New Ordinance or Not, Consumers Will Decide

With almost no compliance from growers on our current cannabis cultivation ordinance, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors is looking into crafting a new ordinance which would undo the few environmental protections that made it into the current ordinance. For instance, the proposed new ordinance allows for more new grows in forest habitat. The last thing we need in Humboldt County is more new grows in forest habitat. Destroying forest habitat to grow pot is like killing whales to make Greenpeace stickers. There’s something wrong with this picture, folks.

I don’t like the sound of it either. The new proposal would allow growers to use generators to power lights in rural greenhouses, so long as they get 80% of their power from renewable sources. This cuts no mustard with me. If I can hear your generator, you’re an asshole who should be run out of town on a rail. I don’t give a damn how many solar panels you have, you are still an asshole, and the County damn well better do something about it because otherwise I’m going to blow your motherfucking head off with a shotgun, and we don’t need any more of that kind of violence around here.

You don’t need electricity to grow weed. If you do need electricity to grow weed, there are plenty of places with flat land and convenient grid power, and you should move there, because the people who grow pot on flat, fertile land, convenient to public utilities, will put you out of business if you don’t. Most growers, who want to stay in the game, post-legalization, probably should think about moving somewhere flat and sunny, with grid electricity, on a major highway.

Now is the time to decide whether you want to be a rich pot farmer, or a poor forest gnome. If you want to be a rich pot farmer, find some land that’s suitable for agriculture, preferably in some other county, and go big. If you want to live here in the forest, then make that your priority, and realize that you’ll probably need to find some other way to make a living. Unless you’ve been spoiled rotten by your drug dealing parents and have grossly unrealistic expectations, that shouldn’t be too hard.

On the other hand, I like some aspects of this proposed new ordinance. I especially like the idea to license businesses for on-site cannabis consumption. I think it’s about time that Humboldt County growers start catering to cannabis consumers instead of drug dealers. Growing and dealing cannabis is all about money, which is boring and banal, like most growers and dealers, but cannabis culture really flourishes when cannabis consumers come together, express themselves, and interact with each other in public places. I think we need on-site consumption in Humboldt County, and I think we would do it well.

Humboldt County culture has been largely shaped by cannabis consumption. Our heritage of alternative energy and building technologies, raising money by throwing wild parties instead of with taxes, and our hedonistic history of free love and running naked through the woods testify to the kind of free-thinking creative ingenuity that cannabis use inspires. Who better than us would know how to design the kind of environment that enhances the cannabis experience?

On-site consumption opens up the whole world of cannabis culture and lifestyle. On-site consumption brings food, decor, art, music, entertainment and fashion into the cannabis industry, creating a lot more economic diversity in our community than a simple agricultural commodity ever could. This kind of direct connection makes the Humboldt brand tangible to consumers. We need on-site consumption for cannabis tourism too. We have a lot to offer cannabis tourists, and I think cannabis consumer tourism will look a lot different from the drug dealer business trips that we see today.

Drug dealers don’t like adjoining rooms in hotels, but don’t complain about the quality of overpriced food. Cannabis users care more about the quality and price of the food, and would rather camp than stay in a hotel. Drug dealers keep a low profile and spend liberally, while cannabis consumers don’t mind looking a little freaky, or complaining about being overcharged. We get plenty of both here, but we should make sure to remember that cannabis consumers, not drug dealers, drive the cannabis market. The less time we spend catering to drug dealers, and the more time we spend with people who work real jobs and buy cannabis with their hard-earned cash, the better we will understand what customers want in a cannabis product, and the more opportunity we have to connect with customers in a way that builds brand loyalty.

Of course, to earn that kind of loyalty, cannabis consumers have to like us. To make them like us, we need to make sure that cannabis consumers have a good time while they are here, whether they show up for Reggae on the River, or blow into town around harvest season. If we want cannabis consumers to patronize our product for the rest of their lives, we had better treat them right while they are here.

That’s an important lesson we need to learn as we step out of prohibition and into the free market. We’ve gotten used to the black market, where government policy props-up prices and limits competition, but in the free market, consumer choice, not government policy makes the difference between success and failure.

Do We Need More New Grows in Humboldt County?

Our Board of Supervisors won’t lift a finger to help poor working people in this community, but they don’t mind bending over backwards for drug dealers. The BOS dropped everything to hammer out new cannabis cultivation regulations before some artificial state deadline. It’s not like we don’t have more pressing real problems here in Humboldt County, like the housing crisis, addiction, drug related deaths, poverty, Hep-C, and the lack of economic diversity, but drug dealers don’t care about those things, so the BOS doesn’t do anything about them.

