A REAL FARMER LOOKS AT "MEDICAL MARIJUANA"

Bob Cannard grows mixed fruits and vegetables on a 25-acre farm in Glen
Ellen. He manages it so that something is always ready to harvest. This
interview was conducted in early May.

Bob Cannard: I'd say we're growing enough to generate a minimum of 150
generous vegetable meals a day. Right now we could pick at least
5,000 salads and 5,000 bowls of fava beans infused with various herbs.
Those two crops are generous right at the moment.

In a month we'll have around 80,000 pounds of potatoes.

Every day between now and then there'll be some major crop that is passing
through.

It may be turnips that people don't like too much, but it'll be a food crop
that's good for them.

Given one good worker one man of the soil from Mexico who knows what his
trade is and how to practice it energetically we can take care of this 20
to 25 acres with its wide range of vegetables and fruits and berries and
herbs and cover crops for the soil. Monday we'll plant 5,000 tomato
plants, after we pick a load of vegetables in the morning.

We'll plant them, we'll get the irrigation lines out, and we'll have the
water on them before 4:30, when his day finishes.

The tomatoes were started 49 to the flat in flats filled with composty
soils, All the nutrition that's available on the earth is in that media and
available to the plant.

They're strong and will resist the stress of transplant They're all about
two inches apart.

Everything they need is right in the soil and they don't have to set out
these seeking roots that run to the outside and the bottom of the pot
looking for stuff, and wrap around and around and around in pursuit of
escape from the prison they're in. As long as I don't let them try to get
too big and force spatial competition, until that point there's no stress.

They root out, they don't intertangle, the root systems are easily
separable, they have finely branched, divided root systems that indicate
contentment where they are. Everything they need is there. We have more
than 100 flats of them; we just crawl along and stick 'em in. And the
ground is all prepared.

I use tractors. I just spaded it this morning.

I'll take the little tractor and mark out all the rows. I do most of the
crawling and it takes Javier just about as much time to walk back to the
truck and pick up a flat of plants and haul it out to me as it takes me to
plant 50 of 'em. Then he'll get a little bit ahead of me in laying out the
flats, and then he'll dispatch himself down to pick up another truck load.
If I get done before, I sit down and have a puff (of tobacco).

What's important is the work ethic.

The two of us are taking care of hundreds of thousands, or millions of plants.

And they're delicate, they've got to be perfect.

Those plants go to famous professional chefs who are extremely demanding.

Cleanliness, size, uniformity, are all important to those guys.

FG: I wanted to get your take on medical marijuana cultivation. Growers are
constantly asking the DA to sanction their operations, all of which are
indoors. They're indoors for security reasons, but they try to pass it off
as a better environment for growing "medical grade cannabis" for which the
clubs pay top dollar.

BC: The people who sell the gear make a lot of money and people who don't
know very much about growing plants go to stores that offer advice, and
it's recommended that they do this. They make a tremendous investment,
which a normal agricultural crop would not justify, and they're sold a bill
of goods If they're growing legal medical marijuana, they should do it
outdoors. It should be medicinal grade.

All foods are drugs.

And as with any food, in order for the mother plant to put its true
fullness and essence into its consuming part whether it's a broccoli or a
bud is immaterial in order for it to truly be mild, clear, sweet-flavored,
truly nourishing broccoli, one that has all of its refined compounds
together, the mother plant's got to have everything it needs.

If the mother plant has deficiencies, those deficiencies are passed on to
the consuming body part. If the mother plant has internalized hunger and
discontentment, it passes that incomplete energy on. If you're going to be
dealing with a medicinal marijuana plant, it's absolutely critical that the
plant is totally filled unto itself and that it's not forced into high
yield. You can grow a plant and force it and do anything you want with it,
because it's immobile and you're in charge.

