Big Weed by Christian Hageseth Page B

painful knowledge that we had just paid six figures to acquire.
    I had put the word out that I was looking for a new grower. Every time I met a new one, I was more than aware that I was no longer approaching our conversation as a neophyte. I was asking better questions.
    Can you show a sample of your product?
    What kind of system do you use for your grow?
    What brands of equipment do you like, and why?
    What kind of system would you recommend for me, a guy who’s licensed to grow nearly two thousand plants?
    What’s your ideal system going to cost me?
    How long will it take you to get the system optimized and operating at 100 percent?
    The last question was obviously critical. Our business was running on fumes, and not the kind our customers enjoyed inhaling. Mr. Pink and I had had our heart-to-heart talk, and it wasn’t looking good. He had a lot riding on this business, well beyond the money he’d sunk into it. He was a lifelong Coloradan and was personal friends with our two landlords. If we couldn’t pay our rent, it would be a colossal embarrassment for him.
    Yet he didn’t once flinch from the awful task ahead of him. He sucked it up. He phoned each of those friends in turn and asked to sit and talk about our problem. One option, clearly, was to liquidate our meager assets and turn over whatever we earned to our landlords. But that option meant we were walking away from the cannabis industry for good. The other option was convincing them to stick with us until we hit upon a better harvest and made good on our lease.
    â€œHow can we get the numbers up?” Mr. Pink asked.
    I’d been talking with a couple of promising growers, Brandon and Kim, whom I’d met through the dispensaries I sold to. Some of those dispensaries also bought regularly from Brandon and Kim. They were not a couple, by the way, just two individuals who had independently earned a reputation for good work. What I’d seen of their product was top-notch, but to get it, we needed reliable, state-of-the-art equipment that was light-years more sophisticated than the jerry-rigged budget system Adam and I had cobbled together.
    Raising marijuana was now looking like an expensive, complex enterprise. But if you set aside a lot of the bullshit and looked at theproblem as simply as possible, it boiled down to an equation anyone could understand:
    More lights = More pounds
    More pounds = More money
    I could buy more lights piecemeal, the way Adam and I were doing, or we could hire some contractors to install lighting and an air handling system, but that would require an efficient design. We’d need the services of a commercial architect, and we’d need to pull numerous permits from the city.
    â€œHow much are we talking?” Mr. Pink asked.
    â€œHalf a million to do it right.”
    Mr. Pink could have said no. He could have thrown me out of his house. He could have told me he had already talked to our landlords, we’re liquidating everything, we are getting out from under this debacle so I can save some face with my friends.
    Instead, he said, “If you can get that much money elsewhere, I’m still in.”
    I’d been talking to contractors to get a feel for the cost of the renovations. One of them happened to mention some friends out in Los Angeles—a retired athlete and a one-time actor—who were interested in investing in some businesses, particularly in the hot new cannabis market.
    The longer I am in this business, the more I realize that you can never predict who is going to turn out to be a diehard marijuana fan. I have met highly successful attorneys and physicians who treat their chronic pain or daily stress by smoking marijuana. I once met an elderly woman—an insanely wealthy individual from a highborn family—who confided in me that she smoked marijuana every day. Many actors and athletes prefer marijuana over alcohol, possibly because alcohol can mean hangovers and