franchises (but fewer than McDonald’s). If you weren’t cannabis inclined, this proliferation escaped your attention and had little impact on your life; but if you were a user, you could, with a doctor’s recommendation, walk into a dispensary and consult a “budtender” about which strains on offer best suited your “condition.” Without the stain of criminality, the dispensary system taught customers about the many varieties of cannabis and their unique properties. It was nothing short of revolutionary.

Titillated by all this fresh information, I decided to do something new and different—even if it meant reacquainting myself with something old and familiar: to submerge myself in this brave new—and yet at the same time, ancient—world. Events were unfolding at breakneck speed—the residents of Washington and Colorado voted to legalize and tax recreational cannabis. Dr. Sanjay Gupta aired his cannabis apologia, Weed, on CNN and started a national conversation about the medical relevance of the plant. The Obama administration softened its antipot rhetoric, and then–attorney general Eric Holder issued the Cole memo, indicating that the Feds would not be storming the Rockies to stop legalization from going forward. And it wasn’t only America that was changing its tune. Uruguay and Spain legalized and Jamaica followed suit. Would, as prohibitionists had claimed for almost a century, the fabric of these societies fray? Would their citizens smoke themselves ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Part I: The Old World
• Part II: The New World
• Part III: Future Weed
• Appendix: Beyond Stoned—Cannabis for Inspiration, Intimacy, and Other Adult Pleasures
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher