From Marijuana Growers Educators
There once was a marijuana-loving guy whose public marijuana media name was Subcool, but he covertly told me his real first name was “Montgomery.”
I met him at a cannabis grower event where he was selling his premium cannabis seeds and his beautiful cannabis photography and strain diary books: Dank, and Dank 2.0.
Subcool’s fascinating biography would be worth a long book. The short version is he loved growing and breeding cannabis since he was a kid, kept doing it despite getting busted, went to prison for it, moved to West Coast states where cannabis was recently legalized, created or supervised creation of dozens of novel cannabis strains and strain families and sold tons of marijuana seeds that grew into hundreds of thousands of cannabis plants.
Subcool is also famous for creating and promoting a homemade blended soil recipe called supersoil.
If you make supersoil properly, start your seeds in starter soil and then transfer them to supersoil 2-3 weeks into grow phase, the supersoil by itself feeds your plants almost all the way to harvest without you having to add any base nutrients, bloom boosters or other feed products.
Subcool was a cannabis king at a time when only a few people were on YouTube showing massive marijuana gardens, and the only person revealing the inner details of the marijuana seeds industry.
He loved sharing new strains. I well remember when he gave me tester seeds from a strain called Jack’s Cleaner.
“Watch for the sharp lemon-vanilla taste, and the sledgehammer Sativa high that borders on hallucinatory,” he intoned. “Nobody ever smelled or tasted a strain like this.”
I knew Subcool didn’t exaggerate about his seed strains. I’d already grown some of them–they were spectacular and exactly like the strain description and photos on his website.
Anyone could see from his Weed Nerd videos he knew how to run outdoor and indoor grows as well as professional boutique and craft grows with fat, gooey, dank buds the size of baseball bats.
But I was totally unprepared for the insanely unique taste and smell of Jack’s Cleaner, and the centrifugal rocket blast-off force of the initial phases of the high.
In October 2017, Subcool lost almost everything when massive California wildfires burned his beautiful Northern California home, ranch, and outdoor and indoor cannabis gardens.
His motherplants, photos, computers, clones, and most of his seed inventory were incinerated as he escaped through the flames just before he too would have been burnt to a crisp.
Thus began an odyssey that ended when he chose Arizona as his new home.
He explained that California’s so-called marijuana legalization regulations were “costly and stupid, designed to work against small growers and in favor of venture capitalist greedy assholes.”
He’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on “compliance attorneys” and grow op infrastructure costs in a futile effort to qualify as a legal California cannabis grower and seed producer.
“States and cities tax weed way too much, compliance attorneys and the regulators profit off of California’s fake legalization. They’re all in bed together. The more I spent to make my 100% safe and perfect grow op meet their regs, the more they said I had to spend,” he complained.
Eventually, he came to mistakenly believe that Arizona’s marijuana legalization regulations would be easier to work with than those in California, and moved to the Arizona desert.
In his Weed Nerd videos from the Arizona era, you see him talking excitedly about new strains, and converting a drained indoor swimming pool into a large grow op. He and business partners also converted a closed bowling alley into a huge, high-tech indoor grow op.
All this time, Subcool was struggling just to stay alive. In 2014, he disclosed to me his ongoing battle with cardiopulmonary obstructive disorder, sometimes known as COPD or emphysema.
He preferred to believe that the potentially fatal disease was caused only by a rare genetic disorder rather than his constant inhalation of combusted and vaporized whole cannabis and cannabis concentrates.
He had no health insurance, had to pay a ton of money for expensive COPD treatments and medicines. He attempted to cut back on how much cannabis he inhaled by switching to tinctures and edibles. But he loved inhaling cannabis.
“I turned to burning pure dry sift and other organic resins, thinking that would save my lungs,” Subcool explained. “It didn’t really work.”
The dry desert air was good for his lungs, and he experienced what he hoped was a healing renaissance in his personal life. His long-time romantic partnership with a woman who calls herself Mz Jill in California ended in brutal acrimony and bitterness, and he was hesitant to ever trust and fall in love with a woman again.
