How to Smoke Pot (Properly): A Highbrow Guide to Getting High - Softcover

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DAVID BIENENSTOCK is the former West Coast editor of High Times magazine and has more recently grown a following as a journalist and video host/producer at VICE, where he writes the Weed Eater column and produces a video series called Bong Appetit. He’s appeared as a weed expert on NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, and HBO, and has been quoted in Salon, Fast Company, AdWeek, Playboy, and The Nation.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 David Bienenstock

CHAPTER 1



Farm to Pipe


So powerful it can quell grand mal seizures, so gentle you’ll never suffer a hangover, cannabis is the closest thing on Earth to a miracle plant. So what could be more fascinating than getting up close and personal with lovely Ms. Mary Jane?








Prior to first meeting Valerie Leveroni Corral, co-founder and director of the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) in Santa Cruz, California, I’d already had the honor and privilege of documenting dozens of different marijuana grows—legal and illegal, indoors and outdoors, organic and hydroponic, one-light closet tents and large “guerrilla gardens” clandestinely planted in remote, difficult-to-access backcountry. But typically I stuck around just long enough to take a guided tour, interview the cultivators, inventory the plants, and sample the goods before heading home to write my story.

Then, in 2010, after seven years working out of High Times headquarters in midtown Manhattan, I relocated to Northern California, and took on a new role as the magazine’s West Coast editor.

Seeking the true heart and soul of the California cannabis movement, I made WAMM one of my first stops upon reaching the left coast. I’d already heard and read much about the collective’s politics—how for twenty years they’ve focused on low-income, seriously ill patients otherwise unable to afford medicine; how they helped pass America’s first statewide medical-marijuana law; and how they survived a DEA raid, then turned around two weeks later and defiantly distributed marijuana to the terminally ill on the steps of city hall—but I had no idea how they managed to plant, tend, and harvest a garden productive enough to supply their hundreds of members with cannabis for an entire year with only a skeleton crew and a small, dedicated team of volunteers.

On the chilly spring morning when I visited WAMM for the first time, the collective’s fledgling seedlings were just getting transplanted into five-gallon pots. Valerie put my wife, Elise, and I to work right away, digging holes and mixing soil. She also welcomed us into an amazing community of reefer revolution- aries, and encouraged us to come back for more. So over the next year (and the years to follow) I got to closely follow the crop’s natural life cycle—from seed to harvest—for the first time, while making a lot of new, kindhearted friends, learning the art and craft of outdoor cannabis growing, and at long last, getting some dirt under my fingernails.

“Growth is so obvious in the garden—you don’t have to wait long to see it,” Valerie once told me, explaining that many seriously ill and even terminal patients find the process of producing their own medicine to be highly empowering. “The garden gives us an opportunity to build something bigger than ourselves. That not only helps the healing, it puts us more in touch with the cycles of life.”

So let’s begin by understanding how the cannabis plant germinates, grows, flowers, and reproduces, and then we’ll explore the many ways clever cultivators seek to optimize this process in search of higher potency and heavier harvests.


THE CANNABIS LIFE CYCLE


Like humanity, Cannabis sativa is a dioecious species, which means it predominantly produces distinctly male and female organisms, in roughly equal number. Pot is also an annual, meaning individual members of the species complete their entire life cycle in less than one year.

In nature, each plant begins life when a previously dormant seed begins to germinate in early spring. Only the strongest and most viable of these seeds manage to throw off their seed casings, stretch into seedlings, grow into mature plants, and prop- agate the species. The rest, at some point along that journey, fall by the genetic wayside, helpfully winnowing the herd through natural selection.


Seeds and Clones

Whether dropped naturally in the autumn by a wild pot plant in the far reaches of Afghanistan’s rugged Kush mountain range, or carefully placed into a moistened rock-wool cube by a state- licensed marijuana grower in Boulder, Colorado, every genetically distinct cannabis plant on Earth starts as a seed—though like many commercial crops, from bananas and avocados to vanilla and lavender, the vast majority of the marijuana in circulation actually began life as a “clone” or “cutting.”

Seedlings grow faster and heartier than these cuttings, but only after a long, delicate germination period. So most cannabis cultivators opt to start each new crop not from seed but by plucking healthy leaves from the lower branches of a special “mother plant” kept for this purpose, and then replanting those leaves in soil or a medium to take root—a technique that saves weeks of growth time on the front end, and also ensures a genetically uniform set of plants moving forward, which is especially important when trying to manage a tightly packed indoor grow.

Another big advantage of using cuttings is that all of your plants will be female (assuming you start with a female “mother plant,” of course). Only females produce THC and marijuana’s other medicinal and/or psychoactive components in appreciable amounts, so taking clones saves the trouble of waiting for seedlings to show their sex (at about six weeks) and then culling all the males.


Vegetative Growth

Seedlings and clones require a couple of weeks to establish themselves, at which point they “take root,” and enter a period of rapid growth. Whether cultivated indoors or out, cannabis will remain in this “vegetative” state—growing taller and wider, and producing a large number of leaves, but not budding—as long as it’s exposed to more than twelve hours of light per day.


Flowering

As the days grow shorter in the autumn, and in particular when the available daylight dips below twelve hours per day, female cannabis plants begin flowering. At which point, they stop growing significantly taller or wider, instead focusing energy on producing more and larger buds covered in trichomes—resinous glands that look like tiny crystals to the naked eye, and like a fluid-filled globe atop a matchstick when magnified.

Male cannabis plants also flower, but unlike females, their flowers don’t produce significant amounts of THC-laden resin, so savvy marijuana cultivators either grow all females from clone or, if growing from seed, kill off all their male plants long before they reach maturity. Either way, the resulting all-female crop, if effectively shielded from pollination, will reach maturity without seeds (or sinsemilla, as the technique is commonly known).

Now, as anybody of a certain age can tell you, there’s nothing wrong with smoking seeded pot, once you remove the seeds, but it’s also, assuredly, less than ideal, because all of the unique compounds in cannabis, collectively known as cannabinoids— including the ones that get you high and help prevent Alzheimer’s—are predominantly found in the trichomes. And once a formerly virginal female comes in contact with the wind- blown pollen of a male plant, she immediately curtails cannabinoid production in favor of literally “going to seed.”


Harvest and Curing

As a female cannabis flower matures, its trichomes change color, starting off clear, turning a translucent milky white, and finally darkening to amber. Harvesting on the early side (translucent trichomes) can limit overall...