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Inside the high-flying pot industry - by Gordon Witkin
Nostalgic baby-boomers who remember hazy college highs on "Colombian gold"
at $40 an ounce would not recognize the power or price of today's
domestically grown weed--strains with nicknames like "Skunk Number 1" and
"Salmon River Quiver." Breeding, cloning, seed selection, hydroponics and
growing techniques that isolate the especially potent, unpollinated female
plant, called sinsemilla, have produced a homegrown product with
off-the-chart concentrations of pot's psycho-active ingredient,
tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. And the potent new product has helped
catapult the marijuana business over the past decade into an imposing,
muscular industry belived to generate more than $16 billion in annual sales.
"I hate to sound laudatory," says W. Michael Aldridge of the Drug
Enforcement Administration, "but the work they've done on this plant is
incredible."
THC content for sinsemilla averaged 8 percent in 1988, and concentrations of
14 to 16 percent aren't unusual. By contrast, Colombian and Mexican
marijuana has a THC content of only 3 to 6 percent. "It's like the
difference between buying a filet mignon and a hamburger," says Jack
Beecham, commander of California's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting.
Sinsemilla prices can run up to $300 an ounce, and the average plant yields
a pound of dope.
Export boom. At least 25 percent of the pot consumed in the U.S. is now
homegrown, up from 12 percent as recently as 1984. The expansion has been
so swift that the U.S. stands on the verge of becoming an exporter nation.
The Americans have also received a healthy push from the Netherlands, where
several companies peddling top-quality seeds to the U.S. (see box, page 30)
have "really changed the face of domestic marijuana as we know it today,"
says Aldridge.
Health experts believe the potency of the new marijuana drastically
multiplies its health risks, and there is heightened concern about
marijuana's being a "gateway" drug that leads users to harder, more lethal
narcotics. Many of those assertions are disputed by pot's defenders, who
are bracing themselves for a new law-enforcement crackdown that has been
signaled by a series of busts culminating in a huge nationwide roundup last
week. Drug czar William Bennett's National Drug Control Strategy, released
in September, terms the domestic-pot situation "intolerable" and calls for
an increase in federal funding to wipe it out, from $8 million in 1989 to
$16 million in 1990, with further requests likely for 1991 and 1992. The
strategy argues that success against pot "should become a bench mark of
national antidrug resolve," adding that "we cannot expect foreign countries
to undertake vigorous antidrug efforts inside their borders if we fail to do
likewise."
Authorities are most worried by the increasingly organized nature of the
trade and the staggering amounts of money to be made. While some pot
growers harvest only for themselves and a few friends, officials say
organized, criminal marijuana rings are on the rise. Kentucky authorities
are finishing up investigation of a group centered in rural Marion County
that they say grew marijuana on 25 farms in nine Midwestern states, with
distribution tentacles reaching as far as Maine. More than 75 members of
the group, which called itself the "Cornbread Mafia," have now been
prosecuted and 182 tons of sinsemilla seized.
Marijuana growers no longer match the Cheech and Chong stereotypes.
Illinois State University criminologist Ralph Weisheit found that most
growers were active, productive members of their communities, such as
real-estate agents and engineers. California busts have turned up teachers
and a county supervisor. And, of course, it has become a salvation
enterprise for many farmers who were devastated by the past decade's
agricultural crises. "Looking back, I wouldn't do it, but at the time it
seemed like the only way out," says Dick Kurth, 59, a Fort Benton, Mont.,
cattle rancher, who just finished serving 15 months at the state prison for
running a marijuana operation worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. "The
family needed money for food on the table. It appeared we could solve our
financial situation within a two-year period, wipe out our debts and keep
the family together like we had been for five generations. I figured people
who produce alcohol and tobacco sleep at night, and we should be able to
live with this."
A tit-for-tat chess match. The sorry truth, though, is that vigorous
enforcement efforts will not necessarily solve the pot puzzle. Federal
marijuana policies have been perhaps the best example of how drug
enforcement resembles a balloon. When illicit-drug operations are squeezed
in one place, they bulge out into another. "Every time [the government]
comes up with a policy that seems like a good idea, it leads to some result
we haven't thought of," says criminologist Weisheit.
The action-counteraction sequence began in the late 1970s, when the
government intensified efforts to eradicate and interdict foreign marijuana.
The harder it became to bring pot into the country from afar, the more
intent growers became in producing a domestic variety. "The major result of
increased marijuana enforcement has been to substitute more-potent and
dangerous domestic marijuana for less-potent imported marijuana," says
Harvard lecturer Mark Kleiman, a former Justice Department analyst who
recently wrote a book on the subject.
As the domestic industry grew, drug agents and growers engaged in an
elaborate chess match. The feds' aggressive policy of seizing growers'
property, for instance, caused them to react by moving onto public
lands--that is, to areas that could not be seized as a drug grower's asset.
