How My Son Became a Successful Medicine Magnate Despite My Worrying

Parents Beware: Beginnings Rarely Predict Endings

I worried when, five years after his father and I separated, my 13-year-old son was caught with pot he’d pilfered from his father’s plant. (To be fair, he could have found it in either parent’s home.)

I worried when in the summer between his sophomore and junior year of high school, the same son ran away from home with two 18-year-old boys. They following the Grateful Dead across the country on the way to their final destination, an Anarchist’s Convention. (I would later write about this episode–without telling him — in a piece for New Woman, “When Good Kids Go Bad,” but that’s another story.)

I worried when the same son, a few years later, in his early 20s, living in Oregon after college, was growing marijuana. The details are sketchy, but hydroponics and an assortment of business partners were involved.

But that was more than 25 years ago.

My son owns a successful business that caters mainly to cannabis growers. On a 2019 airing of the MacNeil-Lehrer Hour on PBS, I see how my son’s decisions got him there.

The piece is not about my son per se. But the interviewee, a fortysomething young man reminds me of him: handsome, articulate, heart in the right place, wanting to do business and do good. He and the other men and women interviewed exemplify the softer side of Humboldt County, the California region featured in “Murder Mountain,” a Netflix documentary about the dark underbelly of the pot-growing culture.

Nowadays, I don’t worry when I hear my son talking about what’s happening in “Weed World,” as I’ve come to think of the area in Oregon where he lives. It’s not far from Ashland, home to a well-known Shakespeare festival. When I visit, I stay in nearby Jacksonville — a town that still has hitching posts on the street and sells lots of tie-dyed stuff on Saturday.

My son acknowledges that there are some bad players in his state, too, but he steers clear of them. He’s far more worried about Big Pharma.

My son and his compatriots approach the cultivation of “medicine” with care and consciousness. It’s hippie meets potpreneur. They have chickens and goats and grow houses and high-tech surveillance equipment.

It is there I visit my first dispensary — a clean, well-lit, legal place. Med Men, which opened up many years later in Manhattan, has been called “the Apple store of weed.”

As it turns out, my son was ahead of his time. He turned forty in 2012 when cannabis was legalized in Washington and Oregon. The “green rush” began.

A wide customer base of Boomers has since embraced the cannabis culture. Some patrons started in the sixties and never stopped. Others are the converted. My son’s partner’s step-dad, an old Navy guy, never had a good night’s sleep until he started using a particular strain of cannabis.

And there’s that: the compounds, the tinctures, the gummies, the tailor-made strains that are good for what ails you.

I finally understand how my son got into the business

Ten years or more ago, a trade magazine ask him to share his story. He, in turn, calls me for help — not as a worried mother but as a journalist “hired” to put together a profile.

Like Steve Jobs, my son started in his basement. He mixed batches of soil and various additives in a kiddie pool, and finally came up with a formula that made plants grow bigger and stronger. One of his key ingredients is guano — the excrement of sea birds and bats.

While writing the profile, I learn — to my surprise — that his love of gardening started at Lake Farm Camp on Cape Cod where in addition to the usual camp activities, kids were put to work on the farm.

“When people ask you what I do, Mom, just tell them I’m into bat shit,” he once told me.

It’s always easier to look back at the bread crumbs than to see what lies ahead.

Here’s what’s happened since…

Big business has moved in. No surprise, really. Drug companies, as well as cosmetics, beverage, and wellness enterprises see the promise of 70 million Boomers not wanting to go gently into that good night.

More research is done now on cannabis, but a lot is still unknown. It may be good for insomnia, certain kinds of pain, nausea, and wasting. Maybe glaucoma, too. But if inhaled, lungs work overtime. If ingested, bones, organs and other systems might be affected.

Still, the market grows, and the hippie culture that never stopped growing or smoking weed is becoming something else. What comes next remains to be seen.

The same could be said of children.

If you like what you’ve read, by all means:

• Subscribe to my Medium articles — you’ll get an email when I publish. Even better, join Medium and tell ’em I sent you!

• Follow me on social media via LinkTree.