There were no obviously bloodshot eyes among the crowd of about two dozen people gathered at downtown Springfield’s Q Hotel to learn about growing medical marijuana.
The absence of Cheech and Chong-level stereotypes didn’t stop a few folks from dipping into wells of weed-related humor as the June 20 program, organized by nonprofit group Ayden’s Alliance, went on.
Abundant laughter shook the room when a speaker went over Missouri rules on what happens when a legal home cultivator grows more cannabis than the quarter-pound allowed each month.
Patients and caregivers are obligated to notify state regulators of their excess marijuana, so they can be issued a written permit to transport it to a local dispensary for destruction.
Josh Loftis with Home Grow Solutions talks about growing medical marijuana at home during a meeting with Ayden’s Alliance on June 20.
Josh Loftis with Home Grow Solutions talks about growing medical marijuana at home during a meeting with Ayden’s Alliance on June 20. (Photo: Nathan Papes/Springfield News-Le)
The crowd, two dozen strong, seemed … skeptical … that anyone would follow that part of the law.
“Better yet, you run it through the Magic Butter Machine and put it in the freezer,” one person suggested, prompting a second wave of laughter. (Edibles are typically made with marijuana-infused fats, often dubbed “cannabutter” when made from dairy. Retailers like Amazon and Walmart sell herbal-infusion machines for home use, often for less than $100, sometimes for much more.)
Growing cannabis at home means making a big investment upfront. It’s not as easy as planting a rosemary bush or a row of elephant ears, so finding ways to grow marijuana cost-effectively — and avoid throwing it away — seemed important to the crowd, which included a mix of activists, hipsters, business people and families with disabled children.
‘How do I grow my own?’
With dispensary sales still months away, Missouri groups like Ayden’s Alliance, along with companies that don’t need licenses to operate because they don’t directly touch cannabis, are stepping in to serve patients by offering them education, if not usable marijuana.
Patients, particularly those who have little experience with legal marijuana in other states, have a lot of questions. Some are about the finer points of Missouri marijuana law. Others have to do with natural marijuana-like molecules produced by the human body, the main topic of the alliance’s June 20 gathering.
But another common question is “how do I grow my own marijuana?”
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Amendment 2 provides for legal home cultivation, but only by registered patients and caregivers otherwise eligible to access medical marijuana under Missouri law. Anyone wishing to grow at home also must pay a $100 annual fee to the Department of Health and Senior Services, on top of the $25 yearly fee for a patient or caregiver card.
The arrangement comes with a series of state requirements. A legal home-grow facility may be indoors or outdoors, but it must be “enclosed” and “locked” — and Missouri provides a 150-word definition of what constitutes “enclosed” and “locked.”
The facility may be used to cultivate no more than six flowering marijuana plants. (The flowers are the business end of the plant: The “bud” is what’s smoked, vaped, infused into butter or oil to make edibles, or made into concentrates.)
In keeping with the complex life cycle of the cannabis plant, Missouri rules allow registered home cultivators to keep another six plants in the vegetative state, the phase of intense growth that young marijuana plants go through for several weeks before they flower.
The seedling stage of the marijuana life cycle lasts two to three weeks. In this Feb. 14, 2019 photo, cannabis seedlings grow under lights as part of a research project at the State University of New York at Morrisville, N.Y.
The seedling stage of the marijuana life cycle lasts two to three weeks. In this Feb. 14, 2019 photo, cannabis seedlings grow under lights as part of a research project at the State University of New York at Morrisville, N.Y. (Photo: Mary Esch, AP)
Legal home growers can keep up a more or less constant harvest by also keeping six more clones or seedlings, provided they’re less than 14 inches tall. (Seeds germinate in about a week; the seedling phase lasts two to three weeks.)
Two qualifying patients may grow up to 12 plants in each stage of development in a single private grow facility. The limit goes up to 18 plants in each phase if one of the patients also has a caregiver ID.
Cultivating micro-batches of cannabis is rather involved. It’s a federally illegal crop that grows in multiple stages, each with special lighting requirements. These vary according to the needs of leggy cannabis sativa or short, bushy indica plants. There are also guidelines for temperature and humidity levels that must be precisely followed. The plants are also pungent — carbon air filtration is needed to avoid skunking up the neighborhood.
