Skipping “The News”

I’ve been taking a break from “the News” lately, pretty much since the election. It just got too embarrassing to watch. Trump turned US politics into a reality TV show, and I’m only willing to dumb down so far. I figure that if anything important happens, someone will tell me. I have that trust because people tell me about it even when nothing important happens. It really surprises me how much people talk about national politics around here.

I mean, my dope yuppie friends have no respect for the law, and don’t pay income tax, but somehow feel invested in American democracy, and talk about it all the time. My homeless friends, on the other hand, suffer human and civil rights violations every day, get treated like second-class citizens, and endure daily harassment from law enforcement, but they are outraged that Russian hackers compromised the legitimacy of “our elections.” “The News” does this to people.

“The News” is the one thing that truly unites us as a nation. We learn to ignore our own reality in order to digest, internalize and regurgitate this unified national narrative we call “the News.” We have news 24/7/365 so that you never have to think about your own life. “The News” is always there for you, telling you what’s important, what you should think about, and how you should think about it, and because we follow “the News” so faithfully, “the News” defines our national debate, and sets our national agenda. By paying such close attention to “the News,” instead of what’s going on around us, we allow the media, corporate interests and lawmakers to ignore our reality as well.

Doesn’t it seem strange that “the News” gives you updates on all of the major stock indices, every half-hour at least, even though most of us don’t own stocks, and if we do, they are managed by someone else, in a 401K, mutual fund, or retirement account, so the information is not that relevant to that many people. On the other hand, why don’t we have up-to-date stats that tell us about our general well-being as a community. Why don’t they tell us, at 8:00am every morning, how many people slept outside that night? Tell us how many people had nothing to eat yesterday. Show us how people make ends meet. Why would anyone care whether the stock market was going up, if these indices keep sliding?

Instead, we let “the News” tell us how many people we have to throw overboard to buoy the economy, as gauged by the stock market. “The News” tells us why we should expect to lose our home if we get sick, and “the News” tells us why we should sacrifice our children to protect the investments of billionaires, but now “the News” has gone too far.

Today, “The News” is telling us to pay attention to Donald Trump. This goes beyond selling the American people on ridiculous ideas that work against their own interests. Paying attention to Trump amounts to stupidity for stupidity’s sake. Paying attention to Trump is like reading The Enquirer. You know that it is a waste of time, and that you are not learning anything, and that it won’t do any good to point out the inconsistencies in their stories, because telling the truth has never mattered to either of them. Why waste your life that way?

From my perspective, as a writer, “the News” helps me gauge what I can assume my readers know, and what rhetoric they are familiar with, but I don’t want to think about that anymore. I don’t want to know how dumb people have gotten these days, and listening to Trump isn’t going to make them any smarter. I thought a Trump presidency would be a goldmine for political satire, at least, but I don’t find Trump very funny at all. Satirizing Trump is like trying to satirize pro-wrestling. How do you make fun of someone who already makes a mockery of the office?

In many ways, Trump is already the perfect satirical president. He’s got the ego, the chauvinism, the poor taste and the obnoxiousness that everyone despises about America and Americans. He treats other people the way the US treats other countries, and he’s fat, ugly and vain, just like most Americans.

He’s really the perfect president because he so completely embodies what the United States stands for. When you realize that, you begin to understand that our problems are much deeper than our current president, and you won’t find the answers to them on “the News.”

 

Besides, we’ve got plenty of corrupt, greedy fascists right here in Humboldt County. Here, we talk about the Fascist in Chief, in Mara Lago, chiefly because we don’t want to talk about all of the sleazy shit that goes on around here. In that sense, talking about Trump is kind of like talking about the weather. Trump is what you talk about when you don’t want to talk about anything. Mostly, people don’t want to talk about anything, because that would require them to think about something, formulate an opinion about it, and invest enough of themselves in that opinion to state it out loud. I’m not sure that people have it in them anymore.

Nobody wants to talk about the housing crisis. Nobody wants to talk about the dead bodies and the missing people, the violent crime, the opiate crisis, the Hep-C epidemic, the human rights abuses and institutional violence going on right here in Humboldt County, stuff we could actually do something about Nobody wants to talk about those things because nobody wants to think about those things, because mostly, they’re too busy scheming their own next crime against humanity. Instead, they tell me what Trump did, because they saw it on “the News.”

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.

The Black Hole We Call “The Humboldt County Human Rights Commission”

I spoke to Humboldt County Human Rights Commission Chairman Jim Glover twice this past week. I called him last Friday to invite him to be a guest on my radio show, Monday Morning Magazine, airing Monday, May 29 from 7-9am on KMUD, Redwood Community Radio (streaming live, and archived, at http://www.kmud.org ). I called because I wanted Jim to talk about the work that the HRC does on behalf of the Board of Supervisors. Having been to a couple of their meetings, I’ve gotten a sense of how the HRC operates, and in one sense, I think they do a great job, for the Board of Supervisors.

On the other hand, I don’t think the HRC does a very good job at all for the people of Humboldt County, and they do a tragic disservice to people who have been victims of human rights abuse. I became aware of the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission after a wave of vigilante violence swept Southern Humboldt last Fall. We had several mysterious deaths. One man was beaten so severely that he spent weeks in the hospital. He will probably never recover completely. Several others were assaulted, robbed and terrorized by vigilantes who, victims allege, identified themselves as “working with” the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, and handed out eviction notices bearing the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department logo.

Multiple victims came forward with physical evidence, corroborating stories, and names of perpetrators, but deputies in the Garberville Substation of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department refused to take a report from at least one of the victims. Because the perpetrators identified themselves as working with the Sheriff’s Department, and the Sheriff was not at all helpful to the victims, the victims, terrified of reprisal from both local vigilantes and law enforcement, turned instead to the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission.

In retrospect, you would have to say that reporting these crimes to the HRC was a waste of time, at best. “At best,” because these reports did not get shared with the commission for several months, but were almost immediately leaked to 2nd District Supervisor, Estelle Fennell, a clear violation of the confidentiality agreement in which these reports were filed. Nezzie Wade chaired the HRC at the time. She was so shocked and appalled that the HRC’s own rules on handling correspondences had been completely disregarded and that a severe breach of confidence had occurred, that she refused to participate in the HRC any further, and walked out in the middle of the meeting.

In her resignation letter, Nezzie Wade puts it like this, “At the November regular meeting I stated my intention to resign from the commission and left the meeting experiencing great frustration due to the continuing improper conduct of business. I have struggled with my frustration and participation on the commission over this lack of consistency and follow through with protocols, since my appointment to the commission.”

She sites the handling of these reports of vigilante violence in Southern Humboldt specifically: “It was in relationship to the message line calls and email communications retrieved by a commissioner acting as the courier for the commission, that I became extremely inflamed over the course of two consecutive meetings (October and November) in which the reports and communications sent to the commission describing instances of vigilante violence in Southern Humboldt reported to the commission via the phone line and email were not revealed to the commission in a way that allowed the grave situations described in these communications to be disclosed to the commission. A violation of privacy and confidentiality occurred when the commissioner acted upon the information in the communications without authority from the originators or the commission, by disclosing the names of complainants and their issues to parties outside of the commission thus compromising the investigation and the ethical standing of the commission in the community.”

She added, “A real travesty occurred when the actual situations of violence were minimized and reported in their entirety as ‘possible vigilante activity’ rather than actual occurrences with the documentation. The standard forms for intake on the message line were never submitted to the secretary nor email declarations of the victims of vigilante violence as clarified when I requested copies of them from the secretary, received no response prior to the November meeting, and was informed by the secretary that the commission did not have them; thus, no one had access to the information except the commissioner acting as courier at that point, nearly two months beyond the initial reports. It was in this context that I stated my intention to resign which I am now acting upon.”

“All of the above highlights the ongoing lack of following appropriate protocols and my great frustration with the Human Rights Commission. One need only review the meetings, comparing the agendas for each meeting with the post meeting minutes. There are many inconsistencies, and the motions are not recorded or business is conducted without following the required processes. Much is omitted. The commission clearly needs training in how to do business. In addition, the lack of term limits has resulted in an atmosphere in which groupthink is pervasive and new members of the commission are often led into following poor methods of handling commission business;for example, the way in which message line calls are taken in, responded to and reported upon.”

