Cracker v Cracker

It really amazes me that we draw such strong class distinctions here in SoHum, where so few people have any class at all. On one side, we have cracker drug dealers posing as middle-class suburbanites, who wouldn’t know class if it bit them in the ass, but if you can buy a symbol of it, they have four. On the other side we have poor white trash for whom class is what we dropped-out of school to avoid. Is there really any difference between us? I sure don’t see it.

We all drink too much, take too many drugs and make big messes in the woods. We’re mostly ugly and unpleasant to be around, and very few of us can hold up our end of a conversation for long without dropping an F-bomb. We dress like shlubs, and barely speak in complete sentences, but instead of recognizing our similarities, we search for petty distinctions that allow us to look down on each other, demonize each other and blame each other, rather than work together to find a solution. That’s the cracker way.

That’s why white people make such great fascists. Without the strict discipline of a strong leader, we all just turn on each other, like overcrowded hamsters, but if a leader can frighten us of a foreign enemy, we instantly become the most vicious killing machine that has ever stalked the planet. We don’t know how to look for common ground or a win/win situation. For us, the only way we know we’ve won, is when we see you lose. It’s a cultural thing, and it goes way back.

Usually, this kind of white cultural ugliness takes the form of racism, but we just don’t have enough non-white people, here in SoHum to blame all of our problems on. Because of our lack of diversity, we’ve had to learn to hate each other based purely on perceived economic status. This has lead to a lot of “cracker on cracker” crime, as tensions flare between two groups of practically identical people who attack each other over differences they would pity each other for, if they weren’t so pitiful themselves. That’s how it is with white people. If they don’t have their foot on your neck, you have to pity them.

Here in SoHum, we have a housing shortage, so we make a distinction between those who manage to find a place to live, and those who get left outside at night. It’s a cruel distinction, and one that could be eliminated with a little compassion cooperation and imagination, but that’s not the cracker way. Instead, we prefer a military solution. Like fools, we beg for more cops, stricter laws and harsher punishments. If we can’t solve the problem with violence, we won’t solve it at all.

When I hear our dope yuppies complain about the poor and homeless, they complain, very vociferously, about very minor offenses. They don’t like people standing on the sidewalks, smoking cigarettes, with their dogs and backpacks. They complain about people sitting on park benches for too long, and in too large of groups. They complain about people’s appearance, or about the appearance of their vehicles. They complain about open containers and smoking marijuana in public. They basically complain about people trying to live their lives as best they can.

On the other hand, when I hear homeless people complaining about the people who harass them, they complain about serious crimes and abusive behavior. They complain about having their tents slashed and their belongings stolen. They complain about being shot with paintball guns, threatened with firearms, and being physically assaulted and beaten up. They complain about having the Sheriff called on them because they were standing on the sidewalk talking to their friends, or about being photographed and videotaped by people who treat them as though they have no right to exist. They complain about being run off of the road when they are walking, or about trucks that slow down as they pass, and then hit the gas to spew a big cloud of diesel exhaust in their face. They complain about being profiled and blamed for things that they did not do, and they complain about collective punishment, violence and open hostility.

I understand class war, and I think class war is worth fighting, but if it weren’t for the weed industry, we’d all be poor, and on the same side. I like poor people. I don’t like to see people suffer, but I do enjoy the company of people who know how to make themselves happy, and enjoy their time on Earth without feeling the need to blow a ton of cash along the way.

The rules of class war are simple. If you aren’t on the side of the people who have less than you, you’re on the wrong side. Here’s why: The people who have less than you, need you, and they will remember you when you need them, but to the people who have more than you, you will always be expendable.

Crackers never figure this out no matter how many times they get fired, laid-off, snitched-out, or otherwise hung out to dry. Crackers always fall for shiny material objects, fancy pageants and big crowds, and will buy into any kind of idiocy that makes them feel like part of it.