Then he met a young woman who was a fan of his Weed Nerd shows and outlandish weed outlaw persona. He “adopted” the woman and her young baby, and they moved in with him in Arizona.
When I saw Subcool, his young lover and the baby together, they looked like an extremely happy, stable American family. He was more energized, optimistic and centered than I’d ever seen him.
As he moved to expand his cannabis empire by selling high-quality cannabis concentrates, I was happy to believe he’d finally found a good home, true love from a young, attractive female, and had good people around him.
But those sweet days soon ended. On October 25, 2019, Subcool shocked me with this news:
“We just got robbed at gunpoint by nearly 30 Maricopa County sheriff officers. They stole everything, including all my money, seeds, plants, medicine, vehicles and my bank accounts. Apparently someone narked on me. I thought I was totally legal and compliant. This is devastating,” he said.
At first, he wanted Growing Marijuana Perfectly to do a “big article” about the raid, but his attorneys told him that would harm his chances of beating the charges or escaping a prison sentence.
So Subcool hardly told anybody about being busted, and told me not to write about the raid.
Thus, nobody reported the raid, leaving growers all around the world wondering what happened to Subcool’s new Arizona-based cannabis seeds and concentrates website, and why wasn’t he making new Weed Nerd videos.
Subcool was spiraling into depression, despair and suicidality. He realized he’d made a terrible mistake moving to Maricopa County, Arizona.
If you’ve heard of Maricopa County before, it’s probably because its former long-time sheriff Joe Arpaio was a dangerous, racist intimidator who thought it funny to house prisoners in crude tents in the desert where temperatures often reach 120°F.
Arpaio fancied himself a celebrity sheriff, and was constantly in the news because of lawsuits, and reports of his department’s racial profiling, embezzlement, abused and dead prisoners, entrapment, and his right-wing comments expressing hatred of Latinos and other immigrants.
During Arpaio’s 15 years in office, there were big-money lawsuits won by inmates abused in his jails, a $100 million misallocation of county funds, failed prosecutions of politicians and judges, and disgusting mishandling of 400 sex crime cases—many involving children.
Litigation defending Arpaio’s bad actions cost taxpayers nearly $150 million.
Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt in a case related to racial profiling in 2017 and faced up to six months in jail, where prisoners would likely have gotten justified revenge on him.
But instead of going to jail, Arpaio was saved by then-President Donald Trump who along with pardoning murderous war criminals, Putin-loving traitors, and financial fraudsters, and being a seditious traitor who orchestrated the January 6 violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, issued Arpaio a presidential pardon that blocked the punishment he deserved.
Arpaio wasn’t sheriff in 2019 when Subcool was busted, but his legacy of hating marijuana and creating a gangsterish police agency lived on.
As Subcool and his attorneys examined his case file, they discovered his arrest had been enabled in part by a secret regulation the city of Mesa had instituted, stating that anyone growing marijuana had to file a garden registration with the city government.
“But they never told anybody about this requirement,” Subcool lamented. “My very experienced attorney and business associates who have been compliant with Arizona’s marijuana growing laws for nearly a decade didn’t know about it. That’s how local government made my entire grow op illegal without me knowing it, and got the search warrant.”
As soon as he was raided, the happy days ended for Subcool. He told me he felt “cursed and jinxed.”
He bitterly complained about his “ruthless, vicious ex-wife.” People who dealt with her said she has a massively inflated ego, is terminally greedy, and runs a bogus seed company selling strain names Subcool made popular.
I urged Subcool to get immediate medical care and mental health counseling after he told me the following depressing news:
“They’re trying to seize this home I live in even though it’s just a rent-to-own deal; my name isn’t even on the lease. So now within a few days I’ll be homeless. My credit score is destroyed by the raid because they seized all my bank accounts and cash. I have two dogs, so finding a place to rent isn’t easy. I’ve thought about camping in a tent or living in an RV, and tried it a little, but I’m so sick and broke, I don’t know if I can continue to manage it. I have to have a permanent address where doctors can send my COPD meds, but instead I live on the road like a wandering gypsy. The lawyer says maybe I won’t get any jail time. I could end up in a diversion probation program, but that sucks too.”
