You surely could if you had enough light in the right spectrums, would be plenty for a few small plants and a small yield for personal usage. I would encourage you to go with a high quality LED though because watt for watt the CFL's will likely produce just as much ambient heat as HPS if you are running alot of them and you still won't have the light output of the HID. This means you are likely to have heat issues and need ventilation, etc. The LED's run much much cooler, use way less electricty and put out basically all PAR watts which is the usable plant growth spectrum.

A good starter light that is extremely bright and only uses 125 watts of electricity is the Procyon 100 LED, equal to approx 250 watts of Metal Halide HID in real world usage for flowering Cannabis, and to about 400 watts of HID for leafy crops like spinach, lettuce, etc. They easily cover a 2 ft x 2 ft area and plants up to about 24" tall effectively. The lights run about $500 each online and will give you many times the useful output the CFL's would and last many many years, however because they are just blue & red spectrum for use during flowering you will need to introduce some full spectrum light into the mix to power certain processes the plants use for budding signals. You can use just 2 CFL's to accomplish this (I would use one warm white 2700k bulb and a full spectrum 5500k in say the 100 watt equivalent sizes) There are some home depots & lowes stores that have huge ones that are like 300 watt equivalents and put out many thousands of lumens each. One of those would surely work too.

If you don't have the budget for the LED then make sure you get as many CFL's in there as you can without having a heat issue. Any constant temps over 85 F or God forbid 90 F without any added CO2 enrichment are not going to be good for your plants health or their growth and will severely affect their yield, flowering time, & potency not to mention make them stink alot more smell wise and dry everything out constantly. Ideally you want temps in the 75 to 78 F range...a little warmer is fine but they transpire alot more at higher temps and you will have humidity issues with no active ventilation/exhaust etc. If you can spring for a small 4" can-fan combo (costs like $139 or so for the combo) and exhaust all the hot air outside of the small tent that would be ideal then you could run a shitload of CFL's in it or even a small HID light like a 250 watt HPS for instance. It would likely yield more than the LED light but will use twice the electricty and runs very hot.

For yield I would rank them like this:

1 - HPS
2 - Metal Halide
3 - LED
4 - CFL

For quality/potency of bud I would rank them like this:

1 - LED
2 - Metal Halide
3 - HPS
4 - CFL

For initial first cost I would rank them like this:

1 - LED (cheapest in long run due to very long life & less heat)
2 - HPS
3 - Metal Halide
4 - CFL

For most heat I would rank them like this:

1 - HPS
2 - Metal Halide
3 - CFL
4 - LED

Hope this helps! :rastasmoke: