October 3, 2010 – Call it the newest gardening trend: Marijuana activists, dispensary owners and growers say there’s been an uptick of medical marijuana patients growing pot for themselves.

The new profile of the home grower is primarily middle-aged or older. It’s someone who chooses to grow indoors to get a more frequent harvest and avoid caterpillars, slugs, spider mites and powdery mildew — the main enemies of the cannabis plant.

The reasons are varied: Buying medical marijuana at a dispensary can be expensive and uncomfortable for those who don’t identify with marijuana culture, and now that the city of Los Angeles has declared that just 41 of the remaining 169 dispensaries are eligible to stay open, finding a convenient place to buy marijuana is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for those with a debilitating illness. The organically minded are concerned about chemicals that might be in marijuana they don’t grow themselves, and still others worry about where their pot came from. “I don’t want to fund terrorism,” one home-grower says.

Some gardeners — and many do see this simply as a form of gardening — say they get the same soothing pleasure from tinkering with grow lights, temperature controls, fertilizers and additives as others get from nurturing prized rose bushes or carefully pruning bonsai trees.

Growing pot at home: What’s legal?

If you have a recommendation from a doctor to use medical marijuana, it is also legal for you to grow it, in limited quantities. The trouble is figuring out how much you can grow before law enforcement comes after you. A timeline of the rules in California:

1996: Proposition 215 passes, making it legal for “seriously ill” Californians and their primary caregivers to grow marijuana for medical purposes if medical use has been recommended by a physician. No limit for how much marijuana a person with a recommendation can grow or possess is set at this time.

2004: Senate Bill 420, the Medical Marijuana Program Act, goes into effect. The bill establishes a voluntary registration of medical marijuana patients and their primary caregivers through a statewide identification card system. The bill’s guidelines state that a cardholder can possess up to 8 ounces of dried marijuana or may cultivate as many as six mature or 12 immature plants. Individual counties may choose to set higher limits, but no county may set a lower limit.

2010: In People vs. Kelly, the state Supreme Court holds that patients can possess or cultivate as much as is “reasonably necessary.” They cannot be convicted simply for exceeding the possession or cultivation guidelines in SB 420; however, they can be forced to defend themselves in court.

A new breed of home marijuana grower

Joanne Clarke, a legal secretary in her late 50s, leads the way down a pale green hallway in her modest Costa Mesa home, past a small guest room on the right and a blue tiled bathroom on the left. At the end of the hall, she opens a door, pushes aside a thick black curtain and ducks inside.

“Isn’t this wild?” she says, gesturing to the high-tech marijuana grow room she and her husband recently installed. “This used to be my daughter’s bedroom.”

Wild is one word for it. Bright is another. Unexpected, yet another. What had been a teenager’s tropical-themed room is now a beaming, humming, indoor plant laboratory complete with silver reflective bubble wrap on the walls, blinding grow lights, ventilation ducts hanging from the ceiling and marijuana plants in various stages of development neatly labeled with names such as Platinum Kush, Purple Diesel and Blue Cheese.

“They are like our children,” Clarke says, gazing proudly at the elegant fronds that look familiar and exotic all at once. “We talk to them.”
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Clarke’s grow room is legal — in the state of California, anyone with a doctor’s recommendation to use marijuana can grow it in limited quantities — yet it still feels clandestine. Although she’s open about using pot (crushed and placed in capsules) to help manage the pain of rheumatoid arthritis, she and her husband haven’t shown the room to any friends. “Ninety-five percent of the people I know are fine with it,” she says, “but it’s that 5% that I worry about. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”

Just as California has seen a rise in small-scale backyard vegetable gardeners in recent years, marijuana activists and growers cite a similar, if much quieter, rise in medical marijuana patients growing pot for themselves.

The reasons are varied: Buying medical marijuana at a dispensary can be expensive and uncomfortable for those who don’t identify with marijuana culture, and now that the city of Los Angeles has declared that just 41 of the remaining 169 dispensaries are eligible to stay open, finding a convenient place to buy marijuana is becoming increasingly difficult, especially for those with a debilitating illness. The organically minded are concerned about chemicals that might be in marijuana they don’t grow themselves, and still others worry about where their pot came from. “I don’t want to fund terrorism,” one home-grower says.

