Barcelona and its flowers

In Barcelona, everybody is shooting a different film on the same street.

Historic associations talk about rights and collective self-supply. Some newer venues offer a polished menu and instant membership. Police investigate industrial grows, power companies watch tampered meters and a member asks for “something around thirty” as if comparing megapixels. The neighbour just wants the stairwell to stop smelling.

Organized crime no longer fits inside a Fiat: it has logistics and customers across the border. Not everything under a grow light is counterculture.

Each film contains part of the truth. The problem begins when one insists that all the others are fiction.

I entered an association for one joint. Just one. Indirect light, a Scandinavian sofa and a menu of percentages. It felt like a modern restaurant; only the pairing was missing, and somebody saying “locally sourced”.

It was funny, and slightly dizzying. As teenagers, we mostly smoked hash. Locally grown flower appeared occasionally, sometimes green, poorly dried and produced with more enthusiasm than method. Thirty years later, I could buy a precise amount and read a lab analysis. We were not as fresh as the product.

I was born in Barcelona in 1976. I am not a spokesperson for the sector, only a small relic who watched a habit become a culture, an industry and a public problem. At sixteen, none of it had a name. It felt like summer.

When seeing marijuana was unusual

In 1992, hash was everywhere. Cobi smiled from the lampposts, Barceloneta was losing its beachside eateries and we lived in a Spain that was analogue, slightly crooked and convinced that summer might last forever. Everybody knew marijuana got you high; the unusual thing was seeing it.

The first time I really saw it was near Besalú, at a farmhouse where a friend’s father grew with the help of a pagès who knew what he was doing. This was not the secret origin of an industry. It was a teenager seeing, for the first time, something that was still rare in Barcelona.

Outside places like that, growing belonged to somebody with land, patience or a German hippie friend. We had a Fiat, and before long we travelled to Amsterdam looking for seeds. There were no online shops and no tutorial for every doubt.

I was sixteen. The cannabis changed hands, and mine were not exactly in my pockets. We learned to grow from Jorge Cervantes’s “bible”. The word bible describes our faith better than the results. One harvest ended up damp inside black bags. It was not guerrilla growing. It was simply a bad idea.

I remember crossing Meridiana in the Fiat with a calm that now feels like science fiction. In my memory, police had more serious threats to deal with and the boot was a minor matter. I may have merged two journeys; adolescence edits its own films too. That makes a story, not a medal.

The story did not fit inside our boot. By fifteen, I was already spending time around Plaça del Pi. Makoki mixed comics, underground publishing and conversations capable of declaring cultural guerrilla warfare without canceling vermouth. ARSEC emerged from that world, together with a question we still have not resolved: if an adult uses cannabis in private, how can it be supplied without returning to the illicit market?

Then came the marijuana special from Ajoblanco, Cáñamo, seeds sold “for collectors” and the first grow shops. We had not moved from illegal to legal, but from clandestine to recognisable. Newsstands were the internet, and the algorithm wore a blue work coat.

Those shops sold lights, growing media and knowledge. While Catalan cooking became a laboratory, thousands of people installed spring inside a cupboard. Domestic botanists could give a TED-style talk about cuttings and watch their expression change when the electricity company parked outside. There was autonomy, remarkable flower and a business that grew faster than the conversation around it.

The 2008 crisis added another layer. In some homes, growing began to look like a way to supplement an income. It was not the whole scene or a route without risks. The history of home growing also had that side, distinct from the pleasure of caring for a plant.

We travelled too: Morocco, Mexico, India. There was curiosity, friendship and a wish to discover other ways of living. Back home, we kept learning through reading, trial and error, and people who knew more about growing than we did.

One. Just one

That was the club’s simple idea. It is Friday. An adult wants one joint. Just one. They do not want to call a dealer, buy more than they need or dedicate a balcony and four months to a hobby they did not ask for. They do not want growing to become another job.

The original idea was almost boring: a closed group of adults who already used cannabis, with no recruitment of new users or minors and supply adjusted to members. Under that model, an association can provide information, analyze products and avoid part of the illicit market. Some clubs and platforms still defend those principles. They need no halo; they simply should not be confused with a commercial façade.

The boundary appears when the aim is not one joint but volume. The problem is not a person’s passport; it is the margin, a language the market learns quickly. A tourist is not organized crime. Commercialization begins when members become customers and the statutes say one thing while the door does another.

Normalisation is not the same as regulation. Sometimes it means understanding a practice and giving it boundaries; sometimes it means the market has found a better menu for the same problem. Barcelona has a talent for both.

Meanwhile, the plant moved up a gear. When I began, the challenge was finding flower. Then we learned to select, cross and concentrate. Potency began to work like megapixels: one number seemed to settle the conversation. It may come from a laboratory analysis, a marketing department or both. The paper is still OCB; the joint is not the same.

Neither are we. We moved from trying to find cannabis to asking whether it will let us work tomorrow. High percentages lose some glamour after a 09:00 video call.

Clubs did not invent that demand, but they are not passive observers. Genetics offer potency, menus rank it like a podium and we choose by number. Asking for something milder should be as ordinary as ordering a short coffee; sometimes it feels as though you have insulted the grower’s grandfather.

While we discussed percentages, the scale changed: industrial grows, violence, electricity theft and export. Some premises are commercial fronts, while genuine associations carry suspicion simply because they have a door and a phone. Regulation should distinguish clearly, not load everybody into the same van.

The city changed. The hour did not.

I return to the association where this essay began. I can ask for a precise amount, ask what it contains and avoid taking leftovers home because a dealer had to sell a minimum. It costs far more than my memory remembers, but memory never paid wages, testing and rent.

At sixteen, we treated drying as a detail and the law barely seemed to see us. Today I find skilled horticulture and precise quantities inside a model nobody can explain without making a strange face. Barcelona learned genetics, marketing and English for tourists. The night-time joint still arrives at the same hour.

One day the guerrilla movement is in the square; the next it has a display case and a museum label. I do not feel nostalgic for the Fiat’s boot, and I do not want to return to damp flower. I miss the city before every oddity became a weekend itinerary. I miss the charming idiots we were too, but I would not give them a harvest or the keys to my home.

If you are from that generation, you may recognise some of those changes. In my case, the difficult part was looking at something much closer: how I had gradually made room for joints in life at home.

After all that history, I am left with a much less epic question: “Am I still choosing this, or does it simply appear?”

One different night does not erase history or award a moral victory. It simply lets the hour arrive without a script. Today’s counterculture may be less photogenic: looking at a beloved habit without surrendering it to police, the market or nostalgia.

I still cherish memories from those years. I can also decide which parts I want to repeat today.