HOOKED ON 'PONICS

Boulder's Basement Bud Forget Mexican Brick Weed, The County's Smokin'
Boulder's Ganja

Good ganja, like good beer, used to be imported. Today, quality beer
is brewed right here on the Front Range at an array of brew pubs and
microbreweries. The equipment used is cheap and easy to find.

Likewise, modern drug users in Boulder want local pot, so they grow
it, or their friends and acquaintances do. Small amounts are grown in
the basements and back rooms of homes on nearly every block in every
neighborhood in Boulder County. The days of potheads waiting on
packages from Jamaica, or bragging about "Tijuana Gold," are over.

We live in the information and technology age, a time when knowledge
and cultural mores mean more than climate in the business of growing
pot. And in Boulder, the culture and the knowledge base are just right
for the cultivation of some of the country's kindest bud.

Just ask any drug user in Kansas City or Cleveland where the best pot
comes from. Topping the list will be Boulder County, where people
share hydroponics knowledge and clippings for new plants.

Hydroponics-a.k.a. aquiculture-is the cultivation of plants in water
that contains dissolved inorganic nutrients. Twenty years ago, it was
a little-known gardening technique used mainly by blue-haired ladies
who grew orchids as a hobby.

Today, people grow a vast array of plants hydroponically with heating
lamps, water, nutrients and plastic containers, which cost less than
$500 to set up. Learning how is easy. Simply log onto the Internet and
read from any of the thousands of websites devoted to the practice of
growing plants in water. What once grew only in the Amazon, can now
thrive in a basement.

"All plants grow better hydroponically," says Ed German, owner of
Boulder Hydroponics on 1630 N. 63rd. "We have customers who use
hydroponics for vegetable gardens, to grow wheat grass, and some of
the best tomatoes on the planet. Chefs grow herbs hydroponically.
People want vine ripened peppers and tomatoes, and they want to know
exactly what goes into them, so they grow them at home. What you can
grow yourself hydroponically is usually better, and cheaper, than the
organic produce you buy at high-end supermarkets."

And really good pot. Right?

"I really wouldn't know about that," German says. "Anytime I even hear
a hint of that from customers, I throw them out. I've told my staff to
err on the side of caution. I've thrown people out simply for having
the image of a marijuana leaf on a t-shirt. I recently threw a guy out
of here because he had an earring shaped like marijuana. Some people
come in here reading how-to books on growing marijuana, and I throw
them out. We do not need customers who are planning to do anything
illegal. There are plenty of legal uses for hydroponics."

Some of his customers, German says, have coral reef aquariums. They
buy lighting at Boulder Hydroponics because it's cheaper than buying
identical products from aquarium stores, which are priced for wealthy
consumers.

German has become so sensitive to the hydroponics pot issue that he
finds it hard not to discriminate against customers who meet certain
"pothead" stereotypes. He remembers the day he first opened for
business, five years ago. The first customer who walked in the store
had long hair and looked like a hippie.

"I can't be prejudicial based on looks, but it's hard," German says.
"When that first customer came in and he had this really long hair, I
thought 'Oh great, here we go.' But it turns out he was a CU student
doing research, and he paid with a university check. So you never know."

Ojo Rojo

A criminal defense lawyer in Kansas City told me his drug clients
often talk up Boulder County bud as something superior. He suggested I
meet with a man who goes by "Ojo Rojo," who once grew indoor pot in
Boulder County and distributed it in Kansas City.

I met Rojo, a middle-aged Hispanic man, at Effrain's-a Mexican
restaurant that happens to be next door to Boulder Hydroponics. I was
expecting someone who looked like a drug dealer, not the well-dressed
man who sat across from me and spoke in a soft, sophisticated manner.

He told me the story of using a few hundred dollars worth of
hydroponics supplies-along with an ample supply of Boulder County
knowledge and marijuana clippings-to improve his family's plight.

"I moved my family to this area in the early '90s from Mexicali,
Mexico," Rojo said. "I own my own business now and have my bachelor's
degree in economics from the University of Denver. Before I was
driving taxi in Mexicali and then I worked at car-washes in Denver. I
have four children who were very young and we didn't have very much
money. Marijuana helped. Not just smoking it, but selling it."

Back in Mexico, whenever his family needed cash, in the old days of
marijuana trafficking, Rojo knew the right people on both sides of the
border. "Two thousand dollars to drive a truck from a pasture of cow
shit in Mexico to a pasture of cow shit in Texas," Rojo recalls. "At
the time it was impossible to give up. I'd have to pay off some cops
in Mexico and wait for some hippies in Texas. I look at those days
with nostalgia."