Some gardeners — and many do see this simply as a form of gardening — say they get the same soothing pleasure from tinkering with grow lights, temperature controls, fertilizers and additives as others get from nurturing prized rose bushes or carefully pruning bonsai trees.

“My husband can spend hours a day in our grow room,” Clarke says. “For him, it’s fantasy land.”

The new breed of home marijuana grower comes in all different forms, whether it’s a 25-year-old rooftop gardener taking as much pride in his first harvest of okra as in the marijuana that grows alongside it or a 75-year-old retiree cheerfully growing cannabis on her senior-village balcony. Pony-tailed boomers are geeked out on the fact that it’s actually legal to grow this stuff, and at least one new grower called up the UC Cooperative Extension Master Gardener help line for Los Angeles County to ask for advice on growing “grass.” (The master gardener on duty misunderstood the question and recommended a drought-tolerant grass. When the caller explained he was talking about grass, she told him she couldn’t help: Master Gardener policy.)

Otherside Farms, a marijuana information and education center founded by Chadd McKeen in Orange County, teaches medical marijuana patients how to grow their own pot and also helps people install grow rooms at home. McKeen says half the people who take the weekend-long class on growing marijuana, which he teaches twice a month, are older couples.

“My market isn’t the 18- to 25-year-olds — they already know everything,” he says. “My demographic is 50- to 60-year-olds.”

When he first started installing grow rooms in homes, McKeen was constantly worried that each job was a setup.

“I thought everyone was a cop,” he says.

But over time he’s become accustomed to the embroidered-sweater-wearing, lighthouse-poster-hanging, older pot smoker who makes up the majority of his clientele. “This is what the marijuana user looks like,” he says.

The grow rooms that McKeen installs are generally replicas of the rooms he has in his storefront headquarters in Costa Mesa, even down to the bright orange Home Depot utility buckets he puts mature plants in. Most of the rooms he installs are in second bedrooms, which he usually divides in half to create two different environments — a “veg room” where the plants grow and a “bloom room” where a change in lighting and temperature encourages budding. He said the rooms generally cost about $15,000 to set up.

Golden State Greenery, another company in Orange County that helps novices build grow rooms at home, offers the “California 5-by-5 special,” a 5-by-5-foot grow tent that can be set up in a living room or garage. The tent is black on the outside to keep light and heat from escaping, and to keep the structure as discreet as possible. But inside, it’s lined in reflective silver to maximize the light source. For $2,500, the company says it can have new clients ready to grow their own cannabis within four hours.

All this fancy (and expensive) growing equipment isn’t technically necessary. It is possible to grow marijuana outdoors in Southern California. If planted in the spring, a seed or clone will generally produce one harvest in early fall. Many people have had success with simply sticking a plant on a balcony or tucking one among the tomatoes in the backyard.

“Pot is actually easier to grow than tomatoes,” said one man in San Diego, who like many people contacted for this article has a doctor’s recommendation and is growing legally but still asked to remain anonymous. “There’s a reason they call it ‘weed.’”

But for many home growers, the best place is inside. An indoor growing system offers environmental controls that would be impossible to get outside — no snails or caterpillars, less chance of powdery mildew. It also offers the possibility of four harvests a year rather than one. Another reason: Marijuana plants, even just a few, are still magnets for trouble even though medicinal pot has been legal since 1996.

“We tell our students it’s kind of like before: You don’t plant it in your front yard or your front porch, and you don’t show it off,” says Jeff Jones, a prominent marijuana activist who teaches grow classes in Oakland and Los Angeles. “There is still the home invasion issue, and your neighbor to the left or to the right might want to steal it from someone who has a VIP pass to grow something that is not legal for others.”

At a recent “traveling party,” when neighbors went around to one another’s homes to check out new additions or garden makeovers, a friend asked Clarke if she and her husband would be showing off their new grow room. Clarke declined.

