Growing weed in a dorm room

Some mornings on my way to brush my teeth as a resident in Muir last year, I would walk over ceiling tile debris left from dorm partiers the night prior. One night walking back to my dorm, the water fountain was flooding the floor. A vape caught on fire in a room on the floor below me during finals week.

Amidst all the chaos that a year in a notorious Red Bricks dorm can bring, I did not realize that there could have been people growing weed in their room.

In Jan. 2020, current fifth year Mr. Anderson, an alias based on one of his favorite films, The Matrix, was underage and looking to get high. He had to get some weed from a local dealer.

“Sometimes the weed would be really good, sometimes it’d be trash,” Mr. Anderson said. “We would roll our joints with receipts. One time, the weed was so shitty. It had a lot of stems, but there were some seeds in the bag.”

Mr. Anderson decided to try to use the seeds to grow his own cannabis. He and his roommate, Morpheus, another The Matrix inspired alias, wrapped ten seeds in some damp paper towels and waited to see if they would start to germinate. According to Mr. Anderson, it is usually rare for cannabis seeds to germinate, but they saw some potential.

“They all germinated,” Mr. Anderson said. “So they all start sprouting, we’re just like ‘Fuck it. We’ll just plant some, we’ll see what happens.’ We’d never grown weed before.”

Morpheus was a plant science major – he has since transferred to another university for unrelated reasons. Their room was already full of plants – tomatoes, basil, flowers. From the outside, it may have looked like they had LED light strips hung up, but these lights were grow lights to help their plants grow.

“Plants were kind of my chosen identity going into college,” Morpheus said. “I kind of went in saying that I’m gonna be the plant guy. I went into the dorms with a bunch of grow lights and stuff like that, but not for any particular reason.” 

Morpheus planted and germinated any seed he could find. He took them from botany labs and found them from stores. Eventually, this habit extended to the seeds he found in the “shitty dealer weed.”

Mr. Anderson and Morpheus added three cannabis sprouts to the windowsill with the rest of their plants. You could walk by their room and just see a wall of plants, according to him. Eventually the leaves got just big enough that you could start to notice these three plants were not like the others.

“The entire time we were like, ‘Dude, we should get rid of them,’” Mr. Anderson said. “But our RA came into the room all the time, and he didn’t do anything.”

The roommates decided to keep the cannabis plants in their room a little bit longer, they found a new space for them hiding from sight off the windowsill. 

“I fixed the grow lights to the top of the drawer and had a little greenhouse in there,” Morpheus said. “We raised these plants, and they were getting a little too big for the inside and we decided that they needed to be set free.”

Mr. Anderson and Morpheus had to find a new location for their plants when they started to produce the odor that any strict mother would recognize. In addition to being a student and an amateur cannabis botanist, Mr. Anderson likes to ride his mountain bike and used to ride along Poly Canyon trail often, which sparked an idea.

“There’s one spot across the creek in Poly Canyon that’s always a little grassy field,” Mr. Anderson said. “It’s almost at the very top when you get to the train tracks, but there’s like a spring up there that’s always moist. So, we went up there and planted them in March of 2020.”

“We were excited because we started to see flowers form on them,” Morpheus said. “We realized that some of them were female,  and we were so excited.” Getting the cannabis seeds to germinate is only the first challenge of growing weed. Only female cannabis plants produce high concentrations of cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). 

Then, COVID-19 complications halted their plans. Morpheus says that the last time he got to check on the plants, they had started to flower, but he had to leave them behind as quarantine started.

“When COVID hit us, some people just left stuff behind and got out as soon as possible, like [Morpheus],” Mr. Anderson said. “Then he came back after two months to get his stuff, and I told him he had to check on the plants. He went up to Poly Canyon, and there were huge holes where the plants were.”

Mr. Anderson and Morpheus still do not know if Cal Poly Police found the plants or if someone else found them and harvested them themselves. Mustang News contacted CPPD if they had any record of finding the plants, but has not heard back. 

But Mr. Anderson and Morpheus are not the only students at Cal Poly who have attempted to grow their own cannabis. In a survey Mustang News sent to 3000 randomly selected students, 8.5% of respondents who consume cannabis have tried to grow it themselves.

“I’m not going out, buying seeds and getting a whole set up to grow weed,” Morpheus said. “ If I ever find a cannabis seed, I’m like, ‘Oh, this is fun.’ But, that’s just me with pretty much every seed that I find.”

Wanting to try again after his first attempt to grow cannabis disappeared, Mr. Anderson legally grew cannabis in his house the following school year. SLO County allows residents 21 years or older up to six plants for personal use.

While not 21 at the time, Mr. Anderson’s new of age roommate agreed to take responsibility for the plants. He started with three cannabis sprouts and propagated them to get six plants.

“It was such a cool process because it’s like a normal plant and then it starts flowering,” he said. “We brought it into the basement and got grow lights going to induce the flowering. We gave them special nutrients.”

Mr. Anderson got multiple ounces of weed from his plants that lasted him years. He just finished smoking the last bit in November. Getting “that shitty dealer weed” inspired him to grow his own.

When weed stays in a bag for too long or gets crushed and dried up, Mr. Anderson starts to feel like it is not even a plant anymore. While he never sold it, he liked being able to share his own home-grown weed with his friends.

“Also being able to give away a lot was pretty cool,” he said. “It’s like people who brew their own beer say ‘Oh, here’s a bottle of my beer.’ Or others say, ‘Here’s a bottle of my wine.’ I’m like, ‘Here’s an eighth.’”