V9Grows420 | Empowering Patients, Promoting Inclusion

On August 20, 2019, LaVaughn Hamilton, who lives in Kansas City but is originally from St. Louis, launched V9Grows420 – a Facebook streamed show that has grown to be the largest social content platform in Missouri cannabis. The date? 400 years after slavery started in the colonies – and a symbolic way for Hamilton to take his power back as a Black man in cannabis.

“The state of Missouri, all by itself, gave us some power to take the worry to consume and to possess this plant that we use to medicate ourselves with,” Hamilton said. “I took that as a way to grasp and pull that power back. And that was the day that V9Grows420 was born. From that point, I knew that this is going to be something that is going to bless a lot of people.”

Every show starts out the same.

“What up, what up, what uuuuuup? It’s your boy, it’s your boy, it’s your motherf*cking boy. V9Grows420.”

Beyond the smile it gives viewers, the recurring introduction is influenced by Hamilton’s love of Martin Lawrence’s radio show intro from the 1990s and Dragon Ball Z content creator SSRIQ. Hamilton says he likes to make his show as fun as possible.

What’s V9? Not a play on Delta 9, but the nom de plume that has stuck with Hamilton from a young age by his friend Chris. The name stuck and became what most know Hamilton as.

PHOTOS//Mimi Amor Photography

LEADING INDUSTRY INCLUSION

On his show, Hamilton guides novice growers through growing their own medicine within the parameters of Missouri’s patient cultivation program. He’s also become a leading face in the activist community for minority inclusion.

“One of the things that I’m focusing on is during Black History Month, I’m noticing a lot of conversations about inclusion,” Hamilton said. “I’m noticing a lot of content creators that we have for cannabis on any platform…the conversation should come up about inclusion. It’s an obvious thing that is happening right now. If you look around the cannabis industry in the country, just take Missouri out of the equation, the country – the population of Blacks and Hispanics [in the cannabis industry] is like five percent. The other 95 percent. Why aren’t they all talking about it? They talk about it but then they are afraid to talk about it again because they’re afraid they’re going to lose viewership or sponsors or feel that they’re going to lose friends – but it doesn’t make any sense because the people who are around them say that people of color are their friends too. If they’re your friends, you should be trying to reach out to them, reach your arms out, and show your support for them and put your arms up as a gate, as a barrier, as a defense to allow yourself to be vulnerable too – because they’re already vulnerable enough. So I think that if everyone would join us in the fight, which I’m not seeing a lot of, that the conversation would be a lot different. When you see a majority of people fighting for the same thing, you cannot ignore it.

“We are the cannabis market,” Hamilton continued. “We created the cannabis market. Always working. We’ve been working on it for decades. To leave them out of the conversation, to leave them out of the initiative, to leave them out of the program at such a large rate, is one of the biggest slaps in the face to people as a whole. I’m surprised that people aren’t up in arms – we’ve got friends, we’ve got family, we’ve got cousins, we’ve got uncles, we’ve got husbands, we’ve got wives, we’ve got children, for that matter, who are of ethnic origin – but we’re not fighting for them? That’s our future. They’re the ones that are going to be the cannabis leaders when they become 18 or older. They’re going to be the leaders in the future – and I’m not going to fight for them? I have a cousin who’s got kids, and I have a mom who’s got kids and I’ve got a grandpa – but we’re a melting pot of culture – the cannabis industry should look exactly the same. A melting pot of culture. Like Cherokee. Southwest Blvd. Dutchtown. Bevo Mill. That shit looks like a melting pot of culture. You go down Gravois. A melting pot. Soulard Market? A melting pot of culture. That whole area.

“That’s how it should look everywhere because America is a melting pot,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton says the value of inclusion is the strength of the melting pot and how it empowers people.

“When people see people who look like them in every walk of life, it makes them walk proud, it makes them walk taller, it makes them feel like, ‘I can do that too,’” Hamilton said. “When you don’t see it and you see 95 percent of the cannabis industry is white – imagine if you took white paint and painted 95 percent of my face white and wrote ‘cannabis industry’ and walked out, like this, people would look at you like ‘wow really’ because most people don’t know that that is the way it works and when they find out they’re like ‘what?’ The power of inclusion is the face of a melting pot. You want it to be rainbow-colored. It’s everybody.”

Additionally, Hamilton asks, “Do you think that proportion of representation represents the cannabis knowledge available in the state?”

He said he wants to see more color in the industry and hopes the industry will step up to embrace inclusion proactively. Hamilton says a good way to increase inclusion is going to more minority-dense areas for events, whether it’s a patient drive, job fair, etc.

GETTING V9GROWS420 STARTED

When Hamilton found out Missouri’s new medical marijuana program would allow patients to grow their own, he was in. He’d already had exposure to growing at home and dove in, doing countless hours of research over a period of months. Drawing from other content creators, he took key points and created a manual for growing – and he got to work.

“I took the bumps, I took the bruises, I got hit over the head,” Hamilton said of his first grows.” Now I can teach others how to not mess up.”

The show first started on a cannabis community Facebook group as a way for Hamilton to dilute redundant information before the show eventually established its own presence as a dominant source of information for home cultivators.

“Of course, it’s blossomed into what V9Grows420 is today,” Hamilton said. “I’m able to teach so many people how to grow. So many people are afraid to grow and I can teach them how to start, where to start, what to do because I was once that person. I had no idea where to start, what to do.”

Hamilton says growing is not as hard as people may think – and the biggest mistake he sees is people overthinking it. He spends an hour to an hour and a half in his own garden.

