Thanks for tuning into the podcast everyone.
This week's episode is brought to you by the famous Area 420.
All summer long they will be holding events at the infamous train cars, starting off on
May 26 with the summer of savings kickoff barbecue.
There will be various vendors on the site, free food and beer, and best of all, the networking
available.
All of this is going to be happening on May 26, 3pm to 7pm in Moffett, Colorado at Area
420.
Then, on June 10th from 10am to 4pm in the San Luis Valley, Moffett, Colorado, there's
going to be a seed and genetics fair.
This will be a great time to get your last minute genetics to put outdoors for the season
right before Father's Day.
There are still spaces available for vendors and food trucks.
For more information, there will be links in the description for vendor information.
Make sure to select BrainStrap as your event contact and tell him you heard everything
on Reefer the Reefer with Little Farmer.
So welcome back, welcome back to the podcast everyone.
Reefer the Reefer with your host Little Farmer.
I'm here with Andre Grossman.
He is one of the men behind the scenes from back in the day.
Growing up, I would go to the grocery store, or actually where I grew up, we would not
even find the magazine High Times where I grew up because it was something that they
wouldn't even put on the shelves.
I grew up in the Bible Belt.
So, oh, we can have marijuana on the shelves and magazines.
So even it would be going to places like New York or going to bigger cities or sometimes
the airport, you would see High Times magazine and you would see some of the prettiest pictures
and some centerfolds and people hanging them up.
Andre is one of the men behind a lot of these pictures that a lot of people don't know about.
It's kind of hard to find information about him on the internet.
He's not too out there on the social media.
So he's kind of a hard man to get and kind of a unheard hero of the photography business
when it comes to cannabis.
And I'm highly excited to have you on the show.
We met down at Area 420 here in Colorado.
You were down there taking some pictures and Matt Brainstrap hooked us up and introduced
us and then I think I ran into you in Denver also at a couple of get togethers.
And then we were down at Area 420 and Matt had you on his show and I helped you get all
set up and heard you talking with Kyle Cushman and telling some of the stories.
And I asked if you'd be on the show and you said yes and I'm highly excited to hear some
of these stories and how you got to where you were and where you're at now.
We talked a little bit and you told me how you got into cannabis and how you grew up
in East Germany and you moved to West Germany before the wall was put up and then you graduated
from high school and then I'll kind of let you go to the rest of it here.
But how did you get into cannabis and when was the first time that you actually smoked
it and were like, oh, this is for me.
Okay.
Hi everybody.
Thanks for having me on your show.
And yeah, let's start from the beginning.
I'm born in 1955 in what used to be then East Germany, but I was only one year old when
I already moved with the family to the West of Germany.
So I grew up in the capitalist, well-to-do West.
And there was like obviously some beer drinking during growing up, but there wasn't much smoking
at this time.
And I think I only saw my first tiny dice sized piece of hashish when I was 17 years
old at school.
Somebody had it.
Look, what is this?
In the locker room and he says like, okay, next weekend we try to smoke some of it and
had the teenage nonstop giggle experience that sort of then made it like a priced thing
to do that with some friends, have some hash when later I think it took us like a good
two hour drive to go to Amsterdam at night to the dam rack was their big Plaza and center
of town where you just were talking now about late seventies or early seventies even where
you hit up some black guys in Amsterdam for hash.
And you could, I guess, buy a gram for $20, but that's all we would get between five guys
and crammed into a car and then drive back to Germany, go home and then get fucked up
from probably like Moroccan hash or something.
Is that where it came from?
In Europe, like Amsterdam back then it was most likely then from Northern Africa somewhere.
But I spent some time after school.
I graduated from school when I was like 19, then go to Berlin for two years and there
the cannabis use was like there was hash and then there was like very rarely some good
grown bud, but that was really rare.
And I became, I went to photography school in Germany and I was like 26 years old when
I had an opportunity to work for an American photographer in the US and Pennsylvania was
working for this art photographer who made it in sort of a social documentary style of
photography a la Diane Arbus.
So that was an interesting photographer.
And they are like this guy always had like a good high quality often like Thai weed or
something there.
And he said here you can always help yourself, it's right here.
And I got more hooked to smoking good pot there in my later 20s there.
And when I was doing this, I was I was working as a print black and white photographs for
like museum quality type.
Was it a dark room?
Dark room.
Yeah, with the old school black and white.
And clocked many hours and made good money and that was sort of fun.
And living in Pennsylvania was two hours away from New York was an easy safe way to get
to know New York.
Was it Philadelphia you were in?
I was more like we're Easton in Pennsylvania.
It's like I think it's 120 miles straight west off the city.
And then made friends in the city, started a little bit with the photojournalism for
German magazines.
That was pretty okay.
Back then you'd get like $350 for a day rate if you landed a job with a magazine.
And if you had two or three of these a month, then it was you were already kind of set or
something.
And I liked to photograph people.
I like to use a flashlight.
I liked photographing at night in clubs, in social environments and stuff.
You mentioned to me that even in Berlin, you were in the night scene.
You went to the clubs and that's where you got into the cannabis scene.
And Berlin was the night scene.
And they had not a rave scene, but they had a night life that was with music and drugs
and dancing.
And just it was definitely counterculture of Berlin at the time.
Back then, if I understood right.
Yeah, up to then I lived pretty much in more provincial towns.
And then that was the first time in the big city.
My friends, I lived together with a couple of people.
And this was a bit of like the commune style was in back then.
And we had like seven, eight people renting one apartment and have a big communal space.
And there was always sort of drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, but also smoking hashish
mostly.
And that was real common.
How did you guys consume your hashish?
With tobacco?
Chilum.
Or hookahs.
Yeah, mostly like Chilum or some day roll tobacco joints and stuff.
Like me personally, I prefer to have like sometimes poke a needle through a beer felt
and then put a small lump on the needle tip and keep it lighted and then hold a glass
over it and smoke it like that.
That's the first way out of smoke hash.
And so in Berlin it was pretty common.
