Pubdate: Wed, 08 Aug 2012
Source: High Country News (CO)
Copyright: 2012 High Country News
Contact: http://www.hcn.org/lettertoeditors.jsp
Website: http://www.hcn.org/index.jsp
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3977
Note: High Country News is a bi-weekly newspaper that reports on the
West's natural resources, public lands, and changing communities.
Author: Matt Jenkins
Ganjanomics:
BRINGING HUMBOLDT'S SHADOW ECONOMY INTO THE LIGHT
One evening last October, I met with Anna Hamilton in the Northern
California town of Garberville. A singer-songwriter with a barbwire
voice, Hamilton is known locally for her radio show, Rant and Rave,
Lock and Load and Shoot Your Mouth Off -- which, it turns out, is a
pretty good description of her approach to life.
"I'm a little gutterballer from the beach," she said. "And I get
nervous around too much normalcy."
We sat by the front window in a bar called the Blue Room, shielding
our eyes from the sun while a pair of hippies attempted to maneuver
their minivan into a parking space. As a dreadlocked woman passenger
gently upbraided him, the scrawny, bearded kid behind the wheel
struggled to line up between the two white lines on the pavement. The
entire operation seemed to unfold in slow-mo. Hamilton watched in disbelief.
"Don't let anybody tell you," she growled, "that pot makes you a
better driver."
The hippies were among a wave of migrants that appear each fall to
help with the harvest. And on those still-warm October days,
Garberville and its neighbor, Redway, a couple miles down the road,
felt like the forward operations base for a hard-core gardening cult.
Citizens stormed local garden centers, loading up last-minute
supplies and hauling them over a tangle of dirt roads into the
surrounding hills.
Out in that wild country, concealed behind private gates in the draws
and gulches that lace the rumpled landscape, lies the heart of what
may be the biggest false-fronted economy in the United States.
California produces nearly 40 percent of the country's marijuana;
worth an estimated $13.8 billion, it is by far the state's biggest
cash crop. The longtime hub of the business is here, in Humboldt and
neighboring Mendocino and Trinity counties -- the legendary Emerald Triangle.
Despite the drug economy's pervasiveness, locals observe a kind of
winking discretion that goes back four decades, when the hill culture
first retreated from the reach of authority. As one grower put it,
"We all are keeping each other's secrets, and there is kind of a
community because of that."
But Hamilton has pushed for more candid talk about Humboldt County's
economic reliance on marijuana. The formerly logging-dependent
counties on the North Coast have struggled economically for years,
and the money weed generates is real. Still, the marijuana business
is an extremely complicated creature. In 1996, California became the
first state to legalize marijuana for medical use. Yet the majority
of the marijuana grown in the Emerald Triangle goes to recreational
markets, and roughly 90 percent is sold outside the state -- where it
has been very, very illegal.
That, however, is changing. A raft of other states have passed
medical marijuana laws, and last fall, California voters took up the
question of whether to legalize pot for recreational use as well.
Despite seemingly broad support, Proposition 19 narrowly lost at the
polls, receiving 46.2 percent of the vote. But in the aftermath of
its failure, marijuana's slow roll towards legitimacy has continued,
if somewhat more sluggishly.
Over the past year, trade organizations and the other institutions of
commerce by which entrepreneurs of all stripes sustain themselves
have spontaneously emerged. Marijuana growers have begun negotiating
the complicated realities of regulation, launched lobbying campaigns,
and even enlisted government support in fighting for market share.
The county government is itself trying to delicately navigate its way
into tapping an industry that is still mostly illegal.
That could soon pit the county against the federal government -- but
it also may be the only practical thing to do. After all, Hamilton
said, "it's stupid to not just flatly admit that marijuana is what's
holding this county's underwear up."
The Emerald Triangle has long been isolated by distance and
geography, holding itself consciously aloof from the rest of
California. Until the 1920s, the main way to reach the North Coast
was by ship, and the timber industry was king, sustained by redwoods
that grew enormous in the coastal fog. By the late 1960s, however,
when the area appeared on the psychic maps of disillusioned hippies
desperate to escape from San Francisco and elsewhere, much of the
land was logged over -- and cheap.