The Board of Supervisors made it a priority to fast-track the new cannabis cultivation ordinance, and now that they’ve spent the taxpayers money to write it and put it into place, the industry has just thumbed its nose at it. Only 125 growers have successfully completed their applications. Another 2,000+ placeholder applications sit there at the Planning Department where they provide cover for gigantic new, environmentally destructive, illegal grows like the one that got raided last week in Blocksburg. The County’s new cannabis cultivation ordinance didn’t mitigate the destruction wrought by the greenrush; the County’s new cannabis cultivation ordinance fueled the greerush.

By all estimations, more than 90% of Humboldt County growers remain outside the law, and the industry continues to grow exponentially. After all the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors has done, with the taxpayer’s money, to accommodate this industry, less than 2% of Humboldt County growers went to the trouble of completing the application. At the same time, thousands of gigantic new grows sprang up all over Humboldt County, set up by black market drug dealers from all over the country who came here to take advantage of the invitation our Board of Supervisors sent them.

Legalizing pot didn’t make cops any less violent. It didn’t make politicians any less corrupt, and it didn’t make drug dealers any less sneaky and self-centered. Just because the American people have come to know cannabis as a benign and benevolent ally, and many people have worked hard to change the law in a growing number of states, that doesn’t mean that drug dealers aren’t sneaky, scummy, self-centered people who are always looking for ways to cheat the system and take advantage of people.

That coarse, greedy drug dealer attitude causes most of the problem we see in our community. Drug dealers created our housing crisis, and continue to use it against us. Drug dealers don’t care about anyone but themselves, and they’re quick to blame others for the problems they cause. That’s why we have no shelter in Southern Humboldt. That’s why we have vigilante violence in Southern Humboldt, and that’s why poverty, addiction and drug related deaths are on the rise in Humboldt County. Drug dealers scapegoat the poor and homeless to divert attention away from the harm they themselves cause. Drug dealers corrode communities and breed poverty and addiction all over America. Why should it be any different here?

Instead of being charitable and working to hold the community together, drug dealers use money and violence to tear the community apart. Instead of upholding community values and becoming pillars of the community, drug dealers find sneaky new ways to evade regulations and avoid paying taxes, while they watch the community crumble around them, and instead of learning to do something productive with their lives, drug dealers look for places where corrupt politicians make harmful laws, and find sneaky ways to exploit those opportunities for profit. That’s why drug dealers come to Humboldt County, and why we have so many of the problems that we do.

Drug dealers saw a place where it was already pretty easy to grow weed, and heard the county say, “We’re not going to send the Sheriff anymore; you’ll have to talk to the Planning Department.” and drug dealers thought to themselves, “How many light-deps can I pull off before those desk jockeys in Eureka even find me?” and the greenrush was on. There was no rush to comply with regulations. There was a rush of drug dealers who came here to exploit a legal loophole and take advantage of a small rural community.

Well now the Board of Supervisors wants to spend more of the taxpayers money to invite even more drug dealers into Humboldt County. They want to make it easier to establish new grows in Humboldt County. Does anyone think we need more new grows in Humboldt County? The idea behind adopting these regulations in the first place was to allow Humboldt County’s “heritage growers” the opportunity to move their “mom and pop” businesses into the legal market. It wasn’t about inviting drug dealers from all over the country to come to Humboldt County to set up gigantic, new, destructive, illegal grows to serve their out-of-state black market distributors.

As it stands, the regulations say that all new legal grows must be located on soil suitable for agriculture aka “prime ag soil”. Makes sense, right? The proposed change would permit growers to level forests and truck in imported soil to build more new grows in forest habitat. Isn’t that why we adopted regulations to begin with, to prevent drug dealers from moving in, chopping up the forest, and blowing up big new grows? The County absolutely should not allow any more new grows in Humboldt County’s forest habitat, and we should not allow the Board of Supervisors to lure any more drug dealers into our forests with the stench of their corruption.

The Failure of Humboldt County’s Medical Marijuana Permit System

Today, more than six months after the deadline to apply, the Humboldt County Planning Department has issued fewer than 200 cannabis cultivation permits in the entire county. That means that more than 2,000 permit applications remain far from complete. The Planning Department has started sending notices to those applicants to let them know that their cannabis cultivation permit application will be suspended unless they complete the process and bring their operation into compliance. Of course, another 6,000-8,000 Humboldt County growers never even bothered to file applications to begin with, but that hasn’t stopped them from blowing up enormous new grows all over the county, doing an enormous amount of new damage to the environment.

