On The Money; The Economics of Drug Prohibition

On The Money;

Economics for the 99%

The Economics of Drug Prohibition

I’m sure that it comes as no surprise to you that dealers of illegal drugs enjoy large profit margins on the drugs they sell. American taxpayers insure these large profit margins through a massive government subsidy known as “The War on Drugs” which costs tens of billions of tax dollars annually. Prohibition is the generic term for the policy of using laws, and law enforcement, to keep certain drugs out of the open legal market. Despite over 70 years of drug prohibition, use of illegal drugs remains resilient, and demand remains, no pun intended, high.

 

The lion’s share of this massive subsidy, gets spent in efforts aimed at the nation’s most popular illegal drug, marijuana, and the plant it comes from, Cannabis Sativa. Government expenditures for the prohibition of marijuana alone include the cost of arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating over one-million Americans every year, far more than the total number of people arrested for all other illegal drugs combined. It also includes eradication efforts aimed at killing cannabis plants wherever they grow, often with chemical herbicides. Economically, this huge outlay of taxpayer dollars functions to artificially inflate the price of marijuana, or cannabis, a hardy weed that would otherwise grow wild in every state in the union.

 

Because of prohibition, this prolific annual weed has become tremendously expensive for marijuana users and taxpayers, as well as hugely profitable for black-market dealers. Despite the high prices and risk of arrest, an estimated 10-20% of all Americans use marijuana regularly, creating a tremendous demand for it. This demand, in turn, fuels a multi-billion dollar black-market industry that operates in every state, county and locality in the US, insuring that every state, county and locality spends even more taxpayer money to battle this black-market activity.

 

Thanks to grassroots organizing by marijuana consumers and advocates, several states have passed laws legalizing the use and distribution of marijuana, mostly for medical use. As more states pass these laws, both the price of marijuana, and the subsidies, at least in the states that have passed these laws, decline as well. Since the passage of California’s landmark medical marijuana law in 1996, the first of these laws, the price of marijuana has declined by more than half, nationwide. As more states pass these anti-prohibition laws, we can expect the price of marijuana to drop still further.

 

As police make fewer marijuana arrests, courts try fewer marijuana cases, and prisons hold fewer marijuana prisoners, taxpayers pay less for marijuana subsidies. While the Federal government has not budged on marijuana prohibition, and still spends billions on cannabis prohibition annually, many cash strapped states, counties and localities, even those that have not passed legalization laws, have de-prioritized marijuana prohibition to save money.

 

As these marijuana price-support subsidies decline, marijuana prices continue to slump. This comes as welcome relief to the millions of Americans who use marijuana regularly, and to taxpayers who have grown tired of subsidizing untaxed black-market profits. Still, thanks to vigorous Federal enforcement, and backlash from law enforcement, who stand to lose a tremendous amount of funding, marijuana prices, taxpayer subsidies and black-market profits remain high.

 

Although those who argue for marijuana prohibition argue that marijuana is a dangerous drug that no one should ever touch, very little evidence supports these claims. On the contrary, tens of millions of Americans use marijuana regularly, and like it. Not one person, in the history of humanity, has suffered a fatal overdose of it, nor has much evidence been found that marijuana causes long term health problems. Marijuana does not produce physical addiction symptoms, unlike alcohol, nicotine, opiates, many prescription drugs or even caffeine which all produce strong physical addictions that can be very difficult to quit. Even long-term chronic marijuana users can kick the habit without much difficulty, if they genuinely want to. This, I tell you from personal experience.

 

Clearly, the reasons for continuing marijuana prohibition are completely economic. Without the massive taxpayer subsidies involved in prohibition, the marijuana black-market would collapse, eliminating a multi-billion dollar industry. Governments would reallocate tax revenue away from law enforcement, and prisons, eliminating thousands of high-paying jobs in those fields. While, no one really likes black-market drug dealers or narco-cops, or would miss them if they learned to do something productive with their lives, they form a significant part of our national economy.

 

The pharmaceutical industry would soon feel the pinch as well. 100 years ago, half of all medicines sold in the US contained marijuana. Plenty of evidence shows that cannabis, or marijuana still works better than many prescription and over-the-counter medications for a host of conditions ranging from glaucoma and chronic pain, to epilepsy, asthma and nausea, especially nausea associated with cancer chemotherapy. Some estimate that legal cannabis, or marijuana, could immediately replace 20-40% of all prescription drugs, working as effectively, with fewer side-effects, than the drugs it would replace.

 

Since marijuana, or cannabis, is a natural plant, it cannot be patented. Because cannabis cannot be patented, patients who need it, would get it from farmers, not pharmaceutical companies. This would cut deeply into the profits of pharmaceutical companies, but drastically reduce health-care costs for patients. Farmers wouldn’t complain either.

 

Further, recent medical research suggests that humans have had a very long, and symbiotic relationship with the cannabis plant. The presence of “cannabinoid receptors” in the human nervous system seem to indicate that the cannabis plant played a role in human evolution, and that our ancestors have ingested cannabis for millions of years.