Now that the dope yuppies have money, and have gotten chummy with the trust-fund kids, this little drug ghetto they’ve created here has become an embarrassment, so they’re doing everything they can to ditch their poor neighbors and gussy-up the place to impress their new rich friends. It’s exactly what any stupid cracker would do. It’s in our blood. Crackers have sucked up to rich, phony friends for a hundred generations or more, and those rich, phony friends have never given us anything except poorer people to look down on. These days, I guess that’s all that most crackers expect from life.

Since we’re all white, none of us have any idea what respect is all about, and none of us knows how to solve anything except with violence. We’re pathetic. Unless we, pitiful, stupid, white crackers, can find some compassion in our hearts, the vision to see our commonalities over our differences, and the imagination to find a new way to live together, it’s a hopeless situation. I always thought that marijuana would help us rise above the pitfalls of our cracker heritage, but here in SoHum, I have to admit that it has only made things worse. We’ve seen it a million times, from the Hatfield’s and the McCoy’s to the Jerry Springer Show, and now on the streets of Garberville. Cracker versus cracker just leaves a lot of crumbs.

New Ordinance or Not, Consumers Will Decide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

“Blood Diamond”

I’ve written about stupid names for strains of weed before, but now I think I’ve figured out why stupid names matter. To market weed effectively, the cannabis industry needs names that appeal to the intellect and aesthetics of a 15 year old boy. I smoked weed for the first time on my 15^th Birthday. I think a lot of people start smoking weed at about that age, so the same logic that applies to naming a hip-hop artist or a professional wrestler also applies to naming weed.

You need a name that sounds cool to a 15 year old boy. That’s why we have pot called: “Green Crack,” “God’s Pussy,” and “Chem Dawg.” From that perspective, the latest “hot” strain around here, “Blood Diamond” fits the bill. I would have bought “Blood Diamond” weed when I was 15, and I would have liked the name too. I haven’t smoked any “Blood Diamond” yet, but it gets rave reviews, from everyone except trimmers.

To me, it’s all just “weed.” I’m sure I’d like “Blood Diamond” weed if I smoked some. I like all weed, and most of the weed around here is pretty good. Don’t ask me to tell you which weed is better. If I’m high on good weed, the last thing I want to think about is how this weed compares with the last weed I smoked. I’m high now. That’s what matters.

I think “Blood Diamond” is a poetic name for weed right now. The term “Blood Diamond” was coined for diamonds mined in conflict zones where they fund bloody civil wars. Many brutal conflicts rage in, diamond rich, Central Africa. Warlords use the money they make from mining and selling these diamonds to buy weapons, ammunition and supplies to advance their personal ambitions of wealth and power through violence and bloodshed. The UN Banned the import of diamonds from conflict zones, but the black market has ways around such things, so “Blood Diamonds,” diamonds from Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Angola and a few other countries, still find their way onto young women’s fingers here in the US.

Now “Blood Diamond” marijuana is finding its way into America’s bongs. While “Blood Diamonds” in Sierra Leone finance a bloody civil war fought by child soldiers, “Blood Diamond” weed supplies an army of underage street dealers who risk violence, expulsion from school and jail time, on the front lines of America’s War on Drugs.

In war zones, arms dealers will happily accept payment, in diamonds, for weapons and ammunition, so warlords dig for diamonds to finance insurgencies that terrorize and destabilize fledgling democracies. In Trinity County last week, cops raided a house in which, in addition to the typical, industrial quantities of cannabis, and commercial quantities of hard drugs, authorities found over a hundred firearms and more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition.

Conflict zones have no environmental regulations. In Central Africa, brutal warlords use forced labor to dam rivers, and dig dangerous mines in the riverbeds to find “Blood Diamonds.” Here in Humboldt County, greedy growers clear forests, bulldoze natural habitat and drain salmon streams to grow “Blood Diamond” weed.

“Blood Diamonds” sparkle as bright as diamonds mined in peaceful democracies like Canada, and most diamond dealers have a “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy. The same can be said for the marijuana industry. Cannabis consumers rarely know much about where their marijuana comes from or how it was produced.