Accompanying her letter of resignation, Nezzie Wade submitted a list of changes to the HRC that she’d like to see implemented. In it, she gets to the heart of why most people think the HRC helps victims of abuse, when in reality, they mostly produce resolution copy for the Board of Supervisors. She begins by quoting the purpose, responsibilities and obligations of the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission, as they appear in the Humboldt County Code:

The purpose of the HRC is to promote tolerance and mutual respect between all persons, and to
promote positive human relationships for the purpose of insuring public peace, health, safety and the
general welfare (Ord. 1023, § 5, 4/22/75; Amended by Ord. No. 2294. 2/25/03)

The responsibilities of the Human Rights Commission are enumerated in Humboldt County Code
Section 228-6 (Ordinances 1023 and 2294) and Article VI of the HRC Bylaws
1. To foster mutual respect and understanding among people, including people subject to prejudice
and discrimination due to race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental
disability, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, civic interest, or any
other factors.
2. To make any studies in any field of human relationships in the County as, in the judgment of the
Commission, will aid in effectuating its general purposes.
3. To inquire into incidents of tension and conflict among or between people, including people
subject to prejudice and discrimination due to race, religious creed, color, national origin,
ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, marital status, gender, sexual orientation,
socioeconomic status, civic interest, or any other factors, and to take action by means of
conciliation, conference and persuasion to alleviate such tensions and conflict.
4. To conduct and recommend any educational programs as, in the judgment of the Commission,
will increase good will among inhabitants of the County and open new opportunities into all
phases of community life for all inhabitants.

The Human Rights Commission shall discharge the following obligations as enumerated in Humboldt
County Code Section 228-7 (Ordinances 1023 and 2294) and Article VII of the HRC Bylaws.
1. To hold conferences and other public meetings in the interest of the constructive resolution of
tensions, prejudice, and discrimination among or between groups of people, including people
subject to prejudice and discrimination due to race, religious creed, color, national origin,
ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, marital status, gender, sexual orientation,
socioeconomic status, civic interest, or any other factors.
2.To issue any publications, recommendations and reports of investigation as in its judgment will
tend to effectuate the purposes of this chapter.
3. To enlist the cooperation and participation of a variety of people, including people subject to
prejudice and discrimination due to race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry,
physical disability, mental disability, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic
status, civic interest, or any other factors, industry and labor organizations, media or mass
communication, fraternal and benevolent associations, and other groups in an educational
campaign devoted to fostering among the diverse groups of the County mutual esteem, justice
and equity.
4. To encourage and stimulate agencies under the jurisdiction of the Board of Supervisors to take
any action as will fulfill the purpose of Humboldt County Code Section 228-6 (Ordinances 1023
and 2294.)
5. To submit an annual report to the Board of Supervisors.

As anyone who reads the Humboldt County Code can see, the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission has a lot of responsibilities and obligations to the people of Humboldt County, even though they only serve an advisory role to the Board of Supervisors, and have no budget. From watching them in action, I can see that they take their role as advisers to the Board of Supervisors very seriously. Conversely, I also see that they fail miserably in their obligations and responsibilities to the people of Humboldt County. Nezzie Wade put it this way:

“While the statement of purpose focuses on the Commission as an organization to promote tolerance and mutual respect between all persons, and to promote positive human relationships for the purpose of
insuring public peace, health, safety and the general welfare, as a human rights organization the HRC
has been unable to truly effect a positive outcome in this regard because it has been absorbed
essentially with promoting ‘nice’ relationships with the BOS and others by keeping any conflicts at a
minimum and marginalized, thus not allowing for the expression of the discord within our community
as presented to the Commission in various ways, highlighted recently by the inappropriate handling of
communications received from members of the Southern Humboldt community regarding several
incidents of vigilante violence towards the homeless, which in no way has served to create an
atmosphere of mutual respect or public peace, safety and the general welfare.”

Basically, we had a series of violent crimes, with victims, evidence and witnesses to back them up, that implicate individuals within the Sheriff’s Department and respected community members, but rather than being investigated by law enforcement and prosecuted by the DA, these cases have been sucked into the black hole we call “the Humboldt County Human Rights Commission,” never to be heard from again, except in leaks back to the perpetrators. These crimes remain uninvestigated, and the perpetrators walk among us today.