 

While it remains unclear exactly how these cannabinoid receptors contribute to human health, they clearly play an important role. Many, now common, ailments may stem from a lack of cannabis in our modern diet. Currently, doctors prescribe prescription drugs to treat these maladies, but the addition of a few green cannabis leaves into the diet, as other doctors recommend, might eliminate these diseases completely.

 

Beyond that, hemp, a high-fiber, non psychoactive, but also prohibited, species of cannabis, has a whole range of industrial uses from textiles and cordage to paper, plastics and building materials. Hemp, an agricultural commodity widely grown in the US before prohibition, could spawn a whole new hemp products industry. This new hemp industry might generate tens of thousands of new jobs in the long run.

 

New industrial hemp products would replace or reduce the need for synthetic fiber and forest products, thus eliminating the toxic pollution from manufacturing synthetics, and the habitat destruction that results from deforestation. While this potential new industry could create thousands of new jobs and spur growth in the economy, it also threatens the profits of some well established, and very influential corporations.

 

You can see that marijuana prohibition has much more to do with controlling “the economy”, than it does with dissuading people from smoking pot. If we could end marijuana prohibition today, black-market drug dealers, narco-cops, prison guards, pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies and forest products companies would all lose revenue. However, the rest of us would enjoy less expensive marijuana, better medicine, lower health-care costs, nicer clothes, cheaper paper and lower taxes, with less pollution or habitat loss. In other words, it would dramatically improve our quality of life. As Freewheelin’ Franklin of Gilbert Shelton’s Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers famously said, “Dope  will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.”

Growing Marijuana is A Labor of Love in Humboldt County

Growing Marijuana is A Labor of Love in Humboldt County

Well Spring is almost here, which means that all over Humboldt County, marijuana farmers are incredibly busy preparing to grow even more marijuana than they did last year. Even as you read this piece, most of them are hard at work building new greenhouses, clearing more forest land, putting in new water tanks and digging gigantic holes all over the countryside.

This process involves hundreds of thousands of man-hours of backbreaking labor and requires millions of dollars in capital investment.

 

This capital comes almost entirely from the sale of last year’s record setting marijuana harvest. Since most of last year’s marijuana harvest has not sold yet, this investment cuts deeply into the grower’s disposable income. Few feel the pinch however, as they will have little time or energy to do anything else for a few months, but prepare for this year’s grow.

 

Why do they do it? So they don’t have to get a job, of course. Who wants to work for a living when you can grow marijuana, right? You’d think, but you’d be wrong. In Humboldt County, growing marijuana is a labor of love, crazy love.

 

Soon thousands of tractor trailers full of potting soil will clog our roads as they make their way into the hills to fill the millions of holes these growers have so diligently dug.

Every year, Humboldt County’s garden supply stores comb the nation for another sparsely populated and poorly guarded county that they can steal. They then dig up the entire county in the dead of night, pack it into bags labeled “Potting Soil” and smuggle it back to Humboldt County where they quickly sell it off on a strictly cash basis to Humboldt County marijuana farmers.

 

Somewhere in Wyoming, or perhaps North Dakota, one morning soon, the citizens of this unfortunate county will step off their front porch on their way to work, only to fall several feet, smack into the bedrock below. They will look up to see their home delicately balanced on jacks and cinder blocks, and realize that their entire lawn, and the soil which once supported the foundation of their homes, has been stolen overnight while they slept.

 

For them, it will already be too late. Their county has already been sold, distributed, and secreted away behind locked gates, where it will remain, protected by a constitutionally guaranteed right of privacy. Besides, few of them could positively identify the soil from under their own homes, especially now that it has been thoroughly sifted and blended with a myriad of exotic amendments.

 

If you visit any of Humboldt County’s garden supply stores, you will find an amazing array of colorfully packaged, and even more colorfully named, fertilizers and soil amendments ranging from liquified fish guts from Alaska’s salmon canneries to ancient fossilized bat guano from caves deep within the jungles of Peru. Most Humboldt County garden shops also offer their own brands of fertilizers that they make on site, mostly from composted US currency.

 

Many of these fertilizers and soil amendments feature cheeky pin-up girls on the labels. This feature, along with the fact that these products sell for more per pound than fresh organic strawberries in January, indicate that these products are intended for use on marijuana plants. Only female marijuana plants produce marijuana, and marijuana growers often refer to their plants as “their ladies”.

 

You’ll often hear marijuana farmers say things like: “My ladies are lookin’ fine.” or “I take care of my ladies, and my ladies take care of me.” or “I need to to get home and hoe my ladies.” This makes them sound more like pimps than farmers, and greatly contributes to the general classiness of Humboldt County.

 

Can you imagine other kinds of farmers talking this way about their crops? Picture a dairy farmer saying “My ladies give me the sweetest cream.” or a broccoli farmer saying “This heat is gonna make my ladies bolt.” or a cabbage farmer saying “My ladies are full of horn-worms.” Creepy, huh?

 

All of this talk about their “ladies” belies the fact that most marijuana farmers are single and live alone. Growing marijuana in a remote, sparsely populated rural area like Humboldt County is a very lonely and isolating profession that tends to attract social misfits and people with self-alienating personalities.

