Played Like a Fiddle

As soon as the bombs started falling on Ukraine, the memes started dropping on Facebook. Suddenly, I’m getting bombed by blue and yellow Support Ukraine memes, followed by Boogieman Putin memes, Ukrainian refugees with their pets memes, and heroic Ukrainian freedom fighter memes. This is what a 21^st Century propaganda war looks like. I don’t know where these memes come from, but they were clearly created by professionals, and released strategically.

Don’t get me wrong. I have only sympathy, compassion and concern for the people of Ukraine and my prayers go out to them. I also have sympathy, compassion and prayers for the Russian soldiers who have no desire to kill Ukrainian people or destroy their homes, but who have been sent on this tragic errand. I have no affection for Putin, and I condemn this invasion. However, the US invades sovereign nations all the time, with much less provocation. If we can’t control our own government’s military aggression, who are we to complain about Russia’s.

What is missing from this deluge of propaganda, is any acknowledgment of US culpability in this dreadful situation. There’s no mention of the long-term CIA operations to install pro-western governments all over Eastern Europe, especially the Ukraine, or of how those operations foment and finance Nazi movements that have persisted in Ukraine since WWII. Nor do they mention the business deals which insure that Ukrainian wealth, humanity and resources be exploited by oligarchs in Berlin, London, and New York, rather than those in Moscow.

On the ground, in that part of the world, there is great disagreement over which of those two “trading partners” offer a better deal, and more than a few idealistic Ukrainians would prefer to cultivate a free and independent nation without any unwelcome influence from abroad. Most, however, would prefer any of the above options, to war.

Crisis in Ukraine

Considering US culpability as the driving force behind NATO’s eastward expansion, We the People, bear responsibility for this mess, even though most of us had no idea what our government was doing over there behind our backs. This is a problem. Our government represents us, and when our government commits really horrible, atrocious crimes against humanity, We the People are to blame. However, We the People are the most media-hypnotized people on Earth, and consequently, corporate interests can obtain our permission, through hypnosis, to use our government in any way they choose.

Let me say that again. We are the most media-hypnotized people on Earth, and corporate interests use media hypnosis to get our permission to use our government to do their dirty work. It’s called “Manufactured Consent.” We get bombarded with one-sided propaganda promoting an impossibly simple, unbelievably naive narrative about Ukraine, just at the moment that their impossibly simple, unbelievably naive narrative about Covid began to collapse.

Russia launched its invasion, just as 2021 US mortality rates revealed a shockingly high death toll. The US overall mortality rate, which remained unchanged through the 2020 Covid pandemic, shot up by 40% in 2021 following the roll-out of Covid vaccines. That’s an unprecedented spike in overall mortality. Researchers estimate that lockdown measures reduced the average American’s life expectancy by almost 2 years, another shocking impact, and a recent study by the Harvard School of Applied Economics revealed that lockdown measures did almost no good, for the enormous amount of harm they caused.

Anne and her family were exterminated by Nazis. The best is yet to come!

I’m just warning you that the people feeding you this bullshit about Ukraine are the same people who convinced you to needlessly live under house arrest for two years, take potentially lethal injections of experimental drugs that don’t work, and wear a mask that you know doesn’t stop the fine particulate matter associated with forest-fires, but somehow prevents the spread of a virus that is a hundred times smaller.

As I see it, there are four great tragedies playing out here:

1. The tragedy of war in Ukraine, for which we bear some responsibility.

2. The Tragedy of US Foreign Policy, driven by oligarchs, promoted through corporate media and drenched in the blood of humanity that stains the hands of every American. The crimes against humanity attributed to our out-of-control government’s policies would, in fact does, fill many volumes. For brevity’s sake only, let’s leave it at that.

3. The Tragedy of Media Monopoly, internet censorship, and the deluge of propaganda that manipulated Americans into doing far more harm, not only to millions of people all over the world, but to themselves, their fellow citizens and their own country, than any foreign power could dream of.

4. Finally, The Tragedy of the American People. Thousands of Americans died needlessly because they were denied early treatment to Covid. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people died, and continue to die, from adverse reactions to Covid vaccines, and thousands more people died deaths of despair as they watched their businesses, marriages, and/or careers collapse under lockdown measures. Perhaps worst of all, in the midst of this tragedy, a kind of insanity has taken hold.

In this socially atomized, media-hypnotized, environment of fear and isolation, Americans are shell-shocked, confused and traumatized. They have no idea where to turn. Out of habit, they turn on the TV; they read the news; they scroll through their feed, because they don’t know what else to do. So, they still live in a virtual reality where Covid vaccines are “safe and effective” and the disease is worth sacrificing your quality of life to avoid. The media continues to ignore the mountain of Covid “vaccine” injuries, while Biden’s administration keeps pushing Americans into this new medical authoritarianism that censors the wails of grieving families while it floods cyberspace with electronic propaganda.

The schizophrenia has taken a toll on the American psyche, and understandably so. Without a firm grip on reality, we’re left rudderless in a shit-storm of sophisticated propaganda. Unfortunately, the technocrats spreading this propaganda know this, and they know how to capitalize on the injuries they’ve already inflicted. Thus far, they’ve played us like a fiddle, and they’re still calling the tune. Regardless of the situation in Ukraine, the tragedy of the American people strikes closest to home, and that’s the one I’m most concerned about.

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.

Denial, the Deepest River in SoHum

I talked to Suzelle briefly after the SoHum values conference in Redway a couple of weeks ago. We talked about how much the War on Drugs overshadows everything in this community. We also talked about how much hardship cannabis consumers have endured under prohibition. I said “There’s a debt that’s owed,” meaning that I thought the people who made their fortunes from the injustice of prohibition owe a debt to the people who endured that violence, injustice and discrimination for so long.

I’m sorry I said that. Not that I don’t think there’s truth in it, but the truth is bigger than that, and I think this community has a lot of healing to do, and needs to take care of itself, first. Besides, some people here have consistently worked for legalization. They worked for it, voted for it, and supported it openly, even though it made them more vulnerable, and threatened the income they earned from producing and selling marijuana. I applaud those people. I wish we had more of them, and I certainly don’t fault them. A lot of them are now involved with building a new legal cannabis industry, and I wish them success.

I realize I don’t always say things in the most sensitive way possible, but I want to make myself clear, and I know that I am talking to battle-hardened veterans of the War on Drugs. I care about this community. I live here, and you are my neighbors, and I’m very worried about what I see going on around here.

I’m proud of what this community has accomplished, and I agree with Owl, who spoke up at the conference to say, “We should be proud of our heritage.” We should be proud of what we did to get cannabis to the people, despite the overwhelming violence and oppression, of the War on Drugs, for all those years. That was an absolutely heroic effort, and we should be proud of it. We should also be proud of the work we did to end the War on Drugs. If you haven’t already done some of that work, there’s still time. Go ahead and write a check to NORML. They still need it, and so do you.

The War on Drugs has taken far more than we realize from all of us. There’s a lot of pain behind the windshields of those giant trucks, and there’s not one of us who hasn’t been scarred by it, even if it’s only by the fact that we’ve become so dependent on it, economically, as a community. We’ve become so economically dependent on it that we just can’t face life without it. We’re terrified of the very idea of it, and it’s the very last thing we want to think about. Since we’re the kind of people who prefer to do things, rather than think about them, we just keep doing our thing and try not to think about it.

We’re caught between two gorgons. On one side, we have the awful horror of the War on Drugs, in which we were heroes, but on which we’ve come to depend. On the other side, we can’t bear the horror of life in Humboldt County without the windfall black-market profits the War on Drugs brings. We just can’t face reality. Instead, we live in denial.

We cope by living in our own delusion and concocting a mythology that has come completely unhinged from reality. By now, I’m sure I’ve written enough about this cultural schizophrenia to fill a book, but here it is in a nutshell. Here, in our denial, behind the Redwood Curtain, we hide within our tidy wholesome mythology of “Mom and Pop,” “back-to-the-land” growers, growing superior, world renowned marijuana of unapproachable quality by practicing impeccable watershed stewardship and sustainable, all organic, biodynamic, permaculture farming practices.

Meanwhile, back in reality, Google Earth shows a vast network of clear-cuts, garbage dumps and stream diversions connected by a million miles of quad trails and illegal roads. Like the original Emerald City in The Wizard of OZ, what goes on here only looks good if you wear the special sunglasses that make the grime of the black-market sparkle like gemstones. Everything is beautiful here in paradise, just don’t take off those special glasses.

 

In our mythological future, this area will become recognized as the best place in the world to grow cannabis, and we will grow pot of such superior quality, that most cannabis consumers, being discerning, cultured people of considerable means, will insist that only Humboldt grown cannabis can satisfy their palette, and they will happily pay a premium for it. Besides, the black market will persist indefinitely because people would rather buy their weed from a drug-dealer, than pick it up at the supermarket. In this mythology, we can all just keep doing what we are doing, and do more of it than ever.

While it is true that the cannabis industry is exploding right now, and some people are going to make HUGE amounts of money from it, everything about this industry is changing incredibly fast. Within this crucible, profit margins will shrink until competition gives way to consolidation. In this process, even if the industry settles here, most of Humboldt County’s growers will get squeezed out of the business. That’s the reality that’s coming down the pike with legalization.

The pot business has always been a game for gamblers. I know that nobody really feels much sympathy for drug dealers squeezed out of the black-market, and I doubt anyone will start a charity for them anytime soon, but we are talking about most of our community now. Most of the people we know, most of the people who were born and raised here, and most of the people who built this community and make it unique, will be squeezed out of the marijuana industry, including all of the bright, imaginative and creative people who have come to rely on it to support their creativity.

