The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (16 page)

• • •

Most of the marijuana smoked in America was grown in Mexico until the mid-1970s, when the Mexican government, at the behest of the United States, began spraying the crop with the herbicide paraquat. About the same time, the U.S. government began cracking down on pot smugglers. With foreign supplies contracting and the safety of Mexican marijuana in doubt, a large market for domestically grown marijuana suddenly opened up. In a sense, the rapid emergence of a domestic marijuana industry represents a triumph of protectionism.

In the beginning, domestic marijuana was grossly inferior to the imported product. Part of the problem was that most early growers did what I did: plant seeds picked out of pot that had been grown in tropical places. Invariably these were the seeds of
Cannabis sativa,
an equatorial species poorly adapted to life in the northern latitudes.
Sativa
can’t withstand frost and, as I discovered, usually won’t set flowers north of the thirtieth parallel. Working with such seeds, growers found it difficult to produce a high-quality domestic crop (and especially sinsemilla) outside places such as California and Hawaii.

The search was on for a type of marijuana that would flourish, and flower, farther north, and by the end of the decade, it had been found. American hippies traveling “the hashish trail” through Afghanistan returned with seeds of
Cannabis indica,
a stout, frost-tolerant species that had been grown for centuries by hashish producers in the mountains of central Asia. The species looks quite unlike the familiar marijuana plant (a distinct advantage to its early growers): it rarely grows taller than four or five feet (as compared to fifteen for the stateliest
sativa
s), and its purplish green leaves are shorter and rounder than the long, slender fingers of
sativa. Indica
also proved to be exceptionally potent, although many people will tell you that its smoke is harsher and its high more physically debilitating than that of
sativa.
Even so, the introduction of
indica
to America proved a boon, since it allowed growers in all fifty states to cultivate sinsemilla for the first time. Some
indica
s will flower reliably as far north as Alaska.

Initially,
indica
s were grown by themselves. But enterprising growers soon discovered that by crossing the new species with
Cannabis sativa,
it was possible to produce vigorous hybrids that would combine the most desirable traits of each plant while downplaying its worst. The smoother taste and “clear, belllike high” associated with the best equatorial
sativa
s, for example, could be combined with the superior potency and hardiness of an
indica.
The result was what Robert Connell Clarke, a marijuana botanist I met in Amsterdam, calls “the great revolution” in cannabis genetics.
*

In a wave of innovative breeding performed around 1980, most of it by amateurs working in California and the Pacific Northwest, the modern American marijuana plant was born. Even today the
sativa
X
indica
hybrids developed during this period—including Northern Lights, Skunk #1, Big Bud, and California Orange—are regarded as the benchmarks of modern marijuana breeding; they remain the principal genetic lines with which most subsequent breeders have worked. Nowadays American cannabis genetics are widely regarded as the world’s best; they are the basis of the thriving cannabis seed trade in Holland, as the American growers I met there were quick to point out. Yet without the Dutch to safeguard and disseminate these strains, the important genetic work done by American breeders would probably have been lost by now, scattered to the winds by the drug war.

• • •

Until the early 1980s, almost all the marijuana grown in America was grown outdoors: in the hills of California’s Humboldt County, in the cornfields of the farm belt (cannabis and corn thrive under similar conditions), in backyards just about everywhere—and a lot more of it than anybody realized. In 1982 the Reagan administration was chagrined to discover that the amount of domestic marijuana being seized was actually a third higher than its official estimate of the
total
American crop. Shortly thereafter, the administration launched an ambitious nationwide program—enlisting local law enforcement agencies and, for the first time, the armed forces—to crush the domestic marijuana industry.

Though the government’s campaign failed to eradicate marijuana farming, it did change the rules of the game, forcing both the plant and its growers to adapt: “The government pushed us all indoors,” a grower from Indiana told me. And it was there, under the blazing metal halide lights, that
Cannabis sativa
X
indica
attained a kind of perfection.