 

The more lonely and isolated the marijuana farmer becomes, the more they tend to talk to, get naked around, and masturbate in front of, their “ladies”, often while looking at the pictures on boxes of fertilizer. This kind of “intimacy” with “their ladies”, coupled with an otherwise isolated existence builds a special kind of relationship between the cultivator and the cultivated that most other farmers, or sane people would not understand.

Original Artwork by Mykol Blackwell

Soon, the marijuana farmer no longer grows marijuana to make money, and instead, makes money to grow marijuana. For these people, nothing is too good for “their ladies”, and they cannot have enough of them. They work harder, and spend more money to pamper “their ladies” than any sane farmer. This is the real reason why Humboldt County marijuana growers produce the best marijuana in the world, and more of it than any place else on Earth.

 

Over the years, because of their extreme devotion and isolation, many Humboldt County marijuana growers have gone totally bat-shit crazy, and fallen in love with “their ladies” in this way. This is why they work so hard, and spend so much money on, “their ladies”.  Every year, more of them go “over the edge”, and every year this “crazy love” impacts our forest habitat more intensely.

 

Personally, I enjoy smoking marijuana, and strongly believe it should be legalized, so that sane farmers, with tractors, and flat land to till, can grow it economically.

I also know that marijuana provides relief for millions of sick people who should have unfettered access to it, at the lowest price possible, but I also care about this community.

That’s why I feel that something must be done to stop Humboldt County’s marijuana farmers before it’s too late. It has become clear to me, that nothing short of intervention, can save these poor souls, and our natural environment from this serious mental disorder.

Multiple Fatalities in Raid on Indoor Grow

BREAKING NEWS: Eureka, CA

Multiple Fatalities in Raid on Indoor Grow

 

Officers from the DEA, the Humboldt County SWAT Team, the Sheriff’s Drug Enforcement Unit and Animal Welfare Division conducted a raid on an indoor grow operation in a high-rise apartment complex in Eureka today resulting in multiple fatalities. While details remain sketchy, neighbors report hearing sustained gunfire and a large explosion from within the building, and seeing one dead body on the sidewalk outside.

 

After the raid, ambulance crews removed numerous bodies from the building, including those of several uniformed law-enforcement officers, but at this point, the total body count remains unclear. Like You’ve Got Something Better To Do has obtained exclusive video footage of the raid recorded on the building’s closed circuit TV surveillance system. VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED!!!

Anna Hamilton Reminds Me of My Grandmother

Anna Hamilton Reminds Me of My Grandmother

 

Listening to Anna Hamilton’s most recent Rant n’ Rave show on KMUD (Friday, Feb. 1, 7:00pm) reminded me of talking to my Grandmother. I love my Grandmother, God rest her soul. She was a great cook. She was full of love for her family and friends, of which she had many, but she made no secret of her bigoted, racist views, especially when she drank, which was continuously. My Grandmother’s views were extremely common among white people of her generation, and all of her friends, so far as I could tell, echoed her sentiments.

This woman is not my Grandmother and I have no reason to believe she harbors any ill will towards anyone,

These racist views were extremely common among white people, even well educated white people, before the Civil Rights Movement, but most people would find them offensive and embarrassing today. My Grandmother very much resented the Civil Rights Movement for the changes it brought to her world, and although this movement changed people’s attitudes on a broad cultural level, as a individual, my Grandmother took her bigoted, racist attitudes to the grave.

My Grandmother, a lifelong resident of South Philadelphia particularly resented the changes that the Civil Rights Movement brought to the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. The Mummers Parade, held every New Year’s Day in Philadelphia, is not unlike Mardi-Gras in New Orleans, except with less nudity, probably because it is very cold in Philadelphia in January.

The Mummers Parade features extravagant floats,

string bands in elaborate feathered, sequined and mirrored headdresses,

and brigades of clowns in brightly colored costumes carrying specially decorated, multi-tiered parasols.

People all over Philadelphia work all year on these costumes and floats to prepare for this one day of wild, drunken revelry that turns the streets of Philadelphia into a massive street party.

One major difference between Mardi-Gras and The Mummers Parade, is that Philadelphia’s Mummers are almost exclusively white, and traditionally, they would all wear black face makeup for the parade.

You can imagine how offensive Philadelphia’s Black Community found this. Thanks to the Civil Rights Movement, Philadelphia’s Mummers can no longer wear black face paint.

Many older Mummers, and white residents of Philadelphia, including my Grandmother, deeply resented the ban on black face paint in the Mummers Parade. For the first few years of the ban, people on floats refused to wave, clowns refused to dance, and string bands would play only Taps whenever the parade passed through a predominantly black neighborhood. For the Mummers, black face paint was not about racism, it was about tradition, but the ban on black face paint starkly revealed that racism was also a cherished tradition in Philadelphia.

According to my Grandmother, Caucasians were better than Black people, Hispanics and Native Americans because of civilization. White people deserved the privilege they enjoyed, not because of any genetic superiority, but because white people were more civilized than Blacks, Hispanics or Native Americans. She explained this to me many times as a child.

