These are not your run-of-the-mill potheads jammed into the long, narrow classroom at Oaksterdam University, a tiny campus with no sign to betray its location on busy San Vicente Boulevard in Los Angeles. A serious vibe fills the loftlike space, where rows of desks are arranged like church pews under exposed ducts. No one clowns around or even smiles much. Instead, eyes fix intently on a screen at the front of the darkened room.
Projected there is a photograph of a healthy marijuana plant under an array of lights. Tonight's subject, Cannabis 101: growing the weed in indoor gardens. It's delicate alchemy, as most of these students, who range in age from their early 20s to nearly 60, already know. During the 13-week semester, many tend—and keep notes on—their own clandestine nurseries in bedrooms and garages scattered around Los Angeles.
Encouraged by instructors, and by the prospect of staking out ground-floor positions in the emerging world of "cannabusinesses," they cultivate popular varieties of bud while experimenting with soils, temperatures, and light sources.
From the rear of the room, a baritone voice pipes up—a student remarking on the crystalline texture of the leaves when the plants are raised under light-emitting diodes.
"With the LEDs, it just looks way frostier than anything under the high-pressure sodium," he says.
Details get technical, as in any science class, but the larger lesson is clear to see. Here, as in many other places across America, the future of cannabis is being sown—and it is a future high on promise.
Oaksterdam takes its name from Oakland, where the university began, and pot-friendly Amsterdam. Here, new growers and dispensary operators are being trained like whole legions of Johnny Appleseeds, soon to spread pot's blessings from one coast to the other. Not that anywhere is truly virgin ground, but consider: The pro-marijuana movement has never had an army so large, politically sophisticated, and well-funded, even if supporters downplay the millions that roll in. Nor has it enjoyed such a frenzied period of media exposure, a startling amount of it positive.
Never has there been such a concerted thrust to legalize the drug nationwide—for medical purposes, for the plain old joy of getting stoned, and for a gold mine in profits to be reaped by those who control the multipronged industry. Together with a rapidly shifting public attitude toward pot and a White House willing to accept state medical-marijuana laws, legalization seems as inevitable today as it was unthinkable a generation ago.
In Olympia, State Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles (D-Seattle) introduced a bill last session that would downgrade marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to a ticketable infraction. Another Seattle Democrat, Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, will be introducing a bill in the House that goes even further, calling for marijuana to be flat-out legalized, then sold, and taxed, in state liquor stores. Seattle voters already instructed the SPD to make marijuana possession cases a low priority, and newly elected city attorney Pete Holmes has said he won't bother enforcing the misdemeanor law that's currently on the books, or tack on pot-possession charges to extend the sentences of people charged with other crimes.
"We're almost at a zeitgeist," says one of the high-profile lobbyists who is making it happen: Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) in Washington, D.C.
Zeitgeist has become one of the buzzwords of the campaign—meaning, in context, a sort of coming-together of favorable forces. St. Pierre, who can call on advisory-board input from the likes of Willie Nelson and Woody Harrelson, is a glib 44-year-old former altar boy and preppy from Massachusetts who likes to wear a marijuana-leaf lapel pin. He says this year NORML has seen an unprecedented escalation of Web-page hits, podcast downloads, new memberships, and media calls.
"We monitor [newspaper] columns, and editors have swung in favor of reform," he says. "I will go give a lecture in Des Moines, Iowa. The questions people are asking come right out of watching Weeds on Showtime. It's quite remarkable."
Badgering newspapers and television programs to pay attention to the subject used to be one of the critical challenges for people like St. Pierre. Getting a meaningful dialogue started was half the battle.
Now the buzz is self-sustaining, indicating America's willingness, as a whole, to engage the subject.
"The first time, nearly eight years ago, I attempted to pitch a marijuana-related story to CNN, they literally laughed at me," remembers Bruce Mirken, a San Francisco–based spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project. "The person who answered the phone burst out laughing. Now they're calling us. We've been on various broadcasts and cable network shows 21 times this year—at least a couple on CNN. We've also been on the Today show, ABC World News, really all over."
CNBC has run and rerun its recent documentary Marijuana, Inc.: Inside America's Pot Industry, exposing the booming pot trade and the sordid side of California's largest cash crop—the shootings, thefts, and arson fires; the homes in Humboldt and Mendocino counties gutted to make room for illegal indoor nurseries; the secluded parcels of national forest planted with pot by Mexican cartels intent on cornering metropolitan markets.
