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Too Legit to Quit

by John Cole

Thought this was interesting:

Joey Burger was 14 when his naturalist parents moved from Santa Cruz to settle in the coastal forest of Humboldt County. Local hippies and homesteaders welcomed the new kid in the woods. They schooled him in the regional art — growing marijuana.

“It was never looked upon as a bad thing,” Burger said.

Except before the fall harvests, when helicopters full of narcotics officers whipped through the sky. Neighbors rushed “to call their friends to make sure they were OK,” he said.

These days, it isn’t just helicopters that frighten Humboldt County’s pot culture.

America’s most renowned bastion of illicit marijuana growing is threatened by cavernous, city-taxed cultivation warehouses soon to be licensed in Oakland. It is alarmed by cities from La Puente to Berkeley to Sacramento that approved taxes on dispensaries or endorsed medical marijuana cultivation, sanctioning a weed economy wider and more competitive than ever.

So now Humboldt seeks to save itself by going legit.

In an area where marijuana growers typically evade attention, Burger is the public voice of the new Humboldt Growers Association. Aligned with a Sacramento lobbyist, it is working for county approval to license and tax outdoor pot plantations of up to 40,000 square feet.

Maybe if we can convince right-wingers that allowing legal pot growth is a victory for the free market, we can finally legalize pot?

BTW- in an era when news is just so poorly done, McClatchy continues to stand out in front of the pack. I just really enjoy their work.

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November 29, 2010 1:21 pm Posted in: The War on Your Neighbor, aka the War on Drugs  38 Comments

38 Responses

  1. Loneoak - November 29, 2010 | 1:25 pm · Link

    Whatup Santa Cruz!

    By the way, we grow plenty of weed here now, although you do need to move to higher elevations to get away from the summer fog. But no need to move to Humboldt anymore.

  2. Mike Kay (Team America) - November 29, 2010 | 1:28 pm · Link

    This wouldn’t be happening if we prayer in school.

  3. shecky - November 29, 2010 | 1:31 pm · Link

    Santa Cruz is in Humboldt County?

    eta: oops, misread.

    I thought one of the interesting stories about the recent pot proposition was the resistance from surprising quarters. This makes some sense.

  4. me - November 29, 2010 | 1:32 pm · Link

    Maybe if we can convince right-wingers that allowing legal pot growth is a victory for the free market, we can finally legalize pot?

    I suspect that the right wingers who could be convinced of that are already on board.

  5. Dennis SGMM - November 29, 2010 | 1:33 pm · Link

    Hearty, swashbuckling, free-market capitalists defying the over reaching talons of big gubmint? What’s not to like?

    Oh, wait; in another five years they’ll be asking for subsidies to keep prices down.

  6. Jager - November 29, 2010 | 1:40 pm · Link

    @Dennis SGMM:

    30 Years from now, America Pot Farmers will be bitching about “cheap sub standard imports” because the Pot Agribusiness big guys will have out sourced the growing to countries with a more favorable labor market.

  7. Punchy - November 29, 2010 | 1:41 pm · Link

    Joey Burger

    Sounds like a new sandwich from The Outback restaurant chain.

  8. Ross Hershberger - November 29, 2010 | 1:44 pm · Link

    If pot becomes like all other row crop agriculture we’ll soon have giant conglomerates dominating the industry, quality just over the level the public would reject, a glut of product and a government agency spending our tax dollars to convince us to consume more of it.

  9. Dracula - November 29, 2010 | 1:45 pm · Link

    This is excellent news for John McCain.

  10. CalD - November 29, 2010 | 1:48 pm · Link

    I frequently wonder why all non-McClatchy US news organizations don’t just die.

  11. Flugelhorn - November 29, 2010 | 1:48 pm · Link

    Seriously. Everything is the fault of the right wingers. No left-leaning people have anything against marijuana at all. I’m sure 100% of the people who read this blog (at least 95% of which MUST be “left-leaning” if not completely over-board) all think pot should be legalized.

    California, a well-known Republican stronghold, just recently proved my point when they shot down Prop 19 which would legalize pot for recreational use. Damn right-wing Californians!