According to my Grandmother, Black people, Hispanics, and Native Americans all came from savage, brutal, backwards and uncivilized cultures. These people were just learning to behave in a civilized manner, and they still had a long way to go before they could be considered the equal of Whites. All of the racial violence, oppression and discrimination that non-white people faced was justified, in her eyes, because civilized people needed to beat the savagery out of them, so that they would learn their place in society. In other words, my Grandmother justified institutionalized racism on the same grounds that she justified beating her own kids.

As outrageous as this sounds today, these attitudes were extremely common 50 or 60 years ago. When Anna read the definition of “Civilization” from her 1947 dictionary, I could easily hear my Grandmother’s voice and attitudes channeled through it.

I don’t believe that Anna harbors the same kind of racist sentiment that my Grandmother did, far from it. I know that Anna is a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement and I know she believes in equal rights for everyone, but her attitudes and beliefs sound as dated and embarrassing to me today, as my Grandmother’s did in the 1970s.

Anna’s blindness to her own cultural prejudices about civilization allowed her to read that stunningly racist, and xenophobic definition of civilization without the slightest hint of self-consciousness, not unlike a Philadelphia Mummer strutting around in black face to the cheers of white onlookers lining the streets. The problem with the definition of civilization that Anna read, was that it defined civilization by who it excluded.

Anti-Japanese propaganda from WWII

According to the definition she read, civilization excludes savages, brutes, uneducated, unsophisticated, rude and unruly people, implying that only good, noble, sophisticated and well educated people could be counted among the ranks of the civilized. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Civilization is chock full of savages, brutes and rude unruly people. In fact, civilization produces them in greater numbers than any other culture in the history of humanity.

Here in California, Native Americans were deemed “savages”, and it was legal for civilized people to kill them, just a few generations ago. Elsewhere, civilized people kidnapped millions of Africans, to keep as slaves,

and just a few short years before the publication of Anna’s dictionary, civilized people exterminated seven million Jews, Blacks, Gays, Gypsies etc. in an extremely sophisticated national operation aimed at cleansing civilization of “mongrel races” and “degenerates”.

Even though we now recognize the American holocaust, the European Holocaust, the brutal history of slavery in the US, as well as thousands of other examples of institutionalized violence, as horrible atrocities, we still perceive civilization as superior to the cultures that those, oh so civilized people, so passionately and violently sought to exterminate. We somehow convince ourselves that all of these crimes against humanity were carried out by “bad apples” like Hitler, but that the core of civilization remains a paragon of high ideals, and represents the highest expression of our shared humanity.

Civilized people are like the mafia. They wear nice suits, keep their fingernails manicured, and behave like gentlemen, until they have business to attend to. Then, they become cold-blooded killers.

Here in Humboldt County, civilization looks more like the mafia than in many places, with so many greedy dope yuppies cynically using their civil and property rights to conceal their criminal activity from law enforcement and their obscene incomes from the IRS. They’ve gotten used to making a living from the violence of the drug war, and enjoy their privileged status, as white people with money, within civilization. Consequently, they remain unwilling to face the reality of their situation.

So let’s define civilization by what it is, rather than by what it calls its victims. Civilization is a way of life characterized by cities, hierarchy, division of labor, inequality, violence and environmental degradation (and writing incidentally). It’s high time that we stop pretending that civilization is something to celebrate and face the reality that civilization is an affront to indigenous cultures everywhere.

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in Humboldt

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in Humboldt

 

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through Humboldt County

Not a creature was stirring, not even Sheriff Mike Downey

The herb was all trimmed up and packed into bags

For smokers of taste, who will not smoke swag

Me in bed naked, my wife in her panties

It’s that time of month, so it’s the ones that are ratty

When out at the gate there arose such a racket

I got out of bed and put on my jacket

Threw on some pants and picked up my rifle

So they’d know I was serious and not to trifle

I stepped out of the door and into the rain

“To be out in this shit, this guy must be insane”

I thought to myself as I trudged up the path,

“This better be good or he’ll feel my wrath”

What did my dumb struck eyes then behold

But a bearded old man in a late model Olds

I yelled “It’s Christmas Eve, are you out of your mind?”

He said “I’m Jewish, you’re Pagan, why’s this a bad time?

My friends all need weed, and I’ve plenty of cash,

At $3,000 a pound, I’ll take your whole stash”

I thought to myself, “Well that’s quite a laugh,

These days I’d a probably sold it for half.”

He showed me a bag that was packed full of bills

I opened the gate and we drove down the hill

I made up some coffee, and rolled up a jay

And showed him a few of the buds on the tray

“Oh, this is the stuff that my friends all love.

They say that your stuff is a cut above.

They’ll pay what I ask for all I can get.

Did you have a good year? Is it all trimmed up yet?”

“This year I grew more than ever before,

It’s weighed up in bags just behind that door.

You can inspect it while I count this cash,

Hand me that ashtray, and I’ll knock this ash.”

We packed all the weed in the trunk of his car.

I said, “You found me out here, you must know where you are”.

“Oh yes, he said, “I’ll find my way out from here,

And I’ve many more stops to make, far and near.”

