When the world’s most plant-friendly television show wanted to incorporate a controversial indoor hydroponics gardening storyline into its second season, the show’s researchers looked to Canada for advice about growing “weeds” indoors.

According to Mark Burley, executive producer for the critically-acclaimed and wildly popular Showtime/Lions Gate television series “Weeds,” the show’s set designers, writers and actors received expert horticultural advice and exclusive plant growth products from an international Canada-based hydroponics company called Advanced Nutrients. It wasn’t hard to find out about Advanced Nutrients: the company has been covered in Forbes, Playboy, other prestigious international publications, and on television and radio.

Burley says that one of Advanced Nutrients’ three founders- a nearly seven foot tall agribusiness expert named Michael Straumietis- spent long hours on the Weeds set this year as technical advisor for the show’s second season. Straumietis patiently explained and demonstrated the latest hydroponics growing techniques, using his company’s immense range of products as props that will be prominently displayed by growers on camera during Weeds episodes, Burley reports. Straumietis and the Weeds crew built a “million dollar grow room” that will be used as a major Weeds set.

What’s a million dollar grow room? It’s a room that produces a million dollars worth of plants per year!

A million dollar hydroponics room on television? Sounds like another cutting edge for an already-edgy television series. For sure Weeds is already the only television program that forthrightly focuses on themes like suburban middle-class marijuana use and retailing. And now, the second season of Weeds (titled “We’re Good to Grow”) highlights indoor hydroponics marijuana growing.

In Hollywood and the rest of California, voters legalized indoor and outdoor marijuana growing by and for medical marijuana patients in 1996. A decade later, hundreds of thousands of amateur and professional gardeners grow the forbidden plant using Advanced Nutrients fertilizers, high intensity plant lights, computer-assisted climate control, carbon dioxide tanks and other high-tech materials and equipment.

Worldwide, Advanced Nutrients is a major player in an industry that grows billions of dollars worth of vegetables, fruits, herbs and houseplants every year.

Hydroponics technology produces tons of premium-grade marijuana for medical and recreational users. Thousands of amateur and professional hydroponics grow rooms feed marijuana to the Dutch cannabis coffee shop industry, which reels in an estimated half a billion canna-tourism dollars a year.

The global hydroponics industry is growing in value as traditional industrial agriculture runs out of arable land and contends with global warming, drought, and increased materials costs.

And according to laudatory feature articles in Forbes and other publications, Advanced Nutrients is the most successful, professional and innovative company in the hydroponics business, with tens of millions of dollars in sales, massive market share and an overwhelming media-product line-marketing presence that dwarfs its competitors.

When Weeds writers and producers went looking for someone to bring authenticity to their indoor marijuana growing theme for Weeds Season Two, Burley affirms, their obvious choice was Advanced Nutrients and Straumietis.

Weeds wanted hydroponics experts and product pioneers who’d designed and tested plant growth products specifically for medical marijuana and who had insider knowledge of professional hydroponics technology. When Weeds brought Straumietis to Hollywood, the hydroponics guru helped Weeds concept, design and construct the million dollar grow room.

“This room is the kind of indoor hydroponics set-up you’d find on a NASA mission to Mars where they use a sealed grow environment to process waste and carbon dioxide while generating food and oxygen for the astronauts,” Straumietis explained. “The grow room I helped Weeds build is better than Mother Nature for plants. Temperature, humidity, light intensity, light spectrum, carbon dioxide ratios, plant nutrition and dozens of other horticultural factors are totally controlled and absolutely ideal for medical marijuana plants. When government-licensed medical growers use our pure, safe, potent plant growth products in sealed grow rooms in British Columbia, where our company is based, they produce the highest quality medical herbal product that helps sick and dying people better than most pharmaceutical medicines do.”

In Canada, Straumietis explained, doctor-approved medical marijuana growers and patients can obtain marijuana licenses from the federal government. This makes it completely legal for them to produce and possess cannabis. Advanced Nutrients donates assistance and supplies to licensed patients and growers.

In return, the company’s team of botanical scientists are able to test and design fertilizers, growth stimulators, bloom boosters, root enhancers and organic, non-toxic plant protection formulas that produce the strongest, safest medical marijuana on the planet.

“Everybody thinks marijuana is a weed that grows anywhere,” Straumietis enthusiastically says, “and to a certain degree that’s true. It’s one of the most prolific, botanically amazing, useful, adaptable plants on earth. You can make fuel, fiber, food oil, industrial oil, paper, clothing, plastic, buildings, intoxicants and medicines- all from this one plant. You can grow it outdoors with nothing more than water, sun, soil and good air. But medical growers need only the best. They need strong herbal medicine so they only have to consume a small amount per dose. And they need their medicine free of molds, mildews, toxic sprays and inferior fertilizers that pollute their crop and cause health problems."

"Out of all the companies that sell fertilizers to medical marijuana growers, Advanced Nutrients is the only one that actually tests and designs for medical cannabis. Our products are the only ones that help growers make the strongest medicine that has no toxicity or pathogens. Our competitors sell weak, poorly-manufactured tomato fertilizers. We sell proven plant science and 100% guaranteed product performance.”

