Flower Power

How Michael Steinmetz became the new king of weed.

- Por Adam Bluestein. Photographs by Mathew Scott

Johnny Casali can feel a helicopter approaching minutes before anyone else hears the whack of rotors. It’s a sensitivity that comes from growing up on a Humboldt County “homestead” in the War on Drugs era.

Casali’s parents operated a melon farm. They also grew some pot. And they weren’t alone. Thanks to abundant rain and sun, the high canopy of giant trees for camouflage, and the withering of local industries like logging and fishing, growing weed was what people did here. And some of them got really good at it. By the 1980s, Humboldt had become a legendary “brand” among potheads in the know.

But if you lived here, you didn’t talk about it. “You never said what you did,” says Casali. “You always said your parents were carpenters.” His parents divorced when he was 5, and as he grew up he would help his mother tend the plants. During summers, Casali and his buddies would surf, rip around on dirt bikes, and Rambo through the woods, tending networks of well-hidden grows. From parents and grandparents, they learned to make fertilizers out of horse manure, firepit ashes, sawdust, and scraps from commercial fishing boats. To trick helicopters scanning for ground-level plants, they’d grow them in the trees, on wooden platforms hung from branches. When Casali was 15, he even made enough to put a down payment on a piece of property.