“Blood Diamond” is just another meaningless moniker designed to brand cannabis and appeal to prospective 15 year old clients, but it says a lot about the cannabis industry and the War on Drugs with an elegance and sense of irony I really admire. Apparently the product is pretty good too. I can only assume the grower who developed this strain, knows the industry, and the plant, very well indeed. I appreciate his honesty and eloquence.

Marketing Cannabis

I love marijuana, and I smoke a lot of it, but by itself, it’s pretty boring. Marijuana enhances a lot of things, like music, sex, food, conversation, art, and even work, and it often inspires fascinating, funny and frightening ideas, all of which I find much more interesting than marijuana itself. In my nearly 40 year history with the herb, I’ve smoked a great variety of weed, some very potent, some not very potent at all, but as I look back, I remember the music. I remember the sex. I remember the conversations, and if I wrote them down, I even remember the ideas, but generally, I don’t remember the weed.

 

I remember being high, so I must have had some weed, but as long I had weed, weed was just one of those things I took for granted, like a cup of hot coffee in the morning, or a cold beer at night. Those things don’t make the day exceptional, they make the day bearable. We all have our preferences about these things, but most of us don’t make them the central focus of our lives.

I bring this up because so many people around here seem really eager to tell me about how good their weed is. If someone offers to share a joint with me, I’m always grateful, and I usually try to say something nice about it, and in fact, around here, the pot is usually pretty damn good, so the compliments are heartfelt.

On the other hand, too often around here, by the time we get to the end of the joint, all we have talked about is the weed in the joint. I do appreciate high quality cannabis, but if I can’t find something, anything, else interesting about you, no matter how good your pot is, it’s probably not good enough to make your company tolerable for long.

I understand that pot growers, like most other successful entrepreneurs, focus a lot of attention on producing a high quality product. I know that it takes a significant amount of knowledge and skill to grow top notch sinsemilla, but personally, the only thing I find more boring than gardening itself, is listening to people talk about gardening. I think I have this in common with most cannabis consumers. This will certainly become increasingly true of cannabis consumers as we move towards legalization, because cannabis consumers who enjoy gardening will quickly become producers, rather than consumers of cannabis.

From a marketing perspective, I think it much more important to understand how the consumer interacts with the product, than to focus on the product itself. You can only show so many trichome close-ups, and award-winning strain names only mean so much. To successfully market a brand of cannabis in a competitive, legal, free market, it becomes critical to understand the customer, and to focus on how your product enhances their lives.

Remember “Miller Time?” “At the end of a hard day’s work, it’s time to head for the best tasting beer you can find. That’s Miller Time.” They don’t say “Miller beer will get you drunk faster than any other beer.” They don’t even say their beer tastes good. They just say it’s “the best tasting beer you can find.” That’s all they say about their beer. They spend the whole commercial telling you that you’re a noble, hard-working man, the kind of man that makes this country great, and at the end of a long day at work, you deserve a beer. Of course any beer tastes good at the end of a long day of work, but wouldn’t you rather drink the beer that appreciates you?

Budweiser on the other hand, wants you to associate their product with good times and good friends. That’s why Budweiser sponsors so many concerts, parties and sporting events. They want you to remember that Budweiser makes the party happen, and that wherever you had a great time, Budweiser was right there with you. Do they tell us anything about the product? If they do, you can bet it’s the most boring part of the commercial.

Now think about how this applies to branding cannabis, especially with regard to the name “Humboldt,” and some of the other brands it will likely compete with. I know that Bob Marley’s heirs inked a deal to market cannabis products bearing the brand name “Marley,” and Willie Nelson recently announced plans to market a line of cannabis products bearing his own name. What does the name Bob Marley mean to cannabis consumers? Bob Marley stands for freedom, the triumph of oppressed people, and cultural revolution. What about Willie Nelson? Willie appeals to red-blooded Americans, stout working people of modest means and conventional beliefs.

