What were the early days of indoor growing like? What did they use, what mistakes were made?

It was interesting because the first light I saw was a 1000w metal halide, clear . . . I mean, not counting fluorescents, which had been around but you couldn't grow really big plants with tubes. Sticks of light might be OK to defend yourself in Star Wars, but they didn’t grow big buds. So in 78 I saw this 1000w halide a grower had in northern California in a barn. It was 8 feet high in the ceiling and a single plant was in the ground. I thought, “this is not going to work”. And later, in the early 80s, I had moved to the Northwest, I began to see some incredible things. The more I learned about indoor growing the more I realized nobody knew anything about it, or the information wasn’t really put together well. That's when I came up with the idea to put lights and indoor gardening together. That's what people wanted and needed.

So your book was the first indoor grow book?

No. Mine was the second. The first was Murphy Stevens' How to Grow The Finest Marijuana Indoors, in 1977. Murphy’s book was the first that had halides in it and showed pictures of big plants growing under them. But they were really into fluorescents. It was the times and tubes were cool. So, my book was the first that had complete information about lights and growing. It came out in 1983. It took about a year to write; it was crude, and getting it published was an ordeal. Most everybody thought I was crazy and wasting my time. Everybody, especially my mother, was amazed when it sold well the first year. The second year, I rewrote it into a 288-page book. That’s when it started to sell and sell. It was on the map then. That’s when it was christened the “bible” because it was the only complete book about indoor growing.

Tell me about the beginning of your relationship with HIGH TIMES.

That was a long time ago. Shortly after the book came out I did a dozen how-to articles for HIGH TIMES . . . I traded them for an ad in the magazine and it was incredible. I was selling more than 500 books a month off the ad. People would call up and I could talk to them . . . there were no RICO laws then. Nobody really believed that you could grow indoors, because nobody had ever heard of it before. Almost everybody thought that indoor dope won’t get you high. And then once it kind of reached a critical mass about 10 years later, the cops learned about it, and that's when it grew more dangerous. But there were lots of good growers who picked it up early and there were lots of grow shows.

How did you contact HT?

I called and spoke to several people including Steve Hager and came to New York to meet everybody. That's how things started. After that, I knew I could write well enough in English, but I quit writing for a while because I'd written some letters to the local paper and people started showing up at my house and I didn't like it. So I stayed away from things for a while and started going to Holland and back to Spain a lot. It was better to do that for my own psyche. I mean, all those people showing up at my house. One guy who came, a heavy equipment operator, a nice guy, but the IRS had fucked him many times for many years. He was an older guy, about 60, and after we talked on the phone once or twice he comes to my house and he's got a whole pickup full of dope with him. He says, “You helped me get here, now what do I do with it?

I told him he couldn't park in front of my house with a half-ton of dried buds. I mean he's there with this dope and he's asking me how to get rid of it! So I told him, look, I'm good at growing, but I don't know anything about selling. So he left. I have no idea what he did with it. He had one huge load!

Then there was another guy in 1985, he grew for his health and money. We met for lunch and he explained that his daughter was blackmailing him. He had to grow more to pay her hush money. I’ll never forget his face when he told me the story. The sadness wrenched his soul.

I also had interviews with the media, they just wanted to use me as meat and throw me to the wolves. The USA Today was doing a feature on indoor growing. I think it was in 1987. The reporter wanted to tape the talk for proof of the story, but I knew that could come back to haunt me. So I didn't give him anything he could really use. But other journalists like Peter Jennings, turned out to be pretty honest.

When did you first witness growing in other countries?

In Spain there were always products made from “canamo” (hemp). Everybody has hemp house slippers there. I knew about it, but didn’t really put it together with the plant. In Mexico when I was in university there, I was up near Popocatepetl, the volcano, and they were growing ‘Popo Blue’. It was blue because it was growing at a higher altitude. I wanted to see it. It grew several places there. In Mexico, as long as you didn't grow too much nobody seemed to care. If they did care, you pay. You have the “mordida”, which literally means the “bite” (bribe) and everybody in Mexico pays it to make things work. If you didn't pay the mordida, it didn't go too well for you. So that was the first time I'd seen it. But I didn't really get into it until 1978 when I had my first decent sized garden, about 110 female plants. That was a nice harvest.

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