I love my job. I grow cannabis for a living. Six days a week, I wake up at 4:30 in the morning, have a cup of coffee, and go to work. I work in full sunlight every day. I grow legendary strains like White Widow and Northern Lights as well as the latest flavors like the Skywalker OG and Kosher Kush. I grow plants that will not grow taller than three feet and refuse to provide more than 220g of flowers per square meter of light. I grow monsters like the Blue Dream that can get ten feet tall and produce 1200g per square meter of light. I fight pests using organic methods and I make our hash by hand using bubble bags, ice, and spring water. If you would have told me that I would smoking flowers of this quality three years ago, doing this work, I would have told you that you were crazy. I built and remodelled million dollar houses for a living and would have kept doing it except for the banksters.
From 1988 until 2008, I built houses. I started as a framer, moved up to trim carpenter, and became a general contractor in 1996. I was in construction during the first Bush recession, but managed to survive. I did quality work and quality work was still in demand. The crash that we felt during the summer of 2008 and was made in explicit in the Spring of 2009 wasn't like 1990. I made a solid six figure income in 2007, I made $71,000 in 2008 and I had made $22,000 dollars by July of 2009. My career as a GC looked like it was over. July 4th in 2009 was a bummer of a holiday in 2009.
Lucky for me and hell of a lot of other people in Colorado, Obama and Holder's DOJ were not going to enforce Federal law in states that had medical marijuana laws. The Ogden Memo was issued in October of 2009. I saw my first real work of 2009 in November and December building Marijuana dispensaries. I stayed solvent in 2009 because of the Green Rush and was busy as hell going into 2010. At some point in 2010 the number of marijuana dispensaries passed the number of Starbuck's in the city of Denver. The federal government gave the medical marijuana industry the green light
I knew the Construction boom caused by this rush to open dispensaries would end, so I tried my hand at growing weed. You could get $3600 a pound in the Spring of 2010, and I had a 1,000 square foot unfinished basement. I thought I could have eight flowering lights. If I could grow eight pounds per crop, and I could grow five crops a year, I should be able to gross $144,000 a year. After expenses, I could still have a six figure income. I built out my basement and had plants growing February 2nd.
Everybody else that was unemployed and was willing to convert part of their house to a marijuana grow did it. Supplement your income, replace a lost job, or just for your own head, a lot of people either started growing or started growing more weed in their house during the Fall of 2009 and the Spring of 2010.
We became the vendors or the notorious "guy with a backpack." We would take our wares around to the different dispensaries selling our crops. Getting onto a shelf could take several visits. I felt like a route salesman. My first crop came down May 10th. I pulled down 9 pounds of White Rhino. It was all sold by June 5th for an average of $3,750 a pound, and I would have been a very happy man except it looked like this was the last crop I was going to be able to sell to dispensaries.
The Colorado legislature passed HB1284 and the vendors were now caregivers and the dispensaries need to start growing their own marijuana. Everybody growing in their basement was screwed. Everybody that had gone large with a warehouse either tried to open a dispensary by July 1, 2010 or partner with a dispensary. HB1284 gave local jurisdictions the ability to ban dispensaries and commercial grows, so if you were in Jefferson County or the City of Longmont you were going to be screwed. The Green Rush just met the regulators - The Medical Marijuana Enforcement Division of the Colorado Department of Revenue was born.
My first crop was well received, and I had been working hard to broaden my list of strains, so I managed to land a job with a dispensary when HB1284 passed. I built out the grow the way I wanted it. Sealed environment with CO2 burners, 48 lamps in eight suites, enough HVAC to keep everything at 78 degrees even when the days were hitting a 100 outside.
We were operational by August, and brought down 56lbs by the middle of December. It was a very happy new year. The dispensary was doing $4200 a day on average. Wholesale was going for $3200-$3,600 a pound and our crew of twelve employees were stoked. Everybody had health insurance, we were making $27,000 to $90,000 a year and 2011 looked to be a banner year. The regulations were tough, but everybody had previous business experience so dealing with the City and the State was a pain in the ass, but not much worse than doing a complicated real estate transaction or running a medical device manufacturer.
We're doing well at this point as a business. Wholesale prices have dropped to $2,600 a pound and retail prices are down to $200 an ounce, but we are still managing to do $3,500 a day. We now have seventeen employees and wanted to add another garden and open another dispensary.
Except Holder's DOJ has decided that the Ogden Memo doesn't mean what the Colorado Legislature, 8,000 people in the Colorado MMJ industry or what Holder told Jared Polis during hearings in Washington, D.C in 2010. Listen to Holder's bullshit during hearings last month.
The feds have decided that Colorado doesn't have a handle on the MMJ industry. Doesn't matter that we are the single most regulated industry in Colorado; the Federal government knows better and our US Attorney is just getting started. We have over 800 dispensaries in Colorado with anywhere from 3 to 50 employees each. Obama and Holder say one thing and do another, and 8,000 odd workers are wondering what they will be doing to make ends meet at the end of 2012.