Most of our community will be squeezed-out of the marijuana industry by greedy, ruthless business-people with major capital behind them. It is already well underway. That’s why we don’t want the marijuana industry in Humboldt County. Large-scale industrial agriculture does not make a good neighbor, nor does it belong on steep slopes in wild habitat. More importantly, it’s not who we are.

We didn’t come here to ruthlessly corner the market of a new industry. We came here to get out of the rat race, to breathe fresh air, hear the birds sing and walk in the woods. We made art. We played music and we told stories. Marijuana reminded us why those things mattered to us, so we made space for them, shared them and celebrated them. Marijuana reminded us why those things mattered, and the War on Drugs reminded us why marijuana mattered, so we learned to grow that too, in secret little patches hidden deep in the forest.

It was risky. You couldn’t trust people who didn’t grow. If you neglected to start seeds, your neighbor might just drop a few seedlings off at your place just to make sure you put a crop in. To be accepted by this community, you practically had to grow, and the stress of it was palpable. You could feel it in town. This was a war zone, and the sound of a helicopter on a hot Summer day still sends most people around here into a panic attack.

We lost a lot of great people in the War on Drugs. A lot of them got busted, some more than once. A lot of people turned to alcohol and other drugs to deal with the stress, some artists more or less abandoned their art, because weed money came so much easier. The black-market had a corrosive effect on the community, and the longer it continued, the more this place attracted a criminal element motivated by greed. Meanwhile, it took almost 40 years for the people to rise up and demand an end to Cannabis prohibition, and the government fought the people at every turn. Today, cannabis is still only legal in states where voters have the power of referendum.

Here, we have so thoroughly internalized the oppression of the War on Drugs that it has blinded us to our options, and stunted our economic diversity. As we move towards legalization, and the price of pot continues to slide, people just keep producing more weed. The art, music, stories, and community celebration gets squeezed-out, replaced with more boring hard work, the rat race, and Netflix by satellite. Nobody’s got time to walk in the forest anymore. They’ve got tarps to pull, soil to move and plants to tend. Prohibition squeezed this community into the marijuana industry, and now the marijuana industry is squeezing the life out of this community. That’s just part of what the War on Drugs has done to us, but the war is far from over for us.

The War on Drugs has affected how we think and how we see the world, and our collective schizophrenia is affecting our ability to make realistic decisions and plan for the future. Consequently, the impacts of the War on Drugs will be felt here for generations to come. While cannabis consumers have paid an enormous price in the War on Drugs, having paid it honestly, they will heal more quickly and recover more completely. For many here, the War on Drugs has crippled them, because they can’t even imagine another way of living, and it has become central to their identity. We face serious challenges, as a community, as we move towards legalization, but to face those challenges, we must first face reality.

SoHum’s Community Values

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Southern Humboldt Community Values Conference at the Mateel Community Center in Redway. As soon as I heard about this event, I knew I had to attend. I knew I had to attend because:

1. I wanted to see who in Southern Humboldt cares enough about community values to show up to an event at 9:00 am on a Sunday morning in April without the lure of alcohol or music. I wanted to meet those people, and…

1. I genuinely care about community values.

These days, people endure enormous economic stress. Economic stress compromises, corrupts and crushes values, as well as the people who cling to them. This economy grinds values into garbage just as efficiently as it does redwood trees, rhinoceroses or the rest of us. If you value anything more than money, I think it more important than ever to remind yourself why, and to draw strength from that knowledge. If we share values as a community, we can share that knowledge, and reinforce those values, to make our community stronger and more cohesive. Really, I understand the importance of community values, but I also understood the motivation for this conference.

The Southern Humboldt Values Conference was sponsored by an organization called SHC, which supports and lobbies on behalf of cannabis growers. They had the idea to use Southern Humboldt’s “community values” as a marketing tool, to help them promote and sell their branded cannabis products. They constructed the conference so that no matter what happened, at the end of it, they would have a list of value statements that they could then distill down to a logo that they could slap on product labels and use in advertising to convince cannabis consumers that their pot was worth more money than pot grown elsewhere.

Basically, the Southern Humboldt Community Values Conference was a scheme, dreamed up by pot growers, to cash-in on anyone left in SoHum who cares about anything but money. You didn’t even have to care that much. At the conference, all you had to do, to express your values, was to show up and give them lip-service. You didn’t have to live them, invest in them, or practice them; they just had to sound good to you on a sober Sunday morning in April.

About 30 people showed up to participate in the conference, and another 10-15 straggled in late, missing most of the process. In other words, more than 99% of the SoHum community had better things to do. When you consider that at least a few of the participants were motivated by the potential ad campaign they hoped to create, you would have to admit that “community values,” on their own, are not a big draw in SoHum, but now that we’ve done the hard work of establishing our “community values,” what shall we do to instill them in the rest of our community?