Fast-forward to April 25 2017, Chris Weston, a recently appointed HRC Commissioner, called County Council’s office to inquire as to whether a particular email, sent from HRC Chair Jim Glover, to other HRC Commissioners only, was compatible with the Brown Act. Like Nezzie, Chris Weston had become frustrated with the obstructionism, unprofessionalism and lack of protocol on the HRC, and with Chairman Jim Glover in particular. On April 24, Weston talked with Glover about the email in question, and encouraged Glover to report the incident himself, but received no response. So, Commissioner Chris Weston felt obligated to report the email, which he said: “appears to intentionally hide a ‘back room deal’ among HRC members absent public knowledge,” to County Council.

Within two hours of placing that call to County Council’s office, Chris received this text message from Estelle Fennell: “effective today’s date April 25 2017 your participation on the commission is no longer required and I am rescinding your appointment.” Chris Weston was removed from the HRC by Estelle Fennell, less than two hours after reporting a probable Brown Act violation to County Council. It looks suspicious.

Here’s how Chris described it in his letter to District Attorney Maggie Flemming, dated April 28th: “If a commissioner is fired without prior discussion of any concerns or opportunity to rectify any shortcomings, it can easily be construed as unfair and inconsistent with the most rudimentary standards of free speech (First Amendment) due process (Fifth Amendment), powers (Ninth Amendment), Rights (Tenth Amendment) and Equal Protection Under the Law (Fourteenth Amendment) enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. If a commissioner appears to have been fired for inquiring about consistency of certain actions with the Brown Act, it sends a powerful message to all commissioners and society in general that the Brown Act is not seriously the law and flouting the Brown Act is allowed and protected by the powers that be in Humboldt County.”

It just gets darker, and deeper. HRC Chairman Jim Glover called me back on Monday, to decline my invitation to be a guest on the radio show, saying “It wouldn’t be proper” as though he were declining the interview on principle. I called him on it, citing the statement he made to the Times-Standard, asking why KMUD listeners don’t deserve the same consideration. He asked me who else would be on the show. I told him, that Chris Weston, Nezzie Wade and Debra Carey, would also be on the air live with him. At that, Jim Glover resolutely declined my invitation.

I have invited 2nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell to join us live on the air for this discussion as well. Estelle is a regular, if somewhat erratic guest on Monday Morning Magazine, and I do hope she will join us. After all, these violent crimes happened in her district and she appointed Chris Weston to the HRC to begin with. I’d think she’d be very interested in this, and I know that she could answer some important questions. I hope you’ll join us for an hour long discussion of , from 8-9am Monday, May 29, live on Redwood Community Radio, KMUD.

What’s $1.5 Million Worth to the Emerald Triangle?

With great fanfare, Gov. Jerry Brown, and Assemblyman Jim Wood announced that the Governor’s new state budget allocates 1.5 million dollars of state funds to clean-up environmental damage caused by illegal marijuana grows here in the Emerald Triangle, aka Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity Counties. Jerry Brown got it right when he said “These illegal grow sites do untold damage to forests and wildlife along the North Coast.”

Anyone who walks in the woods around here can see the legacy of environmental destruction from 40 plus years of illegal marijuana production. These forests are strewn with everything from irrigation line, soil bags and butane canisters, to fertilizers, pesticides and rat poison, to generators, appliances and vehicles, and what you find in these woods will boggle your imagination. I’ve seen trucks, bulldozers and mobile homes, wedged into narrow crevices, on steep slopes, deep in the forest, far from the nearest road. I don’t know how they got there and I have no idea how you would get them out.

In his press release, Assemblyman Wood brought up some of the problems they hope to address with this $1.5 million: Banned pesticides, rat poison, fisheries restoration, chemical ponds, excavation pits, trash, generators, storage tanks, abandoned weapons and illegal clear-cuts that create a fire hazard, “All of this creates a dangerous environment for firefighters, law enforcement and recreational hikers.” Wood’s press release informs us.

