A reefer is a marijuana cigarette, in case you didn’t know.
I always thought it just meant weed, not a joint.
This was because friends and I once saw the movie, “Reefer Madness,” a 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda film that appeared the year before federal lawmakers criminalized pot.
“Isn't it true that you have, perhaps unwillingly, acquired a certain harmful habit through association with certain undesirable people,” said the principal of a fictional high school to a student.
The movie is a dystopian tale of innocent teens lured by drug dealers into addiction. It labels marijuana as a violent narcotic, an unspeakable scourge and the real public enemy number one. Most of the main characters are dead by the end of the film.
Watching this while stoned felt defiant.
“This, I understand, could be attributed to the use of marijuana. It causes errors in time and space,” said the high school principal.
Desirable to Arizona voters nearly a century later, adults and medical patients are now buying marijuana from state-licensed stores.
There’s so much pot that some might say we have Reefer Growing Madness.
So KJZZ’s Hear Arizona podcast unit decided to track the four-month life cycle of marijuana plants grown legally in metro Phoenix, from clone to smoke.
Alien Labs gave KJZZ exclusive access to their indoor facility as they grew a new strain.
Brand founder Ted Lidie bred the strain named Zpectrum.
Lidie is from a Northern California town with the closest freeway access in an area famous for cultivating potent marijuana long before legalization, the Emerald Triangle.
“So the growers from there would come and sit in hotels with their harvest for the year. And they would sell it to all the people that would come from LA and Sacramento and New York,” he said.
Lidie’s guest for the talk is the CEO of sister brand, Connected Cannabis, who gave Lidie a way to bring his own pot to a new legal market in California — and eventually here.
Lidie describes himself as a nerd welcomed by other subcultures because he always had good weed.
“I never felt like I fit in. So, of course, alien means extraterrestrial and space. And it opened up this huge avenue for us to brand. But it also meant outsider,” he said.
Alien Labs’ weed is grown in a noisy indoor facility, where the amount harvested annually is measured in tons.
New clones are cut from dozens of mother plants housed on site.
Water and food to grow the plants flows from an irrigation system housed in its own room.
The grow spaces are brightly lit, each with its own humidity levels and many strategically placed fans.
The people overseeing it all have different areas of expertise.
General Manager Bruno Gagliardi has a horticulture degree — a result of dedicating his life to the cannabis plant as a teenager.
“I’m not shy about it, about my consumption. I do not have issues when people give me weird looks when I’m out smelling like weed in public,” he said.
Gagliardi worked in landscaping out of college. Then he got hurt, his drug test came back positive for weed and he was fired.
He chose to enter the cannabis industry and is supported by his wife and their three children.
“With cannabis, there is no step along the way where the product couldn’t be potentially ruined. It’s something that we have to make sure we have that attention to detail all the way to the end,” Gagliardi said.
Assistant General Manager Alexander Lawrence has nearly 15 years of hands-on experience cultivating marijuana here and in California.
“We’re never going to be done learning about growing. There is never an end to it. If someone says they are a master grower, they cannot be because then they are done learning,” he said.
Performing as the artist Make Somethin, Lawrence likes to record freestyle rap and produce songs.
His degree is in communications. Yet he chooses agriculture as a profession because he’s fascinated by the marijuana plant.
“It’s really interesting being able to shape and manipulate the plant’s growth. There (are) a lot of quirks and nuances that we do here,” said Lawrence.
Those seem to work well as Alien Labs weed regularly wins awards.
The Zpectrum plants I watched grow have already been harvested, cured and packaged.
Soon I’ll follow Lawrence, Gagliardi and Lidie as they buy some and hold a smoke session. Expect those scenes to be part of the climactic episode of Reefer Growing Madness set for release in late March.
The prologue episode is available now wherever you get your podcasts.
