THE OTHER FARMERS MARKET

Local Marijuana Growers Cash In On Well-Heeled Tokers' Love Of Fine Weed

Dallas, Texas -- It's 9 o'clock in the morning when "Ace" begins his
regular "wake and bake" routine of brushing his teeth, brewing a pot
of coffee and rolling a joint.

Today he has a job to do, and he won't have to leave his home to do
it. In a spare bedroom in his northeast Dallas duplex, 35 fully
mature marijuana plants are in bloom, their buds ready to be picked
and hung out to dry.

Harvesting them will take all day, and by the time all of the buds
have been trimmed, cured, weighed and bagged a week from now, Ace
will be ready to introduce his latest "boutique" strain of marijuana
to his faithful clientele.

Two weeks later, he'll sanitize his grow room, plant a new crop and
begin the process again. On average, he manages four or five good
crops a year, each earning him more than $10,000, not to mention all
the weed he can smoke.

Sure beats waiting in traffic to go sit in a cubicle--if you don't
mind committing a felony.

Ace has been at it for nearly 20 years, starting with a single plant
he kept in a 5-gallon plastic pickle bucket in his backyard. He soon
discovered an indoor method of cultivation known as hydroponics,
which was initially perfected for marijuana by a handful of farmers
in Northern California. Hydro farmers use high-intensity lights
attached to timers to illuminate their crops. Instead of soil, their
plants grow in rock or other media and are fed by nutrients dissolved
in water. The result is a cleaner and healthier specimen.

When hydroponically grown marijuana first hit the streets, the word
was that the technique produced a higher concentration of THC, the
chemical in pot that gets you high. Growers later realized that it
wasn't the process but the plant's genetics that made the difference.
This led to a fixation on cross-pollinating specific strains of
"designer" marijuana and ultimately resulted in the creation of a
radical restructuring of prices.

Back in the day, weed was cheap. These days good marijuana costs more
than Prada perfume.

Ace is a professional musician by trade, but he has growing marijuana
indoors down to a science. Getting there wasn't easy.

"Oh, I was an idiot when I first started doing this," he says. "I
can't tell you how many times I screwed it all up by going out of
town to do band gigs and leaving it all unattended, by letting my
dogs knock over the plants or by letting bugs get into my grow room.
After a while, you kind of have to say to yourself, 'Are you going to
get serious about this or not?'"

Like many, Ace started growing for his own use, but when he figured
out he could make five times more money growing grass than by playing
in a band, well...

"It really wasn't a hard choice to make," he says.

A simple starter kit for rookie farmers is available for around $500
from head shops or at landscape suppliers like Texas Hydroponics in
Deep Ellum. This includes the light and timer, nutrients and growing
bins. For an additional $400 or so, you can purchase a fan and
exhaust system that reconditions the air. A roomful of flowering pot
plants puts out a pungent, easily recognizable scent--a sort of
olfactory 911 call that careful growers would just as soon avoid.

You can learn all you need to know about hydroponics by visiting one
of countless Web sites that offer information on everything from the
best places to buy marijuana seeds--illegally, via mail from Canada
or Europe mostly--to how to cross-breed strains, manicure the buds
and tell the sex of your plants, since only females produce buds. The
site -- http://www.overgrow.com/ -- even offers advice on how to deal
with bouts of raging paranoia.

And you thought the Internet was just the world's largest pornography network.

A typical grow room is usually about the size of a walk-in closet,
bathroom or bedroom. More brazen growers will rent homes to use
specifically as pot farms, with two or three bedrooms each hosting a
different strain.

Ace isn't the only member of the Dallas local music scene with a
thriving grow room. The cultivation and sale of high-grade marijuana
seems to be driving a shadow economy that supports many local
musicians while they wait for the Big Break.

"Gene" is the bassist in a high-profile heavy metal band working on
their third album. Much of the cost of making their first two records
was funded by the proceeds from his pot farm. In fact, marijuana is
as valuable as cash within our local agora.