True enough, but how much will $1.5 million really do? Mendocino County Supervisor John McCowan told Ashley Tressel of the Ukiah Daily Journal, “It’s a nice start, but it’s really a drop in the bucket.” adding, “Frankly, State agencies have not been doing a good job of preventing environmental damage.” There, Supervisor McCowan refers to the explosion of new, large scale, illegal grows that have proliferated now that Mendocino County has refocused it’s energy away from marijuana eradication, and onto bringing cannabis permit applicants into compliance with state and county regulations.

With the exponential growth in the industry of late, the large scale, illegal clear-cuts, grading and water diversions going on right now, under legalization, may well dwarf the entire environmental legacy of the War on Drugs. Acting Humboldt County Sheriff William Honsal said he hoped to use Humboldt County’s share of this money to hire three new deputies to the Humboldt County Marijuana Task Force, presumably to stop the environmental destruction that is going on right now. “We need more resources and more deputy sheriffs dedicated to these illegal grows,” Honsal told Will Houston of the Eureka Times-Standard. However, diverting this money to law-enforcement would leave the environmental legacy of the War on Drugs, the unopened buckets of rat poison, the jugs of used motor oil, the leaky diesel tanks, the dams, the stream diversions and the storage ponds, to wreck havoc on wildlife for decades to come.

It remains unclear how the money will be allocated among the three counties. “These funds will go to our well-established Fisheries Restoration Grant Program which was created to address declining populations of wild salmon and steelhead trout, and deteriorating fish habitat in California,” said California Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Charlton H. Bonham. “The $1.5 million will help us continue to clean up the egregious environmental damage, specifically to California’s waterways, caused by illegal marijuana cultivation sites.”

How far will $1.5 million go? “It can cost up to $15,000 to clean-up and restore each acre damaged,” according to State Senator Bill Monning. I’m quoting the senator from a 2015 LA Times article by Patrick McGreevy about new (at the time), civil penalties that could compel busted growers to cover the cost of the environmental damage they cause. I’m sure the cost to clean-up an acre has not gone down any since then. At that rate, this new, $1.5 million dollar allocation will clean up about 100 acres. 100 acres!

Thanks to the ongoing insanity of the War on Drugs, we have over 8,000 active marijuana grows in Humboldt County alone, not to mention tens of thousands of abandoned grow sites in the forest. Mendocino and Trinity Counties have similar situations. In this vast expanse of rugged, remote, mountainous forest, cops and cultivators have played a high stakes game of cat and mouse for more than forty years, littering some of California’s best remaining wildlife habitat with poison and trash.

Today, highly capitalized interests, run roughshod over regulations and ignore environmental consequences in their quest to corner the market in this newly legalized industry. Meanwhile counties scale-back law enforcement and turn marijuana violations over to code enforcement, who attempt to implement regulations and issue permits. We see unprecedented, and unmitigated environmental damage from marijuana cultivation going on all over the Emerald Triangle right now, but thanks to assemblyman Wood’s “leadership”, the state is going to clean-up 100 acres in three huge counties.

It’s a good thing they put out a press release about this $1.5 million. Otherwise no one would have ever noticed the impact of such a tiny investment spread over such an enormous area.

Drug Education

I love science. My grandfather taught science and made sure I had ample early exposure to it. I collected fossils, did the experiments in my chemistry set, built model rockets and kept my deceased pets, snakes and turtles mostly, preserved in alcohol for later dissection. My room looked like a science lab.

I read science too. I hated story books as a child. I cannot describe how disappointed I was in any adult who pointed me towards the children’s section of the library. I’d take one look at the bright primary colors and the smiling anthropomorphic cartoon animals and think to myself, “How stupid do they think I am?” before heading to the science section and jumping into stuff that was way over my head.

As a teenager, they fed us a lot of government propaganda under the guise of “drug education.” Everything they told us about “drug education” seemed fishy to me. Clearly, the government did not want me to try drugs, but equally clearly, the message came through that a whole lot of American citizens thought drugs were worth breaking the law for. The cops that came to my school to convince me to say “no” to drugs, instead, convinced me that cops were small-minded gullible people who understood little besides power, authority and violence.