Clearly, Humboldt County’s plan to rehabilitate thousands of black market drug dealers through the cannabis cultivation permit program, has failed. The permit program has failed to protect watersheds from the explosion of black market grows and failed to bring Humboldt County’s “legacy growers” into compliance. Not only that, the permit program has failed to protect consumers, and ruined Humboldt County’s reputation for clean, organic high-quality marijuana as upwards of 80% of the product from around here now tests positive for pesticides.

Instead of protecting the environment, consumers and “legacy growers,” the Humboldt County medical marijuana permit system has sparked the biggest explosion of gigantic new illegal grows in Humboldt County since the dawn of prohibition. Instead of lining county coffers with the funds necessary to mitigate the damage the black market industry has caused in our community, the permit process has multiplied the damage to the environment and the costs to the community, while creating an unmanageable burden on county bureaucracies. I’ve rarely seen a failure so complete.

We should have expected as much. That’s what we get for trusting career drug dealers and politicians. The Board of Supervisors bent over backwards to give Humboldt County’s black market growers amnesty, and to encourage them to come out of the closet. Growers testified for months about what they wanted in a permit structure, and got most of it. I couldn’t believe how many of our local enviros rolled over, and then set up shop as consultants to the industry. The strongest opposition came from “legacy growers” like HuMMAP.

The county gave the industry the deal it wanted, but the truth is, the black market marijuana industry is more about cheating the government and society than it is about producing marijuana, and old habits die hard. Humboldt’s dope yuppies never wanted legalization to begin with. They hate government paperwork. Most of them won’t even fill out a census form, let alone apply for a permit. The growers who apply, treat the permit process as their first venture into white collar crime. They’ll push limits and test every opportunity to cheat. With thousands of them working together to confound an understaffed county bureaucracy, they figure, rightly, I expect, that most of them will pull off another bumper crop of unregulated, untaxed, black market marijuana this year. It’s the same game it always was, just not as risky, and on a scale that is orders of magnitude beyond anything we’ve ever seen around here before.

Meanwhile, the problems associated with a flourishing illegal industry also increase by orders of magnitude. Our drug addiction rate has hit an all time high, and we die from drug use at ten times the state average. Last year, we set a new record for murders, and violence against the poor and homeless intensified. The county’s housing crisis has only gotten worse, and despite two new laws to criminalize poverty, and the adoption of the “Housing First” strategy, honest working people in our community go without the basic necessities of life on a regular basis because black market drug dealers have squeezed them out of the available housing.

Far from elevating Humboldt County cannabis to the status of Napa County wine, this new permit process has dragged down Humboldt County’s reputation to a new low. Thanks to our Board of Supervisors’ eagerness to partner with black market growers, Humboldt County has become the place where the black market will make it’s last stand. What Appalachia is to alcohol, Humboldt County is to herb, with our pesticide tainted, rot-lung, black market hooch, a lasting legacy of poverty and addiction that testifies to the cruelty and inhumanity of prohibition for generations to come. It isn’t pretty, but it’s profitable, for some, for now, and for our Board of Supervisors, that appears to be enough.

 

Estelle Fennell Eliminates “Friction” at the HRC

Last week, I chased down 2^nd District Supervisor, Estelle Fennell to find out why she removed Chris Weston from the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. Having been to a few HRC meetings, it was clear to me that Chris Weston actually cares about human rights. Most of the HRC commissioners seemed surprisingly indifferent to me. I mean, we have lots of “rights” fanatics around here, at least when it comes to property rights, the 2^nd Amendment, and privacy protection, but the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission has got to be the most tepid organization designed for the purpose of promoting human rights, ever, in the whole history of the civil rights movement. I doubt that butter would melt in half of the commissioners mouths.

Estelle told me, emphatically, that HRC Commissioners serve at the pleasure of the Board of Supervisors, so you can bet that we have a weak Human Rights Commission, because that’s what the Board of Supervisors wants. Chris Weston came to the special meeting of the HRC in Garberville, to hear about human rights abuses in Southern Humboldt, from the people who suffer them. Estelle Fennell couldn’t be bothered. Chris Weston wanted human rights issues agendized and acted upon by the HRC. Estelle, apparently, didn’t. Therefore, Chris Weston had to be removed.