The early indoor gardeners had basically sought to bring outdoor conditions and practices inside, growing full-size plants in soil under a regimen of light and nutrients designed more or less to mimic those found in nature. Very soon, however, growers discovered that nature was, if anything, holding back this particular plant, retarding its full potential. By judiciously manipulating the five main environmental factors under their control—water, nutrients, light, carbon dioxide levels, and heat—as well as the genetics of the plant, growers found that the marijuana plant, this remarkably obliging weed, could be made to perform wonders.

Most of the hybridizing needed to adapt cannabis to indoor conditions was done in the early 1980s by amateurs working in the Pacific Northwest. Cultivars with a high proportion of
indica
genes performed especially well indoors, it was found, and these were further bred and selected for small stature, high yield, early flowering, and increased potency. No one knew just what this plant was capable of, but by the end of the decade there were
sativa
X
indica
hybrids yielding flowers big as fists on dwarf plants no higher than your knee. During this period, cannabis genetics improved to the point where it was no longer unusual to find sinsemilla with concentrations of THC, marijuana’s principal psychoactive compound, as high as 15 percent. (Before the crackdown on marijuana growers, THC levels in ordinary marijuana ranged from 2 to 3 percent, according to the DEA; for sinsemilla, 5 to 8 percent.) Nowadays THC levels upward of 20 percent are not unheard of.

The plant had adapted more brilliantly to its strange new environment than anyone could have expected. For cannabis, the drug war is what global warming will be for much of the rest of the plant world, a cataclysm that some species will turn into a great opportunity to expand their range. Cannabis has thrived on its taboo the way another plant might thrive in a particularly acid soil.

• • •

Along with the progress in genetics came rapid advances in technique. “Indoors,” as one grower put it, “the gardener is Mother Nature, but even better.” Growth rates and yields made large strides through the 1980s as growers discovered they could speed photosynthesis by supplying plants with all the nutrients, carbon dioxide, and light they could handle—vast amounts, as it turned out. (Cannabis is, after all, a weed.) Gardeners found that their plants could absorb hundreds of thousands of lumens—a blinding amount of light—twenty-four hours a day. Later on, by abruptly slashing their diet of light to twelve hours daily (and changing from metal halide to sodium lights, the frequency of which more closely mimics the autumn sun), growers could shock their plants into flowering before they were eight weeks old. With the right equipment, an indoor grower could create a utopia for his plants, an artificial habitat more perfect than any in nature, and his happy, happy weeds would respond.

These sedulous attentions would be wasted on male plants, which are worse than useless in sinsemilla production. As long as a female marijuana plant remains unpollinated, it will continue to produce new calyxes, steadily adding to the length of its flower. In this state of perpetual sexual frustration, the plant also continues to produce large quantities of THC-rich resins. But allow even a few grains of pollen to reach the plant’s flowers, and the process abruptly stops: bud and resin production shuts down, the plant commences producing seeds—and the sinsemilla is ruined.

Growers who start their plants from seed rogue out the males as soon as they declare their gender, but since this doesn’t happen until the plants mature, much time and space are wasted growing males. The solution was to plant clones instead of seeds—cuttings taken from established female “mother” plants. From the perspective of these fortunate females, the practice is an evolutionary boon: they get to multiply their genes without diluting them, as would be the case in sexual reproduction. (Whether cloning is such a boon for the species as a whole is, as the story of the apple suggests, much less certain.) Because these clones were genetically identical, the plants were guaranteed to be female. They also turned out to be biologically mature from the start, which meant that even a six- or eight-inch plant could now be forced to flower.

By 1987 all these various advances and techniques had coalesced into a state-of-the-art indoor growing regimen that came to be known as the Sea of Green: dozens of closely spaced and genetically identical plants grown from clones under high-intensity light. A Sea of Green garden consisting of a hundred clones, grown under a pair of thousand-watt lights in a space no bigger than a pool table, will yield three pounds of sinsemilla in two months’ time.