As I spoke with Subcool, I wished I knew of a crisis support center near him. It seemed he was giving up on life. In mid-January 2020, I received a cryptic message from him which I’ve edited to anonymize the names of individuals Subcool mentioned. Here’s what he said:
“I’m wasting my talent and life now. I never planned to have to move somewhere while I’m sick and solo and worried about going to prison. I hate life but I get up each day and work on. I found out that the cops were watching me on Facebook and Instagram. I discovered that [name redacted] stole all the cash I had hidden that the police didn’t get. She’s out having a great time with my $30,000. I already knew that [name redacted] has been slagging me online, falsely claiming I’m a pedophile and saying other stupid shit. I cry a lot and am drinking alcohol, because I don’t have cannabis. I have only a few days to find a home for me and the dogs, and my lung function is at 27%. I feel like I’m drowning in my own lungs. You go ahead and write my story after I’m gone. I miss the good days of being the happy Weed Nerd Subcool. Arizona was a massive mistake. All I can say is ‘one love, brother,’ and thank you for being one of few good people I met in the marijuana industry.”
Subcool said this to me in mid-January. After that, he never again responded to my numerous emails or phone calls.
When I heard about COVID-19, how it’s especially lethal for people with lung problems, I feared the worst.
Then came the terrible but not unexpected news—Subcool died destitute, abandoned, despairing and unable to breathe at the end of January 2020.
Thank you for your huge contribution.
R.I.P Montgomery Ball, also called Dave Bowman, weed legend Subcool.
There once was a marijuana-loving guy whose public marijuana media name was Subcool, but he covertly told me his real first name was “Montgomery.”
I met him at a cannabis grower event where he was selling his premium cannabis seeds and his beautiful cannabis photography and strain diary books: Dank, and Dank 2.0.
Back then, his books cost $20 each. Today, if you can find them, they cost $700 or more—they’re collector’s items.
Subcool told of his epic transition from being a heating and air conditioning engineer and outlaw cannabis grower to being a worldwide marijuana icon who won a High Times Cannabis Cup Lifetime Achievement Award, and had an army of thousands of subscribers to his YouTube Weed Nerd channel.
Subcool told of his epic transition from being a heating and air conditioning engineer and outlaw cannabis grower to being a worldwide marijuana icon who won a High Times Cannabis Cup Lifetime Achievement Award, and had an army of thousands of subscribers to his YouTube Weed Nerd channel.
Subcool’s fascinating biography would be worth a long book. The short version is he loved growing and breeding cannabis since he was a kid, kept doing it despite getting busted, went to prison for it, moved to West Coast states where cannabis was recently legalized, created or supervised creation of dozens of novel cannabis strains and strain families and sold tons of marijuana seeds that grew into hundreds of thousands of cannabis plants.
Subcool is also famous for creating and promoting a homemade blended soil recipe called supersoil.
If you make supersoil properly, start your seeds in starter soil and then transfer them to supersoil 2-3 weeks into grow phase, the supersoil by itself feeds your plants almost all the way to harvest without you having to add any base nutrients, bloom boosters or other feed products.
Subcool was a cannabis king at a time when only a few people were on YouTube showing massive marijuana gardens, and the only person revealing the inner details of the marijuana seeds industry.
He loved sharing new strains. I well remember when he gave me tester seeds from a strain called Jack’s Cleaner.
“Watch for the sharp lemon-vanilla taste, and the sledgehammer Sativa high that borders on hallucinatory,” he intoned. “Nobody ever smelled or tasted a strain like this.”
I knew Subcool didn’t exaggerate about his seed strains. I’d already grown some of them–they were spectacular and exactly like the strain description and photos on his website.
Anyone could see from his Weed Nerd videos he knew how to run outdoor and indoor grows as well as professional boutique and craft grows with fat, gooey, dank buds the size of baseball bats.