"They could come here and live off of welfare and peanut
butter-and-banana sandwiches," says Charley Custer, a transplanted
Chicagoan, "and just kind of scrounge along."
But the hippies were idealistic, too -- dreamers who hoped to leave
mainstream America behind and create a different reality. Some began
using their new land to grow pot on the side. They weren't the only
ones. The timber industry, battered by environmental regulations and
unfavorable economics, was wheezing a death rattle: In the two
decades after the hippies arrived, logging in the county declined by
60 percent. Meanwhile, a single marijuana plant could fetch as much
money as an entire redwood. Even the old-guard loggers who would
rather cut a tree than hug it saw the practical benefits of the new crop.
"Now it's hard to tell who's who," says Eric Kirk, a Garberville
attorney, "because when the mills all closed down, everybody got into
marijuana."
Even as early as the '70s, it was clear that a new age had dawned.
Itinerant hippies brought in specimens of Cannabis indica, a highland
champion, from Afghanistan, and crossed it with Cannabis sativa, the
Central American species that had long been the mainstay of U.S.
growers. The plants that resulted were hardier and produced a more
potent high. Then came the discovery that unpollinated female plants
- -- called sinsemilla -- are richer in THC, the active chemical in marijuana.
The new stuff practically sold itself, and Humboldt County became a
slightly grubbier realization of the classic California dream. "I've
heard stories about local kids who went away to college, and were
living on Top Ramen diets. They came back, and their buddies who
didn't go to college are driving around big rigs with expensive
stereos," Kirk says. "And they're thinking, 'What the hell am I doing?' "
That kind of entrepreneurialism is hard to hide, and the government
took notice. In 1983, the Reagan administration created the Campaign
Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP, a multi-agency SWAT team that
bills itself as the nation's largest law enforcement task force.
Practically everyone who lived in southern Humboldt in the late '80s
and early '90s remembers frantically dialing neighbors to warn of
impending busts, and women and children streaming out of the hills to safety.
CAMP estimates it has removed nearly 25 million marijuana plants from
California since its creation. But there was a flip side. Many people
jokingly refer to CAMP as a price-support program for marijuana. By
the mid-1980s, with busts limiting supply, pot was going for prices
that have not been matched since -- as much as $6,000 a pound, wholesale.
The high-risk, high-reward nature of the business only sharpened the
local spirit of self-reliance, daring and innovation. Certain
handymen began specializing in the construction of plywood platforms
for marijuana in tree canopies, hidden from helicopter-borne drug
agents. The community radio station, KMUD, doubled as an
early-warning system, broadcasting the position of law-enforcement
vehicles headed into the hills.
Then, things began to change. California's legalization of medical
marijuana in 1996 raised the curtain on an elaborate pantomime that
continues to this day. With a doctor's recommendation, a patient
could either grow limited quantities for personal use, or purchase it
from dispensaries. Some 2,100 dispensaries have sprung up throughout
California, and the medical marijuana revolution has spread to every
Western state except Utah, Idaho and Wyoming. Two years ago, the
federal government issued its own imprimatur of sorts, when Deputy
U.S. Attorney General David Ogden directed federal prosecutors to
leave alone "individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous
compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of
marijuana."
With time, the Emerald Triangle's marijuana growers have begun acting
more like real farmers. Today, many have contracts to supply medical
dispensaries in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento and Los
Angeles. A few growers even receive IRS reportable-income forms from
the dispensaries they sell to, and pay federal tax. An entire cloud
of supporting businesses has also emerged, from attorneys who
specialize in ensuring legal compliance to labs that analyze and
certify the product's purity. A company called Statewide Insurance
Services offers marijuana crop insurance, including a special "raid
coverage" option. The availability of insurance has, in turn, raised
the prospect that growers who supply dispensaries may someday be
eligible for crop loans from banks, just like tomato farmers.
