My weekend got kind of hijacked by HempCon at Los Angeles Convention Center. Wow. It was all there: paraphernalia; collectives offering sign-up bonuses; vendors displaying pot edibles, marijuana smoothies and “Pineapple Express” sodas; medical marijuana doctors giving exams next to psychics, lawyers and accountants; security companies and cannabis merchandising schools with their brochures.

And then there was the publicly traded Medical Marijuana, Inc which just launched its multilevel marketing company that sells hemp health care products. And has penny stocks for sale. The twenty-year old kid at the booth, purple bandana around his blond hair, energetically told me how he had bought a lot stock for his IRA and said that once upon a time Microsoft was at 12 cents a share. Really? Wow.

I checked the Medical Marijuana Inc.’s ticker later and the pink sheet/penny stock has fluctuated between 42 cents and 5 cents since its initial offering in April 2009. Bandana guy tried to get me to sign up for the multi-level marketing company and get in on the ground floor. I declined. Same with buying the stock. Any stock that shows that much fluctuation in short period of time, even it’s cents and not dollars kinda makes me nervous.

Medical Marijuana, Inc, which used to be called Club Vivanet, was one of several companies offering business solutions for medical marijuana collectives, like point-of-sales records, tax software, ID verification, etc. The company’s founder, Bruce Perlowin is a big Yes on 19 backer.

It was really trippy was running into a friend of mine, a long time AARP member who I hadn’t seen in years. Not only is he married now, but he has two hydroponic medical grow rooms which supply a couple local dispensaries and private delivery clients. It’s his retirement. He is pro-Prop 19 because a bust for pot four decades ago really altered his life’s path. Everyone I spoke to at HempCon is pro-legalization, but the majority were against 19, fearing corporations would overtake the growing and distribution and thus create trust and monopolies. Other people were worried about a patchwork of local regulations.

The nice sales engineer from AgraTech, the  company that builds and designs greenhouses for major seed companies and colleges, explained about his product. They can build greenhouses any size, and he told me Ball Seed Company, which operates facilities in 20 countries is readying greenhouses t0 sell pot seedlings. Wow.  But I guess, being a multi-million dollar company, they aren’t too worried about having to pay a local city regulatory fee for growing, like the proposed ones in Oakland which would cost $211,000.

Sadly though with all the fans, swamp coolers, timers and stuff you can’t use solar energy to run a very big greenhouse at all. There are at least  four planned for Oakland if Prop 19 passes on a :

7.4-acre warehouse complex near the Oakland Coliseum, covering 172,000 square feet over four buildings.

Wow. Such a facility would run fans 24-hours a day, using indoor grow lights on timers, and produce three crops a year. Weedguru.com says:

To produce killer bud you will need about 7,000 lumens per sq ft in your grow room. So, in a 5sq ft grow room you would need 35,000 total lumens (7,000 * 5 = 35,000) to reach the optimum 7,000 lumens per sq ft.

To get 35,000 lumens you would need:

# Of lights needed /Type of light/ Total watts /Equals
13.7/ 150w/ incandescent/ 2,058 watts/ 35,000 lumens
11.6/ 150w/ Halogens/ 1750 watts/ 35,000 lumens
3.8/150w Fluorescents 583 watts /35,000 lumens
3.3/ 150w/ Compact Fluorescents/ 500watts/ 35,000 lumens
2.5/ 150w/ Metal Halide/ 389 watts/ 35,000 lumens
2.1/150w/HPS/ 327/ 35,000 lumens

One growhouse in Humboldt was busted when its electrical bill showed 10,000 kilowatt hours per month usage. Yikes! That’s a lot of electricity!

But heck if you use the Freak-1-C NRG Growth Enhancer, maybe you won’t need all those lights. According to brochure, frequencies programmed into the Freak-1-C-NRG products, which look like holograms but they call “frequency fertilizers”:

emit a quantum alchemical force field radiating life-giving elixirs beneficial for plants, humans and animals.

It’s suggest that you

place these energy stations under your plants for optimal yields in half the time.

Oh and salesman Thunder told me that

they capture fourth dimensional energy in the three-dimensional form of a hologram.