In the Wild West of Weed, Mile High Dave Bets on Himself

It's Friday night in downtown Denver, and three chefs are serving Dave Crawford wagyu steak and foie gras French toast as he hits rosin out of a glass giraffe.

"I want to hire you guys after I make my first $20 million," Crawford tells the trio while blowing smoke out of Geoffrey, the dab rig he named after the Toys R Us mascot, before gently setting down the five-figure piece.

Crawford, 45, isn't a famous mogul, athlete or artist (though he might argue about the latter), but people around the world have seen his creations, and he's finally starting to profit from them. He's supplied with free gear so that he can properly dedicate time to perfecting his craft, and his social media presence is growing fast.

Crawford is a cannabis grower who's better known as Mile High Dave, and his aspirations are higher than his dinner guests.

Commercial cannabis cultivation is largely split into two worlds: breeding and growing. Breeders cross strains with desirable traits to create new cannabis varieties. Growers buy clones of strains for a quick route to harvest — but cannabis isn't a one-size-fits-all scenario for every environment and growing technique. The best stuff is developed by growing multiple seeds of the same strain, then picking the best phenotype in a process known as pheno hunting.

Some growers breed their own strains, but pheno hunting can require them to grow dozens, if not hundreds, of phenotypes of the same strain before they find the right one to scale commercially. These winning phenotypes are called "keepers," and that's where Crawford steps in.

"I’m able to bring every plant to its full potential. There’s a world of keepers that have been lost because growers didn’t bring it to its full potential," he says. "I stick to the fundamentals, man. I’m anal-retentive about this stuff, and I’m not trying to get stuck in the bullshit.  People think there’s this magic ingredient or a magic cult to growing cannabis. There's not. It’s about quality genetics and daily dedication to the grow."

A self-proclaimed pot nerd from Southern California who grew up reading High Times under the sheets of his bed with a flashlight — "My dad thought I was looking at porn, but it was just weed," he remembers — Crawford moved to Colorado fifteen years ago in search of opportunities to grow cannabis.

He quickly became a licensed medical marijuana caregiver, a status he still holds today, allowing him to grow more than the twelve recreational plants allowed under state law. He also sells cannabis seeds online and to major distributors called seed banks, taking advantage of a recent Drug Enforcement Administration decision that juvenile cannabis seeds are now considered industrial hemp and so legal to mail across the country.

After gaining attention for his work, he starting naming each of his prized phenotypes the "Mile High Dave Cut."

Mile High Dave Cuts of Dante's Inferno, most notably the #6 and #8 phenotypes, look like they've been freshly flocked in snow and smell like old-school cherry and grape candies. His renditions of Chimera, Emergen-C and Jealousy Bx1 are also popular in Colorado dispensaries; Crawford estimates that around twenty of his keepers have made it into commercial growing operations.

"I'm a big fan of candy and sugar terps. It’s like that packet of Kool-Aid, where you open it up and the flavor dust just fills the room," he says. "I grow flower for flower purposes, not extraction."

Crawford's cuts have proven so popular that Colorado growers are willing to pay thousands of dollars for the right to grow his clones. He also has a partnership with Klone Colorado, one of the state's largest genetic providers for licensed cannabis cultivations, in which Klone sells Crawford's creations to other growers for a fee. Crawford believes that eventually he'll be charging growers across the country $100,000 for the right strain and getting paid royalties for each harvest sold to dispensary customers.

Yet most people smoking those strains haven't heard of Crawford, because he's currently neither an official breeder nor an official grower —  though he's trying to change that.

"I'm looking into purchasing a cultivation license. There are a lot of people getting out of the industry right now, and they’re selling for pennies on the dollar," he says. "Breeding is so cool, too. You’re creating something that leaves a legacy. I’ve made a name for myself off one pheno, but I've really gotten into breeding, too."

That doesn't mean he's going to be leaning into one or the other, though. A growing license would be mostly for research and development purposes, he says, so that he can sell more of his Mile High Dave Cuts to commercial growers. And breeding is only "30 percent of the work," according to Crawford, who is now breeding some of his own creations as well.

"If you’re just a breeder, I don’t have much respect for that," he explains. "It’s like dogs. If you want a championship dog, you look to find a great dog breed. The breed is the template, but the success of the dog is on you and how you raise it."

Crawford gives credit to breeders and acknowledges who they are when working with their seeds, but he considers genetics "public domain," and believes that pheno hunting and finding keepers is where the real skill comes in.

In the past, he says, online distributors and breeders have bought his seeds, ripped photos from his social media account, and then sold them as if they were their own. "I don’t mind sharing credit, but at the end of the day, there are breeders taking advantage of growers," he says. His approach might be controversial among breeders, but Crawford doesn't really care.

"The guy who bought your seeds did all the work, then you take his keeper? To me, that’s working backwards. If I’m starting at zero, finding the best of the best and then giving it to someone else to make money, that just doesn't make sense," he argues. "There are a ton of people selling my seeds who I've never talked to. This shit is crowdsourced, whether we like it or not."

Be it financial or personal motivations, the vast majority of cannabis cultivators, breeders included, want to see their own flower in dispensaries at some point. Crawford says that while he'd like that one day, too, he won't be crushed if it doesn't happen, as long as Mile High Dave Cuts have successfully infiltrated dispensaries. By the end of the summer, he plans to be "fully immersed in the white market."

A sponsorship deal with Athena growing nutrients has helped his mission, but Crawford believes that recognition at major competitions is what will ultimately get Mile High Dave to the mountaintop. He's entering a $100,000 growing competition with Dark House Genetics in Las Vegas later this year, but that's more for the honors than the prize money, he claims.

"The whole market is shifting into a weird space, and a lot of these emerging states are more free for what I’m trying to do," he says. "I’m not a drug dealer. I just love to grow plants, and I want to build something for my kids. I want to build generational wealth through cannabis."