But if you want to grow a truly pain-killing, a truly inspiring, a truly
mind-opening plant, then you've got to have a plant that's growing towards
completeness. Volumetric yield is a secondary consideration. Pumping the
plant to great imbalance with large quantities of nitrogen increases the
chance of getting spider mites on it. Maybe having a fungal attack on the
flowering portion and subsequent rot. Maybe having a soft-bodied finished
product that tends to decay and is difficult to dry. Maybe having an aroma
that is unpleasant, from nitrite-bonded elements that are actually toxic
upon consumption.

This is not the intent, the spirit, the soul of that plant.

That plant is a medicine and its spirit has got to be recognized and nurtured.

If you go in the direction of a naturally supported plant supported in
terms of nutrition it will have a complete immunological system, there will
be no mites, there will be no mildews, there will be no critters attacking
it. It has everything it needs to build its own immune system, and if it
builds it to completeness, nothing can attack it successfully.

Marijuana is a full-sun plant. You cannot grow any plant to completeness
under artificial light. Those light bulbs generate about 3 percent of the
band of cosmic rays that come to our planet. The organisms have evolved
under full sun. You can't grow a broccoli under artificial light. It's
completely bogus. It's just something to sell the gear, to sell power,
it's a scam. Certainly you can force the plant to do anything you want. I
can force you to do anything I want all I have to do is cage you up and
withhold food and subjugate you with threat of torture to your partner, and
you'll do anything I want but I can't force completeness and happiness on
you or my plants. I can only get there through a process of generosity and
actually understanding the plant. And if you do it like that, if you truly
study and read the plant and understand the plant for its health
characteristics, then you have obviated about 80 percent of the work. You
have no bugs that are pests. If you see bugs rising to pest level, you
know there's a deficiency in your system and instead of going with
adversarial energy and killing the bugs and getting into this negative upon
negative, you observe its health, you feed the plant appropriately, and as
the plant gets what it needs, the bug population diminishes and the plants
straightens itself.

Why we have any element of agriculture that is not directed to produce
plants along these lines is purely for economic reasons the people wishing
to control and sell inputs. Today, because we've bought into the line in
general agriculture, the only people who make money are the people who sell
the inputs.

The farmer is purely a serf who goes through the actions and lives the
illusion of independence. And the bankers skim and dictate in collusion
with the materiel suppliers.

You use that commercial fertilizer, you guarantee that you're going to have
bug infestations, because you're throwing the plant off balance. Commercial
agricultural nitrogen is very similar to methamphetamine in terms of what
it does to the organism: it speeds it up, and then it crashes. It also
gets the system of soils and genetic materiel selection addicted to the
drug. We've been dumbed down and reduced to the point where we'll buy a
bogus bill of goods.

We have hollow plants that today have less than ten percent or less of the
mineral content they had a hundred years ago. So we don't get the
organically bonded mineral nutrients, and then our system collapses and
then we get sick and get cancers and they try to shove petro-drugs down our
throats.

Or we consume medical marijuana in an attempt to raise our spirits and deal
with the problem but it's grown in the same fashion, with sickness and
weakness and incompleteness. A plant carrying a toxic load is not the one
you want to raise your spirits.

FG: Almost all the marijuana being sold for medical use is grown
hydroponically from clones.

What's your line on that?

BC: Years ago, when I used to smoke marijuana, I wouldn't smoke any that
didn't have some seeds in it. If you don't find a couple of seeds, it means
the plant has been neutered.

It's been short-changed. It didn't get to do its deal. To manage and reduce
genetic reproduction, I can go along with that; but to eliminate it
completely No. You've got to allow a plant to have a few seeds. How can
it be a truly content plant without sexual fulfillment?

Hydroponic anything Hydroponic tomatoes: why didn't they grab the
marketplace? Because they're crap and they taste like crap. The
full-control agricultural materiel salesmen tried to stuff hydroponics down
our throats. They found many a sucker, and the banks loaned 'em money to
build hydroponic facilities. Then they had high-cost inputs and many
unforeseen problems, and then the finished product was rejected by the
clients, and they washed out. There's a few little niche-y places that
didn't go bankrupt, but to grow a damned weed like marijuana for medical
purposes under pain of confinement is ridiculous.

It should be grown outdoors, in full-sun, with the involvement of the
people who are going to use it as medicine.