But the enthusiastic pursuit of what is still largely an unregulated
industry has generated fallout, too, drawing unwelcome attention to
the whole enterprise. Illegal diversions of water for marijuana
gardens, together with indiscriminate use of fertilizer and
pesticides, have choked important salmon streams. The widespread use
of rat bait took a toll on birds of prey. And the CAMP assaults
literally drove some growers underground: Buried shipping containers
with high-intensity lights powered by diesel generators -- their fuel
tanks holding as much as 2,000 gallons -- proliferated in the hills.
Hamilton and other like-minded residents took to the airwaves on KMUD
and began proselytizing against the "diesel cowboys" who ran such
operations. Diesel dope's carbon footprint would give Al Gore a case
of the fantods: According to some calculations, it consumes about 75
gallons of fuel and releases more than two tons of carbon dioxide per
pound of pot produced. Some growers dumped used crankcase oil from
their generators straight into the ground. Poorly maintained
generators caught fire in the middle of the woods. And they leaked --
sometimes a lot. In May 2008, 1,000 gallons of diesel-grow fuel
poured straight into Hacker Creek, which provides habitat for salmon
and drinking water for the watershed's residents.
But an even bigger problem has emerged recently. Criminal cartels,
mostly with Mexican ties, have begun moving onto federal, state and
private timberland and setting up monster grows with tens of
thousands of plants. Last year, CAMP arrested 182 people in
California, seized more than 5 million plants and shot at least seven
people; the vast majority of the raids were aimed at cartel grows.
All this has helped shape an unusual social code in the Emerald
Triangle. Practically everyone, including the police, distinguishes
between "outlaws" -- the mom-and-pop, reformed-hippie operators who
grow a little dope to make ends meet and put their kids through
school -- and "criminals." And smart growers, while they may
technically be breaking the law by growing for recreational markets,
meticulously observe a certain set of rules that, at least
theoretically, put them in compliance with the state's medical
marijuana law. If a grower has fewer than 100 plants, the federal
Drug Enforcement Agency generally leaves the decision to prosecute up
to the local sheriff. And as long as the grower's not too flashy and
doesn't go around brandishing guns, the sheriff will usually leave him be.
There are, after all, much bigger fish to fry. "Our priority now,"
says Humboldt County Sheriff Mike Downey, "is definitely the cartels."
Scrupulous observance of the law is, although officials hesitate to
say so, tempered by a very practical concern. If local sheriffs were
to crack down on the outlaws, they would destroy a significant chunk
of the regional economy -- and their own budgets.
Just how important marijuana is to Humboldt County's economy may be
as unknowable as the ineffable Tao. One Humboldt State University
economist suggests that a quarter of the county's economy -- roughly
a billion dollars -- is marijuana money. Conventional wisdom suggests
that, particularly in southern Humboldt, the percentage is much higher.
Ernie Branscomb is a genial, fifth-generation Humboldter who owns
Garberville's version of Sears. With his white mustache, bald head
and easy banter, he would seem at ease behind a barber's chair. He's
part of the unreconstructed Old Guard here, at least technically.
"I've never grown marijuana," he said. "I've never even used
marijuana. I'm afraid I'll like it."
Branscomb's store has given him a front-row view of the business, so
I asked him how big a part of the local economy he thought marijuana
is. He pondered for a moment. "In my opinion," he said, "it's about
80 percent."
I laughed and said that was impossible. Branscomb looked at me like I
was an idiot.
"Look around you," he said.
A couple of days after I talked with Anna Hamilton, I met up with a
grower alongside a frontage road in southern Humboldt. I'll call him
Robert Grant. He wore logging boots, cargo pants and a T-shirt, and
had the wiry build of someone who spends a lot of time on the move
outside. We followed a labyrinthine route along dusty roads to a
piece of land perched halfway up a pretty draw full of oaks, golden
meadows and firs, with sweeping views of the surrounding hills.