So being then in New York, age 26, 27, I was going out.
I liked the photograph people, so I go in the nightclubs and somehow a little have very
fair skin.
So too much sun is not my thing, but like at night I liked the clubs, I liked music
and started to make friends in the city that way to meet some musicians.
They didn't mind having pictures and stuff.
So that was kind of a nice thing.
I was into taking the break dancing, do the athletic stuff like spinning on their heads
or have these dance troupes and stuff.
It was kind of nice.
I got nice photography there.
And one night I was taking pictures in a nightclub called the Fun House.
That was a big famous club there in the 80s in Chelsea.
And this guy comes up to me and says, hey, I'm writing a book on these hip hop kids here
and show me your photos and maybe we can use some of the photos in my book.
And that was the start of a pretty long cooperation.
That guy was Steve Hager and he later became the editor in chief of High Times Magazine.
So we did a lot of photography for the magazine through that contact.
I met all the other guys and later one of the things that I always thought was kind
of interesting about the working with the High Times guys is when the High Times, Steve
Hager had this idea to go to Amsterdam where cannabis was viewed more relaxed and not so
super illegal and stuff.
People would have coffee shops where you could buy it, smoke it, and be pretty much not bothered.
And we wanted to start a cannabis cup in Amsterdam and make a competition of who has the best
cannabis, whether this is in a coffee shop or whether this is like imported hash or all
of these things you could get and then meet the local growers, suppliers of the coffee
shops, take pictures there and have competitions who's got the best and stuff and have a big
party event about it with entertainment.
Then I continued working with the High Times guys.
I had like dozens and dozens of covers and centerfolds.
Most of the time they were ideas that were born in the art department at the magazine
and then they call me up and say like, can we come to your studio and set up this and
this photo shoot and stuff.
That was kind of a nice time, met a bunch of people this way.
I did that until about I think 2015.
By 2015 the magazine was like in more serious trouble and they didn't spend money on photographers
anymore.
I had other photography jobs.
I was working in art business doing art reproductions with large format cameras and light systems
and stuff and photograph sometimes 50 artworks in a day or so for use that was used in galleries
or art publications.
But that was a steady job.
I was employed and had health insurance and social security and stuff.
But that also lasted until more recently now I'm like basically retired, moved out of New
York in 2020.
Now I live for three years here in Colorado.
It's a very nice Colorado, the state of cannabis legalization since 2012.
I met some good old friends here again from the back days in Amsterdam of the Adam Dunn
from the Adam Dunn Show.
Introduced me to some of his friends here in the Colorado cannabis scene.
I met many growers from the area 420 where I also met a little farmer here and he invited
me to come to his place now for the first time.
I'm in the central of Rocky Mountains.
There's snow capped.
It's beautiful.
I've never seen it.
I'm like pretty much in awe.
It's gorgeous here in the old Western Front.
The old gold mining town.
We're actually in the highest incorporated town in North America.
We're at 10,500 feet here.
It is still cool and cold at night in the snow falls.
It's a bunch of moose and bears.
So hopefully we'll keep keeping our eye out.
We used to have a dog that would sense the moose and let us know.
So it was easier to know.
But if we catch them out here, it'd be a good opportunity to get some nice scenic outdoor
wildlife shots.
Yeah, very good.
Maybe we go for a moment hiking.
Yeah, we can do that for sure.
I'll put my winter jacket on.
It's cold outside.
We can drive up to the top of the pass.
That's the highest point and see the view from up there.
Yeah, that'd be nice.
Yeah, it's a nice view.
So you had lived in New York during the hip hop days, during the early hip hop days.
Was it the early 80s breakdancing?
More before hip hop.
Yeah, and the graffiti and stuff.
Graffiti, yeah.
Like the break into, like the boogaloo days.
Yeah, I've seen some of your pictures.
It's like the kind of like the punk rock and hip hop singing kind of mixing up with the
club scene there.
Yeah, there's like the garage rock scene a little bit on the Lower East Side.
That's all sort of mixing in and stuff.
That was interesting.
I mean, I would go out almost at least once a week or twice for some kind of event.
And the guy from the High Times magazine had a garage band himself called the Soul Assassins.
And they had, I don't know, three, four guys.
And then sometimes they had a couple of girls dance up front, the band and stuff.
And they made cannabis legalization as sort of like a theme of their songs and stuff.
And their connection to High Times was kind of benefited from that.
The art director would draw album covers for them.
And so then me as a photographer, they always like to have the photographer around the thing
that makes the flashes and later brings pictures and stuff.
And it was a good time.
And then sometimes I made a little bit money with the High Times.
I mean, it was nice if you had a cover and a centerfold, you'd have $700.
So that was not so bad.
You just had to see that you hit the cover and the centerfolds with good photos.
And we met some growers.
They were growing really good looking plants where the plant wasn't just green, but also
had things like purple pistols and stuff so that we get some exciting contrasting colors
and use like a decent resolution cameras so that they look good when they're blown to
a centerfold.
It flew for a while.
Have you noticed a difference in what the buds look like from when you first started
taking pictures and the plants to now what have the plants done?
Like you said, before it was all green, then there's a little color to it.
Now I know there's all types of colors.
Have you noticed any difference in the pictures?
Yeah, one has to say that the evolution of the marijuana flowers, from the potency and
the looks, it's just a staggering trip.
In particular, the sophisticated indoor growing made the buds look just so amazing.
The photography of cannabis became also really amazing.
A lot of guys are into photography.
A lot of guys are into cannabis.
So there's definitely one can see this that also there's an evolution in the technique
of the photography as well.
It's always been a little difficult to do very close-up photography, macro photography,
microscopic photography.
It becomes a little more technical and it's a bit tedious and stuff, so not everybody
is into this.
But today, I know at least a handful of guys that became really good with the microscopic
photography.
That's, of course, a whole new visual world.
When you see these, if you have a 50 or 100 times magnification of like a trichome gland
with the gland heads on top and stuff, that's like out of this world type of photos come
up real attractive.