Rojo tells of the time he was chased by border patrols and agents from
the Immigration and Naturalization Service. "And I'm actually a
citizen. Thinking back, the risks I took for that ditch weed were just
stupid."

After years of racing across the border with Mexican weed, Rojo heard
of a better way. In Texas, he learned about wealthy professionals in
Colorado-outed in 2000 by a federal report as having the highest
number of pot smokers in America-who pay exorbitant prices for pot
grown in basements. Rojo asked questions, read articles and decided to
go for it. He moved to Boulder County and started a small-scale
basement garden of hydroponics weed. He had no trouble selling it
locally, and moved into other markets only because word had spread
about the quality of his product.

"It's all information, man! That's what I love about this area," Rojo
says. "It's part of the culture. Rich, smart people smoking pot. Rich,
smart people growing pot. And Boulder bud is nationally known. Ask our
friends at High Times. But instead of one guy in a moving truck trying
to take 700 to 800 pounds worth of shitty weed across the nation,
everyone's got a friend in Boulder with a couple of plants. Two or
three pounds, two or three plants...it's much safer and it jacks up
the price."

Rocky Mountain High

So I called High Times, to see if Rojo was right. Is Boulder County
hydroponics marijuana famous? Well, sort of.

At High Times, a magazine based in New York City that's all about
drugs, Boulder County is known as sort of a second tier marijuana Mecca.

"It's a rural area with a long-standing hippie culture, and with that
comes a bit of a marijuana cache," says Steven Wishnia, a senior
editor at High Times. "But I've still never had anyone hand me a pipe
and say 'You've got to try this, because it's from Colorado.' It's
still not in a league with hydroponics from D.C. or Humbolt County
(Calif.) or Vancouver."

Boulder's pot culture isn't known for causing trouble. It's an
exclusive class of pot smokers, and unlike alcohol, their drug of
choice has seldom been accused of causing violent crime.

"Shoot, I remember a kid getting killed in Denver over a dime sack of
bud," Ojo says. "Now that doesn't have a damn thing to do with
marijuana. It has to do with culture. Hippie progressive types smoking
good bud-I don't have any problem with that and there's a lot of money
to be made. In the inner-city, smoking pot has to do with escaping
your surroundings. It's something else to kill the pain. Here, pot is
a unifier. It brings yuppies closer to one another."

Still, pot is illegal. If it's so rampant in Boulder, why aren't cops
seen kicking down doors and making arrests?

Rojo says they can't, most of the time, because the hydroponics
operations are too small to detect. They don't generate much traffic.
The heating lamps increase a power bill about as much as a new
computer. By keeping a low profile, with today's higher pot prices, a
grower can make good money selling small amounts to trusted friends
and acquaintances only. The risk is low.

"Keep it small, a couple plants," Rojo says. "The small farms (3 or 4
plants) have taken over the big guys. That's what hydroponics have
done. It's shifted the emphasis from quantity to quality."

Very true, says Wishnia, of High Times. Pot has changed, the price has
increased, and hydroponics are the rage.

"What happened wasn't some new development in technology," says
Wishnia. "Hydroponics has been around for a long time. What happened
was the drug war. Suddenly you had crackdowns at the Mexican border.
You had crackdowns on exports from Jamaica and Columbia. You had black
helicopters flying over the marijuana farms of Humbolt County (and
Ward, Colo.!). So pot growers took it inside, where it's less
detectable. Smaller operations meant higher prices, so people who were
mere users 10 years ago began growing their own. The drug war created
this."

Wishnia says the phenomenon is good and bad for his readers. Marijuana
is better, but more costly despite the rise in competition among
growers, distributors and sellers.

"I remember when Mexican brick weed was $40 an ounce, and cocaine was
$400 an ounce," says Wishnia. "Today, good hydroponics marijuana is
$350 an ounce, and coke is still $400 an ounce."

However, Rojo and Wishnia agree that consumers have never had more
choice or availability than they do today.

"There are 420 strands of marijuana," Rojo says. "There's Northern
Lights, White Widow, Afghani. You name it, and we have it right here
in Boulder County. It's all hydro-tweaking out the bud for the most
THC. Everybody knows how. It's no secret, and when it comes down to it
the cops are more concerned with meth labs in Weld County than
anything here. And the real beauty is that some poor sucker like me
doesn't have to drive to a cow shit field to get it for you all."

The ever increasing cost of living in Boulder is, says Rojo, a major
motivation behind hydroponics marijuana operations. "What do you call
a guy in scrubs standing in a welfare line in Boulder?" he asked me.
"Doctor. I don't know if you come from a million dollar trust fund,
but a lot of us don't. Pot has always been a good way to make ends
meet-especially for someone with family responsibilities."

It's True, Say Cops

None of this, of course, is news to local drug cops.