"Studio owners love it when you pay cash. So many of them get stuck
with hot checks or bands who can't or won't pay...bands who walk in
and say, 'We're gonna be big, just let us record here and we'll make
you an executive producer on our album,' or some shit," Gene says.
"Man, fuck all that. Having a pocketful of 'Heinous' handy has opened
more doors for me than anything. We've actually worked with studio
owners who would rather get paid in weed than money."

"Paul" is a club DJ and record producer. He has been farming for more
than 10 years, but he has his operation scaled down for the time
being because so many other people in town have jumped on the
bandwagon. "I started out just doing it for myself, never really
aspired to do it for a living. I had a really good job at the time,
so I wasn't hard up for cash, but my friends would all come over to
the house every day just so they could smoke my pot...and that got to
be kind of a beating. So I figured, as long as everybody is gonna
keep coming over here, I might as well just grow enough to start
selling the shit to them."

The money Paul made allowed him to buy huge stacks of top-of-the-line
recording gear and DJ equipment. Now that he spends almost every
night spinning records in clubs, he doesn't really have the time
needed to nurture a large garden. "I'm back to just growing one or
two plants every couple of months for my own consumption. I did it on
a much larger scale for long enough that I was able to put some money
away to live on for a while. Of course, I've still got all of my grow
gear. If times ever get tough, it's nice to know that I have
something I can fall back on."

He has a theory--pot smokers and growers are filled with
theories--about how the demand for high-grade marijuana may be a
holdover from the days of the late '80s cocaine era.

"Most of my customers, and I really don't have--or need--many to do
my thing, are people who are settling down into a sort of middle-aged
comfort zone. Those who didn't die or end up in rehab have made it
through the drinking every night...They've got families and
businesses and all of that responsibility that they were initially
avoiding by doing coke, but even years later they still have a little
of that subversive spirit left in them. So, naturally, they've turned
to the drug that least upsets the balance of their everyday lives."

But not just any old drug. Successful middle-class dopers who have
the cash are often willing to spend more to get a better quality
product and scoff at lower-grade "dirt weed" imported from Mexico,
which can sell for as little as a fourth of the price of locally
grown. Call them weed snobs.

"I do see a lot of what you're talking about: people asking for
specific strains, asking me if I'll take two different kinds of seeds
that they've brought back from Amsterdam and then cross-pollinate
them so they'll have their own personal type of weed," Gene says.
"God knows why. I mean, it all gets you high. Do you really need your
own kind of weed? It's like when 'Willie Weed' first made the scene a
few years back. Everyone thought they were smoking pot from Willie
Nelson's personal stash. Its like, 'Come on...dream on. He didn't
grow it himself,' you know?"

When it's available--and that's not all the time--you can find an
ounce of Mexican "dirt weed" for around $120 or less, while a quarter
of an ounce of high-grade pot grown here in town goes for $120,
sometimes more. With names like "Blueberry," "Northern Lights," "Red
Haze," "Kush" and "Bubblegum," name-brand marijuana has become the
latest fixation for baby boomers who have plenty of disposable income.

For all the smokers' pickiness, though, the prices they pay are not
out of line with the rest of the nation. High Times magazine, the
bible of pot smokers, tracks the going price of various grades of
weed nationwide in its "Trans-High Market Quotations." Prices of $400
and up per ounce are common for high-quality domestic bud.

One possible difference between Texas and the rest of the United
States is that the state is something of a bargain hunter's paradise
for smokers willing to toke low-grade hecho en Mexico weed--mainly
because Mexico is close by.

Mexican marijuana is "very prevalent in Texas, so you might see that
divide a little bit more so than you'd see in other places in the
country, where you wouldn't have that option of cheap Mexican versus
expensive homegrown," says High Times Editor Steve Bloom.
"Marijuana's so cheap down in Texas because of the Mexican influence,
so sometimes it's hard not to spend $50 for an ounce when otherwise
you go spend $400 for a quality ounce...Texas always has some of the
lowest prices in the country."