It may be no surprise that a small consulting industry is emerging to help out Missouri patients who want to grow weed. It’s not a big economic sector, particularly compared to the 192 dispensaries that Missouri expects to license by Dec. 31. The relationship between home growers and “Big Marijuana” maybe something like the relationship of craft beer to Anheuser-Busch InBev, or holistic medicine versus Big Pharma. But like those examples, homegrown marijuana has a well-established place in the American economy, whether legal or black market.
Meet Josh Loftis
In the Springfield area, the help-you-home-grow industry appears to boil down, more or less, to one man and his clients.
Josh Loftis is the face, owner and sole staffer of Home Grow Solutions Missouri LLC.
He’s a man in his early 40s with a buzz cut and a couple of decades in the construction industry under his belt. His home-grow consultant uniform consists of khaki-green carpenter pants, comfortable shoes, and black T-shirts sporting his company logo.
Loftis talks about marijuana cultivation, partly with his hands, with such enthusiasm that he sometimes runs out of breath and emits a light cough. He said he suffers from Crohn’s disease, one of the health conditions that qualify a patient for a cannabis card under Amendment 2.
Loftis was present at the election-night watch party in downtown Springfield where local supporters celebrated Amendment 2’s nearly 2-to-1 approval. And in these early stages of medical marijuana implementation, he’s one of the first people would-be patients in this part of Missouri turn to if they’re interested in home cultivation.
Earlier this year, Loftis began sharing office space with another marijuana-related business in an old commercial strip center on East Sunshine Street, within sight of Wonders of Wildlife. There, using folding chairs and a portable plastic table, he meets with clients who expect to qualify for the patient or caregiver ID cards.
The first-time sit-down with Loftis costs $100, about half the price of what patients pay for physician certification. Following that initial consultation, Loftis charges $50 per hour, plus one-way travel costs.
After that, patients pay Loftis to oversee construction of their growing facilities; costs vary, in part depending on how expensive lighting, dehumidification, and other equipment turns out to be.
“The actual buildouts will be job-by-job,” Loftis explained last week, “all depending on individual spaces and equipment selections. Some could get into the tens of thousands for a really nice (18-plant) caregiver grow.”
For example, Loftis said, he knows a medical doctor living one county over from Springfield who’s interested in a fully automated home grow facility. That’s going to cost big bucks.
Meanwhile, Loftis cited the example of another man living elsewhere in Missouri. His apartment is a large open space that the landlord can access anytime, so his best bet is purchasing “a $2,000 grow box.”
Josh Loftis with Home Grow Solutions talks about growing medical marijuana at home during a meeting with Ayden’s Alliance on June 20.
Josh Loftis with Home Grow Solutions talks about growing medical marijuana at home during a meeting with Ayden’s Alliance on June 20. (Photo: Nathan Papes/Springfield News-Le)
‘I don’t want to burn my shed down’
The day before Loftis gave a talk on home growing at the Ayden’s Alliance event downtown, he and a client let the News-Leader sit in on a first-time meeting. (The News-Leader agreed not to photograph the client or use his full name for this story due to two factors: Cannabis is prohibited by the federal government, and the client discussed home growing with Loftis prior to June 28, the first day Missouri allowed would-be patients to apply for medical marijuana cards.)
Loftis opened the meeting by asking his client (first name: Craig) about what kind of space he had for a home grow operation.
Craig, a slender, tattooed man a few years older than Loftis who said he’s on disability payments and suffers from conditions including chronic pancreatitis, told Loftis he has a 10-by-14-foot outdoor shed. It’s freestanding, 12 feet tall in the center, 8 feet on the edges. Craig said he couldn’t remember what he paid for it.
In this April 8, 2019 photo, a Bennington, Vermont resident tends to two marijuana plants he legally grows in a basement. Home grow laws vary from state to state. Vermont allows adults to grow up to two mature plants. Missouri allows qualifying patients and caregivers to grow up to six mature plants.
In this April 8, 2019 photo, a Bennington, Vermont resident tends to two marijuana plants he legally grows in a basement. Home grow laws vary from state to state. Vermont allows adults to grow up to two mature plants. Missouri allows qualifying patients and caregivers to grow up to six mature plants. (Photo: Michael Hill, AP)
“It’s right by a utility pole,” Craig said. “It’s inside a privacy fence. It has a window.”