Grant originally came from Southern California to chase the surf on
the coast nearby. He slowly worked his way into the marijuana scene,
careful not to disturb the local detente. It has served him well. At
this particular spot, 60 plants were perched in the sun, standing in
long raised beds and a handful of blue plastic kiddie pools. The
leafy plants were as tall as apple trees; together, they were
probably worth about half a million dollars, wholesale.
Among them were strains with names like Blueberry, Amazing Haze and
Armageddon. But Grant was most excited about a new twist on one
called Super Silver Haze.
"We've been working on it for nine years," he said, reaching to pull
down a bud that glistened with silvery resin. I took a deep whiff,
and my head filled with the plant's breathy, arresting allure.
Grant saw my eyes widen.
"Yeah," he laughed. "That's ... that just rocks."
Breeding marijuana is its own kind of magic. Grant talked about the
elusive quest to balance a body high with a head high; to blend the
perfect combination of looks, aroma, flavor and THC; and to encourage
resistance to mold, an incessant problem with the coastal fog.
Breeding and growing styles can border on the occult. One breeder
meticulously tracks each plant's parentage in his quest to produce
super-potent "stupid dope." Others drive nails through the plants'
stalks, on the theory that torture will produce more THC. And one
group of ritualists grows weed that's beyond hand-crafted, observing
elaborate precautions to avoid touching the buds during harvest --
the better to preserve their sanctity.
Grant's pot patch reflected the evolving state of the Northern
California marijuana business. His cannabis was contracted to a
medical marijuana dispensary in Sacramento. In the middle of the
garden, angled toward the sky, was a white board painted with a red
cross. An attached bundle of paperwork noted his compliance with the
state's medical marijuana law.
"That's for the helicopters," Grant said. He had little fear of a
raid. The helicopters appeared once earlier in the summer and then
stayed away. And now it seemed the entire industry was poised to come
further out of the shadows.
In 2009, with the California budget going up in smoke, then-Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger -- no dummy about his constituents' yen for
dope -- began to consider legalizing recreational use of marijuana,
and then taxing it, as a way to stem the state's looming fiscal
crisis. The state tax office estimated that a $50-an-ounce levy on
marijuana could, when coupled with increased sales-tax revenue,
generate $1.4 billion for state coffers. The legalize-and-tax mantra
was subsequently taken up by Oakland entrepreneur Richard Lee, who
created Oaksterdam, a sort of vo-tech school for aspiring pot
growers, and almost single-handedly turned the city into a
medical-marijuana mecca.
When I met with Grant, Californians were within weeks of voting on
Proposition 19. Many growers opposed legalization because it was sure
to drop prices, although they hesitated to say so on the record.
Others, like Grant, felt differently.
Despite the spreading legalization of medical marijuana, the profit
margin has stayed fat: For a grower like Grant, it typically costs
$400 to $500 to grow a pound of marijuana that will go for $2,000
wholesale. And with full legalization, he explained, "you're talking
about a lot more consumption." Even if prices were to fall to $1,000
per pound, he said, "I'll take that. Absolutely."
From Grant's perspective, full legalization seemed, at some point,
inevitable. Several fellow growers had recently formed the Humboldt
Growers Association, in essence a lobbying group to help growers
shape -- and get out in front of -- the regulations that legalization
was sure to bring. The Growers Association had begun drafting its own
proposed regulations to submit to the Humboldt County board of
supervisors, which would govern the manner and extent to which
marijuana was grown, and allow the county to collect taxes and fees.
"Everything's tracked. Everything has a permit number that tracks it
right down to the farmer," Grant said. "It's just like lettuce, just
like tomatoes, just like strawberries."
After years of keeping their heads down on the outlaw fringe -- where
politics meant little more than supporting the local road-maintenance
association -- growers were taking a big step into a new and complicated realm.
"There's a lot of uncertainty in the air," Grant said. "But a lot of
entrepreneurs are really excited about the potential."
To a large extent, growers' worries these days aren't all that
different from those of the folks at any local chamber of commerce.
There is the issue of brand protection, for instance. Last September,
a couple of hustlers moonlighting as monks showed up at the
International Cannabis and Hemp Expo in San Francisco, hawking what
they claimed were bona fide Humboldt seeds.