Those who are physically capable need to get out there and harvest their
own stuff and have a true connection with nature.

If I wanted to do that I would contract with the sick people and charge $10
a plant. Let's say you're allowed to grow three plants per person. If
somebody sent me ten dollars that would capitalize me to be able to grow
the plant, and when harvest time came they would get notification and they
could bring $20 and come up and harvest their three plants. A field-grown
marijuana plant with a yield of a half pound a nice well grown naturally
grown, high-energy, sweet, complete plant is going to take up five square
feet. Let's say it's going to take up 4.32 square feet and we can have 10
thousand of them on an acre, and I'm going to get $10 each for
them. That's $100,000 an acre! Oh, my God! I grow an acre of broccoli,
I'm lucky to get 50 cents per plant. Ten dollars? If you grow an acre of
broccoli, you're lucky to gross $3,000. And I can make a living growing
broccoli. Why should I make more than double the profit growing medical
marijuana? It's absurd.

If it's truly medical marijuana sick people don't have economic security.
Maybe they can't work, maybe they get government support to pay their rent,
maybe they're in the process of exhausting savings, maybe they're depending
on healthy family members to siphon off their money is absurd. We're
looking at a half-pound per plant, ten dollars a plant I'm ready to do it.
If I were wanting to grow that crop, I would become inordinately rich
compared to a common vegetable farmer.

But what I'm interested in doing is growing complete full-bodied food that
has the capacity to really nourish the person so that they don't get sick
in the first place. That's what I'm doing.

Hydroponics? Ridiculous. Any phony, commercial growing process is absurd.
What you need to grow good quality plants is good mineral nutrition, good
digestion in the soil, and the appropriate cosmic wavelength that we call
sunlight and a good quotient of old air in the soil to feed the digestion,
which is compost, and a good clean air environment so that the plants can
absorb non-polluted air to build on and function.

I use rock dust and oyster shell and rock phosphates and crushed rock. I
couldn't grow a garden without mineral supplementation. Every enzymatic
process is built around a mineral element a single element or a mineral
compound.

And enzymatic processes control all life. So, delete minerals, you got
problems. Listen to the land-grant colleges and feed plants that old
commercial NPK stuff and you're guaranteed to have imbalances. You can't
force something to grow to completeness. You can only nurture it to grow
to completeness. And it's so easy to do it right.

And it's so hard to do it wrong!

Rimonabant and Strattera

We scooped the Wall St. Journal on Sanofi-Synthelabo's weight-loss drug,
now in phase-III clinical trials (See "Pot Goes Mainstream,"AVA July 24).
The WSJ ran a 30-inch story August 14 with a fairly accurate headline
"Putting the 'Munchies' in Reverse" describing the action of the drug,
which is called Rimonabant,. It works by blocking the cannabinoid
receptors, thereby reducing appetite.

Although one in four Americans is "obese" by government standards, and one
in two "overweight," the drug companies sold only $417 million worth of
prescription weight-loss drugs last year. That's because they don't work
longterm and the side-effects are terrible. Abbott Laboratories' Meridia
increases the risk of high blood pressure, heart attack and stroke; Roche's
Xenical causes diarrhea.

Who knows what adverse effects a drug that blocks the cannabinoid receptors
will wreak?

But if they turn out to be minimal Anybody who bought Sanofi stock based
on our 7/24 item should please remit 10% of any profits to "MMJ Update" c/o
this paper, on a quarterly basis.

Thanks.

Also on 8/14 Eli Lilly got an approvable letter to use the awkward jargon
of government/corporate science from the FDA for "Stratterra," a drug for
treating Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Government/corporate
scientists claim that 10% of U.S. schoolchildren mostly boys have the
condition, which can't be defined with any rigor.

The market for ADHD drugs was over $1.2 billion last year. Lilly is touting
Stratterra as a non-stimulant drug in contrast to the competition (Ritalin,
Cylert, Adderrall). The name seems to contain a subliminal sales pitch:
"Strattera (brings 'em down from the stratosphere to terra firma)."