Loftis thought this was a good setup, able to comply with the “enclosed, locked” requirements. The buildout would only take three or four days, he said.
But the window would need “framing in” to keep uncontrolled sunlight away from the cannabis plants. Light affects plant sex, and plant sex affects whether home growers will have a usable products when the plants finish flowering. Only female plants produce flowers that get humans high.
“If you have plants with weak genetics, they’ll hermaphrodite,” Loftis explained.
Space considerations also affect the strains of marijuana that home growers can cultivate, Loftis said: Tall, skinny sativa strains may only need 18-by-18 inches of floor space; short, bushy indicas need more.
In any case, Craig would need to have the shed divvied up into three spaces: One room would be for processing harvested marijuana, i.e., removing seeds, stems and leaves, drying and curing. Another room would host plants in early vegetative states, lit for about 16 hours per day. A flowering-plant room would need lighting for just 12 hours per day.
“The second you cut it back to 12 hours of daylight, it goes into flower,” Loftis said.
Like commercial cultivators, marijuana home growers need space to process cannabis after it’s fully grown. A processing supervisor at an Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey medical marijuana dispensary trims leaves from marijuana buds at the company’s grow house on March 22.
Like commercial cultivators, marijuana home growers need space to process cannabis after it’s fully grown. A processing supervisor at an Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey medical marijuana dispensary trims leaves from marijuana buds at the company’s grow house on March 22. (Photo: Julio Cortez, AP)
He also advised Craig to call an electrician and an HVAC tech to prepare for lighting and air conditioning work.
“There are some precursors before you set up you are grow,” Loftis told the Ayden’s Alliance group at the hotel the next day. “No. 1, call an electrician. A lot of people don’t think about this.”
Craig had thought about it.
“I don’t want to burn my shed down,” he said. He also said he needed the shed’s final form to look “pretty presentable.” He owns a home in a nice neighborhood. He joked about a high-ranking church official who lives nearby.
“Maybe we’ll plant roses around it,” he said.
Next, Loftis asked him about his budget. Craig said he had $2,500 saved up.
That turns out to be a healthy sum: Loftis said Craig could expect to have $500 or $600 left after the retrofit, but that money would go toward items like marijuana seeds (more on those later) and growth medium.
Loftis prefers coconut husks, also known as “coir,” for the job of delivering nutrients and water. There’s a wide range of other growth media on the market: soil, peat moss, and perlite, among many others. He does not suggest hydroponic setups for home marijuana cultivation, he said.
“I’m going to steer home growers away from hydroponics,” Loftis later said. “It’s one system. If you get a pathogen, it will take every single plant in that trough at one time. Your whole grow is gone.”
Lighting options are key for commercial and home cultivation of marijuana. This May 20 photo shows mature cannabis flowering prior to harvest under artificial lights at a commercial grow in Gardena, California.
Lighting options are key for commercial and home cultivation of marijuana. This May 20 photo shows mature cannabis flowering prior to harvest under artificial lights at a commercial grow in Gardena, California. (Photo: Richard Vogel, AP)
Loftis also recommends LED lights — they aren’t as hot as other options and they use less electricity. Lighting, Loftis said, is one area where “cannabusiness” hype drives up product costs: A handful of Chinese manufacturers make LED strips. Some go into frames for warehouses; others are marketed for marijuana-growing. Warehouse LEDs, Loftis said, might be priced at $190; but “grow lights” made from the same types of LED could cost as much as $1,200.
He told Craig the garden shed would need to be drywalled and insulated, the interior walls coated with reflective paint, and that it would need to be air-conditioned (“It can’t get above 85 degrees, tops”) and outfitted with a simple dehumidifier from Walmart to stave off the mold.
Once the shed is built out, DHSS rules state that it “must be locked at all times with security devices that ensure the room can only be accessed by the patient or caregiver,” according to a June 27 email from DHSS spokeswoman Lisa Cox.
What if Craig or another home grower needs technical help from an electrician or plant consultant? Can they legally go into the grow room? In recent months, this was a question that bugged Loftis and would-be clients, as state officials went through the Amendment 2 rule-making process. But even after the rules were finalized June 4, the answer remains vague.