  12. Sly - November 29, 2010 | 1:48 pm · Link

    Maybe if we can convince right-wingers that allowing legal pot growth is a victory for the free market, we can finally legalize pot?

    Its not a victory for the free market until a large pharmaceutical operation is able to secure a patent and claim exclusivity of sale.

  13. Balconesfault - November 29, 2010 | 1:49 pm · Link

    It was almost 20 years ago I was talking to a friend of mine who hailed from those parts, and he told me that everyone there feared the day pot became legal, because of the havoc it would bring to their profit margins.

    Guess it’s been a good ride while it lasted.

  14. Funkhauser - November 29, 2010 | 1:49 pm · Link

    Drug war:

    http://www.boston.com/bigpictu.....g_war.html

  15. ricky - November 29, 2010 | 1:52 pm · Link

    Nothing like the sound of hovering DEA black helicopters
    to ruin a nice fall harvest day.

    Unless it is the sound of junky locusts.

  16. Amanda - November 29, 2010 | 1:54 pm · Link

    Wow, I can’t believe Bonnie Neely is still on the Humboldt country Bd of supervisors. I grew up in Eureka and still recall her name.

    It was always a point of strange pride when exchange students from Europe would arrive at my high school and they were fully aware of our county for one reason only—pot. :-)

    That said, legalize away. My dad worked for the Forest Service in Humboldt for 20+ years and many a time he came across machine guns on trip wires out in the woods. Ackowledging reality—that pot is a huge part of the local economy, which was destroyed by the death of the lumber and pulp mills in the 1980s—is step one. But the locals need to enact policies to protect small producers; the last thing Humboldt needs is more agricultural industrialization and monopolies.

  17. ricky - November 29, 2010 | 1:54 pm · Link

    @Balconesfault:

    Hailing from parts is a vocation of the short sighted, indeed.

  18. Ross Hershberger - November 29, 2010 | 1:56 pm · Link

    Barring a fascist ‘winger takeover pot legalization will probably happen. But the Dead and Zappa will still be overrated by over-consumers. And I reserve the right to ignore rambling bakeheads who try to convince me otherwise.

  19. J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford - November 29, 2010 | 1:57 pm · Link

    Maybe if we can convince right-wingers that allowing legal pot growth is a victory for the free market, we can finally legalize pot?

    It’ll be easier to convince the right-wingers to legalize pot if we tell them that it will be picked by the invisible hand of free market and not brown hand of an illegal Mexican.

  20. The Grand Panjandrum - November 29, 2010 | 1:58 pm · Link

    Only purchase pot from locally grown sources! It will be nice when good pot shows up at my local grower’s market along side the tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers grown by the folks from just down the road. That’s some change I can believe in.

    I also wonder how long it will be (after legalization) before pot is required to have warning labels like tobacco.

  21. jl - November 29, 2010 | 2:00 pm · Link

    University of California Press has a

    Field Guide to California Agriculture
    Paul F. Starrs, and Peter Goin

    Very good and extensive article on the CA Marijuana crop. I found it more interesting that the ones on beets and turnips.

    Edit: Cole should learn about these interesting CA specialty crops, might motivate his ass to get out here, someday.

  22. PeakVT - November 29, 2010 | 2:01 pm · Link

    Is there any talk of legalizing hemp production these days? For a while the benefits of hemp were used by some pro-legalization folk as the thin end of the wedge, but I haven’t heard much about it lately.

  23. licensed to kill time - November 29, 2010 | 2:01 pm · Link

    @The Grand Panjandrum:

    I also wonder how long it will be (after legalization) before pot is required to have warning labels like tobacco.

    Warning: This product may cause merriment and munchies.

  24. Brachiator - November 29, 2010 | 2:03 pm · Link

    Maybe if we can convince right-wingers that allowing legal pot growth is a victory for the free market, we can finally legalize pot?