Of course, this is Dallas, where who you are is often defined by what
you spend, where we crave to be like Manhattan, even if that means
paying NYC prices. Offering a weed snob a baggie of cheap Mexican
schwag is like ordering a bottle of Texas wine in a Manhattan restaurant.

It's just not done.

These days, marijuana growers have become purveyors of taste and
enablers of style. They exist in a world similar to the one
associated with wine tasting, Cuban cigars and fashion and--whether
it was their intention or not--a shamelessly elitist connoisseur
mentality. Paying top dollar for "White Widow," "Mirage" or--get
this--"The Shit That Killed Elvis" is just as much an exercise in
ego-gratification as, say, dropping 200 bucks on a flacon of
top-shelf perfume or a bottle of Cabernet at the Wine Therapist.
These stoners wear their expensive pot habit like a badge of honor
within their circle of friends. "It's funny, when you think about
it," Ace says. "They all drive SUVs and had heart attacks when they
saw gasoline hit $3 a gallon. But throw down 125 bucks for a quarter
of an ounce, for some shit that I grew in my closet? No problem. I love it."

Still, these growers seem to share a common aspiration to develop a
signature strain of the cannabis plant that they can one day call their own.

Gene likens the process to the marketing of America's other favorite
intoxicant, beer. "Every year, they roll out some new variation on
the theme. First it was malt liquor. Then it was light beer. Then
'dry' beer, or now 'ice.' It's all the same stuff, but changing the
name of it every year or so keeps it fresh as a product. And it
speaks directly to that spender demographic who always has to have
the newest and best of everything. 'You're not still kickin' last
year's played-out shit, are ya?' Companies use this same strategy to
sell cars, clothes, videogames, whatever. "

It's ego gratification, says "Peter," a former bartender who now
grows pot full time. "I've noticed that a lot of these middle-aged
people aren't real educated when it comes to marijuana, but they love
to think of themselves quite differently," he says. "For instance, I
could put three buds of three different strains right here on the
table in front of you, give them goofy names, and the typical
middle-aged yuppie pot snob wouldn't be able to tell one from the
other in a blindfold test. But as soon as they walk out that door,
they're bragging to their friends that they've found an exclusive
strain that no one else in town has access to. It's hilarious, actually."

Despite what anti-drug warriors might say, these home-growers aren't
out pushing their product on the weak-willed. Too bad you can't say
the same about other intoxicant peddlers.

Paul doesn't drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes, but his job as a DJ
means he's exposed to them every night. He says watching cigarette
and alcohol companies market their products in nightclubs is "like
watching the Discovery Channel. These little 'street teams' usually
consisting of three hot women in sexy little costumes literally prey
on the single men who are mingling in the crowd.

"The other night, and I swear this is a true story, [a] guy is
shooting a game of pool, drinking a bottle of water, and this hot
chick walks up and literally puts a beer in his hand," Paul says. "He
tells her he hasn't had an alcoholic beverage in over 13 years, but
he'll drink it just because she's so nice. And just like that, this
guy falls off the wagon. Boom. Thirteen years. It's fuckin' evil when
you think about it."

"I don't know of any grower who ever went out and solicited new
customers," Ace says. "All of my clients are people who I know
closely; either friends, close friends of friends, co-workers,
whatever. There is no way in the world I would go out and engage a
total stranger to buy my marijuana. I don't need to."

If anything, the product Ace and others sell seems to be a soft
landing for middle- aged folks who plowed through alcohol and/or
every drug imaginable when they were younger, and aren't quite ready
to commit to sobriety.

"Vinnie" is a 53-year-old Dallas-based writer and photographer. He's
been smoking marijuana on and off for almost 35 years. While he grew
up smoking cheap Mexican weed, he transitioned to the more potent
hydroponic strain after he discovered it had a different effect. "The
old weed basically served one purpose: to numb your feelings...You
smoked it and then just passed out on the couch. With hydro, it's a
little different in the respect that it actually inspires me and
gives me a roundabout perspective creatively. You have a straight and
logical thought process when you're sober, then you can smoke this
stuff and look at the same thing, whether it's a film you're
watching, a book you're reading or something you're creating
yourself, in a totally different way."

