The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world (15 page)

• • •

It was in the spring of 1982, I believe, that I sprouted a handful of the Maui seeds on a moistened paper towel; within days two of them had germinated. As soon as the weather warmed, I planted the seedlings outdoors, not in the garden proper but behind the falling-down barn back behind the house, in a mound of ancient cow manure I had inherited from the dairy farmer whose place this used to be.

I more or less forgot about the plants until a few months later, when I returned to find what looked like a pair of Christmas trees, eight feet tall at least, rising over the late-summer weeds—lush, leafy, emerald green shrubs growing avidly in the thinning September light. No one would ever claim marijuana is a great beauty, though a gardener can’t help but admire the sheer green exuberance of this plant, a towering heap of leafy palms held up to the sun in an ecstatic frenzy of photosynthesis. The plant has the ardor of a weed.

Though frost was just around the corner (I’ve lost tomatoes here as early as September 15), the big plants gave no sign that they were even thinking of flowering. This I regarded as disappointing but hardly tragic, since in those days people still smoked cannabis leaves. (Nowadays, of course, only the unpollinated female flowers—called sinsemilla—are deemed worthwhile; growers simply throw the leaves and stems onto the compost pile.) Even so, I decided to hold off for a few more weeks to see if I couldn’t harvest a few buds.

The plants continued to grow at an alarming rate, adding as much as a foot to their height and girth every week, so that by the end of September they’d made themselves conspicuous from just about any point on the property. There they were, a couple of jolly green giants lurking behind the barn—and I found myself in a state of almost perpetual anxiety and dread. I’d read in the papers that the state police sometimes did aerial reconnaissance to locate marijuana gardens, and anytime I heard the drone of a small plane overhead, I raced outside to see if its flight path would take it over my plants. The slowing down of any full-size American sedan on my road was enough to rattle me. Every day that fall I weighed the risks of detection, and a killing frost, against the potential reward of a few buds.

A close call ended my career as a marijuana farmer. I’d ordered a cord of wood from a man who’d posted a flyer in town. He showed up with the first half early on a Saturday morning, a compact block of a man with a pewter crew cut, and asked where I wanted it stacked. Though open to the elements on two sides, the ruined barn did at least have a tight roof, and we agreed it was far and away the best place to stack the wood. But before getting down to work, the man and I fell into conversation, leaning there on the warm hood of his truck, enjoying the crisp October morning. Making small talk, I asked if he sold cordwood for a living. No, he chuckled, firewood was just a sideline, that and plowing driveways in the winter.

“Nine to five, I’m chief of police of New Milford.”

All at once the bones in my legs began to go soft. I found I could no longer form a sentence without specifically addressing the muscles in my lips. The barn, you see, was nothing more than a shell of boards, and no police officer standing in it could fail to spot the two green giants through the opening in the rear wall. But what else was I going to do? Dumping the wood anywhere
but
in the barn was ridiculous.

Unfortunately, no nonridiculous stratagem presented itself to my stupefied brain. I simply blurted out that, on second thought, I wanted the whole load dumped right here in the middle of the driveway, that’d be just fine, thanks.

“Don’t be silly,” the police chief said, turning to climb back into the truck’s cab. “It’s no trouble at all. I’ll just back the load up to the barn.”

“Uh . . . no!” I can only imagine how I must have sounded. “Right here, here is perfect. Near the house . . . burn it right away.”

“Okay, maybe
some
of it, but not the whole cord.” The truck’s engine roared to life.

“Yes! The whole cord!
Here!
” I may have been shouting now. “This is exactly where I want it!” And before he could throw his transmission into reverse, I jumped up onto the rear fender and started furiously to throw logs over my shoulder, onto the driveway and the lawn behind the truck, anywhere to block its path to the barn. The man got out, squinted at me in bewilderment, and then, finally, blessedly, shrugged his shoulders. The words “Suit yourself” have never sounded so sweet.