Drugs remained just as mysterious to me after “drug education” as they had been before, so I became curious. I’d heard the expression “experiment with drugs” and the idea appealed to my young science-nerd mind. At the time, even alcohol was alien to me. My parents didn’t drink, except for, perhaps, a glass of wine with Thanksgiving Dinner. By this time, I knew a bit about the scientific studies on the effects of psychoactive drugs, partially through my own reading, but largely through the state sanctioned curriculum taught to me in public schools.

Among the other propaganda, these curricula included quite a bit of science, and often cited the cruel, gruesome experiments conducted on laboratory animals by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. They made us watch graphic emergency room footage of a heroin overdose and showed us color photographs of all the nasty infections you could get from injecting drugs. Back then, Aids was just a chocolate flavored snack people ate to help lose weight.

They showed us how scientists measured alcohol impairment in volunteer test subjects, and of course, we saw graphic footage of traffic accidents involving drunk drivers. I don’t remember a lot of what I learned in school, but the gory drug-ed stuff, like the image of that poor unconscious kid, turning blue and foaming at the mouth while the ER doc cleaned out his abscessed vein, really stuck with me.

So did a short essay by Timothy Leary, included, oddly enough, in a state sanctioned drug education workbook. The authors of the workbook chose to illustrate this essay with a photograph of a distant and despondent-looking teenage girl, looking up at you from the floor, where she sat, back up against the wall, leaning against an open, dirty toilet, surrounded by dismembered manikin parts. The photo could have been left over from a Frank Zappa album cover shoot. Anyway, in the essay, Leary described his experience with LSD and what he meant by “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

I didn’t really understand what he meant, or what about the experiences he had, that he found so appealing, but clearly, here was a Harvard professor who sacrificed his career to endorse and promote an illegal drug. I didn’t understand why, but his enthusiasm, and urgency came through. As a counterpoint to Leary’s essay, we heard an audio tape made by a young man, purportedly under the influence of LSD, immediately before he took his own life. They told us a lot about marijuana too, but mostly they tried to scare us away from marijuana by associating it with all of the other illegal drugs, and reminding us that we would get arrested and thrown in jail if we were ever caught with any.

I don’t want to lead you to believe that my early interest in drugs was driven entirely by scientific curiosity and the public education system. When I was twelve, my parents went through a long, messy, traumatic divorce that concluded, when I was 15, with my mother marrying a guy I did not get along with, and my dad moving away. At twelve, I thought that only an idiot would take drugs, but by the time I turned 15, I wanted to try them all.

I’m sure there were other factors involved in my decision, including hormones. My attitude towards girls made a similar 180 degree switch during those years as well. I also realize that living through your parents divorce is a pretty normal part of growing up, these days, and plenty of kids endure far worse trauma than I went through, but I also know a lot of adults who have way worse problems than I have.

For whatever reason, I began taking drugs. I took them of my own accord, by myself, without peer pressure, usually while doing little other than observing the effects of the drug with more or less scientific curiosity. I wanted to know what drugs did, and why people found them so attractive. I began with the drug most easily available to me, model airplane glue. I already had some in my room. At the time, the model industry was switching to fume-free, citrus-based plastic model glue, but the old fumy stuff worked better, and I still had some.

Sniffing glue felt good for about 3 minutes, but left me feeling sick for the rest of the day. Still, the effects were dramatic and interesting enough that I persisted for a time. At school, the first real illegal drug I scored was a black barbituate capsule called a “carbitrol.” I remember having coordination problems and feeling very sleepy when I took it. I did not understand the appeal of this drug at all. Eventually, I came to realize that many popular drugs effect how people feel in social situations, and the effects of these drugs, like alcohol for instance, were quite boring to observe, alone, under more or less clinical conditions.

I smoked my first marijuana through a pipe I made myself from an aquarium air line valve and some hardware I stole from my step-father’s workshop. I couldn’t believe how harsh it felt, and how much my throat and lungs burned from it. I could hardly imagine effects that would make it worth doing again, and I didn’t feel any psychoactive effects at all, that first time, but I figured I must be missing something, so I persisted. Finally, on my third attempt, I felt the full, psychoactive effects of cannabis. It felt great, almost overwhelming, but positively vibrant, in a way that no amount of objective science, or anti-drug propaganda, could have prepared me for.