He started the car, and then turned on the lights,

And I heard him say, as he drove out of sight,

“Marijuana to all, and to all a good night.”

Doping Hurts Everyone, Especially Drug Enthusiasts

Doping Hurts Everyone, Especially Drug Enthusiasts

 

Well they stripped Lance Armstrong of his 7 Tour de France titles, leaving those races unwon in the annals of international cycling. As a recreational drug user, you might think that since I take drugs myself, it wouldn’t bother me so much that athletes use steroids, human growth hormone and god knows what else to improve their performance, but you’d be wrong. I find this explosion of the use of performance enhancing drugs particularly insidious, and it really pisses me off.

Like life doesn’t suck enough for people of normal abilities, now they have to worry about everyone else using drugs to edge them out of jobs, sports, college, game shows and even dates.  I remember cocaine as the first popular performance enhancing drug, and look at what a nightmare that turned into. I don’t think we have recovered yet, as a society, from the damage it caused.

Before cocaine, we took drugs to impair performance, or at least we accepted that side-effect as part of the experience. No one thought of partying as particularly competitive. We took drugs because they made us feel good, not because they made us feel better than other people.

Cocaine changed all of that. Suddenly, partying became a competitive sport. It wasn’t enough anymore, to smoke a joint, have a few drinks, relax and unwind with your friends. Instead, while you got quietly shitfaced, your friends all started talking faster than a caffeinated auctioneer. They were still dancing at 2:00 AM, when most decent people have already passed out in a puddle of their own vomit.

Most of them didn’t even dance before cocaine, but after the cocaine, if you wanted to hang with them, it was going to cost you. Then, all of these cocaine people started to get really competitive at work, because they needed more money to afford all of the cocaine they took. They started identifying with the boss’ greed more than with their coworkers interests.

Cocaine had as much to do with the collapse of labor unions in America as Ron Reagan, and the two worked together, hand in glove. Instead of standing together, we were all too busy running back and forth to the bathroom, trying to get the edge on each other, selling each other out, and screwing each other over.

All of those cocaine idiots eventually crashed and burned, but we’ve never recovered, as a nation, from the moral decay we suffered as a result of the cocaine epidemic. To this day, we remain a nation of greedy, superficial, backbiting egomaniacs. That’s real damage, folks! Cocaine turned us into a nation of assholes who systematically exterminate human decency for profit.

It’s not enough just to show up for work anymore. Now, they expect you to push yourself to exhaustion, just like a coke-head, and they’re always pushing you to improve your performance, because everything is so competitive these days. Why, do you suppose, is everything so competitive these days? It’s because cocaine turned us all against each other, and we’ve never been able to trust each other since.

I still enjoy drugs, but I take them because they feel good, or because I want to have a drug experience, not because I think they give me an edge over other people. People like Lance Armstrong, who strive to be exceptional, and especially those who juice themselves with performance enhancing drugs, make life harder for the rest of us who just want to show up, go through the motions, and draw a paycheck. For that, they should be punished severely.

Dirtbags, Miscreants, Undesirables and Low-Lifes pt.2

Dope Yuppies Suck

 

The L.A. Times recently ran a story about Humboldt County and the marijuana industry here, and the story echoed a common myth about this area that really deserves some analysis. You will hear this myth often repeated on KMUD, and reflected in Kym Kemp’s blog Redheaded Blackbelt. They both do their best to disseminate propaganda for the marijuana industry, and between them they’ve done a pretty good job of putting their spin on things. After all, the marijuana industry is still a pretty secretive business, and news gathering has become a relatively passive activity these days, so it’s not surprising that this myth gets so much traction in the press, but it’s about time someone took a closer look at it.

So, here’s the myth: The people who moved to Southern Humboldt in the late 70′s and early 80′s, like to paint themselves as the “back to the land” movement. They moved here to escape Babylon, and built little cabins, grew organic veggies, made arts and crafts, and raised a family. They grew just enough marijuana to pay their taxes, support their favorite non-profit, and put a pair of used tires on their old truck.

On the other hand, the myth continues, if you moved here during the 90′s or, god forbid, this century, you’re only here for the money. It’s these “newcomers” who brought in the big diesel generators, and started these giant industrial mega-grows. It’s these “newcomers” who spill diesel fuel in the creeks, pump our rivers dry, and spread rat poison all over. It’s the “newcomers” who drive like maniacs on our roads, bring hard drugs into our community, and dump trash in the river.

You see, according to this myth, it’s only the people who’ve been here 30 years, not the people whose families have been here a hundred years, or the people whose ancestors have been here for thousands of years, who form the true “community” around here. If you’ve been here longer than them, you are a redneck, if you’ve arrived since them, you are a carpetbagger, but if you’ve been here for 30 years, no longer, and no shorter, you are part of the twelfth tribe of Israel. The myth tells us that the people who’ve been here 30 years, take impeccable care of their land, manage it wisely, and use the money they make to fight injustice all over the world. Don’t they sound like awesome people?

The truth is a very different story:

Back in the 70′s and 80′s, most of the people around here bought their land from a guy named Bob McKee. They all love Bob because he would buy large tracts of logged over timber land, dirt cheap, and then break them up into parcels small enough that pretty much anyone who wanted one could afford one.