In response, local growers proposed an ordinance to protect the
county's good name, which has acquired a special cachet over the
decades. A fellow named The Man Who Walks in the Woods drew up a
draft resolution freighted with 11 "whereas"es, one "be it resolved,"
and a "be it further resolved," and called for amending the county
code to note: "The name 'Humboldt' as it expresses or implies or
suggests Humboldt County, California is hereby reserved for the
permanent and exclusive benefit of the legal residents of Humboldt
County, California." Other enterprising souls began researching the
feasibility of trademarking the Humboldt name, which sparked some
nervous speculation that one or another local faction might lock up
the appellation.
People also worried about the Emerald Triangle's distance from its
main markets. There had been some recent discussion about using
refrigerated semis to haul tons of weed down Highway 101 to the Bay
Area. Somebody proposed repurposing an old armored car as a
dope-delivery vehicle. ("I saw the thing, in Redway," Anna Hamilton
told me, slightly incredulous. "It's an old dusty Brinks truck that's
been sitting in somebody's yard for the last 10 years.")
Behind all this was a much more serious debate: how to bring Humboldt
County's shadow economy into the bright light of government-regulated
industry. For many growers, that's a pretty radical change. The black
market is, in many ways, the ultimate free market. "The irony is that
the most progressive community in the nation has been living Ronald
Reagan's wet dream," Hamilton told me. "It's going to be a hard sell.
A lot of people don't understand why a third of their income should
go to taxes. They have never had to share their money with anyone. "
But big shifts are already happening in the business landscape. After
four decades, the Humboldt growers, who had perfected the high art of
lying low, are being edged out by an explosion of upstart, indoor
growers in big cities like Oakland. "The rural counties that grow
outdoor weed are getting left behind," Hamilton said.
That profusion of new supply has been pushing prices down, a trend
that would be sure to continue with wider legalization. That would
undercut Humboldt County's economic basis -- and that suggested a
natural alliance between Humboldt marijuana growers and the county
government. "The county," Hamilton said, "is a vested partner in the
stability of the price."
Two camps emerged in the debate over how to shape the future. One
grew out of Hamilton's crusading, and became the Humboldt Medical
Marijuana Advisory Panel, or HUMMAP, a loose affiliation of locals
including Hamilton and The Man Who Walks in the Woods. Some HUMMAP
members were small growers who also belonged to the newly formed Tea
House Collective, which is attempting to ride the wave of a new era
of discriminating tokers -- namely, those Whole Foods devotees in the
Bay Area with enough of a paycheck left over for boutique bud.
The other camp was the better-capitalized and more ambitious Humboldt
Growers Association. While the HUMMAP types drove slightly
dilapidated Toyotas and Volvos, the Growers preferred lifted Dodge
pickups. Joey Burger, who owns a local business called Trim Scene
Solutions -- best known for selling a power weed-trimming machine
called the Twister, which looks like a gleaming jet engine on wheels
- -- was their main ambassador.
The Growers proved far more adept at politics than Hamilton's crew.
Last year, members of the group contributed at least $14,750 to the
re-election campaign of a county supervisor named Bonnie Neely, plus
$13,000 to Paul Gallegos, the county's district attorney. But it
wasn't until they held a press conference last October, to unveil
their proposed regulations for how the county might regulate and tax
marijuana, that it was clear just how successful the Growers had been
in making the drug business a respectable issue for elected officials.
A day earlier in Eureka, 50 miles north of Garberville, HUMMAP had
unceremoniously trotted out its proposed regulations in the time
allotted for audience comment at the end of a county supervisors'
meeting. The Growers, in contrast, rented a building with views of
the Eureka waterfront, invited the press, and rolled out their
proposal with a formidable show of support from the county's
political bigwigs. Neely emceed the event; District Attorney Gallegos
and another county supervisor named Mark Lovelace were also
prominently in attendance.
Gallegos has never hidden his belief that the war against marijuana
is, for the most part, a waste of time and money. "We don't see
people smoking marijuana with a whole lot of initiative to go out and
commit crimes," he told me a couple of days beforehand. "Generally,
what we see on marijuana is people being stoned."