For instance, one of the value statements we generated was some word-salad gobbledygook about how much we love the natural environment. All of the value statements we generated at the conference came out as such convoluted and poorly written sentences that I could not summon the energy to write them down. I found it embarrassing to have even participated in composing them, and I would have been even more embarrassed for anyone to see them written in my notebook. I do recall, however, that this word-salad value statement about how much we love the natural environment, contained the phrase, “we honor the cycles of nature.”

That sounds good, right? I’m down with it. I think we should honor and respect all of nature, including human nature, so sure, if we can at least get “the cycles of nature” into our community values statement, that’s great. At least “honor the cycles of nature” implies that nature is alive. As I recall, the rest of that value statement referred to the natural environment in terms of how we consume it, using words like “scenic beauty” and “peace and quiet,” but we all agreed on, and adopted, “honor the cycles of nature” as part of our cherished community values, while we ignored other values like eloquence and clarity entirely.

OK. Now we’ve had this conference, and we’ve established that honoring the cycles of nature is a stated, adopted and cherished Southern Humboldt Community Value©. Shouldn’t we make it clear to all of the people around here growing light-dep and mixed-light cannabis that they have gotten out-of-step with our community values? Will SHC refuse to allow light-dep or mixed-light product to be labeled with the “Southern Humboldt Community Values©” label?

I mean, it’s bad enough that light-dep and mixed-light growers waste panda plastic by the truckload, create noise and light pollution that disrupts wildlife behavior, and that they pollute and destroy critical habitat here in SoHum, but none of that conflicts with our newly adopted community values. On the other hand, light-dep and mixed-light growers definitely cheat the cycles of nature, for profit, which is clearly not in accord with our stated community values. Should we tolerate this heinous affront to our shared community values here in Southern Humboldt?

Often community values conflict with economic opportunity. People who believe in community values, will uphold the values of their community, no matter how ridiculous they seem, or how much they cost, in terms of missed economic opportunities, because it’s more important to most people to be a part of a community than it is to be rich and alone in secret. That’s the paradox of community values in Southern Humboldt. Here in SoHum, we have a whole community of people who have decided that they would rather be rich and alone in secret, than uphold community values.

Humboldt’s growers should realize that the people who buy their product are all expected to uphold community values, every day, even if they work for minimum wage, which a lot of them do. Even the poor and homeless are constantly reminded to uphold community values, so I doubt that anyone will be willing to pay much of a premium for it in their marijuana. Think about how many marijuana consumers have been kicked out of school, discriminated against in the workplace, and persecuted by law enforcement, because they smoke marijuana, and how much that has cost them in terms of lost income, pain and suffering, and then think about how much these people have paid for weed over the years, because of prohibition. How much chutzpah does it take to imply that there is anything like “fair trade” going on here?

Besides the gobbledygook about the natural environment, we had one value statement that involved respect for counter-cultures, and talked about accepting refugees from all wars, but within it, we included the phrase “we speak in code and privacy is key.” That’s very important to remember when dealing with people in Southern Humboldt.

Nothing you hear, here in SoHum, really means what you think it does. When they say “community,” in SoHum, they mean “growers.” When they say “our diverse community,” they mean, “Some of us grow headband; some of us grow blue dream, and some of us grow OG, but the people who work in our grocery stores, at the bank, or even on our own farms, don’t count.” “Privacy is is key” means “you’ll never find out what we are up to unless we get busted for it.”

The truest, most relevant, and elegantly stated value statement of the entire conference came, near the end, from a cheerful, bright-eyed young woman who obviously knows this community well. She said, “It’s kinda like we all killed the same person and we’ve all been covering it up.”

That’s pretty close to the truth. Since the casualties of the War on Drugs number in the millions by now, it would have been more accurate to use the plural form of the noun, but after a long day of torturing the English language, I really appreciated the honesty and eloquence.

Lots of Soil, Not Many Vegetables

We don’t garden much, but this year we thought we’d grow some purple carrots, garlic chives and green onions in pots around our home. We stopped at Dazey’s garden supply store to look for some vegetable starts, because, as I recall, they used to have a pretty good selection in the Spring. When we got there, the place was mobbed. All around us people were piling sacks and loading and unloading trucks in every available space. We asked about plant starts. They told us they don’t do plants anymore.

They’d happily sell me a trimming machine, bubble bags, and all the soil and amendments I could ask for, but they had no plants at all in their “garden center.” They sent me to Sylvandale’s and Redway Feed, both of which, like Dazey’s, were hopping with customers, but unlike Dazey’s, actually had a few plants. Still, the selection seemed pretty slim at both locations.

Back in high school, I used to work in a garden center. We had more plants than all of the “garden centers” in SoHum put together. I mixed mountains of soil, filled thousands of flats with six-packs and soil and watered millions of tiny seedlings every year, for people who grew flowers and vegetables in their gardens. That’s why they called it a “garden center.” I guess we don’t even pretend to grow anything but pot around here anymore.