If I would put an image that's printed nice as a 16 by 20 nicely framed, I would put that
on the wall at any time in my living room and it'd be looking really, really good and
stuff.
So I'm like, I can like, that's an exciting thing.
I tried some of the close-up photography myself.
It's really difficult to do it really good and stuff.
So I applaud some of the guys that are doing it.
Maybe at some point, I might actually get into shows of my cannabis photography where
it's not just my own photographs, but maybe eventually be able to make an edit of the
best cannabis photographers that I come across and do sort of really attractive shows when
you source from different photographers.
Then you can really hit another level of juicy looking photo shows or something.
There are new social spaces in the cannabis industry with all the dispensary social spaces
developing, coming up that look great with nice art on the walls and stuff.
There's things to come and things to look forward to.
That event space at the area 420 where they have these train cars that are already social
spaces now, they're beautiful by the Sangre de Cristo mountains next to the Hoover hot
springs, the Sand Dunes National Park.
Of course, the area 420 will have their own dispensary there that you can stop right off
the road there and buy cannabis, smoke cannabis products, watch it like ant, see photo shows,
art shows in those train cars.
That'd be really nice.
A little exhibition, like a little gallery.
That'd be nice.
Openings for those things and who knows, new life will come there.
Definitely on a bunch of weekends during the summer, the 420 events on Friday afternoons.
The 420 event in the last couple of weeks ago was really nice.
A lot of people showed up.
Yeah, I was down there.
I think they're having another one here on the 26th of this month.
It's on a Friday, I believe.
Yeah, it's a great place to congregate and have a good time with like-minded individuals
who have a love for cannabis like we do, basically.
You mentioned social media sites out there like Instagram.
You are on Instagram at agros55, I believe.
A-G-R-O-S-55 if anybody wanted to follow you and come on and check some of your pictures
that you have available online.
You like Instagram.
How do you feel about the new cameras making it really easy for anybody like myself to
take really good pictures?
Because I have no experience with cameras, but my phone takes a really nice picture and
everybody is a cannabis photographer now on Instagram.
Yeah, it has two things, of course.
To me, being a competitive guy or something is annoying to a degree.
Okay, what?
I'm not the only one who can take good pictures.
So terrible.
But the other side is that now we get spoiled by an ocean of really good photography because
every time the photos are really good when people go, oh, look at this.
Where's my camera?
I need to take a picture.
That's when a picture is a good picture.
Then now in most cases when that happens, people have their camera with them.
They work very well and stuff.
For example, one thing I really like.
I like storms on oceans and seeing the largest waves possible.
Now when you go on YouTube, you can watch this all day long because every sailor who
gets into a storm off of Northern Russia or something has his camera when his ship breaks
in half or something.
So we get to see all that cool stuff, especially in outdoor fields of marijuana when people
go hang out in the sunrise or in the sunset when it's beautiful, maybe with some fog or
some dew on the plants and take spectacular pictures with their iPhone or something.
That's great.
It just also proves the power of the image, whether it's a photo still image or the moving
image.
This is a very powerful thing and everybody loves it and stuff.
It's just for myself, I wish there were some more paid jobs for myself in photography.
Maybe the cannabis industry is going to regain a foothold in the next couple of years and
find ways how to become more, I don't know, just make some profit for one, pay less taxes.
That would be a good thing and people have a decent wage for decent work.
The way that what's so nice about when you go down to the area 420 there, all these people
are growers, they're very hardworking and real dedicated to the quality of cannabis
first and foremost and that's what ultimately is going to make those guys survive because
we need some good pot.
So you've been around some of the best cannabis in the world, in Amsterdam, high time in New
York.
What are some of the best strains you've ever smoked?
What do you like to smoke now if you had a choice?
I know I heard the story about the strawberry cough and you and Kyle Cushman, he had it
and you cloned it for a long time and you helped distribute it throughout New York for
a while in your younger days and it was a very common staple in your grow.
Was that one of your favorites to consume personally?
Yeah, the strawberry was definitely a nice smoke.
If you grow it carefully organically yourself, give it a good cure, that's a good thing.
But I would also enjoy like really a traditional well-cured hash in the right environment or
something if you're comfy at home or maybe with some friends.
The old school hash, not the newer hash.
Like somebody brings something from Afghanistan or from Morocco or like a really good hash.
But I think then you always get surprised by something new.
You always have to try around, try a little bit.
I like all of these things really.
Sometimes I run out of really good pot and then you say like, hey, I didn't have some
from last year's harvest in this container and check it out.
It's not so bad.
It'll get me over until I meet again one of the guys from 420 years, from area 420.
Give me some good pot.
Maybe Mad Kiss.
But I don't know what comes to mind.
There's always something new also.
Do you find the difference between the newer herb on the scene and the older because everybody's
like, oh yeah, the newer stuff's higher in THC, it's more intoxicating.
Do you feel like the older herb was better or the newer herb or is it not much difference
in your mind?
I wouldn't take a stand easily there.
I remember when in the 90s there was always somebody who had the best pot or something
and I would say that during that time the high quality indoor pot would be the winner
of the day out there.
Sometimes outdoor would then again blow all the indoor stuff away.
There would be cannabis cups in Amsterdam where you would smoke this locally grown stuff
in Amsterdam for a week and then all of a sudden somebody shows up and says, oh, I'm
coming fresh from the steps of Romania and here's some outdoor grown and then blows
everybody away because it just has some kind of different outdoor effect or something and
grown in the wind and the sun.
It's very nice.
Yeah, they say the sun gives it a different terpene profile, different cannabinoid structure
and more sesquiterpenes or something like that.
They're still debating what the difference is but the natural sunlight does produce different
cannabinoids and terpenes which give you different effects which I've noticed like more body
and more full head to toe really nice feelings.
One never stops learning about new findings in growing or consumption.
I was growing myself in New York City until about 2018 until I was so a bit overwhelmed
with the frustrations of growing pot.
There's too much paranoia and stuff and too much expenses with electricity and all the
fancy grow equipment and then prices also came down over the decades.
