A lot of people have encouraged me to write about the new Humboldt dope-yuppy lobbying group, California Cannabis Voice Humboldt, or CCVH, and their plan to short-circuit Humboldt County’s medical marijuana ordinance process, by sponsoring a medical marijuana ordinance initiative. I don’t know what these people expect me to say about this, but I appreciate the encouragement. I probably would have written about CCVH anyway, after reading the article about them in the North Coast Journal a couple of weeks ago. That pissed me off, but right off the bat, I don’t like the name: California Cannabis Voice.
Sure, you live in California, or at least you grow pot here, and you grow cannabis, but you DO NOT speak for cannabis. Cannabis does not want CCVH’s constituents to make any more money. Marijuana wants to be free. Marijuana wants to have thousands of seeds, and marijuana wants to grow everywhere.
Marijuana wants to be the poor man’s best friend, not some dope-yuppy’s slave. CCVH is made up of drug-dealers and their lawyers, working together to keep marijuana under their control, so that they can continue to make money from it. Their name should reflect that.
I can understand why they didn’t go with California Dope-Yuppy Voice Humboldt, or Whiny Spoiled Brat Drug Dealer Voice Humboldt, but calling this group California Cannabis Voice, is like calling the American Cattleman’s Beef Association the National Brotherhood of Cows. That ain’t right.
So change the name. Call it a “growers association” or a “cultivators, processors and distributors consortium” or even “Shiftless Greed-bags for Cannabis Control.” You could probably get some buy-in from law-enforcement with a name like that.
I hate it when sleazy drug-dealers wrap themselves in beautiful marijuana. It’s kind of like watching corrupt politicians wrap themselves in the American flag to sell us war crimes and atrocities, except that marijuana really is a lot more beautiful than the American flag, which makes the present name, California Cannabis Voice, all the more offensive.
Like I said before, the article I read in the NCJ pissed me off. Actually, it was the third paragraph. Here it is, from Thadeus Greenson’s cover story, as it appeared in the Dec. 11 edition of the North Coast Journal:
“You thought the end of timber was bad?” asks Luke Bruner, CCVH’s co-founder and treasurer, “Well if we lose cannabis, all we have left is meth.”
That tells me everything I need to know about CCVH. Think about those words.
Personally, the collapse of the timber industry didn’t hurt me a bit. I miss the forest though, and the biodiversity. God I miss that. If we could turn back the clock, and you can bet that we’re all going to wish that we could turn back the clock on this one, we’d have hired a lot fewer loggers to begin with, and left a lot more trees standing, doncha think?
I don’t mean to be insensitive, but I understand. People lost their jobs. That sucks. I grew up in Akron, Ohio. I’ve seen what the collapse of an industry does to a community. I know about “shrinkage.” I know what it is like to be laid-off, permanently. It has happened to me. It sucks. I know. Join the club! This economy sucks! I wrote a book about it. You should read it.
You know what? Losing a job is not the end of the world, and it’s not all bad. In fact, there’s a whole lot about the marijuana industry, and I mean a whole lot, that none of us will miss. The air got better in Akron, after the tire industry moved overseas, the trees haven’t stopped growing in Humboldt County, and even though it’s almost legal, it’s still great to live in the forest and grow your own herb. If you don’t have to worry about selling it, getting ripped-off, or someone killing you to get it, so much the better.
“All we have left is meth” That should tell you what kind of low-life bottom-feeding dead-ender Luke Bruner is. Really Luke, is that all you have to offer the world? Or is that the only way you can imagine that a man of your education, experience and bent could enjoy an upper-middle-class level of consumption? Either way Luke, it don’t look good.
Humboldt County used to be known as the place with more artists per capita than any county in California. Eureka remains one of America’s great small art towns. Artists all do different things, and look for ways to be unique. This leads to cultural diversity, which translates into economic diversity.
Dope yuppies all do the same thing. They are a mono-crop, mono-brow, mono-culture that stifles creativity, and smothers diversity. Even most of the people in the marijuana industry would be better off without it.
Really folks, Dope-Yuppies Suck! Sure, they have money, but that doesn’t make them suck less. It makes them suck more. Who else but dope-yuppies spend $13 bucks for a fucking chicken sandwich?
Dope yuppies need to make a stupid amount of money, because they spend money stupidly. Because dope-yuppies spend money stupidly, all of the merchants around here cater to the whims of the stupid dope-yuppies with too much money, while they ignore the needs of the people who live and work here. That’s just one way that Dope Yuppies Suck!! The list goes on.
Daryl Cherney talked to me at length about research he’s done into the lawyer behind CCVH, one Mr. Matt Cumin. Cherney told me that he looked into all of the web references about this guy. He thinks the guy is a fraud, and that he’s just out to take advantage of scared dope-yuppies worried about the coming collapse in the price of marijuana. He also told me that he thought that CCVH’s proposed new ordinance was designed to squeeze small “mom and pop” growers, out of business.
That all sounded great to me. I really didn’t know what I was supposed to be outraged about, except maybe the regulations, the fee schedule, and the proposed canopy area, but I have no interest in looking at any of that stuff. I’m a writer, not a reporter. I want to get at the truth; I don’t give a damn about facts. I don’t want to see a well regulated marijuana industry in Humboldt County. I want to see Humboldt County’s dope-yuppies go broke, give-up and go away.
That’s what legalization should do. It should flood the market with good weed at reasonable prices in the open market, completely undercutting black market profit margins, causing all of that festering black-market corruption to whither and die. Really, it’s much better for people to think of us as the place with the really big trees, rather than as the heart of the festering corruption that defined the failed War on Drugs.
That’s what really concerns me about the marijuana industry and Humboldt County. Until now, marijuana growers needed the forest. The forest gave them cover, and allowed them to hide marijuana among the trees. Once prohibition disappears, so does the utility of the forest, at least for the purpose of growing marijuana. Without prohibition, the forest is just in the way, soaking up sunlight, and sucking up water that could be otherwise used to grow more marijuana. That’s why we see giant holes in the forest canopy appearing all over Humboldt County.
As far as I see it, this is the issue. We can have dope-yuppies, or we can have forests. In the end, we’ll wish we had more forests. In the meantime, the dope-yuppies are going to make a fuss, and they’re going to slash and burn their Humboldt County holdings to squeeze the last few drops of blood out of the War on Drugs. The sooner we put them out of their misery, the better it will be for all of us.
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