On the coldest and grayest days of winter, a warm and improbably bright yellow light reliably shines on a dense thicket of plantings deep inside a repurposed warehouse. They are marijuana plants, some as tall as Christmas trees, thick with flowers.

“For these plants, it’s like July 15 every day,” said Rino Ferrarese, the president and co-founder of CTPharma, one of the four licensed producers of medical cannabis in Connecticut, a state weighing a jump into the much bigger recreational market.

Serrated leaves and flowers glisten with what appears to be a light frost, a promising sign for a cash crop nearing maturity. The whiteness actually is a sticky resin containing the active elements of cannabis, THC and CBD, among others. 

By weight, the weed Baby Boomers smoked in college probably was no more than 3% or 4% THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the mood-altering substance in marijuana, Ferrese said. Lexikan, his company’s popular version of a strain known on the street as Lemon Skunk, has more than 30%.

“That’s our Whopper,” Ferrarese said. “That’s our Coke Classic.”

A vial with an eighth of an ounce, or 3.5 grams, of dried and trimmed Lexikan flowers commands a premium price, currently advertised for $42 in Hartford’s medical marijuana dispensary, one of 18 statewide. The plants now nearing maturity each should yield a pound and a half of flower buds. [Read more at The CT Mirror]