"Christine," who makes her living as a muralist, set designer and art
director for many of the lavish social events around town, sees real
value in designer marijuana. "It really influences my creativity, and
I mean that in a good way," she says. "I'm more open to experimenting
with color and texture. And the overall effect of the smoking
experience is more like a trip. Music sounds better, and I really
notice other sounds or smells or tastes that I would just normally
take for granted otherwise."

Christine grew up in a small town near Lake Texoma and had always
smoked the cheap stuff before she made the move to Dallas. "It was
quite an eye-opening experience discovering hydro...Smoking dirt weed
is pretty much the same thing every time: It smells rank, gives me a
headache or puts me in a stupor. It's not at all productive."

The public perception of marijuana use has changed dramatically over
the last 10 years. While the Bush Administration still considers
marijuana a dangerous "gateway" drug that leads to harder stuff, the
popular culture has embraced pot as an acceptable prop in the
entertainment industry. The industry's depictions of pot smokers also
has shifted since the days of '70s comedy duo Cheech and Chong, who
may have done tokers a huge disservice by reinforcing the stereotype
that typical dope smokers were hapless idiots.

After Cheech and Chong went their separate ways, the public profile
of marijuana temporarily went back under the radar. The focus of the
late-'80s "War on Drugs" shifted to an epidemic of freebase cocaine
for the haves and crack cocaine for the have-nots. Gangster rap
artists like NWA and Ice T spoke explicitly and often alluringly
about the lifestyle associated with drug dealing in urban
neighborhoods. But when the multi-platinum rap group Cypress Hill
appeared on the scene in 1991, marijuana was, more often than not,
the predominant subject matter in their lyrics. High Times magazine
immediately embraced Cypress Hill as the new mascot for their agenda.
A year later, Dr. Dre's first solo album, The Chronic (a slang word
for high-grade marijuana), introduced the world to a young smokestack
named Snoop Doggy Dogg.

You know who I'm talking about, right? The tall, skinny guy in the
car commercial with Lee Iacocca? That's how far we've come now.
Mainstream corporations are using dopers to sell their products.

The everyday depiction of marijuana use is par for the course in many
of HBO's original programs, most notably on Entourage, Six Feet Under
and Da Ali G Show. Showtime has a criminally boring new weekly comedy
called Weeds, about a Republican soccer mom who makes ends meet by
selling pot to her high school-aged kids' friends. Cult films like
Garden State and Half Baked have explored the daily use of the drug.
The common thread here is in the representation. Before, we had
Cheech and Chong bumbling through ridiculous situations like a couple
of brain-damaged idiots. Now the characters in these programs smoke
marijuana with the same casual aplomb of a Starbucks latte junkie.

Dallas-based musician and filmmaker Michael Henning has been working
on a documentary film called Hempsters--Plant the Seed, which is
narrated by longtime advocate and actor Woody Harrelson, and features
Willie Nelson and Ralph Nader, among other decriminalization
cheerleaders. He sees the current infatuation with ganja as an
extension of the cultural influence of the entertainment industry.

"One of the first high-profile entertainers who really leveraged
marijuana as something other than just a recreational drug was Bob
Marley," Henning says. "Marley introduced the American mainstream to
Rastafarian culture and how the followers of his religion used the
cannabis sativa plant as a sort of sacrament to God. It was
different; people really started to see marijuana in a different
light. These days, the highest-profile celebrity spokesperson for the
legalization movement is Woody, who has been on the case now for over
10 years. He has really reached out to the Hollywood people on one
hand, and I think Willie and Merle [Haggard] have focused on Middle
America on the other."

WFAA-Channel 8 news anchor Gloria Campos looked as though she could
barely keep from breaking out in laughter last week when she reported
on a call for a ban by Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, parents and school
administrators of a new candy called "Stoner Pops," a hemp-derivative
marijuana-flavored lollipop. The tone of the story was certainly
meant to be serious, but it was buried at the end of the program, and
Campos looked as if she might have been enjoying a little "Stoner
Pop" herself. You have to imagine that if this were, say, a heroin or
cocaine-flavored lollipop, she probably would have wiped that grin
off her face.

