🔒This farm encourages weed growth

On a dank Maine winter's afternoon, a guard escorts me into a nondescript boxy building, then takes my driver's license for the duration of my stay. She ushers me to a dressing area, where I slide booties over my shoes, don a blue lab coat and follow her down a long corridor to a warm room with bright grow lamps. Inside, Patricia Rosi, the petite CEO of Wellness Connection of Maine, smiles and looks almost lovingly across rows of lush, green cannabis mother plants that resemble a tropical forest.

She takes me into an adjourning room, the nursery, where cuttings from the mother plants start new lives in blocks of rock wool. The rows of baby plants, with each plant individually labeled, bathe under warm growing lights for about three weeks. The company grows more than 40 different strains.

Rosi says Mainebiz was the first press to get broad access to the WCM's cannabis growing and processing factory in five years. See more in the Feb. 6 cover story, “Growing a 'cannabiz' in Maine.”

We walk across the hall to two adjourning rooms. We have to wear special glasses to protect our eyes from the harsh grow lights in both of them. Rosi describes the first room as the kindergarten, where the baby plants undergo a growth spurt under a yellowish metal-halide light for 18 hours a day. Next door, high-pressure sodium lights are on 12 hours a day and then off to mimic the autumn sunlight and prompt flowering in eight weeks.

Back across the hall a room holds horizontal rows of strings running floor to ceiling, flowering plants clinging to them upside down for a week until the buds dry. I inhale deeply, but the air circulating in the room renders it scentless. Those buds will be stripped of debris, the clean buds bagged and the debris processed into edibles in a separate area.

To get to the processing section, Rosi takes me back to the dressing area, where we take off the blue lab coats and booties and walk outside to the adjoining building. We put on white lab coats and booties. The aim, she says, is to prevent cross-contamination of the growing plants, which exude oils and other debris, with those that are clean for final processing.

Rosi's excitement grows as she takes me into a room filled with machines that process the excess flower parts into tinctures and other forms of edible marijuana, so most of the plant can be used. In another room, she introduces me to Sonia Buckhoff, an employee of three years who is weighing buds for packaging.

Rosi says that while many people think those who grow and sell marijuana are stoners who sit on the couch, it is an intricate business with lots of chemistry knowledge needed and with high costs — $50,000 a month on electricity alone.

While the state monitors the factory every year, Rosi says more clarity is needed on quality and safety requirements for marijuana. Her company essentially self-polices its safety and cleanliness conditions. It is setting up its own research and quality lab and has hired Dan Niesen, a PhD, to run it. In his LinkedIn profile, Niesen notes he's “quality control, quality assurance manager at Wellness Connection of Maine, 'The way Medical Cannabis should be.'”

The stringent regulations and safety standards for drugs that go through U.S. Food and Drug Administration testing don't exist yet for marijuana. Niesen says outside labs can't test the product, partly because it's still illegal on a federal level.

As the tour concludes, we head to the security station to retrieve my driver's license and take off our white lab coats. Near the exit, security workers watch a series of monitors showing all parts of the factory and each of the company's four Maine dispensaries. I take a last look at the lush greens on the screen, sigh, and head out into the New England winter.