I remember a time maybe around 2005 where I actually myself got forked over $6,000 in
cash for a pound of Primo strawberry pot.
From there, now you're in Colorado in 2022-23 and you couldn't sell a high quality pot for
$200 or something.
Yes, it's been a big, big change in black market and it all depends on what state you're
in now.
From where I was at, we would ride up to New York, not me personally but I know some people
from New York that would come down to West Virginia to go to school and they would ride
up to New York and buy nickel bags and come back and sell them for $20 each.
Or if they could get a pound, it was really cheap and they could come down and triple
the money pretty easily.
I can imagine the pricing got cheaper in Canada.
I know a lot of New York would get their herb from Canada and when it went illegal there,
it was across the border even quicker and faster and cheaper.
Here it used to be $350 an ounce flat back in 2000.
You couldn't get a break and if you wanted to get a pound, it was like $3,800 almost.
Something like $3,200.
If you can get a pound for $3,200, it was cheap of Primo.
I was in California and had a bunch of outdoor, really great outdoor season probably in 2003
or so and all of that started flooding into here and brought the prices down to about
$2.75 an ounce.
And then I think when I came out here right before they legalized, it was about $1.75
an ounce.
And now there is no black market really.
If you're buying something on black market just because you don't want to go to the dispensary
or you're just wanting to support a friend or something like that, that's basically the
black market here.
The growers I learned from don't grow anymore because it was just supplemental income for
them and some of them didn't even smoke.
Now with the cost of electricity and the price, there's just no black market.
But then that gives a chance for the dispensaries to jack up their prices.
And whenever that happens, little bits of black market will bounce back up.
So there is a fluctuation here and there I've noticed, but it all depends on the taxation.
Like you were talking, it's really, really steep and a lot of these new states.
So even in West Virginia, they got medical and there's a couple dispensaries.
It's not that good quality.
So people are still traveling out of state to go get their herb for a cheaper price with
better quality.
And it's got to be some kind of medium across the country here soon.
Hopefully that'll balance it out and got to be a point where the growers can actually
make money.
And it's around $1,200 a pound would be something that growers could sell their herb for and
still make a profit here in Colorado or any other state, depending on the taxes.
It's interesting to hear these numbers for sure.
When it becomes more expensive to produce it, then you can sell it for why then do it.
A lot of people gave up.
I don't know.
Sounds like a bad thing, but maybe it's a good thing if it improves the quality somehow
that the people who are into it are also really into the quality of it, which just makes sense.
I think the outdoor, down in area 420, there's going to be more outdoor.
So people complain, oh yeah, these people down there growing all this outdoor, tanking
the market.
And I've heard people say that.
Like there's more outdoors, cheaper for them to do it.
And sometimes we've smoked really good outdoor that blows indoor away.
So sometimes it just doesn't look the prettiest.
It might not have the visual bag appeal, but it's going to have higher contents of certain
things that make you feel better and more therapeutic.
So the outdoor is going to change the scene.
If there's legalization of outdoor grows, it's going to be a whole different bargain
because you can grow more, can be better quality if it's done right, and the prices will be
different.
It's going to make it even cheaper and there won't be any electricity.
Yeah, this is like one of those real interesting things about the area 420 as well, that you
can talk there or visit a grower who is doing the most ultra high tech way of aeroponic
growing of marijuana indoors.
And you can sit next to a guy who 500 yards on a different lot away grows an incredible
outdoor field in the ground right there.
Like I met one guy there who already pulled off like five years of big summer harvest
with like, what do they have sometimes, 2000 plants or something on there.
And they're all like big six foot bushes and stuff or five foot bushes.
And it's like good stuff.
I even saw there at the area 420 buds that top colors, they were grown outdoors.
They look even better than indoors or it looked like indoors because it's just christally
crazy and big thick buds and stuff.
So it was crazy.
You actually came to America when a lot of the American growers were going to Holland
because of the drug war laws and you came to America and lived in New York City during
some of the harshest drug wars laws.
So I got to give you salute.
Thank you for doing that and keeping cannabis alive.
And all the pictures you did, you inspired me when I first got into cannabis and seeing
some of these pictures.
I was, man, just some of them were mouthwatering.
Can't lie.
Thank you.
Now that was a one off interesting thing for myself to have met the high times guys in
order to more or less go back to Europe, go to Amsterdam and see what had realized, what
had developed there.
That was sort of, was a bit of a shock to me actually because I thought like, well,
I have to admit though, I lived in New York in the eighties and in the nineties through
2020, but I have never really gone to the West coast all that much.
I was at some point in the golden triangle up there in Willets when my friend Carl Cushman
was living and growing up there and that was interesting to see.
There was like, let's see, when was that?
I would say around 2008 or something.
I would go visit Oregon, Northern California up there.
That was nice to see, but it was only like a one week visit.
So I never got to like really live there and experience that.
That's a whole other, that's also, well, of course the original scenes were often, were
there, that's where a lot of it started.
It's a lot more laid back out in California, but in that area it could be dangerous too
because all the growth there, especially in the illegal days.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, they have the big stories.
They end up missing and you stumble into somebody's land that you shouldn't have been on, booby
traps or whatever out there.
They had like that serious movie, that's a good movie, Murder Mountain, right?
You know that one?
I've heard of it, but I haven't watched it.
Yeah, yeah, no, there's real stuff going on.
I mean, I've heard of people here back in the 90s and 2000s getting robbed in black
market and it was back in the day when nobody would invite you into their garden.
If you got invited to somebody's garden, they really trusted you.
Yeah, definitely.
And it was just a no-no.
And it was people getting robbed.
And I know you have a story about being in New York that I've heard you tell that not
only was it dangerous watching out for police and being put in jail, but people in a big
city, there's a lot of dangerous people out there.
Would you mind telling the story about what happened to you?
No, not at all.
And right away, I would like to mention that I had to admit to being maybe a bit naive
in my late 20s coming from Europe to the city.
I never had any really bad experiences in my life.
