Big Weed by Christian Hageseth

advice.
    I took Adam aside one day and tried to make sure he understood how serious our predicament was. “We have to hit our numbers next time,” I said, “or we can’t pay our rent. Do you get that? We’re not fucking around anymore. It has to come in high.”
    I didn’t think it was unreasonable to shoot for seven pounds of product. Seven pounds would put us at $28,000, enough to put us ahead for three months. And the harvest after that would be gravy. We just needed to turn it around—fast.
    â€œIt’s not fair that you’re putting all this pressure on me,” Adam said. “You should have known. You can’t expect this of me. I told you when we started that it would take time to dial this in, man.”
    â€œNo,” I said. “No, you didn’t say it takes time to dial in. You said we would be up and running, no problem.”
    I could sense that we had a fundamental problem, but I was not able to nail down exactly what it was. But one day, when I ran into Adam building light hangers out of PVC pipe and rope, I asked why he didn’t just go to the grow store downtown and buy some professional-grade brackets to hang our lights.
    â€œCan’t do it,” he said, shaking his head. “When they see you come in to buy all that stuff for lights, they know you’re growing weed. They copy down your license plate number and give it to the cops.”
    Oh shit, I thought. I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
    I’m sure he believed every word of what he was saying, but all I heard was the old marijuana paranoia. The same sort of fears thatI’d heard from the naysayers among my family and friends ever since I’d embarked on this adventure. People still couldn’t get it into their heads that marijuana was legal now. We had a license. We were legit. There was no longer any reason to fear walking into a gardening center and buying tons of lights. That’s what you do when you grow legal marijuana.
    But there, in a nutshell, I had seen Adam’s biggest problem.
    At heart he was a basement grower who loved marijuana. He knew exactly how to grow six to ten plants. He had no clue how to grow two thousand.
    He may have spent fifteen years growing weed, but he’d been running scared the whole time. He’d done it under the cover of darkness, policing his every move so that whatever behavior he revealed to the outside world did not betray his secret. Never in a million years would he install a state-of-the-art light system by hiring an electrician. No, he’d do it himself, just to stay under the radar. He was a DIY guy at heart. It was all he knew, and he had trouble thinking big.
    Once I understood where he was coming from, I saw it everywhere. It was etched into every piece of equipment in our supply chain.
    In the world of business, legal business, you didn’t always start out big, but you started out boldly. You had to. You needed big profits as soon as possible, or your venture was doomed.
    In the world of the illegal grower, staying small was how you survived. You grew enough for yourself, your friends . . . and that’s it. Maybe if you were really bold, you grew a little to sell. But when that happened, it was scary. Growing was bad enough; that one prospective grower I’d interviewed had gotten eight years in prison for that felony alone. Growing and selling was enough to bring The Man down on your head with a vengeance.
    Wow. Here I was, planning to take the medical marijuana market in Denver by storm and the whole time it was as if I were drivinginto my future in a gas-guzzling car with an eight-track tape on the stereo.
    So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised the day Adam called me to give me the news on our third harvest. I was driving in the car with my wife.
    â€œYes?” I said expectantly.
    â€œFour pounds,” I heard him say.
    â€œShit,” I said. “You know what that means,