"Most of our cases deal with indoor growing operations," says
Lieutenant Jim Smith, of the Boulder County Drug Task Force. "With
hydroponics it's all about the THC content. The price of really good
bud is getting close to the cost of cocaine. This is where technology
and the market have taken it."

Although Boulder has a national reputation for liberal attitudes
regarding pot, don't be deceived. It's no more legal here than
anyplace else in Colorado. Attorney Mark Langston, a Boulder native
who defends marijuana cultivators, says the common consumption of
marijuana in Boulder often leads to a dangerous assumption that it's
almost legal.

"Anyone who thinks Boulder is so bud-friendly needs to understand that
cultivation of marijuana is a felony act here and everywhere,"
Langston says. "There is nothing legally special about Boulder when it
comes to pot."

Despite his warning to pot users and growers, Langston says local law
enforcement agents tend to have relatively progressive attitudes about
pot. They enforce the law, but understand that alcohol presents bigger
social problems.

"I've heard members of the law enforcement and judicial community side
with pot over alcohol," Langston says. "They know that something like
75 percent of all cases have an alcohol element. How many times do you
hear about a CEO coming home after a long day, smoking a joint and
beating his wife? What makes Boulder weird is that you can get in
trouble for pot, but you can get in a lot more trouble for lighting up
a cigarette in a restaurant than going outside and burning a joint."

Smith says the Boulder County Drug Task Force seized approximately
1,800 pounds of marijuana last year. "That's somewhere between 2,300
and 2,400 plants," he says. "We have busted major distribution
networks stemming out of Boulder County. Sixty to 70 plants is usual
for operations like that."

Although Boulder has become best known in recent years for its
home-grown weed, Smith says the days of running drugs into Boulder
aren't completely over. He describes a market between Boulder, Mexico
and British Columbia-a place High Times says still has far better pot
than Boulder.

"In the last year we've busted two major distribution networks," Lt.
Smith said.

"Usually these 'distribution networks' are just a couple of buddies,"
says Langston. "Someone in Canada knows a couple guys in Washington or
Oregon, and they know a guy in Boulder or Humbolt County, California.
So they get together on it."

The community of growers in Boulder, Smith says, is about as diverse
as the different strains of pot. Some are engineers and scientists,
others are just the lazy dopers one might expect.

Sergeant McGraw of the University of Colorado Police Department, says
his agency handled 55 drug cases last year. The vast majority, he
says, involved small amounts of marijuana-less than an ounce-making
the crimes class 2 petty offenses that seldom result in more than a
fine.

So what is the cumulative effect of Boulder's Rocky Mountain high
times as a distribution hub of high-grade marijuana and an
international trading partner with pothead Canucks?

An American Drug and Alcohol Survey showed Boulder Valley 11th and
12th graders getting far more stoned than state and national norms. In
the 1998-99 school year, 37 percent of the district's seniors were
brave enough to tell an anonymous survey that they had smoked
marijuana, compared to the 30 percent of high school seniors
nationwide who admitted to getting stoned in a one month period.

The issue of dazed and confused juveniles came up at the Boulder
County Movement for Children Legislative Forum. The panel included
Alyson Shupe, health planner for the Boulder County Health Department,
and Bill De LaCruz, a Boulder Valley School District board member. In
the Louisville Times, De LaCruz says: "Nobody talks about what it is
to be a community. Our affluence allows us not to talk about it. We go
into our million dollar houses and are able to forget about what is
going on. What is going on in the affluence of the 'new Silicon
Valley?'" De LaCruz asks rhetorically. "Our children are mirroring
what they see."

What Do The Children See?

"There are a couple of different theories about the higher rate of
drug and alcohol abuse by our kids," Shupe says. "Some think it's
because the University of Colorado is a party school-Ski U. Some blame
it on Boulder being an old hippie enclave. Those hippies are still
around. It could also be a matter of prosperity and affluence."

Until last week, drug concerns were far from normal conversation
material in Boulder. Then Brittany Chambers died. The local freshman
took Ecstasy at her 16th birthday party and faded into a deadly coma.

At Saint Louis Catholic Church in Louisville, the Rev. Donald Willette
began last Sunday's mass with a prayer for Brittany's soul.

"This young girl was looking for ecstasy on her 16th birthday,"
Willette says. "Many people are looking for ecstasy in their lives,
young and old alike."

Willette describes Boulder County's drug culture as a symptom of
narcissism.

"Affluent communities are always more in danger of this," the priest
says. "You asked me, 'What's my stance on marijuana?' Marijuana has to
do with me, me, me and me. Like with everything, what is the
motivation behind the activity? Marijuana is probably no better or
worse than alcohol in that regard."