As soon as the wood was unloaded, the chief of police drove off to go get the second half of my cord, and I, temporarily reprieved but still in full panic, ransacked the toolshed in search of an ax. There would be no buds after all. I chopped down the two plants, the trunks of which were as thick around as my forearms, hacked off the branches, and stuffed the fragrant mass of foliage into a pair of heavy-duty trash bags, which I hauled up to a crawl space in the attic—all in about four minutes. My harvest, when dried, yielded a couple of pounds of leaves that smelled like old socks.
Something
happened when you smoked them, but the effect had less in common with a high than with a sinus headache.

• • •

As you can probably guess, I’ve told my marijuana-growing story more than a few times, after dinner with friends, say, and I can usually count on a few laughs. The happy ending is one reason, but the other reason the story qualifies as light comedy is that the suspense on which it hinges, while real enough, is not exactly a matter of life or death. If the police chief had spotted my plants, things would have gotten uncomfortable for me, but it was not as if I would have gone to jail. In 1982 a legal slap on the wrist, and perhaps a certain amount of personal embarrassment (What do I tell my parents? My boss?) was really about all a small-time marijuana grower had to fear. It hadn’t been many years before this misadventure, after all, that an American president—Jimmy Carter—had proposed that marijuana be decriminalized (his sons and even his
drug czar
smoked), and Bob Hope was telling benign jokes about doobies in prime time. Marijuana then was harmless, funny, and, it seemed to everyone, on the verge of social acceptance.

In the years since, there has been a sea change concerning cannabis in America. By the end of the decade the plant had suddenly acquired, or been endowed with, extraordinary new powers, which, among other things, rendered my story a period piece, quaint in its goofiness and not at all likely to be repeated. A couple of facts will illustrate the change: The minimum penalty for the cultivation of a kilogram of marijuana (the size of my harvest, more or less) in this state has, since 1988, been a mandatory five-year jail sentence. (Other states are harsher still: growing
any
amount of marijuana in Oklahoma qualifies a gardener for a life sentence.)

Jail time would not be my only worry were I so foolish as to reprise my experiment. If the New Milford police chief happened to find marijuana growing in my garden today, he would have the power to seize my house and land, regardless of whether I was ultimately convicted of a crime. That’s because, according to the somewhat magical reasoning of the federal asset-forfeiture laws, my
garden
can be found guilty of violating the drug laws even if I am not. The titles of proceedings brought under these laws sound rather less like exercises in American jurisprudence than medieval animism:
United States v. One 1974 Cadillac Eldorado Sedan.
If the police chief chose to bring such an action (
The People of Connecticut v. Michael Pollan’s Garden
), he’d simply have to prove that my land had been used in the commission of a crime for it to become the property of the New Milford Police Department, theirs to dispose of as they wished. So do things stand in America today that yielding to the temptation of a forbidden plant not only can get you temporarily expelled from your garden but can get your garden taken away forever.

The swiftness of this change in the weather, the demonizing of a plant that less than twenty years ago was on the cusp of general acceptance, will surely puzzle historians of the future. They will wonder why it was that the “drug war” of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s fought the vast majority of its battles over marijuana.
*
They will wonder why, during this period, Americans jailed more of their citizens than any other country in history, and why one of every three of those were in prison because of their involvement with drugs, nearly fifty thousand of them solely for crimes involving marijuana. And they will wonder why Americans would have been willing to give up so many of their hard-won liberties in the fight against this plant. For in the last years of the twentieth century a series of Supreme Court cases and government actions specifically involving marijuana led to a substantial increase in the power of the government at the expense of the Bill of Rights.
†
As a result of the war against cannabis, Americans are demonstrably less free today.

