The Medical Marijuana Ghost of Christmas Past
When money matters more than marijuana... 
Bart is a money grower, a hydroponics cash cropper. Had a 15,000-watt sealed grow room wrapped up tight, like a Christmas present. No air exchange, finely balanced ratios of hydroponics nutrients, C02, oxygen and temperature. A medical hydroponics marijuana garden worthy of being a NASA operation on a spaceship to Mars.
"It's all about the green, homie, going right into my bank account," he'd say, surveying the endless cycle of cloning, ripening and harvesting that fueled his playboy lifestyle.
Greedy was too mild a word to describe Bart. He worshiped money and what it could buy him. But I'll give him this much: he grows only for individual medical hydroponics marijuana patients, and dispensaries. His buds are clean, sweet and perfectly trimmed. He has them lab-tested before he sells them. He delivers on time and never second best. He has pride in his work.
Bart was up front that selling marijuana to make a pile of money was his only motivation. He made fun of me when I said he was also helping sick and dying people.
"Yeah right, I'm sure all those 18-year-olds with medical cards are sick and dying," he scoffed. "They just want to get high. It's all about getting high and making money and living large."
The man read GQ, Esquire and all the other men's magazines, and used his medical marijuana profits to buy himself the lifestyle he saw in the fancy ads. Toys galore. A McMansion home on the shore of a lake. Flashy ladies, dripping with sex, a lot of them in the exotic "dance" business, whose names he couldn't remember the morning after. Suits tailored in Hong Kong that he wore only once.
A very bright guy, organized and ruthlessly professional, but hardened like the steel barrels of the guns he owned, determined to live the good life, using his medical marijuana grow op to do it.
When a patient or dispensary owner mentioned that his prices were at the highest end of the scale, when the owner of one of California's biggest dispensaries asked if he'd donate some medicine for low-income patients, Bart laughed at them, insulted them, called them socialists, communists, liberals, moochers.
"This is a capitalist world," he'd say. "Nobody's giving me electricity, bulbs, or ballasts. You want to give the dank away, you want to feed the world with weed, you do it, but pay me first."
Bart was riding high until, a little too stoned and expecting the knock knock of a hot woman he'd met at a strip club who had slept with him several times at his home, he flung open his door to find no woman...
Instead, three of the woman's male associates pushed their way into his house, tied him up, and pistol-whipped him until he provided the combination to his safe.
They seemed to have known just when to hit. Bart had taken down 40 plants three weeks earlier. The cured buds were lab-tested, vacuum-sealed, ready for delivery.
They smacked his skull with cold hard metal one more time as they left the house. When he woke up, his door was wide open, the police were arriving out front, and his head felt like a lead balloon.
Today, he winces when he estimates how much money it cost him in lost cash, buds and legal fees. He pled to a cultivation felony, paid a huge fine, escaped prison time, sold most of his toys, and moved 400 miles away, telling nobody where he was going.
"It was probably $170,000 or so all in," he muses. "They took my life and turned it upside down and shook all the money out of my pockets."
When Bart landed right-side up, he was in a different town, with a smaller grow room, and permanent physical pain.
He began to see medical marijuana in a new light. It worked for him better than the doctor's pills.
When he gets stoned, he sometimes remembers the medical hydroponics marijuana robbery and his former cash crop life, and he sees the hidden hand of karma and fate in all that happened.
Funny thing is, people say Bart isn't the same man anymore. Every year at Christmas, he goes to medical marijuana dispensaries where people with cancer, HIV, stroke, multiple sclerosis and other conditions spend away their disability checks or pennies gathered from panhandling.
These folks buy the lowest-priced medicine they can find. They're the people you see on the fringes of the medical marijuana world. The indigent, homeless, poor, fading away, helpless. They aren't Cheech and Chong stoners. They need their medical marijuana, but it costs too damn much.
Calling himself Sativa Claus or Old Saint Indica, and without identifying himself or saying why he does it, he hands these poor souls ounces of the stickiest bud they've ever seen, says "Merry Christmas," and heads for the exits. Bart told me he hands out three pounds or more during his holiday giving.
"People who are members of a church give a tithe, a set donation," he explains. "Marijuana is my church. This is my tithe, how I give back for what has been given to me."
The grateful, surprised patients sit laughing and beaming afterwards, passing joints and pipes, feeling warm and happy for the first time in a long time, wondering who was that guy that handed us this fine medical marijuana.
Only a few of us know he used to be only a money grower, a cash cropper, with a medical marijuana money machine, and not yet enough heart.
Daniel Dharma has a master's degree that combined religious studies, neuropsychology and counseling therapy. He has spent many years studying the use of medical marijuana as a tool for self-improvement, spiritual enhancement, and overall health. Look for his articles that explore the inner terrain of medical marijuana use and gardening.
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Thursday, 08 December 2011