You could never make a living logging these small parcels, and there weren’t any jobs, to speak of, anywhere in the vicinity, so this low priced land became attractive to artists, who don’t have to worry so much about their commute, but also don’t make much money. At one time Humboldt County had more artists per-capita, than any county in California. That’s why Summer Arts Fest is older than The Mateel. The artists in SoHum needed that outlet, more than they needed a place to party. That was 37 years ago.

Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan disrupted the flow of marijuana from South America and Mexico, and very suddenly, people started buying up those cheap parcels, specifically to grow marijuana. Bob McKee got rich, and all of a sudden, almost anyone with a green thumb, and bit of chutzpah, could make a living from the privacy that these forested mountains provide.

So, these people who moved here 30 years ago, all moved here to grow pot. They bought cheap, logged over timber land, built homes with outhouses without permits, diverted streams, and grew marijuana illegally to make money. They made pretty good money growing pot, so they started buying up the parcels around them. Their drug-dealing friends in the city, who came up here for the lavish parties these folks threw, started buying parcels as well.

Some of these people were greedier than others, some of them were more competent than others, but they all partied a lot. They brought hard drugs like heroin, cocaine and meth, which have remained epidemic ever since.

They drove like maniacs, like their kids do today, and they made huge messes up in the hills. They buried piles of car batteries. They changed their oil in their driveway, letting the spent oil seep into the ground, and they abandoned thousands of vehicles all over the hillsides of Southern Humboldt, and that was just the beginning.

 

photo credit Humboldt Sentinel
http://humboldtsentinel.com/2012/01/13/weekly-roundup-for-january-13-2012/

People who’ve owned their property since the eighties don’t really need much income anymore to cover the basics. They paid their land off decades ago, and thanks to proposition 13, many still pay less than a thousand dollars a year in property tax, at least on the parcel they actually live on.

For most of them, however, the basics were not enough. They like to party. They want to go to a dozen festivals every summer, winter in Hawaii, ride around on quads, watch movies on their big screen TVs, and if their local non-profits can pour beer, they want to support them too. You see, they just want regular “middle-class” stuff, and marijuana provides that for them, but it gets to be a chore.

Growing all of that marijuana starts to feel like work. So what do you do if you own a few parcels of land, and you want the income from all of them, but you don’t actually want to do the work of growing the marijuana? You want to hire people, but you don’t really want them show up at your place and punch a time-clock, and you really don’t want to cut them a check every week. You want them to grow pot for you, sell it, and give you the money, and you want some insulation from the risky side of the business. Here’s what you do.

You “sell” them a turnkey business. Here’s how this works. You find an up and coming drug dealer, who’s already moving a lot of weed for you. You teach him how to grow, introduce him to your clone supplier, and help him set up his generator, pump, lights and fans. You offer to “sell” him one of your SoHum parcels for a price based on the expected profits from the weed grown there in the next ten years. You draw up a land contract, and you “loan” him, the money that you expect to be payed for your share of the weed. Then you turn the operation over to him.

You see, you “sold” that parcel, that you originally traded a motorcycle for, for $250,000, to a 28 year old guy with no job, and $50,000 in small bills. There’s now a big ugly diesel scene and a giant, water sucking industrial mega-grow on it. You get all of the profits, and some drug dealing kid from the city takes all of the risk and does all of the work. He’s in possession of the land, should the cops ever raid it, so you can deny any knowledge of what goes on there, and you can legally repossess it, if he ever fails to make the payments.

Not that long ago real estate agents around here sold land, generators and lights together as a package, and advertized them in local papers. For decades now, all of the land sold around here, sells at a price based on the value of the marijuana that can be grown there, and the county happily appraises this land at the inflated prices.

So, if you moved here recently, besides paying through the nose for your land, you likely pay three times what your neighbor pays in property tax. You still can’t make a living from the timber on one of these parcels, and there are still very few jobs in the vicinity, but these parcels no longer sell at prices that artists or writers can afford. No, every parcel sells as a prime marijuana gold mine, with a price determined by how much marijuana the buyer and seller think they can pull out of it.

The people who sign those land contracts, often as not, get busted, shot to death in a drug deal gone bad, or simply fail to deliver the cash, so they lose the property, and we never see them around again. It’s a huge ripoff, and it’s just one of the ways that the people who’ve been here thirty years, feed on young people like vampires, growing ever richer, and more smug about themselves, while they destroy habitat, drive endangered species to extinction, and enslave the young.

Most of the rentals in SoHum work the same way. Landlords expect tenants to grow for them, and use the lease as legal insulation. The dope yuppies who’ve been here thirty years know how few opportunities there are for young people, and they look for desperate young people to take advantage of.

The people who’ve been here thirty years have engineered the marijuana industry here. They employ, and exploit the army of young growers, share-croppers, dealers, mules and trimmers that you see around town. They are responsible for the giant mega-grows, the water diversions, the rat poison, and all of the problems and pollution that goes along with them, and they make sure that no young people today, ever get the kind of deal that Bob McKee gave them.

