NEW YORK FIRES UP THE DECAF MARIJUANA

"Normally I sell pretty good Jamaican weed," Tommy, a drug dealer who
works in Washington Square Park, said the other day. "For some of my
good customers, I'll get the hydroponic stuff, the superior product.
But one day a couple of months ago, these guys started asking me for,
I don't know-I guess you could say a mellower weed."

Tommy, who is middle-aged, with long, gray hair and a droopy waddle of
skin under his neck, snuck a sip from his cup of tea. One of his
recent customers, he said, "was like, 'I don't smoke too much . the
last stuff I bought got me paranoid about whether my kid is making
car-insurance payments. I couldn't sleep all night, and I was
constipated for two days.'"

Tommy's buyer was not unusual, it turns out. As better cultivation
techniques and genetic engineering have made marijuana more potent
than ever, dealers and users say that many members of pot's first
generation-the baby boomers-have discovered they cannot function under
the modern bud's influence. Here in New York, they've begun asking
their suppliers to provide them with a kind of low-grade, retro,
"decaf" pot-one effective enough to produce a mild high, and not so
powerful that it makes them hallucinate at Junior's soccer practice.

"I'm 47," said Steve Wishnia, a senior editor at High Times magazine.
"You go out in a social situation, you don't want to be incoherent.
You don't want to be unable to buy a movie ticket-or at least you
don't want buying a movie ticket to be a major transaction."

The demand for decaf pot runs against the idea that drug users always
want the most effective, fastest-acting version of their drug of
choice. Older pot smokers seem to want marijuana that reminds them of
the seedy, cruddy stuff they used to get in their high-school or
college days, when quality was often amusingly poor and getting high
could be a crapshoot.

"There's a lot of people who are requesting products that won't give
them heart palpitations or paranoia," said Brian Del Re, a sales
representative for Club 139.com, a New York-based company that sells
smoking accessories. Mr. Del Re, noting that marijuana 25 years ago
was a "lot weaker than it is today," called decaf weed "a trend that's
just beginning."

The problem, Mr. Del Re noted, was cultivating the mild stuff. Most
commercial marijuana, he said, is specially bred for potency-fewer
seeds, bigger buds and macroscopic THC crystals. Mr. Del Re told his
own horror story about super-potent pot. "One time I'm using a
five-foot water pipe," he said. "I took one puff of high-potency
marijuana, and I fell on a couch and listened to my heart palpitate in
my head for the rest of the night. If you're not a regular smoker,
it's even harder to take."

Tommy, however, had a common-sense solution for the decaf-pot demand.
He walked back to his office-a Ford Explorer-and laced a couple of
joints with the tobacco from a Marlboro Light. As pot-dealer tricks
go, this is the oldest one in the world. But Tommy said that some of
his customers actually preferred the tobacco-laced herb. He sells
these joints for the slightly inflated price of $12 each-same as he
charges for the regular stuff.

"Here's the best part," Tommy said. "I told them I was giving them a
deal because of the tobacco being so cheap. They were happy; they
didn't know the difference."

Tommy said that nowadays he always keeps a few tobacco-laced joints on
hand. He even has several grades-from 80 percent marijuana and 20
percent tobacco down to a 20/80 marijuana and tobacco mix. They all
cost $12 per joint.

Hoping to capitalize on the demand, some marijuana botanists have
begun breeding low-potency plants. "I keep one or two of them just in
case," said one grower, who did not wish to be identified. Another
grower, a 52-year-old retired dentist who lives on the Upper East
Side, said: "I grow for myself, so obviously I don't want it to be
stronger than I can handle-which, at 52, is less than it used to be."

Referring to contemporary, super-bred marijuana, the grower said: "One
joint and I would lose my whole weekend. Your only other choice is to
just take one toke and then you're O.K. But that's no fun. I don't
want it to be over so fast-like my prom night! I like the flavor. You
know, there's a reason why they call it 'flavor country'-not 'flavor
tiny little town that you zoom by in two seconds.' So I started
growing my own stuff."

Kyle Kushman, the cultivation reporter at High Times, said the secret
of breeding weaker plants was to ignore today's conventional wisdom
about marijuana growing. "Basically, what you do is what I advise
people not to do," Mr. Kushman said. "You find some seeds in the pot
that you buy on the street, and you put in soil and grow it."

He concluded: "They're not going to look like the plants in the
centerfold of High Times magazine. At least not today's High Times.
They might look like the plants in the centerfold of High Times 15
years ago."