“I come home from work, I look around, see if I see any deficiencies or pests,” said Hamilton. “Pests are a big problem in gardens, which is why you do not walk in your grow area with shoes on. Never walk in there with your shoes on, especially in the spring or summer. Bugs will crawl up in your shoes and soles.”

Pests to watch out for include mites and aphids, but Hamilton says it is easy to avoid problems – and recover from issues.

“You really have to go hard on this plant to destroy it and it can recover like nobody’s business,” Hamilton said. “Being a caregiver and a cultivator myself, this is the foundation of this entire program. It is indeed the foundation because having home cultivation is the idea of putting patients over profits. Bottom line. You’re giving patients control over their own medicine. They can grow it their way. They can grow it at their leisure. They can grow how much the state will allow them to grow. But they can also be a caregiver and give patients under them so much control. That is the true foundation of this program. It’s a patient-driven program. I applaud Missouri for allowing patients to grow the best quality they can grow and the quality they can grow is mind-boggling.

“That’s so important to me, patients having that option,” Hamilton said, pointing to other states that lack a home grow aspect of their program.

As of publication, Missouri has over 20,000 registered home growers. Patients and caregivers must register with the state. A patient may grow up to 6 plants in each of three stages, 6 each in clone, vegetation, and flowering stages for themselves, while a caregiver can grow up to the same number for each of up to 3 patients or two patients and themselves.

Another indicator that home grow may be taking off in Missouri? Go shopping for Mason jars. Or lids. (If you can’t find any, there are obviously some online, but the editorial board of this publication encourages patients to check out hardware stores in the canning section.)

“You have options,” Hamilton said. “The ability to have options really puts patients in control of their own medicine, their own way.”

ROOTS

Hamilton’s passion for his medicinal garden wasn’t love at first sight. He grew up in the projects in downtown St. Louis where he said cannabis was – and is – a part of everyday life. Family, friends, neighbors – everyone used cannabis.

“In the 80s and 90s, I was exposed to a lot,” he said.

When he was young, he wanted to see what the buzz was all about – and that journey didn’t last long for him.

“There were things that cannabis couldn’t do for me at that time in my life because of prescription drugs that I was on at the time that were counteracting it,” Hamilton said. “The more it let on, when I kept trying and kept trying to get to that medicated spot where I knew everybody else was getting to, I was like ‘where’s this buzz, every time I smoke with you guys, I am getting none of what you’re getting.’ They’re like ‘damn, I am blasted, I am blown, I am smacked,’ I heard it all the time.”

“Damn, you smoked a whole blunt and nothing?”

Cannabis was never foreign to Hamilton, who said his view of cannabis is very domestic.

More than his own experience with cannabis, his personal experience with the stigma of cannabis has steered his show. As a patient and caregiver, Hamilton sees cannabis not as a gateway drug, but as a gateway away from drugs.

“What I thought I knew about cannabis, what I knew my people thought about cannabis – is that it is medicine,” Hamilton said. “It’s calming, it’s relaxation. But to me, the world outside, the people who throw shade at it, dare to be different from stigma, ‘gateway drug,’ ‘reefer madness.’”

Hamilton noted the harm caused by other legal, non-medicinal substances, like alcohol and tobacco, that kill people every day that few bat their eyes at compared to the stigmatization of cannabis.

“It’s the easiest cop-out,” Hamilton says of nay-sayers. “This gateway is bullsh*t.”

It wasn’t until he was older that a conversation with a friend helped to reveal why Hamilton had struggled to obtain any relief or sensation when using cannabis in his youth. Hamilton says that the ADHD prescriptions from his childhood may have offset the effects of cannabis. Without those medications in his system, Hamilton’s eyes were opened to the personal power of cannabis.

“I was like, ‘ok, I have got to do some more research on this,’” Hamilton said. “I knew the effects, I knew what it could do, but I wanted to understand what it was going to do to me specifically.”

He looked at profiles of strains he was familiar with – from Super Silver Haze, Black Widow, Black Mamba, and on – for similarities and finding his own terpene profile.

“Now I can pretty much smoke anything and my body can handle it because it’s no longer a foreign object,” Hamilton said.

“It is medicine,” Hamilton said. “It is medicine, I don’t think it’s a ‘maybe’ at this point.”

WHAT’S NEXT

That medicine and empowering other patients to control their own medicine is something that V9Grows420 seeks to share., The show recently did a giveaway to benefit a low-income patient. The drawing, worth over $900 in equipment and materials, was completely random – but ended up going to one of Hamilton’s earliest viewers. Hamilton himself chooses to grow on a budget and put the package together of some top-of-the-line equipment he had on hand. He said that he wants his viewers to have the same option to grow without breaking the pocketbook.

“Soil, nutrients, lights, you got it,” Hamilton said. “It was completely random, but it was someone who has been watching my streams from the very beginning. She was very deserving of it. Shout out to Evelyn Cooley. Very deserving.”

V9Grows420 is followed by over 3,500 people on Facebook, making him one of the largest content producers in the state. Impressive, but that’s not what it’s about for Hamilton.

“It’s like not having it,” Hamilton said. “My content is going to stay the same. I’m not going to change who I am. I’m the same person I am when I first turned that camera on. It’s just me.”

The show is a compliment to his own home grow consulting, where home growers can request to have him visit their grows at an affordable rate – right from his Facebook page.

“To me, education should be free. Knowledge should be free. What you pay for is someone’s time. Knowledge should be free. I don’t charge anybody to come to my page, to watch my content, or even ask me small questions. Every day. I’m glad to do it or give a pointer here and there. I’m not going to get into the whole shebang, you have to leverage your time. I have a family too. But at the same time, they have those small questions, I’m going to answer them. You should want to garner and support someone’s time.”