Its time to legalize marijuana, and drive a stake through the heart of the dope yuppie lifestyle. Legalization would help the salmon. Legalization would help the fishers, and legalization would help everyone who likes to smoke herb, or needs it for medicine. Legalization will only hurt a small clique of people who moved here thirty years ago, got lucky, exploited the land, took advantage of people, and have gotten way too smug about it. Really, no one deserves it more.

Dirtbags, Miscreants, Undesirables and Low-Lifes pt1

Dirtbags, Miscreants, Undesirables and Low-Lifes pt1

 

I’ve heard a lot of talk about the invasion of “dirtbags”, “miscreants”, and “undesirables” in our community. I agree with a lot of this talk. I agree that this invasion has gotten out of hand. Every town can handle a few “dirtbags”, but they have overrun our small town.

This invasion has gone on far too long, and its high time we took decisive action to take back our community. These “people”, I use the term loosely here, wreck our environment, suck up our resources and tear at the very fabric of our society.

I also agree that we should do everything we can to drive these undesirables from our midst. We should make them feel unwelcome. We should insist that the Sheriff enforce every law that applies to them, punish them to the fullest extent of the law, and, if that’s not enough, we should pass draconian new laws that persecute them more directly.

I am in complete agreement with the sentiment I see expressed in our local papers, and hear around town. We should take back our community. We should drive “them” out of town. My only disagreement with the prevailing sentiment, is who exactly “them” are.

This week, part one of a two part series about “them”, the real “undesirables” and “miscreants” who suck the life out of our community. For part one, I offer this letter to the editor of The Independent, inspired by one of the letters I read there on this issue. A highly abridged version of this letter will appear in The Independent, but I thought you deserved to see it in its entirety.

Dear Editor,

I cheered and said “good riddance” the day I saw that Country Real Estate had closed their Garberville office. I had hoped that would be the last we would see or hear from George Rolff, so reading his repulsive letter in The Independent disgusted me doubly.

I am not writing to weigh in on the issue of people hanging around in Garberville and Redway. I know that the abundance of poor people around town creates a real challenge for the retail merchants in town. It really is a lot for them to deal with, and the marijuana growers in the hills should step up to the plate on this issue.

After all, kids all over America smoke Humboldt weed, listen to reggae music, and pretty soon, they start to believe in it. They say “goodbye” to Babylon, grow dreadlocks, and come here. They know that all of their money has been coming here for years, and they think that folks here have been using it to “make Babylon fall”, instead of blowing it on status symbols like oversized diesel trucks. They don’t realize that the marijuana industry is a bottomless pit of greed and indifference that wants to suck them dry.

One of arguments I hear the most, from the people who make their living from marijuana, yet oppose legalization, is that, in a legal environment, big corporations like JR Reynolds would take over the industry. RJ Reynolds spends billions of dollars funding cancer research, and medical facilities, and millions more on public art. They’ve learned that they can buy some respect, if they take some responsibility for the social problems they create. Folks around here might take a lesson from the tobacco giant when considering what facilities to include in that new community park they are all so proud of. We don’t really need another expensive “middle-class” status symbol for drug dealers around here.

But that’s not what pissed me off about George Rolff’s letter. What pissed me off about Geoge Rolff’s letter is that someone in the real estate industry had the nerve to complain about all of the poor people around town. If the marijuana industry is a bottomless pit, the real estate industry is the Grand Canyon of greed and indifference, as perfectly exemplified by Mr. Rolff’s attitude in his offensive letter.

While bankers orchestrated the housing bubble and the collapse of our economy, the real estate industry acted as their highly paid mercenary army. During those bubble years, people like George Rolff, Blake Lehman, and the rest of the real estate industry collected obscene commissions on inflated land prices. They made those deals that went bad. They appraised land at those ridiculously inflated prices. They turned housing into a luxury that only the rich could afford. They made millions of people homeless, and they got filthy rich doing it.

I saw George’s Harley, and his wife Melinda’s Mustang. They wanted everyone to know that they were doing well. Thanks to them, a lot of people in town aren’t doing very well. Personally, I find conspicuous consumption much more offensive than conspicuous poverty, and I find complaints about poor people, from people in the real estate industry particularly odious.

It is not a crime to be poor, but what the real estate industry did to our nation, our community, and our economy was a crime against the American people. It’s shameful for George Rolff to blame his victims, and to attempt to sweep them under the rug.

Poem, Summertime in SoHum

A Poem: Summertime in SoHum

 

They say this is a lovely town

Its reputation quite renowned

It’s where the hippies made a stand

When they got back to the land

Where now are these proud stout folk?

Or is this just some kind of joke?

Surely you don’t mean the dealers

Driving ’round in their four-wheelers

Maybe perhaps you mean the growers

You couldn’t set your sights much lower

They cause all of our diesel spills

And make a mess up in the hills

They drain the river for their crop

While salmon populations drop

Just so they can make a buck

Those people never gave a fuck

Or do you mean those Humboldt Hotties

So eager to show off their bodies

Perched atop their high-heel shoes

In little more than their tattoos

Somehow I don’t think they’re the segment

‘Cause by age 18 their mostly pregnant

Or do you mean the other ones

The ones who really love their guns

They love to shoot them night and day

Just to prove they are not gay

Or perhaps I am still wrong

What of the others in the throng?

