PRESENTS
a l l i m Sinse Sto r y
An assortment of Sinsemilla Tips issues over a “sea of green” garden— a technique that they covered first.
As Cannabis culture began shifting away from smuggling towards the “grow your own” philosophy at the end of the 1970s, a demand arose for more in-depth grow advice than what High Times offered at the time. From that vacuum, a new underground magazine emerged that would revolutionize Cannabis cultivation in America: Sinsemilla Tips.
RAID & REVENGE
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For more about Tom & Sinsemilla Tips, listen to Episode #16 of our podcast at worldofCannabis.museum/cannthropology.
Billed as “the nation’s only technical journal for the marijuana industry,” Sinsemilla Tips was created in 1980 by a grower named Tom Alexander as a sort of revenge fantasy against the establishment. Alexander had been living on a primitive 160-acre homestead in the backwoods of Corvallis, Oregon, where he planted around half an acre of quality Hawaiian genetics. But before he could harvest his first crop, a timber scout spotted his garden and reported it to the sheriff. On Sept. 27, 1979, 16 officers with semi-automatic rifles raided his homestead – confiscating his 1,200-plus plants and arresting him and his wife. Fortunately for them, the charges were ultimately dismissed due to an error on the search warrant regarding the location of his property. The authorities still kept his weed though, of course … and weeks later, three of the sheriffs involved were arrested by state police for attempting to sell it themselves. Unlike Alexander, however, who’d faced a $100,000 fine and possible 20 years in prison, the crooked cops were sentenced to just three years of probation. Incensed by this blatant injustice, the outraged outlaw set out to exact his revenge on the establishment through the written word. He decided to write a book about Cannabis cultivation, but was quickly persuaded by his grower friends to publish an ongoing journal instead. Without a lick of experience in journalism or publishing, Alexander sat down
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with a typewriter, a kerosene lantern (he had no electricity), and some rubber cement and got to work. The result was a 16-page, typo-ridden newsletter that he christened Sinsemilla Tips.
TWO MOONS RISING
COURTESY OF TOM ALEXANDER
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WORLD OF Cannabis
After printing around 1,000 copies, Alexander drove up and down the coast from Mendocino to Seattle selling the newsletters for 50 cents apiece at grow stores, on street corners, or Sinsemilla Tips founder Tom Alexander. wherever he could. It was while visiting those horticulture shops in Humboldt and Seattle that he noticed all of the growers with wads of hundreds buying fertilizers and grow lights, that he had another bright idea. One month after starting the journal, he opened Oregon’s first hybrid indoor/outdoor grow shop: Full Moon Farm Products. “It was a 5,000-square-foot grow shop on Main Street in downtown Corvallis, right in front of everybody,” Alexander boasts. “It had windows that were 12 feet high, and we put grow rooms with 10foot tomato plants in those two front windows to show what could be done with those lights.” Upstairs from the Full Moon shop became the offices of New
Issue #3 - Fall 1980