    The defeat of Proposition 19 in the California November elections complicates any path to legalization. Some of the opposition to the proposition came from those who feared a horde of stoned drivers on the streets and freeways. But some of the opposition came from somewhat surprising sources (Marijuana initiative drew strongest support in Bay Area, but failed in ‘Emerald Triangle’)

    Proposition 19, the measure to legalize marijuana in California, drew its strongest support in the Bay Area, passing in San Francisco and five nearby counties. San Francisco voters were most ready to see legal weed sold in their neighborhoods, favoring the measure 65% to 35%....Los Angeles County, where a quarter of the state’s voters live, tilted against the initiative, voting 53% to 47% against it.

    Voters in the “Emerald Triangle,” where a segment of the economy depends on marijuana, did not take a shine to Proposition 19. The initiative had sparked a vigorous debate among growers about whether legalized weed would help or hurt Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties.

    Although the initiative could have allowed the underground industry to surface, possibly turning the region into the marijuana equivalent of California’s tourist-drawing wine country, it also could also have caused the price of marijuana to drop, possibly even precipitously.

    Another way of looking at this: California farmers want people in Oakland and other cities to buy their weed for, uh, medical purposes, but they do not want them to be able to grow their own supply in warehouse operations. Medical marijuana is already a big business. And big businesses always seek to protect their turf.

  25. Loneoak - November 29, 2010 | 2:07 pm · Link

    @Flugelhorn:

    California voters are a notoriously fickle lot and repeatedly fail to fit the notion that we are all lefties. CA voting against Prop 19 does nothing to prove that lefties also oppose marijuana legalization.

    In Northern California, we are mostly lefties. The Central Valley and the Sierras electorally look a lot like some Midwestern red states, like Indiana. And SoCal may be known as a leftwing bastion because of Hollywood, but Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Orange County are serious power centers for wealthy Republicans. That said, on most counts even the Republicans are more socially liberal than the country as a whole, but that’s true in almost every coastal state anyway.

    As a lefty, this continually frustrates me, so I chuckle at folks like yourself that assume this is a homogeneously liberal state.

  26. geg6 - November 29, 2010 | 2:10 pm · Link

    @Brachiator:

    Completely anecdotal, of course, but I know a guy who is a huge grower (and who sells only a small percentage to legal buyers through medical mj coops) who totally voted against Prop. 19 because it would cut into his non-legal and gigantically huge illegal profits, not so much his legal ones.

  27. Brachiator - November 29, 2010 | 2:14 pm · Link

    BTW- in an era when news is just so poorly done, McClatchy continues to stand out in front of the pack. I just really enjoy their work.

    I agree that the McClatchy crew do some good work. Too bad that they are getting clobbered along with other print media organizations. By the by, I ran across this little tidbit as I was looking at the McClatchy marijuana story:

    An outbreak of gonorrhea across Alaska that began in 2009 is continuing this year, and health officials say they are trying new ways to curb it. Between 2008 and 2009, the number of gonorrhea cases in Alaska rose an alarming 69 percent, according to a new U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report….

    The new report shows that Alaska ranks ninth in the nation for its rate of gonorrhea, compared with its ranking in recent years in the mid-20s. Alaska also is second in the nation for its high rate of chlamydia, another sexually transmitted disease that often is transmitted along with gonorrhea.

    Real Americans™ in the land of Snowmobile Snooki, too stupid to use condoms.

  28. WyldPirate - November 29, 2010 | 2:15 pm · Link

    @Flugelhorn:

    California, a well-known Republican stronghold, just recently proved my point when they shot down Prop 19 which would legalize pot for recreational use. Damn right-wing Californians!

    Yeah, and guess who some of the biggest opponents of Prop 19 were?

    Those growers in Humboldt Co. and the rest of the Emerald Triangle.

    They’re not stupid. They get about 2G’s a pound for their product now which is then sold retail in the dispensaries for about the same price that Kind bud goes here in my neck of the woods on the East Coast ~ $80-$100 per 1/4 oz.

    They’re making a killing off of herb and the bottom would fall out of the prices if it were legalized. And, as someone mentioned, smaller operations couldn’t compete with the bigger outfits growing it agribusiness style.