Never got, never saw much guns throughout my growing up.
My time in Germany, only the police had guns in little pouches made of fancy leather and
stuff.
But I knew with the marijuana that you had to be a little bit careful, because of course,
there were fairly strict laws about even just one joint or something could send you in a
bunch of trouble already or something.
At least if you were young and your family found out that you got caught with marijuana
or something, that was like trouble.
In New York, we were always in the US, you always be careful about not having too much
with you if you would carry.
You wouldn't like, if you were carrying an ounce, you'd already kind of be pretty nervous.
And if you were in the subway in New York and you have an ounce of weed in your pocket
and it's not wrapped well and it stinks, it's definitely a cause for concern and stuff.
And then I even never forget at some point where in New York, at some point I met some
people that were more the dealers of pot, people that would bring in large amounts of
Mexican weed in the old days or something.
And meeting these people and it was then sometimes I would go to a grow and the grower would
have a gun in the back of his pants and you'd be like, oh wow, here's people now where you
see.
This can sometimes be dangerous or something for real.
If you kept sticking around and stuff, you heard being in touch with the high times people,
there's always the stories what happened to other people.
People were getting busted for growing and stuff.
And I never had much problems or something until I did eventually move small amounts
of pot for friends because I had access to it.
And then you can sort of hook up friends or something and then you start to make an extra
couple of bucks or something, but it's just friends.
So it's nice because it's with friends.
Yeah, because I never really sold to strangers.
I never sold to make money.
On a street corner or something.
I was one, I would get an ounce and give three quarters to a friend and keep a quarter
for myself at a discounted rate basically so I could smoke cheaper.
That's what I did.
And then one thing that I tried to stay away from in New York, but I did do it at some
point to throw a really big party in my apartment.
I had a nice loft at some point down by the Brooklyn Bridge on Broadway and had just published
a photo of a really nice marijuana plant on the Sunday cover of the New York Times.
I mean the Sunday magazine of the New York Times.
And I threw a party in my apartment where I just told all the friends, hey, tell all
your friends and stuff.
And all of a sudden there were 120 people in my house.
And I thought like, well, that's fine, but one of the uninvited guests that I didn't
know put a gun to my head about two years later because he was a gangster.
He came to my party uninvited, but you hang out at a bar in the East Village and hey,
there's a party at this guy's house.
Let's all go and stuff.
And this guy became like a customer of buying half ounce or ounce bags of pot that I had
access to.
I made sure to always meet people in a neutral environment, in a cafe, in a bar somewhere
on the street, never in my house to show where you live.
But in this one situation, I kind of had started to trust a person and let him in my apartment.
And there then it happened, the guy put a gun to my head and robbed me blind and stuff.
And it was pretty scary event because what he did, he handcuffed me, made me lie down
and poured a bunch of lighter fuel over me and stood there with the lighter and threatened
to set everything on fire if I don't give up all the goods I have, give me all your
drugs and money and stuff.
So I had probably a pound of good pot in the house and five grand in a box somewhere that
I gave up to save my ass and stuff.
He took the shit and left and stuff.
And then I was handcuffed on my back and was there in my house, handcuffed, just gotten
robbed blind.
And it was about 5.30 in the afternoon and my friend Kyle Cushman was the pot editor
at High Times Magazine at the time.
And I called him up and dialed with my chin on one of those old phones.
And he actually came and rescued me, uncuffed me and stuff.
That's crazy.
I know a couple other people that had gotten robbed in the past and one of them actually
got shot.
He was mistaken.
He wasn't even selling.
Like somebody down the hall was selling weed and they got the apartments mixed up and came
into his house.
Lovely.
He had stuff to do with cannabis.
So he found out a couple weeks later that it was meant for the people down the hall.
But yeah, that type of shit makes you want to get out of the game.
And the paranoia of that happening or getting busted is not an easy thing to take.
It's not for the weed cart.
Yeah, yeah.
Definitely.
It was probably six years ago I moved back out here just because I was growing illegally
and it was so paranoid.
I didn't grow it the last year I was there and just got tired of smoking weed.
That wasn't what I grew.
And I got sick too because it was contaminated weed.
I don't know where it came from.
Colorado.
It was all this gorilla glue from Colorado.
It's good.
It looked good.
It smelled okay.
But when I smoked it, it burned my lungs.
That's nasty.
Yeah.
So after smoking three bottles, I ended up coughing a lot and ended up getting bronchitis
and threw the rest of it in the trash.
Yeah.
That's kind of like in a way one of the good things that you have to have if you're serious
about your smoke, you have to have access to good smoke.
Either you grow it yourself, which is probably the best idea because then you really know
what's up with it and it'll probably be the best you get anyways or something.
A lot of people have green thumb and just have to try it.
I started it at some point and I was also never grew even a houseplant in my life.
Even my mother didn't have many houseplants.
There was maybe a cactus in the living room or something.
And I was fairly even paranoid of trying it, of being pretty sure it would be a failure
or something.
But then I did have this contact to the high times guys and stuff.
And I had met some funny growers in California too.
Back then they were the big guys in LA, they have a pretty big indoor grow place with five
to six grow rooms with like four or six thousand watts each room and stuff.
And I never forgot this one guy, he was saying, what do you need a bedroom for in your apartment?
You make that the grow room and then you sleep on the couch or something.
And I came to the point at some point in New York because the rents were always really
expensive.
And if you lived in Manhattan, everything was always a thousand or two thousand or three
thousand dollars and stuff.
There was nothing like two hundred or some dollars.
It was always like up there.
And I was always in the above two thousand dollar range for where I rented and lived.
But I made that choice and never regretted it that you grow indoors for yourself and
your friends.
And it worked really well for me.
I mean, I paid those rents for a long period of time.
Well, I think that's a way it should go now is in caregiverships.
Like as in caregivers, you can have one person for a group of five people and they're designated
to grow for these people and grow as much as they want and distribute and those people
help pay for it.
