The company was formed out of his love and passion for the plant
While many people may stake their claim to being the greatest in the game, most of the real innovators are incredibly humble individuals who aren’t the type to toot their own horn and shout about their multitudinous achievements from the rooftops. Underground breeders are the life blood which keeps the industry alive and hungry and many of them have been in the game for years without ever making a real name for themselves in the traditional sense of gaining fame. In the great state of Massachusetts one man has dedicated himself to his greatest passion for the best part of three decades and turned a favorite hobby into something special. His name is Peezy.
Back in the 90s he first started to dabble with growing his own weed using landraces and skunk-style seeds he managed to get his hands on, but the reality of his situation goes back to the generation before him as he is the son of an old-school breeder and grower who grew his own strains throughout the 70s and 80s. When he was a curious child he was always intrigued by the sweet smells around the house until one day he picked one of the discarded roaches out of his father’s ashtray and tried to smoke it. Suffice to say this first foray into the world of smoking didn’t turn out too well and he coughed his lungs out until his brain hurt. Feeling shocked, sick, scared and slightly stoned, the experience put him off trying again for a good few years. But by the time he had reached his teens he had plucked up the courage to try again and learned how to use a bong by watching his favorite Cheech and Chong movies. This time things went a lot more smoothly and he found himself enjoying the sensation. From that moment forward he knew that this would be something that he was likely to enjoy for a long time to come.
A few years down the line he decided that he wanted to come clean with his dad and let him know that he not only had been pinching his buds but also fancied himself as a grower in his own right. They worked together on a crop and crossbreeding project in the summer of 93 and it became the foundation upon which their relationship became stronger than ever. His dad taught him the ropes and gave advice, but Peezy wanted to expand his levels of understanding ever further and sought out information wherever he could. Using books, magazines, friendly advice and a fair amount of trial and error he spent all his spare time making up random crosses and experimenting in his own way over the next five years until he undertook his first ‘proper’ project with indoor and outdoor breeds that required a draw out thought process and generational breeding work. Peezy remembers that this was part of the Blueberry Northern Lights project as DJ Short’s Blueberry was the hottest thing on the block and the 90’s Northern Lights strains were the bee’s knees. Thanks to his father’s connections and snail mail seeds from people all over the place he had access to exceptional quality and he could play around to his heart’s content.
Throughout his experiments he quickly learned that cannabis was helping him in so many ways and was far more than a plant he was interested in. A number of his health problems began to fade and he weened himself off of the prescription pills he was taking. What started off as an interest and hobby became something which helped change his life forever. Even with this in mind, Peezy had no idea at this time that he would go on to make a lifelong career as a breeder and grower. Over the years his strains have won numerous awards, but Peezy is not the type to enter his own strains into contests. Growers across the globe have fallen in love with his trains and year after year he hears his strains mentioned in various contests, which he thinks is great, yet he shrugs off this kind of recognition and remains humble. “It’s cool that people enter our genetics and win awards. I’m happy for them. It’s just never been my jar of weed, per se.”
In the middle of the first decade of this new millennium he started working on his Dirty Water Organics company. For the first few years this was just the name he used for his work in the local community, but by 2012, following a split from one of his working partners, he was ready to launch it as an official title and it’s a name he has put to his seeds and medicine ever since. While he is really a one-man band when it comes to his work, Peezy does have a number of people who help him out as testers or on-off breeders who may have ideas they can work on together. The company was formed out of his love and passion for the plant and its ability to help people from all walks of life by giving them access to top-shelf medicine which is catered to their individual needs. The rest is history as they say and he now has a strong following on social media across various platforms for his seed-focussed business.
Fast forward to today and he doesn’t grow for the purpose of mass production or dealing anymore and his focus has shifted to nothing but pure breeding. In his own word’s his life is 24/7/365 cannabis breeding and he dedicates his time to plant selection, pollen collection, pollinating and line breeding his work to ensure standards are always kept to a maximum. Peezy and his associates pride themselves on bringing the best quality to the public (as well as themselves, obviously) and they work tirelessly to deliver medicinal and recreational strains which can meet a diverse range of needs.
By acting in the position of a caregiver, Peezy can ensure that he provides strains that are specific to the needs of individual patients and once they have prepared the crops, edibles, topicals or extracts for a particular patient they usually give away anything which is left over to other patients in their care who might benefit from it. What motivated Peezy to focus his efforts in this way was his own experiences with chronic and debilitating illnesses that impacted on his standard of living on a daily basis; cannabis helped him maintain a better standard of living and no he wants others to benefit from his knowledge and experience. As he lives in a recreationally and medically legal state, he has found that the shifting public perception means that he has seen it become far more normalized over the past few years and this means that he can work without the worry which often plagued him in the past. By dedicating his time exclusively to breeding he is able to target specific illnesses and ailments to ensure an optimum level of care through cannabis.
While he sees the shifting dynamics of the political world as a positive thing on the whole, Peezy still wishes that there was more of a move towards decriminalization as opposed to medicinal and recreational legislation. He sees the idea of recreational as being a bit of a false motivator for many as it is just a ‘relaxation of the rules’ and people can still ‘end up in jail’ if they are caught with too much weed in the eyes of the law. He explained that he firmly believes that: “Cannabis plants grow freely in the wild from the earth and have been around for so long in civilization, so it’s ridiculous to make it illegal and ban it from our culture. It takes no extra processing to create cannabis to smoke – it simply starts from a seed or clone, grows, gets cut down, dries and then is used. It’s not like some of the other earth-grown drugs that are outlawed that need a bunch of different additives or processes to make into the drug form. No sir. Cannabis should be free from all laws. Anyone should have access to it and we should all be able to grow our own without limits on how much we can possess or how many plants we can grow. It’s prohibition that created the Illegal drug market with cannabis. It’s killed countless people, destroyed millions of other lives. When you outlaw something it drives prices up making it worth big bucks on the illegal market, this is where cartels and street gangs/local armed dealers come into play and when you have lots of money involved, there’s going to be violence in any situation when it’s unregulated and illegal. History has shown that over and over again, it’s too bad the governments and world leaders of countries can’t see that. Still, any progress is good…so I can’t complain.”
At the time of writing there are numerous projects in the pipeline, but Peezy remains adamant that the one thing which will always be at the forefront of his motivation is the desire to produce clean, potent medicine for those in need without bowing to trends or pressure from external parties
By PSY-23
Originally published in Weed World magazine issue 137