Aimless drifters, shiftless thugs

Junkies all strung-out on drugs

Homeless people and their dogs

In a schizophrenic fog

If there’s anyone that I’ve left out

Please stand up now and give a shout

‘Cause I’d love to meet these rumored folks

And learn that they are not a hoax

Still this place it suits me right

Not because of, but in spite

Of the industry that’s changed the face

Of this charming little country place

The saving grace, this is no lie-ee

In winter time they’re in Hawaii

Or perhaps in Mexico

What do I care where they go

So Summertime please hurry by

I really hope that time will fly

‘Cause when again it starts to rain

These folks will all get on a plane

then I can go and buy propane

Without them driving me insane

 

postscript:

There’s just one group that I’ve left out

The folks that I can’t live without

They’re always there in sun and rain

And do their jobs without complaint

Those are the folks who work in town

And make our little world go ’round

On The Money, The Medical Model v Prohibition

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

The Medical Model vs Prohibition

 

I love marijuana. I think it’s a marvelous plant. I love smoking it, and I hate that it is still illegal. I’ve been involved with marijuana activism since the late 80′s. A picture that includes me in a tricorner hat, at Hash Bash in Ann Arbor, MI, appeared in at least half a dozen issues of High Times in the early 90′s. I co-founded Mass. Cann., the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, started their newsletter, Mass Grass, and I beat the pavement door-to-door canvassing for medical marijuana in the mid-nineties, so I celebrated the passage of Prop.215 as much as anyone. However, while marijuana has stepped out of the shadows a bit, under the medical model, modern medicine has become a much darker place.

 

Much as I enjoy recreational drugs, I generally dislike drug dealers. I don’t dislike them because they sell drugs. No, I like them because they sell drugs. I dislike them because, invariably, they love money more than drugs. That’s just wrong!

 

That’s what’s wrong with most drug dealers. They don’t sell drugs because they love drugs, and find them interesting. No, most drug dealers sell drugs for the high profit margin. They’re real interest is money. That makes them stupid and boring in my book. You may find some interesting characters at the bottom of the drug-dealing totem pole, but the further up you climb, the more boring and stupid the people, but today’s medical industry makes drug dealers look brilliant and interesting.

 

The modern medical greed machine even makes banksters and real estate bloodsuckers envious. Now that they wrecked the economy with the phony housing bubble, the only thing they can make money on these days is student loans for people going into the medical industry. There’s as much big money in sickness as there is sickness in big money, and you don’t even have to see a single patient to cash in.

 

Look at the city of Hartford, CT. They don’t have any big factories with spewing smokestacks, nor do they have any coal mines or clear-cut forest land. Yet ringing the city of Hartford, you will find dozens of tony suburbs full of well-manicured, chemically-treated lawns and clogged with late model Beemers, Camrys and SUVs. Where does all of this wealth come from?

 

Hartford isn’t world-famous for its underground marijuana industry. That explains all of the new rolling stock around here, but they’ve got a better racket than marijuana in Hartford. It’s called health insurance.

 

The money you, and everyone else, spends on health insurance, pays all of those Beemer driving, Chemlawn spraying salaries in Hartford, CT, and produces billions of dollars, that’s billions with a B in profits for corporate shareholders, besides. They might eventually shell out some money to your health-care provider, if you get sick, but that depends on your policy. The policy that they wrote, and you never completely read or understood.

 

Health insurance makes big money, but it’s incredibly dull work, so it tends to attract dull, greedy people, even duller and greedier than the people who deal illegal drugs. In Hartford, CT, even more so than here in Humboldt County, CA, greed and tedium feed on each other producing rising rates of conformity and consumption.

 

As people increasingly seek entertainment to relieve the boredom and status symbols to bolster their failing self-worth, dull, greedy people require increasingly obscene incomes just to cope with the misery of their empty lives. They become a plague upon the planet, and a danger to themselves. In other words, they become middle-class.

 

This lethal combination of greed and tedium, or “greedium”, as I call it, has spread to all aspects of the medical industry. People infected with greedium believe, falsely, that if you endure tedium, you should be paid more than people who do what they enjoy. If you sat through four years of boring classes, you deserve more money than someone who did something more interesting with their time. Greedium says that tedium, and only tedium, deserves compensation, and the more tedium you endure, the more money you deserve to make.

 

So it goes, that Hartford, CT has become a black-hole of greedium, bent on sucking the life out of the rest of the country, and it has infected the entire medical industry. Our small town hospital just approved a $30,000 dollar a year raise for our hospital administrator, so that he can maintain a residence in a nicer community, with better schools in another state.

With an annual salary just shy of $150,000, he makes more than pretty much everyone else around here, even most of the dope yuppies, but doesn’t see a single patient. Yes, greedium is the real epidemic in this country, and it’s spread through contact with the medical profession.

So it’s good news, bad news. The good news is that marijuana has finally become part of the medical industry. The bad news is that the medical industry has become a bigger rip-off than prohibition.