A friend of mine, who works at one of our local “garden canters” told me they had an order for 600 pallets of bagged soil (that’s well over 1,000 cubic yards of sterilized potting soil, packed into over 30,000 bags) for one customer. I have no idea how many tractor-trailer loads that comes out to, but the delivery driver is going to know that route well by the time it is all delivered. The garden center I worked at couldn’t move that that much soil in a decade, no matter how they sold it. Here, you could sell all the dirt on the planet to Humboldt County pot growers if you could just find enough trucks and drivers to deliver it.

Who’s got the time for a vegetable garden when you’ve got 30,000 bags of soil to open before you plant, and you pay almost as much for soil as you would for all the vegetables you could grow in it? If it doesn’t make sense to grow vegetables that way, why grow pot that way? If it weren’t for marijuana prohibition, no one would dream of cutting down trees or draining salmon streams, or hauling 600 pallets of sterilized potting soil, half-way across the state and ten miles up a muddy dirt road to a hole in the forest, to grow a common, hardy, agricultural staple. None of this makes any sense, outside of the War on Drugs, but it looks like we’ll see more Drug War madness in 2017 than we ever saw before.

2017 promises to be the biggest soil delivery season in Humboldt County history, and our roads are in the worst shape I’ve ever seen them. Just add the cost of the road damage, both to county roads, and to private roads and adjacent habitat, to the long litany of costs born by the community at large for the War on Drugs. I know you don’t want to think about that. You really don’t want to think about the millions of lives, lost and ruined, even though you know some of them. You don’t want to think about what it has done to you and your kids, and how it affects our community. You don’t want to think about what it says about our society, and what it is doing to the Earth. You don’t want to think about it, because you don’t want to know, and you don’t want to know because if you knew, you couldn’t do it. You wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t tolerate it.

 

According to 2^nd District Supervisor Estelle Fennell, so far, Humboldt County has only granted 19 cannabis cultivation permits, and they’re holding meetings all over Humboldt County to decide how to spend the tax money they collect from these few growers who paid the fees, made the improvements and submitted to inspections, and still dare to compete with the black market. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Humboldt County’s growers have opted to remain in the shadows to serve the nationwide black market.

 

The County received over 2,000 cannabis permit applications before the deadline last December. Most of those permit applications will never get approved. Growers knew that they could file a little paperwork and pay a fee that would keep the Sheriff out of their hair for a year or two. The black market has always had a cut and run attitude. The fact that over 2,000 people filed applications for permits, doesn’t mean that they intend to comply with state and county regulations, it just means that they intend to cut big this year. Instead of bringing the cannabis industry out of the shadows, Humboldt County’s cannabis permit program seems to have allowed a couple thousand growers to buy cover for all of them for one more big year in 2017. After that, we’ll see what’s left of Humboldt County.

Listen to Neighbors on KMUD

 

 

I spend a lot of time in this column talking about what’s wrong with Humboldt County. I write about what’s wrong with Humboldt County, because that’s where we should focus our attention, but today I want to tell you about something really cool going on around here that you ought to know about: Neighbors, not my neighbors, or your neighbors, or even The Neighbors, as I have been informed, but Neighbors.

Neighbors are a really tight little band in Arcata, playing some remarkably original music. They’ve been playing together since they were teenagers, and have incubated their own unique sound over almost two decades. Classically trained piano and organ player Peter Lisle dreams up these delightfully witty, complex, sophisticated, unpretentious psuedo-pop songs, which he also sings. The rhythm section of Dan Boburg on drums and Sierra Martin on bass bring this extremely challenging material to life, and make it dance.

Neighbors don’t rely on any of the latest high-tech gadgets to make their high energy pop music, instead they turn strong composition, intelligent lyrics and old fashioned musicianship into something new and different that you really should check out. Musically, they remind me of Frank Zappa’s, Orchestral Favorites-Studio Tan, phase. Peter’s vocals reminds me of They Might Be Giants, only more so. Neighbors are not a bar band, and they don’t make background music. Their music demands to be listened to, and deserves your full attention. I’m afraid I don’t hear this kind of creativity in music nearly often enough, and I think people should listen to Neighbors, just to be reminded of what human beings are capable of when they work together.

Peter writes charmingly accessible lyrics, often about literary themes. Enkidu Must Die is Peter’s musical interpretation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The Winded Mare recounts a famous scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Earth Abides is based on a science fiction book of the same name. Peter has also written some more personal songs. Helicopter tells the story of Peter’s challenging love affair with the aircraft of his dreams, and Mountain Road tells the true story of a camping trip too harrowing to remember, with consequences too severe to forget.

