Now when I say blow up my house, I actually mean something more along the lines of this.

Blazin'

In the early 2,000's, if you were getting high quality hydro in the city I called home, you were probably buying weed that I either grew, or knew the grower of. It was an insane period of my life that I will never forget. Outlaw brotherhood with a crew of people that were good-hearted and highly dependable mixed with financial freedom that up until that point I never had, and seldom have experienced since. We played more in general, during that 5-6 year period and life was less business-like. Of course when you are younger, you have a tendency to be reckless and arrogant, which we certainly were at times. We were outside the system, few of us had real 9/5's, and we were making bank. We were just perpetual students or had 'started' businesses to turn hard cash into real assets. Our core crew of guys never went out of our way to hurt anyone, we just wanted to have fun, party, and be left alone to do our thing. Only from a handful of sources in my life have I ever experienced the bond and support that I had during those early days of growing. And people wanted our product.

The Mentor

One of my long time friends, someone I had known since grade school, revealed his small grow operation to me one afternoon in a small crawl space he had. Maybe a dozen plants in a small 3'x4' flood table and a 600 watt bulb. This was not the first time I had seen a grow operation. That being while I happened to be tripping balls and visiting the basement of my college baseball team captain. This was a revelation at the scale of it, and how easy closet cannabis really was. Ed Rosenthal really knew what he was on about I guess . Well that sent the wheels to spin and soon most of us were doing something similar. Still working my way through college, and taken a pretty large chunk of time off to travel, fuck around, marry a crazy foreigner, divorce said foreigner, and generally waste time, I had plenty of opportunities for cheap rent, and lots of closet space. Soon we were renting houses, friends were buying houses, and the boom was on.

The Dungeon

I schlepped coffee at a busy university coffee house on the side early on, while still finishing classes. It was a great place to distribute from. Rich college kids with drug appetites that don't quit. It was in an old 50's type side-by-side business building which had a massive interconnected basement with the place next door. The owner of said place next door, who worked more hours then anyone I have ever met (poor guy), was a huge stoner and would take frequent breaks down in this massive dungeon of a basement. You could literally get away with anything down there. Drink, smoke, coke, sex, people have thought of everything. At this particular rendezvous, I was lamenting the fact we hadn't found a really killer strain to use, now that we had solidified our growing technique. He told me about an amazing bud he had gotten his hands on and had managed to find a small collection of seeds, maybe a dozen or so. He would hook me up next time he saw me. If you had a dollar for every time...... Anyways, I filed it away and thought not much more on it. The next week he produced the seeds to my gratitude, called it 'grapefruit,' and that was that.

The Struggle

Well, anyone who has started seeds knows how absolutely fragile they are. Even the slightest misstep, too much water or not enough, and it's over. Fungus, mold, cats! I ended up with around 6 females, and of those two turned out to be extremely viable. The one female was incredibly vigorous, grew like nothing we had seen, and looked absolutely magnificent. This was really before the days of shatter and the extracts that are so popular now, and high quality bud was at a premium as this was before the recent boom in cannabis related industries. We were telling my mentor about it, prior to him getting a sample, and he thought we were full of it. They were blown away, and the smoke was as potent as anything.

The Day Wrecker

So now we got the strain and we are ready to go, and my friend comes back from Amsterdam with a bunch of seed packets and says, 'Here. Take this one.' The Baldy. The day wrecker. A Northern Lights #4 crossed with a good ole' Big Bud. And the result was unbelievable. Using an 11hr light/13hr dark light cycle, Baldy finished in a legitimate 6 weeks. The genetic mingling must have been absolutely perfect because it not only was a prolific producer like you would expect with a Big Bud predecessor, but the THC content had to be 25-28%. Not to mention, the cannibinoid content was just so, that you literally were only capable of playing video games, eating pizza, and maybe having sex. Thus, day wrecker. I sold to many people that told me they preferred not to smoke the Baldy for that reason.

Clone Army

Soon, everyone was up to speed and cycling both Grapefruit and Baldy, and we were absolutely swimming in ganja. Rolling jays by the score, at the time I think Ghost Recon had become the rage, heading to shows, blazing everywhere we went. Renovating an old school bus we took some time off and drove down to Cabo. Went on a couple fishing trips, and literally lived off of fish taco's on the beach for a month. Guys had started expanding into real estate more, trying to blow up additional houses. We had a guy in the periphery of our group, who ran in a familiar circle, that most of us did a little business with. Everyone knew what he was capable of. He was a big baller and he started bank-rolling multiple houses for his crew, using his girlfriend who was a mortgage agent at the time. They were setting up these fake mortgages, using fake information, she was clearing everything, and he would set up a grow house. Mortgage fraud, plain and simple. He may have had 20 properties like this, and we were supplying a clone army for his entire operation, or at least trying to. I think a lot of the clones died, because his friends weren't very experienced and clones are touchy as hell. I would say, at the peak of production there may have been 30 houses producing the same strain of weed

The Weakest Link

Of course every chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and it was pretty obvious in this case. Big baller was using mules to smuggle cocaine from Cali and one of his guys got pinched. Well you all know how that goes. Mortgage girl was caught up in the aftermath as they poured through the finances. She's got a paid vacation. Somewhere behind the scenes, deals were made between various collectives, and suddenly my mentor becomes a person of interest. Nobody really knows how long they watched, but it had to have been for months at least. They managed to get mentorman and his business partner, as well as two of our close associates at three different properties, all at the same time. I remember sitting at another friends place, and he received this phone call. It was very short, and I could tell immediately the change in his demeanor. I pressed him what it was all about. He proceeded to tell me in a series of disjointed stutters and explanations. I got the picture pretty quickly. As I left his house, I couldn't help think I might not see him for some time.

A Whirlwind

I remember barging into my business partners room, and giving him the rundown. Then we fled down stairs to get started. At this point we had been providing clones for several people, and keeping ourselves supplied as well. We had 100's of plants in various stages of growth. It was the garbage heap for the vast majority, and a small collection with bud we could potentially salvage we stuffed in a black garbage bag to deal with later. We had the entire house rewired when it had first been purchased, by an electrician friend who was well trusted. We had professional level timer boxes put in, extra ampage on the box itself, and generally made it capable of running any electronic device at once you could think of. All of this had to be ripped out. Any trace of what we were doing had to be ripped out. In our minds the cops were literally minutes away. Who the fuck knew? It was absolutely futile what we were doing. I remember literally cackling like a mad man as I was stuffing electronic wiring and circuits, rock wool blocks, and plants alike into massive garbage bags. What the hell were we going to do? It was mad, and so surreal. You knew this was going to happen at some point.

The Aftermath

Well, the cops didn't show up that night. Or the next. In fact, it seems they barely knew we existed, and we were never on their radar. For the 5-6 years that we had been growing it had been a vitally important experiment for myself. The proof that survival outside the system was not only possible, but sets you free. Now more than ever I need to harness the power of this experience and post through my handle @transcendfinance
They had been after my mentor friend the entire time on a tip from a former friend who was trying to lighten his sentence by giving people up. In a fun turn of karma, my mentor gave them a piece of information about the checkered past of our former associate which put him away for good. All told, only mentorman and his partner served any time. At most they spent six hours in jail. They were never charged with a crime. Mentorman had only about a dozen large flowering plants at the residence that he legally owned. He said the cops had come expecting 1000's according to the tip off and were clearly pissed about it. $10,000's of man hours for 12 cannabis plants. His business partner had 700-800 plants spread across two properties. No charges. There had been a few pieces of mail with our address at one of their residences but they had used some misdirection to protect the information contained therein.

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