Unfortunately for medical marijuana growers and others who appreciate the cannabis plant, the USA is not Canada. The US federal government and the Supreme Court have repeatedly insisted that medical marijuana and all marijuana cultivation, sale and possession is illegal, regardless of state laws that legalize medical marijuana growing and possession.

That’s why the Showtime Network, which produces Weeds along with Lions Gate Films, raised eyebrows with its suburban marijuana dealing theme in Season One, and is likely to raise eyebrows sky high with its suburban marijuana growing theme in the upcoming season.

L. Brent Bozell, a syndicated pundit and founder of the Parent’s Television Network, harshly criticized Weeds last year, saying Weeds glamorized drug dealing.

When a top Showtime exec was asked about the controversial choice of featuring a marijuana-retailing suburban mom as the central character of Weeds (Mary-Louise Parker won the Golden Globe and is nominated for an Emmy for her moving portrayal of pot-dealing soccer mom Nancy Botwin), he was unapologetic.

"It seemed like exactly the right thing for us," said Robert Greenblatt, Showtime’s president of entertainment. "It was something that was inherently dangerous and edgy, and we had to approach it in the right way, but we never shied away from it."

If you had told former US anti-drug czars like retired General Barry McCaffrey and William Bennett that Hollywood would one day be making a highly-lauded, extremely popular series that sympathetically portrayed marijuana users, dealers and growers, they’d have asked what you were smoking.

During Bill Clinton’s presidency when McCaffrey headed the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), the general was mired in scandal when the public found out that government and private donors were secretly paying off major television networks and studios to plant anti-marijuana storylines in popular television shows.

John Walters, who now heads ONDCP, says marijuana is dangerous, addictive, and deadly. He decries movies, music and other pop culture that “glamorizes drug use and downplays the effects of marijuana.”

For Straumietis, the controversy is of no concern. All he cares about is making plants grow to their maximum potential.

“Growing it is legal for medical patients in Canada, and even though we’ve been hassled by the government and some competitors, we’ve stayed focused on making the best plant growth products in the world,” he said. “Our research and development scientists make dozens of proprietary, easy to use formulas for people growing orchids, orchards, golf course turf, wine grapes, fruits, vegetables, houseplants, trees, organics, and yes, medical marijuana.

Advanced is expanding into large-scale agribusiness and human vitamin-supplement products. What we learned from medical marijuana research has created a segue into related industries so our products can help more plants and people.”

But the big question is: Will Advanced Nutrients and Straumietis’s super-duper hydroponics grow room make for exciting television? After all, watching plants grow isn’t like watching the Super Bowl. Weeds has become a darling of critics and garnered huge and increasing market share because it highlights dramatic themes and human relationships, so how will indoor agriculture fit in and hold viewer attention?

Straumietis predicts viewers will be enraptured by the underground science of hydroponics growing, as well as the stress, drama and danger indoor hydroponics growers have to handle.

Weeds isn’t showing a relaxed, no-worries legal medical marijuana garden in Canada, where patients have a government pot-growing license proudly framed on the wall and can call police if somebody rips off their crop.

Instead, the amazingly courageous Weeds series shows the hidden world of dedicated, somewhat fanatical American gardeners who risk prison, burglaries, fires, armed robbers, helicopter infrared surveillance, police raids and other calamities- all because they want to grow a high-value criminalized plant.

As for eye candy, the grow room set Straumietis designed is a high in itself. The Advanced hydroroom would almost be more at home on Star Trek than on a top-rated dramedy.

Viewers will be riveted by futuristic hydroponics gear, Advanced Nutrients potions, and the ongoing tension growers face in a hostile environment. The grow room sub-plot will well- complement Mary-Louise Parker, Kevin Nealon, Elizabeth Perkins and the other hot stars who make up the sizzling Weeds ensemble.

Straumietis says he’s sworn to secrecy about exactly what Weeds actors and writers will do with the million dollar grow room he designed and helped build for the set of Weeds Season Two.

“WEEDS is the most interesting show on television, so whatever they do with that grow room is going to be compelling TV and it’ll show what it’s like to use NASA-level hydroponics to grow plants indoors,” Straumietis explains, “Advanced Nutrients products will be prominently displayed as the show’s actor-gardeners work their crops, that much I can tell you. And Advanced Nutrients is proud to be the television industry’s first-ever hydroponics technical advisor.

Weeds already has more than 50 million viewers worldwide.

We’re sure viewership will increase when people see the fascinating, secret world of indoor hydroponics on Showtime.”

IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN TELLING YOUR AUDIENCE ABOUT THE FASCINATING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TELEVISION’S MOST COURAGEOUS SHOW AND THE HYDROPONICS INDUSTRY’S MOST SUCCESSFUL COMPANY, PLEASE CONTACT ADVANCED NUTRIENTS VIA PHONE AT 604-854-6793 OR VIA OR VIA EMAIL AT VIPmedia@advancednutrients.com.

When you contact us, please provide full contact info, along with the media outlet you work for and your deadline dates. Tell us if you need photos or other logistical support.