At the press conference, Gallegos led off the speakers, saying, "My
feeling on this is we're a decade late."
Eventually, the microphone came round to the Growers' not-so-secret
weapon: the magnificently pomaded Max Del Real, a glad-handing
cannabis lobbyist from the state capital whose very name was spoken
with awe -- or perhaps a kind of disbelief. Del Real promptly dialed
up the grandiloquence to 11.
The Growers, he reminded the audience, "are your neighbors. These are
the same people who sit on your PTAs, coach your soccer teams.
"These," he said, "are good Americans."
Del Real emphasized that, to qualify for a permit under the Growers'
proposed regulations, any applicant would have to have been a
Humboldt County resident for at least two years. "The key term here,
people, is localism," he beamed.
The proposed regulations, like HUMMAP's, required growers to minimize
their environmental impact, and obtain state water-rights permits for
irrigation diversions from rivers or creeks. Both proposals would
have excluded violent felons from the business. But the Growers were
also lobbying for bigger grows than HUMMAP was. Whereas the HUMMAP
proposal allowed grows up to 2,500 square feet, the Growers' proposal
allowed ones up to 16 times bigger.
Each of those -- roughly an acre -- would bring the county $80,000 in
permitting fees. Del Real pointed out that the Growers' proposal
would, at a minimum, bring $10 million into Humboldt County's
coffers. Then he hinted -- obliquely enough, but darkly nonetheless
- -- that three counties elsewhere in the state were already
considering pot-friendly regulations designed to establish themselves
as the next Humboldt County. "They're looking at jobs. They're
looking at revenue. They're looking at bottom lines," he intoned.
"Humboldt County needs to move quickly on this particular issue."
With that, Del Real roared to a Hollywood finish. "I don't think the
road ahead is complicated, and I don't think it's long.
"Thank you," he said, "and God bless you, Humboldt County."
Despite a strong showing in pre-election opinion polling, Proposition
19 was defeated by 53.5 percent of the vote last November. Pundits
are still dissecting the exact cause of the measure's demise. But
Prop 19's very appearance on the ballot, Mark Lovelace told me when
we first met last fall, "was a point that, to me, made this situation
much easier to talk about."
This January, Lovelace, a former environmental activist who cut his
teeth fighting to save old-growth redwoods here, became chairman of
the county board of supervisors. He is soft-spoken and slightly
buttoned-down. He hardly qualifies as a cannabis crusader, but he's
frank about the realities in this part of the world.
Humboldt County faces one of the classic conundrums of rural areas
throughout the West. Its government services are subsidized by people
in urban centers elsewhere in the state. Only 16 percent of the
county government's revenue comes from local taxes; nearly 70 percent
comes from the state and federal governments. That has put the county
in a tight spot as those budgets have imploded over the past two years.
Right now, marijuana money shows up on the county's books only in
roundabout ways -- primarily as sales tax when a grower buys
groceries, or fertilizer, or a new truck, or ducks into the gas
station for a Mountain Dew. "I don't think we need to have a firm
number to know that it's an important part of our economy," Lovelace
said. "And we also don't need to know that number to know that there
are issues we need to regulate."
As such, the county is continuing to develop regulations specifically
for medical marijuana. Those will likely require growers to comply
with everything from product labeling to workers' compensation, and
set up a structure for taxes and fees. Lovelace is the first to admit
that such far-reaching oversight isn't always welcome.
"Being illegal has been a wonderful barrier to regulation," he
laughed. "There are going to be a lot of people who are going to be
pining for the good old days, when the only thing they had to worry
about was getting busted."
But growers would benefit from the bargain, too. Humboldt is home to
a thriving microbrew industry, and Lovelace is fond of pointing out
that the government had helped breweries in their efforts to market
their products to an outside world thirsty for craft beer with a good
story behind it. With pot, the county could essentially give a Good
Housekeeping Seal to local growers who follow good farming practices.