I continued to explore the world of psychoactive drugs and soon discovered LSD. LSD also had dramatic and interesting effects, so I took it often. I took LSD until I understood exactly what Timothy Leary meant by “Turn on, tune in and drop out,” and I understood his enthusiasm and urgency. I found marijuana and the psychedelics to be, by far, the most interesting of the illegal drugs, and I pursued my study of them enthusiastically. I quickly discovered that marijuana fit nicely into my daily life, while LSD was a much more draining ordeal, that usually involved losing a nights sleep.

Scientifically, both cannabis and LSD have dramatic psychoactive effects that the user feels very strongly, but that cause few, and relatively superficial, changes in behavior and physiology that scientists can measure objectively. The objective studies I read, of the effects of LSD, prepared me not at all for what I experienced when I took it myself. For instance, the study that examined the effects of LSD on cat behavior, found no specific behavior that cats only did under the influence of LSD, and only a few behaviors that scientists could measure as increasing or decreasing under the effects of LSD.

Objective science yielded very little insight into why LSD effected people so dramatically, and why people like Timothy Leary, who took it themselves, rather than feeding it to lab animals, felt so strongly about it. To this day, most of what we know about the LSD experience comes from direct, observational experience, and objective science has gotten little better at explaining it.

Today we have MRI machines that can measure crude differences in brain activity between high people and people who are not high, but MRIs don’t explain why some people have religious experiences that change their lives, while others become paranoid, anguished and suicidal. I’ve had both types of experience, as well as several others that I found totally inexplicable, but absolutely fascinating, but back then, it was time for me to choose a major in college.

Since these experiences happened in my mind, I thought Psychology would be an appropriate field of study. I very quickly discovered that psychologists had, quite artfully, excised the mind from their field of inquiry, and had defined “psychology” as “the study of behavior” so as to fully embrace the methodology of objective science. In Psychology classes, once again, I found myself reading studies that measured crude behavioral changes, objectively, and offered little insight into people’s lived experience.

I took several psychology classes and learned that, for all of it’s objective science, the field had yielded very little insight into the nature of mental illness, nor done much to improve the condition of mentally ill people, but had made great strides in predicting and influencing consumer behavior. I found it very curious, and rather disappointing, that scientists who were so eager to attach sensors and electrodes to every inch of our bodies, and sample all of all of our bodily fluids, apparently had no interest at all in studying the contents of our perceptions, scientifically.

No one seemed interested in studying direct experience, and there didn’t appear to be a way to do it objectively. That is, according to the scientific method that had been drilled into my head, over and over again, since I was a small child. Then, in my college catalog, I spotted an interesting elective in the Philosophy Dept called “Phenomenology” with Dr. James Buchanan. Phenomenology is the study of perception and direct experience. I had to buy five books for the class, all of them translated from German, none of which would I have found penetrable without the absolutely riveting lectures of Dr. Buchanan.

Dr. Buchanan deftly explained the shortcomings of objective science and how objective science distorts our view of the world. He explained why physics and chemistry have advanced so much faster than biology, medicine and psychology, and he very clearly explained the difference between a machine and an organism. Dr. Buchanan explained why objective science had been very helpful in learning to build machines, and why it was totally inadequate to understand organisms. Then he taught us the phenomenological method of scientific observation. I promise I won’t bore you with it.

It changed my life. The following semester, I took Dr. Buchanan’s Existentialism course, which I found just as riveting, and over the summer I did an independent study project with him on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. After that, I dropped out of college and started a band.

I didn’t start a band because I thought it would make me rich and famous; I started a band because I didn’t want to perpetuate a culture that systematically debases life by objectifying it. Instead, I wanted to work on building a new human culture, organically, from the ground up, based on the shared experience of people working together in small egalitarian groups. A band seemed like a good way to do that.

I still love science, especially ecology and wildlife biology, but I understand the limits of objective science, and I understand the poisonous cultural myth that uses objective science to push us down the road of maximum destruction and harm. I’m still interested in building a new human culture from the ground up, but, unfortunately, I don’t meet many people who found drugs as educational as I did.