I heard Neighbors play live at the Bird Ally X appreciation benefit last December, and they blew me away, so I arranged to interview them for my occasional KMUD radio series, The Adventurous Ear. During the interview, Peter told me the story of what happened on that fateful camping trip in the Trinity Alps, and what he told me made my jaw drop. I’d tell about it, but you really should hear it in Peter’s own words, and you should hear the song he wrote about it. You’ll have a chance to do that, this Thursday, March 23 at 5pm when KMUD will air a brand new edition of The Adventurous Ear featuring: Neighbors. You can listen live at 5pm on Thursday, or anytime thereafter on the archive, at www.kmud.org

The show also features most of the music from Neighbors eponymous 10” red vinyl record, which you can find at People’s Records in Arcata. It’s the best new record I’ve heard in quite a while, and I recommend it to everyone. I know that not everyone will like it, but I recommend it to those people even more. Take the time to appreciate what these young men have done. It’ll make you feel better about being human.

Going Off-the-Grid

The other day, an associate told me about her most recent PG&E bill. They told her that she owed them more than $500 for one month’s service. That’s a lot of money. I can understand why she was outraged, and I sympathize. I’ve never had to deal with PG&E, and I’ve certainly never paid a ransom like that, but it’s only because I learned my lesson elsewhere.

I love electricity. I always have, and a lot of the things I enjoy doing, like audio/video recording and production, cannot be done without it. Back in the ’90s, I worked with a number of environmental non-profits who would call me whenever they needed anything videotaped, because they knew I was sympathetic and had access to equipment. I shot one nuclear accident, a few exciting acts of civil disobedience, several colorful protest demonstrations, and a whole lot of long boring meetings.

I stood there, pulling focus, and monitoring the audio, as Yankee Rowe officials explained “burps” of radiation they released into the air, and into the river. I watched officials from the Mass. Department of Public Health explain the findings of the health study of the community surrounding the Yankee Rowe Nuclear Power Plant, which showed elevated cancer and birth defect rates. I squinted into the viewfinder as cancer survivor and schoolteacher Stacia Falcowski showed me the drainpipe where radioactive effluent from nuclear power plants flowed into a pond in a city park in her backyard, and I watched the Geiger-counter confirm her accusations. Stacia Falkowski lives in Springfield, Massachusetts, next to Unifirst, the company which launders uniforms from New England’s many nuclear power plants.

I watched the Public Utilities Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission screw rate-payers, tax-payers, and future generations with the false promise of “clean, safe, too cheap to meter” nuclear power. I saw how corporations, investors, politicians and bureaucrats work together to make the worst possible decisions for ratepayers, but the best possible ones for their investment portfolios. I saw civic-minded citizens make heroic sacrifices of time, energy and money to educate their community and organize resistance to nuclear exploitation, and I saw how utility companies use money, lawyers and public relations flacks to overwhelm citizens efforts to oppose them.

I’ve seen enough to know that they pump dead bodies, crippled children, the habitat of endangered species and humanity’s future through that power grid, and that’s what comes out of your wall to make your TV glow when you pay your electric bill, whether it’s Conn. Ed or PG&E. At the time, I think I only paid about $25 dollars a month for electricity, my share of a bill split four ways, but I really resented paying it, because of what I had witnessed.

That’s when I started thinking about what it would cost, and what kind of changes I would have to make to move my little A/V production studio off the grid. Twenty years ago, in 1997, after a lot of thought and a good bit of research, I made the leap and purchased a pair of 75 watt PV panels, a charge controller and a 250 watt, pure sine wave, inverter from the Solar Living Center in Hopland. The whole system, with a battery, and accessories cost about $1,500, more than a month’s salary at the time, and as much as I could afford.

Soon, my solar powered PA system began providing sound at anti-nuclear protests in Vernon VT. Shortly after that, my production studio went off-the-grid, and shortly after that, so did my partner Amy and I. We haven’t paid an electric bill since, but that’s the least of it. Energy independence feels great. It’s like the difference between booking a cabin on a cruise ship, and having your own sailboat.

I soon realized I could play, record, produce and perform, anywhere. I started playing outdoors, improvising on electric guitar to the natural sounds of the environment. Jamming with nature changed how I thought about music and composition and turned into a thing. These improvisations felt really good, and tended to attract audiences, which then turned into a cross-country tour, culminating with two weeks of mixing, mastering and exploring in the Mojave Desert, and my third solo album.

This solar powered tour also led me to discover Redwood Community Radio, KMUD, and through it, the community of Southern Humboldt. Lots of people, I discovered, have their own “sailboats” out here, and well know the taste of freedom they bring. They even have a shop in town that sells them. Every time we told someone how much we liked it here in Southern Humboldt, they asked us, “Why don’t you stay?” So, we did, and now it’s home.

Maybe two people going off-the-grid means nothing in the big picture of global climate change, and I’m sure Conn. Ed didn’t even notice we were gone, but going off-the-grid felt empowering, liberating, and it changed my life for the better, in ways I would have never imagined before I did it. If you’re on the grid, you have lots of good reasons to resent paying your electric bill, more than you probably know. The price of solar PV panels has dropped precipitously, and electric bills have only gone up since I made the leap back in 1997. What are you waiting for?