“It’s still hard for people to understand this is legal,” she says. “So now when people ask about our new hobby, we just laugh and say my husband is growing a few plants for me. People know we’re doing it. They just don’t know the full extent.”

By Deborah Netburn. Source.

August 20, 2010 – Tigard, Oregon — In an unassuming, mostly unmarked building space off Pacific Highway, Sarah Bennett is trying something different.

Earlier this year, Bennett opened Human Collective, a nonprofit organization that aims to connect card-holding patients in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program with licensed growers for quicker access to the medicine. The clinic also offers a program where patients can receive small amounts of donated marijuana for free.

“I believe that we’re one of a kind right now,” Bennett said. “There isn’t any other place like this.”

Under state law, licensed growers are allowed to possess only what’s needed for their clients, and no more. The idea behind the free program, Bennett said, is to keep any excess marijuana from being needlessly destroyed or, in other cases, ending up in the wrong hands. It gives growers a safe outlet if their plants produce more medicine than their patients require, she added.

“It’s staying within the hands of those who are authorized to have access to it,” she said.

That’s hard to quantify for Tigard in such a short time since Human Collective opened, said Tigard Police spokesman Jim Wolf. But police are aware of the new clinic, he said.

Many patients don’t have the ability to grow their own medical marijuana, Bennett said, which can take three to six months. That’s where Human Collective comes in.

Since the clinic opened in April, its patient membership had climbed into the 70s by last week, said Bennett, founder and executive director. That number continues to rise, she said. Each patient must identify a personal grower under the law, and patients can choose themselves as the grower. Human Collective’s model provides patients access to a multitude of quality growers and other resources, Bennett said.

Human Collective doesn’t allow access to anyone not enrolled in the state’s medical marijuana program. A sign at the clinic’s entrance reads, “This establishment is for OMMP cardholders only.”

The vast majority of patients who walk through Human Collective’s door are honest, according to Bennett, and genuinely need the help.

“They don’t want to be criminals,” she said. “They don’t want to have a bad reputation for using alternative medicine.”

Daniel Davies counts himself in that category. The Tigard resident said he recently began coming to Human Collective to find better access to medical marijuana. He listed bipolar disorder and cleft palate among the conditions he’s been treated for.

“A lot of my body is pretty messed up,” Davies said.

Davies said he appreciates the atmosphere and knowledgeable volunteers at the Tigard clinic.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. People occasionally walk in hoping to cash in on medical marijuana they don’t need, Bennett said, but volunteers have learned to spot red flags.

Visitors looking to abuse the system may ask for an unreasonably large amount of marijuana, Bennett said. They may get caught feigning a physical ailment, having approached the clinic without showing it before. Or they may try to rush the process as quickly as possible.

In those cases, staff can –and do — make a “judgment call” to not allow access to marijuana, Bennett said.

Human Collective operates primarily on its membership fees, which cost $350 per year for its first 100 members, paid upfront. After 100 members are signed up, the annual fee rises to $365, or a dollar per day. Members can then access medical marijuana through MedExpress, a sort of flex spending account used to reimburse growers that can also be withdrawn by patients at any time.

Existing Oregon law prohibits the clinic or any licensed grower from making a profit on a marijuana transaction. Human Collective reimburses its growers for the exact amount it cost to produce their product — paid through members — each time. Marijuana prices vary widely, Bennett said, falling anywhere between $1 to $15 per gram, depending on the strain or type.

Human Collective operates without a payroll, functioning with an all-volunteer staff of about eight people.

Jaime Angel attested to the Tigard clinic’s uniqueness. She manages the Portland office of Mothers Against Misuse and Abuse, or MAMA, a nonprofit that helps people register for the state medical marijuana program. Angel said clinics related to the program are still rare, and only recently began emerging. The state program formed in 1998.

Bennett said she’s seen people with very difficult, painful situations in the short time her clinic has been open. She described the “phenomenal” feeling that comes from seeing patients find relief from debilitating health conditions and often damaging treatments. Most are simply looking for help, she said.

“Everybody who comes in here wants to work within the boundaries of the law, and they want to do the things that are right,” Bennett said. “And we’re just trying to help show … this is how things go right.” By Eric Florip. Source.