Once on government land, growers guarded their plots with what one observer
termed a "Marquis de Sade torture chamber of devices": Concealed steel-jaw
traps, land mines, hidden fish-hooks hung at eye level and camouflaged,
Vietnam-style pits with sharpened sticks. The situation was so dangerous
that in 1987, the public was advised to avoid 773,000 acres of
national-forest land across the country, from the Shasta-Trinity National
Forest in Northern California to the Daniel Boone National Forest in Eastern
Kentucky. Stepped-up enforcement by the Forest Service helped reduce the
total to 384,000 acres last year, but some forests remain perilous. Two
Forest Service officers were recently shot at and their vehicle was rammed
by suspected cultivators in Oregon's Rogue River National Forest.
The vigorous outdoor eradication efforts undertaken in the mid-1980s have
now prompted growers to take their latest countermeasure. They have moved
to fancy indoor growing operations with high-intensity lamps, conveyors,
timers, fans, sprinklers and automatic fertilizing systems. The added
advantage of the move to this high-tech arena is that precisely regulated
growing conditions--especially light availability--can yield three harvests
a year, compared with just one outdoors. Growing indoors hides the crop
from thieves, animals (deer love pot) and, most important, the law. "The
cops brag they aren't finding pot in the hills of Northern California any
more," says Tom Alexander, publisher of Sinsemilla Tips magazine. "What
they don't say is that the growers are actually in a warehouse in San
Francisco."
The pot bible. The move indoors has now changed law enforcers' tactics,
too. Last week, the DEA announced that 231 indoor "grows" nationwide had
been busted, while some 36 stores peddling growing equipment were served
either search warrants or subpoenas for records. In addition, 303 people
were arrested in the continuing conspiracy investigation. The case was born
in late 1987 when veteran DEA agent Jim Seward was struck as he thumbed
through a copy of High Times magazine by how it had become a one-stop shop
of ads for seed catalogs and growing equipment. High Times, the bible of
the marijuana industry, "just seemed to be a middleman in a dope deal," says
an exasperated Seward. Yet drug agents were struggling to police the indoor
operations one by one with cumbersome traditional law-enforcement methods
like informants.
Seward decided to try something different. Undercover agents were sent to
some 80 equipment dealers nationwide, saying only that they were interested
in growing pot. "The response ranged from 'Would you like to buy my
business?' to selling us plants to 'I don't know what you're talking about,'
but very few turned us down flat," says Seward. Armed with the legally
necessary "reasonable belief," DEA then subpoenaed United Parcel Service
this summer for 90 days' worth of shipping records from 29 of the equipment
firms, a strategy that kicked out an incredible 21,000 leads. "The problem
is growing faster than we can target resources," says Seward.
Indeed, in 1984, 649 indoor growing operations were seized in 22 states; by
1988, the totals were 1,240 indoor "grows" in 41 states. And the profit
potential is staggering. Convicted former grower Paul Stanford of Portland
says he rented a house, invested $1,600 in equipment--six lamps, a timer and
a few fans were the big expenses--and took in $25,000 from his first
harvest. "It seems too easy to be true," adds Brian, a former Virginia
grower, who insisted his last name not be used. "But if you can grow good
tomatoes, you can grow good pot."
Meanwhile, the stores selling indoor equipment are now "a big, booming
industry," says High Times Editor-in-chief Steven Hager. In late 1985, say
DEA agents, only nine such companies were advertising in High Times. By
mid-1989, 81 firms were running equipment ads in High Times. Store owners
and advertisers feel they are getting a bum rap when authorities claim they
are part of the conspiracy to produce pot. "We sell a product where we can.
We don't check people out," says Dan Murphy, who owns a gardening-equipment
distributorship in Seattle that was seized by the feds last week. "You
advertise where you feel you have a market." DEA agents, however, feel
their investigation puts them on solid ground in charging many of the
merchants selling indoor-growing gear with aiding and abetting in the
distribution and manufacture of controlled substances.
Apple-pie pot. Above this storm, High Times itself is doing quite nicely.
Advertising manager Ellen Spencer states that the gardening industry "has
really found a market here" and says the growth in ad pages has been
"monstrous" in recent years, though she declines to quote exact figures.
Average sales per issue are 80,000-85,000, up from about 72,000 just three
years ago, in part, says editor Hager, because the magazine has returned to
its counterculture roots. "Pot smokers are the most persecuted minority
group in America. At some point, they'll turn around and fight for their
rights," he says. "This plant is not anti-American. It's part of the
fabric of American society."
But like it or not, pot is still illegal. In fact, it is becoming more so.
Oregon, a leader in the 1970s decriminalization movement, just hiked its
maximum fine for possessing less than an ounce of pot from $100 to $1,000,
and last fall's federal drug bill provided for five-year minimum mandatory
prison sentences for cultivation of 100 plants or more. Drug agents feel
that has given them the green light for using innovative but surely
controversial methods to go after the growers. "Until the law changes,"
says Terrence Burke, DEA's acting deputy administrator, "we're going to
enforce it."
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