 

Even assuming that I would have never paid more than $25 a month for electricity, my system has paid for itself many times over, and I continue to rely on it today. Hopefully it lasts another 20 years or more. I recommend going off-the-grid to everyone. It’s not that hard, and it can be more rewarding than you might imagine.

Casualties of the Greenrush in Humboldt County

Cannabis prohibition is a ripoff, disguised as a scam, concealed within a hoax, and the people who go into the black market tend towards the sneaky, scammy, and opportunistic. I don’t really have much sympathy for the johnny-come-lately greenrushers, who pay premium prices for ramshackle dumps so they can grow weed in Humboldt County, while so many of the people who live and work here, go homeless. Still, I can’t help but feel a little bit sorry for them when I see how much the dope yuppies take advantage of them.

My neighbor recently rented out her backwoods homestead to a greenrusher from NJ that she found on Craigslist. It took her nearly two years to find someone desperate and foolish enough to pay the ridiculous sum she was asking. She had friends who were homeless, mind you, and lots of people around here need a place to live, but no one who could afford what she was asking, would ever live in such filth, and no one who would tolerate the conditions, could afford what she was asking. Eventually, Craigslist brought her a live one, and he signed a lease with her.

 

The first time he asked me for help, he needed a jump-start, because he left his lights on. What are neighbors for? I helped him out a few times, and was friendly about it. We live pretty far out in the sticks and I do my best to cultivate good relations with our neighbors. Around here, you never know when you’ll need them, so I got to know my new neighbor a bit.

He is about the same age as me, and hanging out with him felt like hanging out with friends in college. We’d puff fat joints while we talked about music, old TV shows and marijuana. He was obsessed with marijuana. He watched a lot of TV too, but he was obsessed with marijuana. He told me how much he was paying in rent. I’m sure it added up to more than my previous neighbor ever made off her crop in her best year. “Am I an idiot?” he asked me.

“Can you make it work?” I asked, in an attempt to politely avoid blunt honesty.

“Yeah, I think so.” he replied. As it turned out, he was wrong.

He had never grown anything before, let alone cannabis, and his ineptness at gardening was only exceeded by his ineptness at business. I’ve never seen anyone spend more money on grow supplies than he did. For awhile, he had a crush on one of the girls who worked at Dazey’s Garden Supply and I think he bought a lot of stuff just to impress her. His mother paid all of his bills, and sent him credit cards, so it was no skin off of his nose.

 

Still, he didn’t need six seedling heater mats or eight T-5 fluorescent lighting fixtures or five generators to run them all. He hated being out in the sun, and couldn’t take the heat. When he installed an air conditioner, I knew I knew he wouldn’t last. I also knew that we would get no peace until he moved. His generators ran constantly for the duration of his three year stay.

He hated to work too. I can’t say I blame him for that, but he brought in a partner to do the grunt work, that I really didn’t like. While hanging out with my new neighbor was like talking to friends in college, being around this other guy was like Jr. High. I found him crude, obnoxious and insufferable. Fortunately, he wasn’t there that often. He lived on the East Coast, and commuted to Humboldt County. He must have flown back and forth across country at least a half a dozen times over the course of the growing season, which means the pot they grew together, here in Humboldt, under the sun, has a bigger carbon footprint than any indoor pot you’re likely to find anywhere.

Together, they may have grown the most expensive marijuana ever produced in Humboldt County. They couldn’t have made money on it. In fact, they must not have made money on it, because now they are both gone. Humboldt County turned out to be an expensive mistake for both of them, but that wasn’t enough.

Their little adventure in SoHum also took out two younger guys, who diligently trimmed weed for my new neighbor. These trimmers took their pay in product, in hopes of selling it for more money, out-of-state. After leaving here, the two set out across country, by car, but didn’t even make it to Reno. A Nevada State Trooper pulled them over for tailgating a semi, smelled weed, searched the vehicle, found fifteen pounds of weed and arrested them both.

These four guys all lost their shirts in the greenrush, on just this one property in SoHum. This must happen all over Humboldt County. I’m sure that not all of the greenrushers are as dumb as these guys, but I’ll bet they’re not that far from average. The NCJ just reported, this week, that the wholesale price of cannabis continues to fall. Can the “green-flight” be far behind?

None of these guys really wanted to live here. None of them cared about the forest. They all came here with dollar signs in their eyes and greed in their hearts, lured by the sweet scent of California sinsemilla, and the prospects of making a quick buck. When all was said and done, their whole endeavor turned out to be a complete waste of time, money, energy and resources. They would have made more money working in a fast-food restaurant. They would have all done better, at almost anything else, almost anywhere else.

The only winner here is my former neighbor, now enjoying her retirement in Mexico. Almost none of the money earned off of her land, since she moved, stayed in Humboldt County, but all of the mess did. My neighbor left 30 years of garbage when she moved, and these guys just added to it. Together they turned a beautiful forest into a complete dump, for no good reason. Really, if you’re thinking of coming to Humboldt County to grow weed. Save yourself a lot of trouble. Don’t.