But I was totally unprepared for the insanely unique taste and smell of Jack’s Cleaner, and the centrifugal rocket blast-off force of the initial phases of the high.
In October 2017, Subcool lost almost everything when massive California wildfires burned his beautiful Northern California home, ranch, and outdoor and indoor cannabis gardens.
His motherplants, photos, computers, clones, and most of his seed inventory were incinerated as he escaped through the flames just before he too would have been burnt to a crisp.
Thus began an odyssey that ended when he chose Arizona as his new home.
He explained that California’s so-called marijuana legalization regulations were “costly and stupid, designed to work against small growers and in favor of venture capitalist greedy assholes.”
He’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on “compliance attorneys” and grow op infrastructure costs in a futile effort to qualify as a legal California cannabis grower and seed producer.
“States and cities tax weed way too much, compliance attorneys and the regulators profit off of California’s fake legalization. They’re all in bed together. The more I spent to make my 100% safe and perfect grow op meet their regs, the more they said I had to spend,” he complained.
Eventually, he came to mistakenly believe that Arizona’s marijuana legalization regulations would be easier to work with than those in California, and moved to the Arizona desert.
In his Weed Nerd videos from the Arizona era, you see him talking excitedly about new strains, and converting a drained indoor swimming pool into a large grow op. He and business partners also converted a closed bowling alley into a huge, high-tech indoor grow op.
All this time, Subcool was struggling just to stay alive. In 2014, he disclosed to me his ongoing battle with cardiopulmonary obstructive disorder, sometimes known as COPD or emphysema.
He preferred to believe that the potentially fatal disease was caused only by a rare genetic disorder rather than his constant inhalation of combusted and vaporized whole cannabis and cannabis concentrates.
He had no health insurance, had to pay a ton of money for expensive COPD treatments and medicines. He attempted to cut back on how much cannabis he inhaled by switching to tinctures and edibles. But he loved inhaling cannabis.
“I turned to burning pure dry sift and other organic resins, thinking that would save my lungs,” Subcool explained. “It didn’t really work.”
The dry desert air was good for his lungs, and he experienced what he hoped was a healing renaissance in his personal life. His long-time romantic partnership with a woman who calls herself Mz Jill in California ended in brutal acrimony and bitterness, and he was hesitant to ever trust and fall in love with a woman again.
Then he met a young woman who was a fan of his Weed Nerd shows and outlandish weed outlaw persona. He “adopted” the woman and her young baby, and they moved in with him in Arizona.
When I saw Subcool, his young lover and the baby together, they looked like an extremely happy, stable American family. He was more energized, optimistic and centered than I’d ever seen him.
As he moved to expand his cannabis empire by selling high-quality cannabis concentrates, I was happy to believe he’d finally found a good home, true love from a young, attractive female, and had good people around him.
But those sweet days soon ended. On October 25, 2019, Subcool shocked me with this news:
“We just got robbed at gunpoint by nearly 30 Maricopa County sheriff officers. They stole everything, including all my money, seeds, plants, medicine, vehicles and my bank accounts. Apparently someone narked on me. I thought I was totally legal and compliant. This is devastating,” he said.
At first, he wanted Growing Marijuana Perfectly to do a “big article” about the raid, but his attorneys told him that would harm his chances of beating the charges or escaping a prison sentence.
So Subcool hardly told anybody about being busted, and told me not to write about the raid.
Thus, nobody reported the raid, leaving growers all around the world wondering what happened to Subcool’s new Arizona-based cannabis seeds and concentrates website, and why wasn’t he making new Weed Nerd videos.
Subcool was spiraling into depression, despair and suicidality. He realized he’d made a terrible mistake moving to Maricopa County, Arizona.
If you’ve heard of Maricopa County before, it’s probably because its former long-time sheriff Joe Arpaio was a dangerous, racist intimidator who thought it funny to house prisoners in crude tents in the desert where temperatures often reach 120°F.