Maybe help for the place they live, the electric and food, you know, nothing where he's going
to live lavishly, just where he makes a living, pays rent, pay the bills and still support
everybody else with their cannabis.
Yeah, that seems a good idea.
That would be good for the community, you know, because that's a fairly small circle
and they can all know each other and stuff, you know, and say like you grew.
Yeah, that's also one of those things.
I mean, to grow the pot really good, you do.
You have to know your shit.
You know, it's kind of like the more you know, the better.
You never learn.
You never stop learning and stuff.
And because there's natural good ways of growing it without toxic pesticides or anything, you
can be careful that if you do the growing right, you don't have to have pests or critters
or fungus on it and stuff, you know, and that should all be understood by everybody.
You don't want you want clean, high quality pot, not some stuff that's like sprayed with
what you don't know or critters you don't know or anything.
This is you ingest this, you know, it's already bad enough.
So I don't I don't think consuming on accident a couple of little bugs are going to be bad.
You know, the high you'd be highly, highly surprised how many bugs are in our canned
foods and some of our foods.
We don't really realize we're eating them all the time.
Especially in the US, there's a certain amount of organic material that's not the food that's
allowed in there.
They're like the larvas, aphids, little tiny bugs that you can hardly see.
There's some of that on our food and you don't really notice it, especially if you grow in
the garden, you know, you see the little bugs all over the place and some of the outdoors.
I found little bugs on some of the outdoor, you know, they just get caught up in the bug
and the stickiness and they get trapped there.
Some of them will break down actually because of the sun, the UVs, but then some of the
hard shell ones might get like a shell of a locust or a grasshopper or something in
there.
But you can take those and a lot of people with outdoors will dip them and clean them
and spray them down with cleaners.
There's certain types of cleaners, like hydrogen peroxide or good rain mimics hydrogen peroxide.
That's why they say taking a little hydrogen peroxide and put it in water is like rainwater.
It'll help clean it and disinfect it and it's good for it.
It might be a good thing to do for outdoor crops too, especially down here where we're
talking about the San Juan Valley where you've got these strong dust storms.
There's always a bunch of stuff in the air.
If there's a good, safe way to dip them in some cleaning solution and stuff, I've
haven't seen it myself, but I've heard when they do it, the water gets dirty looking pretty
quick.
Yeah, I've seen some people take big plants and a 55 gallon bucket of water and they dip
it in there, maybe with the hydrogen peroxide without just to clean off the residues and
whatever blood on it.
Some of that can fail a test of microbes or contamination, heavy metals.
I've heard that happening.
But yeah, some of the heavy metal testing and some of the other stuff is over regulated
in some states.
I believe some of the natural occurring chemicals, like I believe one of them they look for is
going to be a natural forming of strychnine or something like that, which is also in the
seeds of apples.
So, some people say that eating the seeds of apple is actually good for you and it's
anti-cancerous, but then you could read that it has a strychnine, a form of strychnine
that's naturally occurring in the seed itself.
But that same one can fail a heavy metals test in cannabis plant.
So is that actually going to be bad for you?
Because some people say yes, some people say no.
Like the other arsenic is known to be not good for you, proven it can give you cancer.
I mean, I guess there are definitely things that need to be fine tuned over the legal
period that they find a way of how have a more fair taxation and have like more sense
making control mechanism with all this test that this also is for the benefit of the consumer
and not to enrich some kind of testing business or something.
These things will probably fine tuned.
I think it's good.
We never cared in the old days, really.
We would say, well, we would prefer the pot to be grown in an organic way or something,
that you like meaning avoid as many bad things as possible, which one of them would be to
use just salt fertilizer because it's the easiest way to do it and stuff.
If you adopt and learn an organic way to grow, that's then definitely a better tasting pot
than to just grow with like mineral salts.
The pesticides and herbicides are the worst, especially pesticides, indoor and outdoor.
Outdoor people spray herbicides on them too to keep other herbs down too.
That's terrible.
Those are really what will mess up your lung because a lot of the testing from what I heard
of consuming those and being approved by the governing factors, FDA probably in this case
in America, they tested the consumption on food and people eating it, not inhaling it
on something like in a tobacco form or in a cannabis form.
Those pesticides will go straight to your lungs and are more bioavailable to your body
and make you sicker quicker.
Back to Germany, I think they're about to legalize and be the first one in Europe to
go fully legal, right?
Have you been keeping up on that?
I'm not so entirely sure about Europe, but Spain is another place where there's a big
marijuana scene because they have some kind of lax law situation that some kind of thing
where if you don't know and you don't tell, then it's not a problem or something.
I lived in Spain for 12 years.
When I lived, where I lived, it was on the north coast in the center, it was called Santander
in Cantabria, and it was a little more conservative.
So it wasn't like that.
I worked in a restaurant for a little bit, had an owner who was a national police.
He was part owner and he was there for the interview and I said, oh yeah, what about
marijuana and this and this is illegal?
And he said, well, if you grow it home for yourself, we're not going to bother you.
But if you're out distributing it, then it becomes an offense.
But if you go to the next province over where Bilbao and the Guggenheim is and that border
is France, that's a whole other story.
You can get hash right next to the police department.
The police department, they don't really care.
Barcelona on the east coast, that's a whole other story.
That's where Spanibus was, I believe.
They celebrate Spanibus and have an expo there every year.
I've been there like two nights and didn't have any herb walk down the beach.
It was constantly people giving out flyers for the late night scene.
There's a light show DJ here and this and handing them out.
And as they were handing them out, marijuana, ecstasy.
I was like, oh, there you go.
Funny.
I was like, how much?
Ponto?
Oh yeah, come with me.
I walked down the pathway and he'd reach into the bushes and just pull out a bag.
Here you go.
20 euros.
I'm like, okay.
Back to the hotel.
I know not too much about the German cannabis legalization efforts.
I do know that the efforts have been going on forever and nothing would ever really change
in Germany.
And it was still illegal more recently and stuff.
But I think there's some more movement happening now because they have a more newer government
in Germany now and they promised their voters certain changes in the drug policies.