Now ask yourself, “What does the name ‘Humboldt’ conjure up in the minds of America’s bongloaders?” I mean, besides pot snobs, dope yuppies, and shadowy drug dealers who destroy natural habitat to exploit marijuana prohibition for profit. Do you think pot smokers identify with Indian killers, forest rapers or red-neck dirt farmers? Honestly, what else have you got?

Which brand of weed do I want to smoke? Find out next week when I tell you what we have to do to make the name “Humboldt” a marketing goldmine. You’re not going to like it.

Free the Weed, Screw the Economy

In the current debate over how to regulate cannabis in a legal environment, I hear an inordinate amount of concern about the possible economic effects of disrupting the current black-market. I mean, we didn’t mind when Amazon drove brick-and-mortar bookstores out of business. We didn’t care when itunes destroyed the record industry. “That’s progress,” and “You’ve got to stay ahead of the curve if you want to compete.” we said. It seems to me, that this whole internet revolution, that turned our economy upside-down, and ruined a whole lot of honest hard-working people’s lives in the process, remains hugely popular, despite the casualties.

But I guess it’s a different story when it comes to drug dealers and the legalization of marijuana. That’s what they’re telling us, right? They are telling us that we need to regulate marijuana very carefully so that the price remains high enough to preserve the drug-gangster lifestyle. The recently passed CA state medical marijuana regulations will dramatically slow the development of new, legal, cannabis related business opportunities. Instead, they create a whole bunch of totally unnecessary, regulatory jobs for people who do nothing, except consume tax dollars and keep marijuana expensive. It’s appalling!

For decades, we’ve paid exorbitant black-market prices for pot. We’ve lost jobs, been denied jobs, paid fines and legal fees, and spent time in jail, as veterans of the War on Drugs. We’ve paid excessive taxes, suffered indescribable social injustice, and lost civil rights, to pay for the cruel, misguided, and completely unnecessary, War on Drugs. The War on Drugs has claimed millions of casualties. We’ve been through hell in the War on Drugs. We’ve paid enough for marijuana. After what we’ve been through, no one should ever have to pay for marijuana, ever again. Never.

We really shouldn’t worry so much about the effect the collapse of the marijuana black-market will have on our local economy. I know that the prospect of shrinkage in our local economy frightens people, but we should embrace it. What good does the economy do, if it destroys the environment, works us to death, and makes the things we need ridiculously expensive? The truth is, the marijuana economy does a lot more harm than good, and we’d be better off without it than you think.

It is important to remember that he economy is not one of those “more is better” kind of things. If you haven’t read my book, On the Money, Economics for the 99%, you owe it to yourself to do so. In it, I explain, in detail, how the economy works against you, and why making the economy larger, inevitably makes your life worse,. Consider this example:

Imagine a businessman, running his own small business, but business is slow. He’s just scraping by, economically. He goes to work at 9:00am, where he has a few orders to fill, and the phone rings once in a while. He makes a few calls himself, to drum up some new business. His customers like him because he gives them excellent service, and he’s built a personal relationship with most of them, but business is slow all around, so they don’t have much work to send his way. By 3pm he’s got his work squared away for the day, so he decides to knock off early. Of course he’s got his phone on, in case he gets a new order, but he’s out the door at 3pm.

Since it is such a lovely afternoon, he decides to take a walk in the park, and stop at the library on the way home. He arrives home around 5pm, with a stack of library books, and cooks his own dinner. Nothing fancy, but he makes it the way he likes it. After dinner, he doesn’t go out to a nightclub, because he can’t afford it. Instead, he picks up his old guitar, which he enjoys playing, when he has the time and energy. Since it was an easy day at work, he has some time and energy, so he has a good time playing the guitar, forgets about his money problems for a while, and maybe even teaches himself a new song. Then he relaxes a bit, reads one of the books he checked-out of the library, until he gets too tired to read, and then goes to bed.