Just look at Estelle Fennell’s atrocious record on human rights: She worked to pass two new laws to criminalize poverty, one prohibiting people from asking for help, and the other prohibiting sleep, laws which fly in the face of the most basic of human rights. She supported Measure Z, which shifts the burden of taxation away from land-owners, who reap most of the benefits of county government, and onto the working poor and homeless, who can afford it the least, and to whom the county offers little more than evictions and jail time. Most recently, her decision to hire a poorly qualified new Public Defender with a weak record, a decision which demoralized the County’s well-respected Public Defender’s office, will only make it less likely that the County will respect the rights of indigent defendants. Considering her record, putting a commissioner on the HRC who actually cares about human rights would be out of character, so we shouldn’t be surprised that Estelle Fennell rescinded Chris Weston’s appointment.

I asked Estelle Fennell, directly, why she removed Chris Weston from the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission. She didn’t want to tell me. She told me that Chris knew why she removed him, and that I should ask him, so I did. I invited Chris Weston to appear as a guest on my radio show, the Memorial Day (May 29) edition of KMUD’s Monday Morning Magazine. On my show, Chris told us that the reason Estelle gave Chris for why she removed him, was that he created “friction” within the HRC.

“Friction!” We’ve got teenage kids beating homeless old men with baseball bats in Southern Humboldt, and she’s worried about “friction” within the HRC. A man was set on fire in Garberville, but she’s worried about “friction” on the HRC. As Chris Weston said on the air, “Human rights don’t get defended without some friction.” and “if it weren’t for ‘some friction’ blacks would still be slaves, and women would still be the property of men.”

I think it will take “some friction” to address our continuing problem with violence against the poor and homeless in Southern Humboldt. We have a serious human rights problem in Southern Humboldt, and ignoring it won’t make it go away. If Ron Machado were gay, the incident where he was set on fire would be national news, and the perpetrators would face federal Hate Crime charges, but because he was poor, white and heterosexual, in Humboldt County, he’s just good kindling. That’s a cultural problem and it’s a cultural problem caused, not by poor and homeless people, but by the people with six-figure incomes around here, like Estelle Fennell.

We call it a “community” here in Southern Humboldt, but what goes on here is more like a casino. As long as you have money, we don’t care who you are, or where you got it; you’re welcome to stay and play. If you don’t have money, on the other hand, you’d better scram, even if you were born and raised here, even if you have a job and work here, even if you think you are part of the community here. To the rich people around here, like Estelle Fennell, you’re not a contributing member of the community, you’re just a loser, and you are taking up valuable real-estate, so move on. That’s how a casino operates, but you can’t build a community that way.

We don’t make “community” a priority, here in Humboldt County, we make money our sole priority, and ignore the social, cultural and human consequences of that decision. Our current Board of Supervisors has created an atmosphere conducive to gamblers, that lures shady business-people, and outright criminals into our community to loot us of our quality of life, ruin the environment, and exploit us economically, while it sweeps the social problems their policies create for our community, under the rug, or out the door.

They ignore the housing crisis. They ignore the addiction problem. They ignore the dead bodies. They ignore the violence against the poor and homeless. They ignore the sex trafficking, and they ignore the people in our community who are suffering. All they see is money. Everything else, they just brush off, throw away, or pretend it doesn’t exist. Of course, they can get away with that now, because there’s so much money around, but when this casino stops paying, the high- rollers will be gone, along with the money. All that will be left is the wreckage, and the losers. That is, the environment and the community.

It’s happening already. The smart money is getting out while the getting is good, leaving the suckers to lose their shirts on the downhill slide. Meanwhile, large scale organized crime has become entrenched in the area, institutionalizing hard drugs, sex trafficking and other crimes in Humboldt County while honest working people live in their cars or sleep under bridges because drug dealers have taken over most of the available space. That’s what’s happening to our community, and to our home, here in Humboldt County, thanks to our current Board of Supervisors.

The housing crisis here is literally killing people in Humboldt County, and Housing First won’t begin to address it. Our whole economy is based on dealing drugs, but we have almost no treatment for addiction, and we die from drug use at ten times the state average here in Humboldt County. The housing crisis forces people into the drug economy, and the drug economy drives addiction. Addiction leads to poverty, crime, hopelessness, and death. This is no accident. This is being done to us intentionally. This is how greedy parasites suck the life out of a community, and our current Board of Supervisors invited them here to do it. Now that Estelle Fennell has eliminated the “friction” at the HRC, I guess it will just be smooth sailin’ from here.