    Personally, I don’t think it will ever be legalized now. IT’s too big of an industry keeping it illegal. Legalization would cut into the profits of distillers and breweries. It would put the DEA, cops, lawyers, judges, prisons and prison guards and drug counselors out of work. And don’t forget the damage to the drug cartels and the American firearms manufacturers.

  29. slag - November 29, 2010 | 2:27 pm · Link

    BTW- in an era when news is just so poorly done, McClatchy continues to stand out in front of the pack.

    Indeed. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to subscribe to their news feed, but it’s done now. Finally.

  30. Mike Kay (Team America) - November 29, 2010 | 2:28 pm · Link

    @Brachiator: forget condoms, this would be solved in a snap with mandatory school prayer.

  31. Brachiator - November 29, 2010 | 2:29 pm · Link

    @geg6:

    Completely anecdotal, of course, but I know a guy who is a huge grower (and who sells only a small percentage to legal buyers through medical mj coops) who totally voted against Prop. 19 because it would cut into his non-legal and gigantically huge illegal profits, not so much his legal ones.

    Makes sense. Also NPR recently did a story on declining marijuana prices (Plummeting Marijuana Prices Create A Panic In Calif):

    Prices are now much less than $2,000 a pound, according to interviews with more than a dozen growers and dealers. Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman says some growers can’t get rid of their processed pot at any price….

    “There’s a tremendous amount of concern, borderlining on fear,” says the former underground grower who now cultivates medical marijuana.

    He says the drop in pot prices is in part the result of more growers and a more tolerant legal landscape. But he says another factor is quality. Indoor-grown marijuana is increasingly favored by dispensaries and consumers for its looks, consistence and potency. It costs more to produce than pot grown under the sun, but commands as much as double the price. That’s one reason retail prices haven’t hit the skids.

    Legal and illegal cultivators are … taking hits … as oversupply and the recession affect the marijuana market.

  32. taylormattd - November 29, 2010 | 2:29 pm · Link

    @Mike Kay (Team America): Maybe we should let the free market decide whether prayer in school is the most efficient method of learnings our children.

  33. General Stuck - November 29, 2010 | 2:36 pm · Link

    meh, If we are going to slide down the TSA slippery slope to neo fascism, I at least want to have a good buzz on.

    edit – as for Alaska, they can just Clap Louder!

  34. Brachiator - November 29, 2010 | 2:42 pm · Link

    @Mike Kay (Team America):

    forget condoms, this would be solved in a snap with mandatory school prayer.

    I think that they are already praying that they don’t get a disease. Along with the standard prayers that nobody gets pregnant.

    Doesn’t seem to be working. Or as one might reply to Sarah Palin, “How’s that hopey prayin’ thingey workin out for Alaskans?”

  35. The Grand Panjandrum - November 29, 2010 | 2:43 pm · Link

    BTW shouldn’t Reefer Madness be the obligatory video embed for any post about the Killer Weed? Nothing like a bit of campy propaganda for a few chuckles.

  36. Lysana - November 29, 2010 | 3:12 pm · Link

    @Ross Hershberger:

    Barring a fascist ‘winger takeover pot legalization will probably happen. But the Dead and Zappa will still be overrated by over-consumers. And I reserve the right to ignore rambling bakeheads who try to convince me otherwise.

    Ironically, the biggest Zappa fan I know is allergic to marijuana.

  37. Cris - November 29, 2010 | 5:43 pm · Link

    @Brachiator: Medical marijuana is already a big business. And big businesses always seek to protect their turf.

    This is why, as my man John Masterson says, we have to get past medical.

    @The Grand Panjandrum: I also wonder how long it will be (after legalization) before pot is required to have warning labels like tobacco.

    My money is on “immediately.” As in “a condition of legalization.”

  38. Cain - November 29, 2010 | 7:07 pm · Link

    @licensed to kill time:

    Warning: This product may cause merriment and munchies.

    I bet frito-lay would be total proponent of pot consumption. Until bankers create a “snack futures” and thus a new bubble begins.

    cain


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