• • •

Before I left Amsterdam I wanted to visit a modern marijuana garden, and on my last night an expatriate American grower I’d befriended agreed to show me his. For days I’d been fishing for an invitation, and I could see he was torn between the outlaw’s professional discretion and the gardener’s irrepressible desire to show off. In the end the gardener prevailed.

The garden was in a working-class suburb half an hour north of Amsterdam, and on the train the grower told me he’d chosen this particular town because it is home to a candy factory, a bakery, and a chemical plant. Marijuana plants, and
indica
s in particular, emit a strong, acrid odor; he was counting on the cacophony of smells produced by these three neighbors to cover the telltale stink of his plants.

When we came to the gardener’s house, he showed me upstairs. At the far end of a dark, narrow, cluttered corridor, he flung open a tightly sealed door and I was hit squarely in the face first by a blast of white, white light, then by a stink so powerful it felt like a punch. Sweaty, vegetal, and sulfurous, the place might have been a locker room in the Amazon.

After my eyes adjusted to the light, I stepped into a windowless chamber not much bigger than a walk-in closet, crammed with electrical equipment, snaked with cables and plastic tubing, and completely sealed off from the world. More than half the room was taken up by the gardener’s Sea of Green: a six-foot-square table invisible beneath a jungle of dark, serrated leaves oscillating gently in an artificial breeze. There were perhaps a hundred clones here, each barely a foot tall, yet already sending forth a thick finger of hairy calyxes, casting about vainly for a few grains of airborne pollen. A network of narrow plastic pipes supplied the plants with water, a tank of CO
²
sweetened their air, a ceramic heater warmed their roots at night, and four 600-watt sodium fixtures bathed them in a blaze of light for twelve hours of every day. The other twelve, they were sealed in perfect darkness. The briefest lapse of light, the gardener informed me gravely, would ruin the whole crop.

There was nothing of beauty in this garden. Should legalization ever come, no one is going to grow cannabis for the prettiness of its flowers, those hairy, sweaty-smelling, dandruffed clumps. There was also something bizarrely anomalous about this totalitarian hothouse, with its strict monoculture of genetically identical plants growing in lockstep—such ferocious Apollonian control in a garden ostensibly devoted to Dionysus.

Yet to a gardener there was much in this claustrophobic chamber to admire. I don’t think I’ve ever seen plants that looked more enthusiastic, this despite the fact that they were being forced to grow in an utterly unnatural, even perverted manner: overbred, overfed, overstimulated, sped up, and pygmied all at once. “Happy to oblige!” the marijuana plants seemed to say, sucking up the CO
²
, gorging themselves on the fertilizers, guzzling down the water, and throwing themselves at bulbs so hot and bright I finally had to look away. In exchange for a regimen of encouragement the likes of which few plants have ever known, these hundred eager demonic dwarves would oblige their gardener with three pounds of dried buds before the month was out—some $13,000 worth of flowers.

It was all more than a little mad, and very soon I was counting the minutes before I could politely make my exit and draw an ordinary breath. On the train back to Amsterdam, I tried to make some sense of this particular madness. It had a rather notorious local precedent, of course, an episode of equally intense involvement with a particular plant. During the tulipomania that briefly bewitched this city—the last time flowers traded for such fortunes—gardeners would exert themselves with a similar obsessiveness, rigging their precious plants with burglar alarms, deploying mirrors to multiply their blooms, and utterly failing to notice as their world shrank to the dimensions of a fevered dream.

One could argue that the fevered dream was the same then as now, and certainly visions of wealth have underwritten both the seventeenth-century tulip and twenty-first-century marijuana flower. Yet in the case of the tulip, by the end there was nothing
but
wealth to fuel the madness, and that surely is not the case with these other, uglier flowers. (The buds are homely, turdlike things, spangly with resin.) Tulipomania may have had as its spring the human desire for exotic visual pleasure, for beauty, but that didn’t last. Beauty eventually gave way to status as the desire that drove otherwise rational people to navigate their lives by the polestar of this plant. And by the end pure financial speculation had hollowed out even that desire, so that no one noticed when the flowers were replaced by mere promises of themselves: the words on the paper of a futures contract.