Historians of the future will decide for themselves exactly why marijuana, of all drugs, should have become the focus of the American drug war—why the bright line of prohibition was drawn around this particular plant, rather than coca or poppies. Did marijuana pose a grave threat to public health, or was marijuana the only illicit drug in wide enough use to justify waging so ambitious a war in the first place?
*
Whatever the case, it’s hard to believe such a powerful new taboo against marijuana would have stuck if the plant hadn’t already been a powerful symbol. Certainly marijuana’s close identification with the counterculture made it an attractive target to a drug war that, whatever else it may have been, was part of a political and cultural reaction against the sixties. But whatever the reason, by the end of the twentieth century this plant and its taboo had appreciably changed American life not once but twice: the first time rather mildly, with marijuana’s wide-spread popularity beginning in the sixties, and then again, perhaps more profoundly, in its role as
casus belli
in the war against drugs.

• • •

There has been another dramatic change in the story of marijuana since my brief career as a grower, and that is the change in the plant itself. When the natural history of cannabis is written, the American drug war will loom as one of its most important chapters, on a par with the introduction of cannabis to the Americas by African slaves, say, or the ancient Scythians’ discovery that hemp could be smoked.
*
For the modern prohibition against marijuana led directly to a revolution in both the genetics and the culture of the plant. It stands as one of the richer ironies of the drug war that the creation of a powerful new taboo against marijuana led directly to the creation of a powerful new plant.

Marijuana’s recent natural history is much harder to reconstruct than its social history, since so much of it took place underground and in secret; this plant’s Johnny Appleseeds have tended to be far-flung and anonymous. But I was inspired to go looking for them a few years ago, after I learned (from a friend of a friend) just how sophisticated marijuana cultivation had become in the years since my feeble attempt and how much more potent American pot had grown. This fellow had once helped design and install a series of state-of-the-art “grow rooms.” As I listened to him talk about his work one evening, dilating on the relative benefits of sodium and metal halide lights, the optimal number of clones to plant per kilowatt, and the intricacies of hybridizing
indica
s and
sativa
s, it dawned on me that
this
was what the best gardeners of my generation had been doing all these years: they had been underground, perfecting cannabis.

• • •

To a marijuana grower, Amsterdam in the 1990s was something like what Paris in the 1920s was to a writer: a place where alienated expatriates could go to practice their craft in peace and hook up with a community of kindred souls. Growing marijuana is not precisely legal in Holland, but several hundred “coffee shops” are licensed to sell it, and small-scale growing to supply those shops is officially tolerated. Beginning in the late 1980s, as the United States escalated its campaign against marijuana, American refugees from the drug war began moving to Amsterdam. Growers took with them their seeds and expertise, and this migration, matched with a Dutch genius for horticulture going back to the tulip craze, made Amsterdam, once again, the place to go if you cared deeply about one particular plant.

I went to Amsterdam to learn about the recent history of marijuana in America and to see—okay, and sample—what these gardeners had wrought in the years since my hasty retirement. I arrived in late November, at the time of the Cannabis Cup, an annual convention and harvest fair (sponsored by
High Times
magazine) that attracts many of the brighter lights in the field. American growers come to the Cup to do what gardeners always do when they gather in the off-season: swap seeds and stories and new techniques and show off their prize specimens. Some of the pioneers of modern marijuana growing were on hand, and I found that if I approached them as a fellow gardener, they were more than happy to share their experiences and knowledge.

Within a few days I had begun to piece together the story of how American gardeners, operating in the shadow of a ferocious drug war without benefit of professional training, had managed to transform “homegrown”—a derisive 1970s term for third-rate domestic marijuana—into what is today the most prized and expensive flower in the world.
*
But while the ingenuity and resourcefulness of growers had much to do with this success story, so did the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the plant itself. From the plant’s perspective, the American drug war presented an opportunity to expand its range into North America, where it had never had much of a presence. (Except, that is, as hemp, a distinct, nonpsychoactive form of cannabis widely grown for its fibers before prohibition.) To succeed in North America, cannabis had to do two things: it had to prove it could gratify a human desire so brilliantly that people would take extraordinary risks to cultivate it, and it had to find the right combination of genes to adapt to a most peculiar and thoroughly artificial new environment. This is the story of how that happened.