"The folks that want to be good growers? Those are the people we want
to work with," Lovelace said. "We'll be doing what we can to try to
support them as an export product that's compatible with our values."
Government "support" of good growers would also include diverting
even more of the law-enforcement muscle away from locals and onto the
large-scale Mexican grows. "If they do it right," one prominent
grower explained to me, "we can cut the cartels out."
Lovelace said as much himself. If recreational marijuana use was
legalized, he pointed out, the massive Mexican pot ranches carved out
of remote public lands and out-of-the-way private timber holdings
"will be every bit as illegal as they are today. And all of a sudden,
you have a legal industry that is saying, 'We want you to go after
those guys, because that's our unfair competition.' "
People in California's marijuana business delicately refer to what
they call a "lack of alignment" between state and federal policy.
Today, a medical marijuana garden that is legal under state law can,
under federal law, still be prosecuted as a major felony. And the gap
between the state and federal worldviews is widening again, causing a
distinct sense of unease that the feds may see the defeat of
Proposition 19 as a mandate to finally bring the state to heel.
Indeed, this year federal officials have taken a more aggressive
stance. The city of Oakland, never a place to tiptoe around a social
issue, has been preparing to issue licenses for several indoor
medical-marijuana farms, each bigger than a football field. In
February, Melinda Haag, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District
of California, wrote to Oakland's city attorney to remind him that
the federal government still views marijuana as a Schedule I drug --
the bad kind. Haag warned that "we will enforce (the Controlled
Substances Act) vigorously against individuals and organizations that
participate in unlawful manufacturing and distribution activity
involving marijuana, even" -- in a seeming reversal of the federal
government's position -- "if such activities are permitted under state law."
The Department of Justice followed up that letter with a barrage of
similar messages to Colorado, Montana, Arizona and Washington, and in
March, federal agents raided several marijuana dispensaries in
Montana. To make sure the point was clear, in June, Deputy Attorney
General James Cole issued yet another memorandum, about the Justice
Department's position nationwide, writing: "Persons who are in the
business of cultivating, selling or distributing marijuana, and those
who knowingly facilitate such activities, are in violation of the
Controlled Substances Act, regardless of state law."
The Treasury Department, meanwhile, has begun dismantling the basic
business infrastructure that medical marijuana dispensaries rely on.
This spring, banks holding accounts for dispensaries received a wave
of letters threatening to revoke their FDIC insurance, and big banks
such as Wells Fargo have since been closing such accounts.
As Humboldt County officials slowly move forward with their medical
marijuana regulations -- an effort that will likely take at least
another year -- some wonder whether they should see the Justice
Department's recent statements as a warning to hold off. When I
talked with Lovelace again in July, he sounded exasperated. "Frankly,
the federal position isn't doing anything to actually help us with
the issue," he said. "I just don't think they get it."
Anna Hamilton, for her part, has become disillusioned with the
slowness of the process, and with HUMMAP, the group she helped to
start. In fact, when I spoke with her this summer, she had
practically become a cheerleader for the rival Growers Association.
"They're putting thousands of dollars into political campaigns up
here," she said. "And HUMMAP, meanwhile, can't raise 40 bucks at a
meeting with 60 people."
Indeed, the Growers do seem to be building steam. After Bonnie Neely,
the county supervisor, lost her re-election bid last fall, they hired
her as a consultant. Paul Gallegos, the district attorney, won his
re-election campaign, but ended up $47,000 in debt; this July, the
Growers co-sponsored a fund-raising dinner for him in Sacramento.
The road ahead is undeniably longer and more complicated than Max Del
Real predicted. But Humboldt's growers are used to biding their time.
They've been doing it for 40 years.
Robert Grant is keeping a close eye on the Growers Association's
progress. After Proposition 19 was defeated, the Growers scaled down
their proposed regulations to apply only to medical marijuana. But,
Grant points out, their proposal is carefully written so that if --
or when -- recreational use is finally legalized, it can easily apply
to a much bigger market.
"It's so seamless," he says, "it's beautiful."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom