MATT CASEY: A reefer is another word for a marijuana cigarette. Reefer Madness is an old anti-pot movie turned into a cult classic by legalization advocates working to change public opinion. You’re listening to Reefer Growing Madness, a podcast that tracks the growth cycle of legally grown marijuana from clone to smoke. I’m your host, Matt Casey.
[SONG PLAYS: "REEFER MAN" BY CAB CALLOWAY]
CASEY: Notice I didn’t say SEED to smoke. At least some legit weed companies in what prohibitionists might call this Brave New Arizona don’t plant seeds. So my first visit to a huge indoor pot farm west of Phoenix was made hoping to meet and greet the freshly cut clones that I aim to follow until they’re ashes.
Last episode, we gave you a primer on the slew of slang and scientific terms related to marijuana. And the prologue episode before that has a brief history of marijuana criminalization and legalization in Arizona. This is Chapter 1, the clone episode.
A warning, dear listener, that you’re going to hear some foul language at times. Yet government funded research says there’s a positive link between profanity and honesty…
[SONG PLAYS: "REEFER MAN" BY CAB CALLOWAY]
CASEY: The tiny copies in question came from a mother plant. It’s an indica-sativa hybrid called Zpectrum with a Z. The lead farmers will explain what happens during the two weeks it takes these fledgling plants to hopefully grow their own root system. And you’ll get to know one of the growers whose approach is strongly influenced by methods developed when marijuana was still mostly an illegal cash crop.
The first visit to the Alien Labs marijuana farm was one of my longest because Bruno Gagliardi, the general manager, graciously let me tour the whole operation.
BRUNO GAGLIARDI: With cannabis, there is no step along the way where the product couldn’t potentially be completely ruined. It’s something that we have to make sure we have that attention to detail all the way to the end.
CASEY: Alien Labs weed is grown in a noisy two-story maze of hallways and long rooms where the amount harvested annually is measured in tons. Water and food to grow the plants flows from an irrigation system requiring its own command space. The grow rooms are brightly lit, each with their own humidity level and strategically placed fans.
GAGLIARI: So this is the Mother Room. (Opens door as employee rap music plays.)
CASEY: All marijuana clones have a mom. Dozens are kept here. After we enter the Mother Room, the clone cutters politely turn off their music. Gagliardi’s job is to maintain a cultivation schedule that produces multiple harvests monthly. So today the workers will spend significant time snipping clones from several different strains. The process starts with selecting and cutting a mom’s best looking branches.
GAGLIARDI: Then they clean up the plant as much as possible. Remove any unnecessary nodes. Leave the top most growing points.
CASEY: Minimum leaves mean fewer tiny openings called stomata.
GAGLIARDI: The plants have been severed from the root system. They no longer have an efficient way to pull water. So the most important thing is for us to slow down transpiration, which is water loss.
CASEY: Higher humidity prevents loss too. So all Alien Labs clones start under a plastic dome. Having already been there 90 minutes, and not wanting to be the guy who hangs out too long, meant I wouldn’t actually see the Reefer Growing Madness clones until day five, when my podcast partner Tim Agne set up the smartphone we’d use as our time-lapse camera.
TIM AGNE: Matt, you want to take a look at this shot and tell me what you think.
CASEY: I think it looks great, sir.
AGNE: All right.
CASEY: Creative challenges bring out Agne’s brilliance. We’ve worked together for years, and I trust his judgement. With us to meet the Zpectrum copies that are just a few inches tall is Alexander Lawrence, the assistant general manager.
ALEXANDER LAWRENCE: We have to come in and wipe the dome out every day. Is that going to be OK?
AGNE: Yeah, that’s fine as long you kind of put it back in the same spot.
CASEY: The copies are plugged into rockwool for this first phase, and dome vents are slowly cracked to help the clones acclimate to the larger room. Removing the dome too early can cause the leaves to cup for self-protection. On the other hand, waiting too long to adjust the vents can cause a stem that’s supposed to grow roots to deflate and become mush. With clones so vulnerable, Lawrence has to take extreme care.
LAWRENCE: I mean we just cut it from another plant so it's essentially in limbo, purgatory of life and death as we’re trying to get it to live again.
CASEY: The two-week clone phase before planting almost never goes the same way twice. Clones shrivel if they haven’t rooted by the end of that time. So Lawrence sometimes has to repeat the step, giving them another chance.
LAWRENCE: Probably the most terrifying thing is, "Are my clones going to root? They better root because if they don’t then what are you going to do? Do you have enough cut to make up for your percentage of loss?"
CASEY: Nine-week cycles are the rhythm of Lawrence's life after about 15 years of growing for Alien Labs, its sister brand and peoples’ home-gardens. Cloning and caring for mother plants are among his favorite chores. Roughly 80 genetics live at the farm. The corporate office analyzes market feedback to find consumer favorites then sends down orders for which strains to grow.
LAWRENCE: Keeping the clones ready on schedule … We have to cut the moms back two weeks prior to taking the clones so there is a lot of strains being juggled.
CASEY: The list includes one labeled Arizona’s top strain of 2024 by Phoenix New Times. Z — just the letter that stands for the candy brand I’m not saying — is also a parent of those six Zpectrum clones that I’m hoping will root. Z is a personal favorite of Lawrence. Midway through a visit to his home to see a freestyle rap session, he takes out a mason jar of Z.
Tracking Z plants at the farm takes up an entire notebook. The strain has a unique grow schedule, and mother plants require different care than others. Lawrence breaks up a bud and packs a glass bowl. A citrus flavor of the candy Z was first named is the source of the strain name.
Lawrence hobbies as an aspiring hip-hop artist. He grew up in Northern California’s East Bay, which is known musically for punk rock bands like Green Day. He has a punk approach to making songs. First he shuffles through a few beats to pick one that hits.
[BEAT PLAYS]
CASEY: Then Lawrence plugs in headphones and starts freestyling. I first hear his rhymes acapella.
LAWRENCE: (external mic) Yo, jump through the portal. Something like a worm hole. Oh which way did they go. Yo it's like a rabbit hole. Call me Alice though. Not to be confused with Alex though.
CASEY: He might do overdub tracks for emphasis. It kinda just depends. But with a beat in hand, Lawrence can record and produce a new song in about five minutes. Jams from these sessions often end up on mixtapes that he’ll listen to the next day at the farm.
LAWRENCE: (internal mic with beat) Yo, jump through the portal. Something like a worm hole. Oh which way did they go. Yo it's like a rabbit hole. Call me Alice though. Not to be confused with Alex though.
CASEY: Lawrence performs under the name, Make Somethin — without the G — and his freestyle character is the called Yundastologist, a made up word that makes him free to invent sounds to keep the flow going if he doesn’t quickly think of a word to rhyme. Lawrence’s path here started in high school. A classmate used a pencil and a table to make a beat.
LAWRENCE: People were roasting each other. And I jumped in and, you know, had some roasts I wrote on the side real quick. And then realized that was super fun. People were laughing. One of my other friends made beats already, and then we worked on an album almost immediately.
CASEY: Hands-on at home and learning from other cultivators is how Lawrence learned to grow pot. He calls it the street method. The first relationship that led to him growing marijuana professionally started in college, where Lawrence studied communications. A classmate had a home garden and asked Lawrence to help trim leaves from harvested buds. Soon he got to know more people in the pot community.
LAWRENCE: At some point you meet the person where the pounds are really coming from, and then they usually need help trimming their weed.
CASEY: A friend of a friend got Lawrence work for what is now the sister brand of Alien Labs. He learned their grow-secrets and became so trusted the bosses gave him a key to the facility.
LAWRENCE: Dealing with the cash product, weed. And imagine working at the Tiffany store. There's just diamonds everywhere. You're working in a garden. You're trimming these guys' weed. They're not watching you the whole time. They might even run out for lunch.
CASEY: California legalized medical marijuana in 1996. And Lawrence got a patient card as soon as he could.
LAWRENCE: My experience with weed, back then when I was 18, is so different than now. Back then it was so … it was the shit. I really wanted to smoke more. Growing older, I definitely want to smoke less.
CASEY: So he goes periods without marijuana even while he grows it. Lawrence doesn’t want constant consumption to make him forget how normal life and his personal feelings really feel. But he’s definitely in a smoking phase right now.
LAWRENCE: (external mic acapella) It’s the Jeckyl and the Hyde in me. Yep, like some piracy, Yep, travel seven seas. Yep, watch my eyes bleed. Yep, when I hit the Z.
CASEY: He knows some in his industry may not understand the conflict and frown on sober stints. Not consuming makes it easier to manage the farm’s complex and constantly changing cultivation schedule. Rolling reefers when he’s off work can even give him the next-day scaries about his to-do list. Yet having smoked in his free time means that when something goes sideways at the farm — a regular thing — his stress is less while working to fix it.
LAWRENCE: (internal mic with beat) It’s the Jeckyl and the Hyde in me. Yep, like some piracy, Yep, travel seven seas. Yep, watch my eyes bleed. Yep, when I hit the Z.
CASEY: Lawrence is aided in his music by having studied communications. He especially enjoys knowing how to produce and edit video, but he didn’t have a job in mind after getting his degree. Instead he’s become a manager in agriculture and feels like he’s in the right place. Lawrence and General Manager Bruno Gagliardi have to maintain the rapid-fire harvest cadence by coordinating teams of workers to do chores in rooms filled with strains of marijuana plants in varying growth stages. Communication is key for Lawrence.
LAWRENCE: I use that so much at my job, explaining to my teammates that the absence of conflict is a red flag in any relationship, so it's normal for you guys to butt heads once in a while.
CASEY: Five or 10 years ago, he could not have imagined the industry’s expansion. He moved to Arizona to grow weed and has been part of the recreational program pretty much from the start.
LAWRENCE: A lot of people might not enjoy their jobs, you know, and I get up every day and I'm excited to go to work.
CASEY: Lawrence is an open-minded guy. He doesn’t believe there is such a thing as a master grower because he doesn’t think it’s possible to ever be done learning how to grow weed. Legalization has let people with agriculture degrees seek careers in marijuana. Legacy growers — those at it before it was legal — have been wary of their ideas. But now, after about a decade, the best from the two schools of thought are making a new school of thought. Lawrence and Gagliardi are among the authors, writing the syllabus back inside Alien Labs.
Inside the grow room, the dome just came off the six Zpectrum clones I’m watching grow. Gagliardi is my guide today. His degree is in horticulture.
BRUNO GAGLIARDI: Looking really good so far. So we can see there are signs of rooting. We even have a root that’s growing up the wrong way.
CASEY: Gagliardi grew weed on his own for years before clawing his way into the industry. He gently lifts and looks under the tray holding the clones that have grown more leaves and stems.
GAGLIARDI: There you go, see? So those cuts have now fully rooted into the substrate
CASEY: The start of legalization coincided with Gagliardi’s college studies to give him a career that makes good on his teenage promise to dedicate his life to the marijuana plant.
GAGLIARDI: The clone stage is probably the most critical and probably where most things can go wrong.
CASEY: With two days until the clones are scheduled to be transplanted to individual pots, there’s still lots of room for chaos in the cultivation cycle..
[SONG PLAYS: "REEFER MAN" BY CAB CALLOWAY]
CASEY: But that’s a tale for the next episode of Reefer Growing Madness. The plants are gonna post up in a room set up like the Summer Solstice in terms of light. And we’ll get to know Gagliardi on a weeknight, cooking dinner for his wife and kids. Now my project partner Tim Agne has a preview of the photo and video online for the Clone Episode….
AGNE: One of the first photos that I took, that really kind of jumped out at me as being just an incredibly cool photo is that we on one of our visits, we popped out of the room where our plant was. We went into another flower room where there were other Zpectrum plants growing, and I have a picture of (Lawrence) just kind of leaning in, almost like nose, like right up on the plant, smelling this Zpectrum flower.
He he knows exactly what he's looking for when he does it. In this photo, you see him, you can kind of see the contemplation on his face. You can see the plant reflected in his sunglasses.
The sunglasses were another very interesting detail to me. I talked to him about them a little bit. They're not normal sunglasses. I would throw on my regular sunglasses when we went into these rooms. He's wearing these special blue light, they're it's essentially a blue lens to kind of counteract the very yellow light that we're seeing in those rooms.
CASEY: Reefer Growing Madness was produced and hosted by me, Matt Casey. Tim Agne is our digital editor. Assistant News Director Lindsey C. Riley is our project editor. To see photos and other media from this episode, be sure to check out our website: R-G-M-dot-kjzz-dot-org. Thanks for listening.
[SONG PLAYS: "REEFER MAN" BY CAB CALLOWAY]