 

The “Heritage” of the War on Drugs

Drug dealers suck the life out of a community. Look at what they’ve done to Southern Humboldt. Drug dealers use black market drug money to drive honest working people out of their homes, which they then convert into dope houses. Meanwhile, middle-class professionals, who could afford to live here, won’t, because they don’t want to associate with, and don’t want their kids to associate with, so many low-life, criminal drug-dealers. Who can blame them?

Even the non-profit environmental organizations that were founded down here, have all fled to Arcata and Eureka, where the economy still boasts some diversity, and black market drug dealers haven’t completely driven everyone else away. Ironically, even black market drug dealers, complain about black market drug dealers around here. Apparently, drug kingpins don’t like to see street-dealers working their neighborhood any more than anyone else.

Working people either camp out in the woods, or commute from Fortuna, for the privilege of serving rude, disdainful drug dealers, for little more than minimum wage. Retirees live in fear, behind locked doors because of drug-related violent crime, and because of the number of desperate drug addicts on the street. We all pay a high price for the black market cannabis industry in Humboldt County, whether we buy pot or not, and the concentration of drug dealers in our small community continues to increase because only drug dealers can afford to live here, and only drug dealers want to live in a community so dominated by drug dealers.

Despite all of the social problems that black market drug dealers create, and the enormous costs of those problems born by the community, our Board of Supervisors is totally hypnotized by the shady characters who sit in the gallery, fanning themselves with enormous wads of cash. As a result, the county spends the taxpayer’s money to punish the symptoms, while it serves the disease. Now that the county has bent over backwards to embrace these drug dealers, it seems their efforts have mostly been in vain.

The vast majority of Humboldt County’s black market growers have opted not to apply for a permit to grow cannabis legally under the county’s new regulatory guidelines. The Humboldt County Planning Department has only received about 2,500 permit applications, out of an estimated 10,000 illegal grows, and the deadline to file an application has passed. Our investigations reveal that many of the applications filed, have little or no chance of approval.

Many more permit applications were filed by tenants, rather than landowners. I imagine a lot of entrepreneurs have set up shop here, because Humboldt County passed an ordinance first, and they want to get into the legal cannabis market early, but I wouldn’t be surprised if these companies move elsewhere as soon as the opportunity arises. Being first probably means more to them than being here.

 

So far, only about 300 applicants have completed the process and received permits. I wish all of them tremendous success. However, that means that Humboldt County’s back-country still harbors thousands of black market growers who have made little or no effort to come into compliance with the law, despite the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors’ eagerness to court them. Clearly, the majority of Humboldt County’s growers prefer to serve the black market, and remain outside of the law.

We should have expected that. After all, most of these people got into this business because they couldn’t compete in the real world, without cheating, to begin with. They know that they don’t stand a chance in the legal market. The legal market has an entirely different dynamic than the black market. While the legal market is competitive and driven by consumer choice, the black market is more of a hostage situation maintained by draconian police-state law enforcement.

By now, most of the “Mom and Pop,” “Heritage” growers, that everyone was so concerned about, have sold out to greedy, out-of-control, greenrushers, or turned the keys over to their kids. As long as we continue to craft cannabis regulations to protect the interests of black market, so called “Heritage” growers, we preserve that heritage of violent, drug-related crime, environmental destruction and social problems that we’ve come to expect from the War on Drugs. Haven’t we had enough of that?

Instead, California’s cannabis consumers should insist that the State immediately license large-scale cannabis farms, in appropriate locations. Only a bumper crop of legal weed will insure that the price of cannabis falls far enough, fast enough, to relegate the black market in marijuana to the pages of that long, dark tome known as the History of the War on Drugs. We should have closed the cover on that book a long time ago, but let’s do it now, before it can do any more harm.

Remember! Every single time a black market grower goes out of business, because the price of marijuana dropped too low: A homeless family finds a place to live. Five local kids don’t grow up to become drug dealers, and the legal cannabis industry creates ten new jobs for people who make “value added” products, which in turn creates a hundred new jobs for builders, contractors and business service providers. The lower the price of legal, raw cannabis falls, the more it helps the economy, the community, and the environment.

It’s time to demand an end to the violence, environmental destruction and crime that black market drug dealers bring to our community. Cannabis consumers deserve safe, reliable cannabis products at reasonable prices, and communities everywhere deserve to be rid of the crime, violence and corruption that black market drug dealers bring to every town, including ours. Humboldt County’s black market growers have demonstrated that they prefer the company of criminals to building strong community. They think they can hide their depravity behind a new downtown facade, bury it beneath ball-fields at the Community Park, and drown it out with obnoxiously loud music festivals, but their contempt for cannabis consumers, the community, and the environment, as well as their eagerness to milk the War on Drugs,to the bitter end, reveals their true colors.