And they were actually really pressured to get something going.
And I think they did.
They made some new laws regarding the cannabis.
It was really bad.
I mean, it was there with heroin at number one schedule or whatever.
Like here in America.
Yeah.
So you could get in really bad trouble.
Like during the time period when I grew up, like in the 70s or something, man, even for
a small amount, people got in so much trouble and stuff.
And so it was only around in the big cities also.
Yeah.
I have been talking to a couple of people in Spain.
When I got there, where I lived, nobody grew.
There was a couple seed shops.
It was legal to sell seeds, but I couldn't find any green herb.
It was all hash.
Morocco or…
It's only a couple hundred miles away.
Yeah.
So they would have a lot of hash smoking with tobacco, like you said.
They would roll it up with tobacco.
And I didn't like it that way.
So I smoked hash out of a little pipe, a little hash pipe.
It treated me well.
But I met a Canadian who had a Northern Lights mother plant that was probably six foot tall.
And we were cutting 50 clones off at the time, taking them to Belvao.
And they would sell them out of the store and clones.
Like it was nothing.
So we got a little plant.
I got another apartment.
I had another room.
And we put up 12 plants there.
And it was the first time I set up and grew.
And it was pretty cool.
It was liberating to be able to grow your own weed.
And I ended up teaching a couple other people.
So now when I go back, there's at least six or seven growers in that town.
And it's pretty easy to find a herb.
And it's a whole different scene.
And they're saying they're just waiting for Germany to legalize.
And then the rest of Europe will probably follow suit just because a lot of them look
up to Germany as being the economic leader in the European Union and very efficient and
don't do too many idiotic things.
So they follow along with them.
Even though the good weather for growing is more south of the Alps.
If you go like Spain is probably a good place to grow.
They used to grow a lot of tobacco in the south.
It's just a water thing there in the south.
Now more than ever.
And the north where I lived, it rained a lot.
Too much then.
That's a beautiful area though.
I like that northern Spain there.
Both northern Italy in the mountains there.
In Switzerland.
There's going to be some good places to grow some out there.
I guess the climate has always changed since then too.
So I guess they're getting some more warmer weather summers in northern Europe as well
where they have a good two, three month period where they have above 80 or something and
be good for growing.
That's the beautiful thing about cannabis though.
You can have different varieties that grow better in certain areas.
There's a little cooler and a little more sunlight or longer days.
They have varieties that will go good.
That's when it comes to the regional cannabis.
I think in California they're starting to get something region terroir.
I can't remember the saying.
But it's going to be kind of like the grapes grown in southern France.
And they get them certified.
These are grapes from this area locally.
That will be their regional touristic attraction when people travel there.
They could get this regional herb.
And I think maybe the south of France and some of the northern Spain would be really
good places to grow too.
Oh yeah, the south of France for sure definitely.
Like in the Pyrenees.
That's like…
In Germany too.
That's where the Dutch come from or the Amish.
My mother's family came from east of the Rhine before there was east and west Germany.
It was just a Germanic land.
It wasn't actually Germany and Holland and different countries there.
But when her ancestors moved to America.
I think in Europe…
And now they were all farmers and it was just farmland.
In Europe it's still really popular with the hash because they have these old traditional
production places in North Africa where they are still making big production every year.
For outdoor growers in North in Europe, in Spain, I think especially in Spain during
the summer, all the pollen of the Moroccan cannabis plants goes up in the air and lands
in Spain and pollinates everything.
That would be crazy.
This is like something that happens to the dismay of these guys that are growing.
That's an issue in the area of 422 or any place you grow outdoor.
If you have males you've got to cut your males down.
But in these areas where you're talking about, they just throw them out there and let themselves
pollinate each other and probably make the hash with the male.
I don't know in how far in the long run that would be a thing that should be improved
I guess, that they also start to be considered about people in other areas are growing and
don't want that.
I think it was an issue in Oklahoma too.
When they started growing there was a lot of grows and it attracted a lot of bugs.
There was a big influx of aphids.
It created new infestation problems of different types of bugs migrating and having a large
food source.
Yeah, I don't know.
What else would I like to say about growing the pot?
I could do it pretty good, but I think it's a lot of work.
It turned out to be a lot of work.
If you don't put in the work you get these things like problems with pests or any kind
of these problems only always come up if you don't pay attention enough.
The new term is dialed in.
If you've got it dialed in, meaning what you're doing, what to prevent, what to feed
it, the timing, what lights, how to cure it, how to dry it, how to do everything, you've
got to dial it in.
It's really hard to do, especially the larger you go.
Some people would blame me of being against large corporate grows, but I'm not.
I feel that the quality goes down, but if they got it dialed in and know what they're
doing there can be some successful large grows, which that's hard to do.
If you got the right amount of people, the right setup, and like you said, you pay your
workers and they can make a living.
That's hard.
Earlier you mentioned making a living off of it.
A lot of these larger places don't want to pay people that know what they're doing.
They just pay them to follow orders and they run out of green thumbs and just find people
that want to have a green thumb but don't have it and it ends up not turning out as
a good thing.
That's the main thing is it's hard to find a quality grower and pay him well, which gets
back to the fact people want to grow their own because they're not getting respected
or paid enough to grow it for somebody else.
I find it to be a very common problem in the industry right now.
I know this is during the growth process, the more every single plant can be monitored
and supervised or something, you kind of ideally want to look once every day or once every
other day below every single plant to see what's going on if there is nothing weird
going on and stuff.
If you have a thousand plants in a space or something, somebody needs to be at least once
a week bowing down on every plant to kind of look and clean it a little bit.
It's hard for one person to grow 50 plants.
High quality and taking care of everything all the time.
It becomes too much for one person.
I don't know, VF.
That's kind of like what I did when I was growing, I was kind of around maybe use four
lights and have about 50 plants.
Then you have some area where you can keep some other plants so you can have a healthy
cloning practice that can give you some extra income, can help some friends with giving
some of them some clones.