Arpaio fancied himself a celebrity sheriff, and was constantly in the news because of lawsuits, and reports of his department’s racial profiling, embezzlement, abused and dead prisoners, entrapment, and his right-wing comments expressing hatred of Latinos and other immigrants.
During Arpaio’s 15 years in office, there were big-money lawsuits won by inmates abused in his jails, a $100 million misallocation of county funds, failed prosecutions of politicians and judges, and disgusting mishandling of 400 sex crime cases—many involving children.
Litigation defending Arpaio’s bad actions cost taxpayers nearly $150 million.
Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt in a case related to racial profiling in 2017 and faced up to six months in jail, where prisoners would likely have gotten justified revenge on him.
But instead of going to jail, Arpaio was saved by then-President Donald Trump who along with pardoning murderous war criminals, Putin-loving traitors, and financial fraudsters, and being a seditious traitor who orchestrated the January 6 violent attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, issued Arpaio a presidential pardon that blocked the punishment he deserved.
Arpaio wasn’t sheriff in 2019 when Subcool was busted, but his legacy of hating marijuana and creating a gangsterish police agency lived on.
As Subcool and his attorneys examined his case file, they discovered his arrest had been enabled in part by a secret regulation the city of Mesa had instituted, stating that anyone growing marijuana had to file a garden registration with the city government.
“But they never told anybody about this requirement,” Subcool lamented. “My very experienced attorney and business associates who have been compliant with Arizona’s marijuana growing laws for nearly a decade didn’t know about it. That’s how local government made my entire grow op illegal without me knowing it, and got the search warrant.”
As soon as he was raided, the happy days ended for Subcool. He told me he felt “cursed and jinxed.”
He bitterly complained about his “ruthless, vicious ex-wife.” People who dealt with her said she has a massively inflated ego, is terminally greedy, and runs a bogus seed company selling strain names Subcool made popular.
I urged Subcool to get immediate medical care and mental health counseling after he told me the following depressing news:
“They’re trying to seize this home I live in even though it’s just a rent-to-own deal; my name isn’t even on the lease. So now within a few days I’ll be homeless. My credit score is destroyed by the raid because they seized all my bank accounts and cash. I have two dogs, so finding a place to rent isn’t easy. I’ve thought about camping in a tent or living in an RV, and tried it a little, but I’m so sick and broke, I don’t know if I can continue to manage it. I have to have a permanent address where doctors can send my COPD meds, but instead I live on the road like a wandering gypsy. The lawyer says maybe I won’t get any jail time. I could end up in a diversion probation program, but that sucks too.”
As I spoke with Subcool, I wished I knew of a crisis support center near him. It seemed he was giving up on life. In mid-January 2020, I received a cryptic message from him which I’ve edited to anonymize the names of individuals Subcool mentioned. Here’s what he said:
“I’m wasting my talent and life now. I never planned to have to move somewhere while I’m sick and solo and worried about going to prison. I hate life but I get up each day and work on. I found out that the cops were watching me on Facebook and Instagram. I discovered that [name redacted] stole all the cash I had hidden that the police didn’t get. She’s out having a great time with my $30,000. I already knew that [name redacted] has been slagging me online, falsely claiming I’m a pedophile and saying other stupid shit. I cry a lot and am drinking alcohol, because I don’t have cannabis. I have only a few days to find a home for me and the dogs, and my lung function is at 27%. I feel like I’m drowning in my own lungs. You go ahead and write my story after I’m gone. I miss the good days of being the happy Weed Nerd Subcool. Arizona was a massive mistake. All I can say is ‘one love, brother,’ and thank you for being one of few good people I met in the marijuana industry.”
Subcool said this to me in mid-January. After that, he never again responded to my numerous emails or phone calls.
When I heard about COVID-19, how it’s especially lethal for people with lung problems, I feared the worst.
Then came the terrible but not unexpected news—Subcool died destitute, abandoned, despairing and unable to breathe at the end of January 2020.
Thank you for your huge contribution.
R.I.P Montgomery Ball, also called Dave Bowman, weed legend Subcool.