If a professional doper like Snoop Dogg is now being paid to appear
alongside a well-respected former CEO as a spokesperson for an
American automobile manufacturer, is the general public really that
afraid of marijuana smokers? Apparently not.

Are Gene, Ace, Paul or Peter at all worried about going to jail? Of
course they are. But you might be surprised to hear their opinions of
drug laws. As we sit around a table in our favorite Greenville Avenue
coffee shop, they take turns talking about State Authority vs.
Personal Freedom.

"I'd actually like to thank the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration]
for refusing to decriminalize marijuana," says one of the growers.
"They're making me rich. As soon as they decriminalize it--which they
almost certainly will do while ultimately dealing with the potential
cost and logistics of prosecuting, convicting and incarcerating all
of the truly violent and dangerous criminals that we have running
around out there--then the price of marijuana is going to go down and
I'll have to look for another way to make money. So, yeah, keep it
illegal. Fuck it."

Ace has had versions of this conversation before. "A couple of my
customers are actually trial lawyers, and we have this discussion all
the time. The motivation behind making anything illegal is to provide
a deterrent from people disrupting a peaceful society. Pot laws
aren't keeping anybody from smoking pot. They don't work. If
anything, they just distract the police from dealing with the people
who really are disrupting our society," he says.

Despite the fact that each of these guys consumes an ungodly amount
of their product, they're all incredibly long-winded and have
reasonably educated--and varied--opinions on everything from
international politics to quantum physics. I'm doing my best to keep
them all focused while we finish our veggie burgers.

Ace still isn't finished offering his opinion on the law. "What
anyone does in the privacy of their own home should be nobody's
business but their own. Why should the government care if I want to
sit around and watch TV all day? The government here will never seem
to grasp the fact the laws aren't at all a deterrent. If anything,
they provide a phony allure to reel in the curiosity seekers, the
bored yuppies and desperate housewives who are looking for any
measure of excitement they can find. Hell, all of my customers are
over the age of 35, all of them are employed and none of them are
turning around and giving the marijuana to kids. So, you tell me: How
are they really a threat to anyone other than themselves?"

Detective Monty Moncibais, the drug prevention and community
relations officer for the Dallas Police Department's Narcotics
Division, says that hydroponic marijuana grown locally rarely
registers on their radar downtown--at least not specifically as hydroponic.

"We average 40 narcotic complaints a day in our office by phone, and
we have another five to 10 complaints that are faxed in," Moncibais
says. "The problem in trying to put a handle on how much hydroponic
is being reported is that the person who usually calls in or files
the complaint doesn't know what they're transacting. They'll say
suspicious activity hand-to-hand, heavy foot traffic, heavy vehicle
traffic. We only average probably one complaint per day that even
specifically names marijuana, and the hydroponic style is even more
rare. I think that in the last year we've had maybe three complaints
where someone actually said these people are growing marijuana on
sponges or it's hydroponic. But I'm not saying it's not out there."

Moncibais says that every morning he sees the reports from narcotics
division officers of every person arrested in Dallas. "In the last
six months, I only saw one where the narcotics officer said they
arrested this person with hydroponic marijuana. It's either just
being labeled marijuana or it's just plain marijuana, not the
super-duper stuff."

Peter looks at the prospect of getting arrested as nothing more than
a potential cost of doing business. "There are lots of really simple,
no-brain rules for growing pot and getting away with it. Don't grow
where you live; borrow somebody else's car when you go to buy your
lights and gear; don't ever show anybody your grow room; don't use
your cell phone for anything but emergencies," he says. "But the way
that most growers get busted, and I've heard this from a lot of
different people, is that their girlfriends turn them in. A guy will
go out and cheat on his girlfriend, then she finds out and calls the
cops on him. That's one of the reasons I haven't had a girlfriend in
a long time."