That's all good, but then ultimately I like to have the good growers grow the pot.
Then if you decide to be a grower, you kind of should be doing it 100% and stuff.
Then you'll get somewhere.
It could be tedious and it's like having children or a pet.
It's hard to travel and you can't leave them for too long.
Yeah.
I got mine set up where I only have to see them every three or four days now.
I can't give them all the inspection I'd like all the time.
I have to prevent a lot.
Things happen.
It's not an easy task and I salute everybody out there doing it that can do it well and
keep doing it.
It looks nice in your one space though where the plants have these big containers.
What's that?
30 gallons or something.
50 gallon pot.
Then they have a nice space to spread out in there.
That seems like a good thing to do.
It's easier too for me.
It's called no-till gardening.
It's cheaper.
I'm recycling the dirt only by some new amendments to top dress them and to feed them using some
fertilizers from build a soil and ferment a plant extracts this time around.
It's easier because I don't have to water them every two days.
I can water them more and I come back in four days and it's pushing it every three days.
But if I got five to seven gallon pots, especially cloth pots here at this humidity, every two
days you have to water them.
It's like a real very low humidity area around here.
It really makes such a big difference.
You water something and after two days or something it's like dry or something.
I don't like to automatically irrigate because if you're not here and something happens,
a little tiny hose pops off and they say your whole floor is flooded and then you come in
and you're standing in water.
It reminds me of …
People die that way too.
I've heard of people dying.
Like the floor floods and they touch an electrical cord on that water and that actually electrocutes
them.
It really strikes a chord with the watering systems.
Having lived and grown in apartments for 20 years.
I can't tell you how many times my downstairs neighbors came running up the stairs and pound
on my door.
There's a lot of water coming down.
A lot of water.
One time I live above a pizzeria and I had this like 100 gallon reservoir that needed
to be sometimes refilled out of the other 100 gallon reservoir with the reverse osmosis
water and I would have like a huge pump and a thing and it still would take 10 minutes
to pump 100 gallons.
I would always manage to walk away from that.
When that pump flipped the hose, flipped out of the thing or whatever the fuck happened,
it made like a major flood above this pizzeria.
It was amazing and it was like the pizzeria that was the closest to the first precinct
which is the main police headquarters in Manhattan and New York.
These guys are like the pizza guy said to me, you know how many cops come to like have
pizza here every day?
We're like doing a nice 50 plant garden upstairs and this is the irrigation water that's raining
down on you.
But nothing like this ever happened to me.
I never got busted like that.
We had like close calls though where you somehow find out through the super that there is some
kind of inspection or repair thing or something where they need to have access to your space.
And that's like then of course all of a sudden you try to cram 50 plants into a square yard
or something and make that nobody notice it.
I had that six foot mother plant in the middle of downtown, something there in Spain where
I lived.
Carried in a van.
I had to take a trash bag and put it over the top and carry it down the street.
And then the same thing happened, oh inspection.
And I hurried out, had to take it down, no trash bag, run it down through this huge ass
fuck the cannabis plant.
Like Sunday morning, four o'clock in the morning or something, there's nobody out trying to
get into the van and take it somewhere else.
It was frantic.
And I think every grower has been in that situation, especially if they rented, they
had to take everything down within 24 hours, find another place to put it or store it someplace
for a little bit and then bring it back and put it all back up.
I've done that before, it's not fun.
But hey, Andre, it was a great pleasure having you come on the show and tell everybody some
of these great stories.
I highly salute you for all the pictures and keeping up the legacy when it was during the
Prohibition days in New York City and risking your neck.
Thank you.
Thank you too for having me.
And then yeah, we're having a good situation here on the 26th.
We're going to be hanging out at the area 420 in Moffat and continue the exchange of
cannabis knowledge.
I just actually had a new How to Start Growing Cannabis book with a photo of mine on the
cover in the mail a couple of days ago.
So that's always kind of fun.
Which one was it?
It's on my latest Instagram post.
AGROS 55, by this Canadian publisher.
Green Candy Publishers out of Canada.
They have a Grow 101 book and they have a nice one of those Kyle Cushman purple plants
and that one is a very popular image.
So if you find an unusual looking pot plant, you can really do something with the photo
like that, but it needs to be unusual.
The one picture you're talking about with the purple before.
Then it went like the High Times cover of the year.
Yeah, right.
And they had like a photography special and then it was on the cover of that and it was
on the cover of the Sunday magazine in 1995.
This is a photo where if every photo, one could actually drive like a mid-size family
car or something, but it's just rare that you land like something big and profitable.
But you keep trying and then you diversify.
You do like little things here and there.
You do some of this and some of that.
Maybe we work together and find ways to do it.
This is that sounds interesting with your mushroom drop.
That's the new photography future too with the mushrooms and one of my favorites is the
time lapse and they're so quick.
They'll grow in three, four days and you can take the time lapse instead of taking the
time lapse of a canvas plant like months.
It takes dedication.
That's a good idea actually to do that.
Yeah, and then watch them pop up and eat them in person.
They come back down.
It's really cool to watch.
I like that a lot.
Okay, let's eat some mushrooms.
They are legal here now, so that is actually something that's coming up in the near future
that photography is going to be possible.
There's so many different strains coming out now and they're everywhere.
You can get them pretty much.
They're not for sale anywhere, but if you go to the right place, people are gifting
them all the time.
I got some gifted to me the other day.
If you'd like one, you're more than welcome to have some.
Thank you.
Good show.
Hey, thank you for tuning in everyone.
Tune in again next week and we'll have another special guest.
Thank you.
Peace and love.
Once again, this episode was brought to you by Area 420 in Moffett, Colorado in the train
cars.
They will be holding events all summer long starting on May 26th with a barbecue kicking
off the season, followed up on June 10th with a seed and genetics fair.
There are still spaces available for vendors.
If you're interested, make sure to contact Mountain Valley Events and BrainStrap.
All links will be found in the description.
Let them know you heard it on Reefer the Reefer with Little Farmer.
Thanks for tuning in.
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