“The laws do not speak to who may be admitted or why,” Cox said.
Josh Loftis with Home Grow Solutions talks about the regulations of growing medical marijuana at home during a meeting with Ayden’s Alliance on Thursday, June 20, 2019.
Josh Loftis with Home Grow Solutions talks about the regulations of growing medical marijuana at home during a meeting with Ayden’s Alliance on Thursday, June 20, 2019. (Photo: Nathan Papes/Springfield News-Le)
But, she said, “anyone entering the facility must be admitted and accompanied at all times by the patient and/or caregiver, who bears the responsibility of keeping the plants secure at all times.”
If a patient’s marijuana is lost or stolen, Cox said, it’s up to that person to report the problem to DHSS in a timely way. Otherwise, their ID card could be revoked.
Loftis said state officials recently told him to use a “common-sense” approach: An electrician can come in to perform work. But it’s not a good idea for a home grower to show off their setup to friends and family.
Seeds by ‘immaculate conception’
But where do patients source the seeds (or clones) to begin with?
That’s where the “immaculate conception” comes into play. That’s Loftis’s phrase for the uneasy situation Missouri’s cannabis community finds itself in as it begins working with a federally prohibited product.
Between now and Dec. 31, 2020, the general expectation is that Missouri officials will take a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to seed sourcing, looking the other way while home and commercial growers acquire plant genetics. Growers might buy them online — prices of more than $100 per packet of 10 seeds aren’t uncommon — or otherwise, traffic them in from other states.
Acquiring marijuana seeds or clone plants is a major issue for would-be home growers in Missouri or elsewhere. In this Feb. 14 photo, a professor at the State University of New York in Morrisville displays some cannabis seeds.
Acquiring marijuana seeds or clone plants is a major issue for would-be home growers in Missouri or elsewhere. In this Feb. 14 photo, a professor at the State University of New York in Morrisville displays some cannabis seeds. (Photo: Mary Esch, AP)
Others might purchase them inside Missouri from “old hippies” — Loftis’s phrase, and his recommended option, due to the expertise developed by local black-market growers over the past four decades. Their plants are adapted to Missouri conditions, including climate and mold levels, Loftis said, and longtime growers have a sense of which cannabis strains are said to promote effects like appetite support or sleep aid, for example.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2021, all Missouri medical cannabis will have to be obtained from a licensed cultivation or dispensary facility. Those seeds and plants will all be cataloged by a seed-to-sale tracking system. Anything outside the state system will be in the black market.
But until then?
“The manner by which a cultivator obtains seeds or a mother plant from which clones can be obtained is not within the department’s authority,” explained Cox, with DHSS.
Josh Loftis with Home Grow Solutions talks about the regulations of growing medical marijuana at home during a meeting with Ayden’s Alliance on Thursday, June 20, 2019.
Josh Loftis with Home Grow Solutions talks about the regulations of growing medical marijuana at home during a meeting with Ayden’s Alliance on Thursday, June 20, 2019. (Photo: Nathan Papes/Springfield News-Le)
But it is under federal authority, and it’s technically a crime, regardless of the source.
“It is weird talking to government officials and asking, ‘Can I sell seeds?'” Loftis said.
“When I’ve got my card, I’ll feel much better,” replied Craig.
Loftis acknowledged that learning to home grow is no small feat, with would-be home growers facing an avalanche of information.
“I keep getting calls and emails from people who are dizzy from being marketed to,” he told the News-Leader. He said his goal is to help people get through the steep upfront costs and be able to create a relatively cheap, long-term supply of medicinal weed for themselves.
Later, he told the Ayden’s Alliance meetup, “Guys, we can spend $400 per ounce producing this, or we can spend $60. You know what? The flowers will be the same either way.”
DIG DEEPER
Medical marijuana in Missouri
Illinois is the latest state to OK recreational marijuana. What’s that mean for Missouri?
Nixa City Council approves buffers for medical marijuana businesses, facilities
DHSS reveals a bit more about where dispensaries and other marijuana companies will locate
Why you won’t be seeing Missouri medical marijuana advertised on TV
Missouri will take online applications for marijuana ID cards a week early
Credit:www.news-leader.com