Yes, Moncibais says, pissed-off estranged girlfriends are a detective's ally.

"I couldn't tell you the number of calls we received from someone
who's been jilted or a competitive dope dealer who wants his
competition out of the way," he says. "Those things happen
continually. But that happens in every crime."

Farmers shouldn't, however, think that sacrificing having a
girlfriend will provide a clear path to a successful growing
operation. DPD narcotics officers have a few tricks up their sleeve.

"Now, we have made indoor hydro arrests in the past. It's not
something that we don't know exists...It is much more expensive than
normal marijuana, so you're not going to see your street guy, the
street user, really using a lot of that. But we know that it's in
parts of town, and we have different investigative techniques--by
taking meter readings and different camera shots in the house. But,
overall, it's kind of lost in our complaints in the volume of other
complaints coming in."

"Beth" is the former wife of a longtime grower. While she never felt
compelled to rat out her ex, she was happy to leave the lifestyle. "I
had a straight job and always had my own legitimate income. On the
other hand, he rarely ever left the house. I just got tired of all
the paranoia, always wondering if the cops were watching our
apartment or if we were going to get ripped off," she says. "It
wasn't worth it for me personally. I don't even smoke pot that much."
What started out as a couple of plants in a bedroom closet of their
apartment in (ironically enough) Farmers Branch, eventually led to
their leasing a three-bedroom house in The Colony that was used
exclusively for growing.

"It got to the point where I didn't want to be there, and he never
wanted to leave the house unattended, so we never really saw each
other," Beth says and laughs in retrospect. "He was more married to
growing weed than he was to me."

Finally, one day she just packed her stuff and left, which obviously
caused her ex-husband a great deal of concern. "He tore down the grow
room and moved out of our house the next day," she said. "And it
didn't take long for me to begin to feel like the weight of the world
had been lifted from my shoulders."

I'm baked.

A friend of mine from high school is in town for an art gallery
opening over the weekend, and we're poolside, splayed out in
100-degree heat at a gorgeous Uptown hotel. I've got Paul Wall's
"Sittin' Sideways" blowing up my iPod, there's not a cloud in the sky
and neither of us brought any sunscreen. We're also somewhat
immobilized by the effects of a new variation on the "White Widow"
strain, which was grown within walking distance of the hotel.

We're both far too lethargic to protect ourselves from the
potentially lethal effects of sunshine. Maybe they ought to outlaw sunlight.

The late comedian Bill Hicks used to have a bit where he addressed
the campaign against marijuana. It went something like, "You know,
we've been fighting this war on drugs for a few years now...and from
what I can tell the people on drugs are winning."

Back at the coffee shop, Ace takes it a step further. "Truth be told,
we're not fighting back. We're all on drugs, every single one of us.
Whether it's coffee, tobacco, alcohol, prescription drugs, pot,
refined sugar or black tar heroin, everybody holding this newspaper
relies on something to self-medicate or to feel better than they
normally do," he says. "We hear about other people struggling with
serious long-term addictions to dangerous drugs like crystal
methamphetamine or heroin, but we shouldn't feel compelled to declare
'war' on them as people. They're human beings, our neighbors."

Peter chimes in: "Every other commercial you see is for a new drug
that, like he just said, exists for no other reason than to make
people feel better. And the tag line is always 'Ask your doctor to
prescribe so-and-so,' as if the patient, merely by watching an ad on
television, might know a more appropriate remedy for their illness
than the doctor himself. If we've reached a point where we can
basically prescribe our own medicine, why can't we just grow our own pot?"

On any given day, you can jog down many residential streets in Oak
Cliff or northeast Dallas and smell the distinct aroma of marijuana.
This subversive farmers market is flourishing because of its
connection to that coveted demographic: the image-conscious boomer
who always pays with crisp twenties straight from the ATM machine.
Now that it's held in the same regard as sports cars, single-malt
scotch and exquisite jewelry, we shouldn't expect the infatuation to
evaporate any time soon.

This is Dallas, where image has always been everything. Green is the new gold.