[wordup] Forbes: Inside Dope

[Adam Shand]

What's interesting about this is not what it's saying but whose saying 
it.  Especially odd is the bit at the end which talks about how to grow 
good dope.  It would seem that Forbes, or at least a writer and an 
editor at Forbes, is giving their tacit approval.

Adam.

Via: http://www.csof.net/node.php?id=729
From: http://www.forbes.com/maserati/146.html

On The Cover/Top Stories
Inside Dope
Quentin Hardy, 11.10.03

In the quiet countryside just outside Vancouver, B.C. an ambitious 
young entrepreneur surveys a blindingly bright room filled with lovely 
plants--dozens of stalks of high-power marijuana. Almost ready for 
harvest, they hold threadlike, resin-frosted pot flowers, 
rust-and-white "buds" thickening in a base of green-and-purple leaves. 
The room reeks of citrus and menthol, a drug-rich musk lingering on 
fingertips and clothes.

"There's no way I won't make a million dollars," says the entrepreneur, 
David (one-name sources throughout this story are pseudonymous). He 
runs several other sites like this one, reaping upwards of $80,000 in a 
ten-week cycle. Says he: "Even if they bust me for one, I'm covered."

So, it seems, is much of Canada--covered with thousands of small, 
high-tech marijuana "grows," as the indoor farms are known. Small-time 
marijuana growing is already a big business in Canada. It is likely to 
get bigger, despite all the efforts of the antidrug crowd in 
Washington, D.C. On Oct. 14 the U.S. Supreme Court, by refusing to 
disturb an appeals court ruling, gave its stamp of approval to doctors 
who want to recommend weed to ease their patients' pain or nausea. In 
the U.S. nine states have enacted laws permitting marijuana use by 
people with cancer, AIDS and other wasting diseases. The Canadians are 
even more cannabis-tolerant; although they have not legalized the drug, 
they are loath to stomp out the growers. This illicit industry has 
emerged as Canada's most valuable agricultural product--bigger than 
wheat, cattle or timber.

Canadian dope, boosted by custom nutrients, high-intensity metal halide 
lights and 20 years of breeding, is five times as potent as what 
America smoked in the 1970s. With prices reaching $2,700 a pound 
wholesale, the trade takes in somewhere between $4 billion (in U.S. 
dollars) nationwide and $7 billion just in the province of British 
Columbia, depending on which side of the law you believe.

In the U.S. the never-ending war on drugs endures, to modest 
discernible effect. In a largely symbolic act the U.S. Justice 
Department has just imprisoned an icon of the pot-happy 1970s--Tommy 
Chong of the old Cheech & Chong comedy team--for selling bongs on the 
Internet (see box, p. 154). But in Canada the trade in pot, or cannabis 
(as many Canadians call it), is an almost welcome offset at a time when 
British Columbia's economy is in the doldrums.

Tourism here is down, and thousands of jobs got axed when the U.S. 
slapped tariffs on exports of softwood and then banned Canadian beef 
after an outbreak of mad cow disease. The marijuana business, by 
contrast, is thriving, not least because Canada shares a thinly guarded 
5,000-mile border with the U.S., a big market. Ultimately much of the 
revenue flows into the coffers of hundreds of legitimate businesses 
selling supplies, electricity and everything else to the growers and 
smugglers.

And who are these growers? Not a small coterie of drug lords who could 
be decimated with a few well-targeted prosecutions, but an army of 
ordinary folks. "I know at least a hundred [of them], 20 years old to 
70," says Robert Smith, who isn't part of the trade but indirectly 
profits from it at the furniture store he owns in Grand Forks, B.C., 
110 miles north of Spokane, Wash. "Of the money coming through my door, 
15% to 20% comes from cannabis--we'd be on welfare without it."

Mexico remains the biggest supplier of foreign pot for U.S. consumers, 
growing valleys of lower-grade grass and sending it north; some 500 
tons of pot were seized at the Mexican border in 2001, more than 100 
times the volume confiscated at the Canadian boundary. California is a 
prodigious supplier, as well. But Canada's industry is notable for its 
dispersion. The scattered and all but undetectable production may well 
herald a modus operandi for other regions.

Small growers like David bring in $900 a pound at the low end, with net 
margins of 55% to 90%, depending on quality, depreciation and labor 
costs. They produce half a pound to 30 pounds every ten weeks, selling 
their product to local users or peddling it to "accumulators," who then 
smuggle it over the border or sell it up the chain to larger brokers. 
Accumulators and brokers typically add $80 a pound to the cost, as do 
the high-volume smugglers who buy from them. Smugglers returning money 
to Canada for other dealers skim a 2% laundering fee.

"The first time somebody gives you a bag of money so heavy that you 
can't lift it, it's surreal. Pretty soon, it's just dirty paper," says 
Jeff, who recently retired from smuggling up to a ton of weed a week.

Building The Perfect Bud

Want dope? Plant seeds. Want high-end dope? Pay attention.

LIGHTS: With 1,000-watt metal halide lights first blasting clones for 
24 hours a day, followed by 12-hour intervals of dark to force budding, 
a half-year grow cycle is cut to ten weeks.

GENETICS: Breeding stock is critical to top-quality pot. Branches of 
the best female plants are cut and potted. The genetically identical 
offspring are also cloned.

AIR: Temperatures in the 70s. Added carbon dioxide boosts production, 
quality.

DIRT: Or hydroponics or aeroponics. Nitrogen for growth, phosphorous 
and potassium for resinous flowers. Beneficial fungi and bacteria to 
boost THC.

Sources: Ed Rosenthal; Advanced Nutrients.