The next day, he wakes up, makes his own breakfast, and goes back to work, hoping he’ll have a little more business. Let’s imagine that on this particular day, he gets a big contract. I mean, an enormous new contract. Suddenly, this businessman is swamped with work, but his money problems are over.

He realizes he needs help. That means he needs to put up a sign, place some want ads, answer calls, conduct interviews, file paperwork, set up accounts, buy a time-clock, and train new workers. Then he needs to order more stock, buy new machines, and put an addition on his shop. So he gets right to work, and by the time he finishes working for the day, it’s already 9:00pm. He goes home, exhausted, orders a pizza, and falls asleep in front of the TV. He feels a little queezy after that pizza, but he chalks it up to the excitement of this life changing day.

The next morning, he gets up early, grabs a breakfast sandwich and coffee, which he consumes at his desk. It’s not great, but he ignores his disappointment because he’s got more important things to think about. Instead of lunch, he grabs a candy bar from a vending machine, and again, eats it at his desk, between interviews. His phone never stops ringing, and instead of knocking off at 3pm, he doesn’t get out of the office until 9. When he gets home, he orders another pizza, and eats it in front of the tube.

After a few weeks of this, he realizes that he’s drinking four cups of coffee a day instead of one, because he constantly feels run-down, but the caffeine makes it hard for him to get to sleep at night, so he has a few beers with his pizza. After a few months, he realizes he’s gaining weight, so he joins a gym, and orders some home exercise equipment he saw advertised on TV, but he’s too exhausted to exercise or go to the gym, and instead, decides that he needs to improve his diet.

He starts looking for restaurants that serve healthier food. Turns out they charge more money for it too, but he happily pays it. Instead of drinking four cups of drip coffee, he has a vente double cappuccino. He stops drinking beer, and becomes a fine wine enthusiast. Still, the money comes in faster than he can spend it. He commissions a master luthier to build him the guitar of his dreams. When it arrives, he realizes that he no longer has callouses on his fingertips, and he doesn’t have time to play it.

He still feels run-down, and has a vague sense that he’s not taking very good care of himself, so he buys himself a brand new luxury car with all of the amenities. This makes his employees jealous, because they cannot afford such extravagant wheels. They now feel exploited, and so they start asking for raises. They no longer see him as the hardest working member of the team, but as the boss who gets rich off of their hard work.

Do you see a pattern here? Obviously this successful man deserves the money he’s making. He’s sacrificing his life for it. Clearly, we should view this successful businessman as a role model for the kind of job creator and consumer who drives economic growth That doesn’t mean he’s doing himself, or anyone else, any favors. In fact, he’s killing himself, and he’s killing himself, in part, because it’s the only relief he now sees from a life of too much work.

That’s what economic growth does to us. For the economy to grow, we have to work more, and spend more, every year. Believe it or not, we’ve got better things to do. You might not remember what they are, because you’ve been a slave for so long, but really, you’ve got better things to do than feed your one lifetime to the goddamn economy.

Too much money and too much work are much worse for people than too little. The black-market marijuana industry may have solved our money problems, but it has ruined the quality of our lives, weakened our community, and it continues to consume people, littering our streets with more of their broken husks every day. We don’t owe drug dealers anything, and we owe the economy even less. We deserve better, and it’s time we demanded it.

Who Buys All of This Weed?

I hear a lot of talk around here about the potential impact to our local economy from the impending legalization of cannabis. Suddenly, dope yuppies who, just a few years ago, weren’t even registered to vote, now spend money on lobbyists to convince lawmakers to construct a legalization framework that keeps the money pouring into the pockets of the same people who have profited from prohibition for more than 30 years.

Dope yuppies have never cared about anyone but themselves, and the bankers and merchants who make dire predictions about our local economy, would be every bit as concerned about the potential loss in revenue if this county’s chief economic export were underage prostitutes and child-pornography. Money is money, after all.

I don’t hear any mention, however, of the people who buy and consume all of this weed. As one of those proud pot smoking Americans, I am even more fed-up with the outrageously high price of black-market weed than I am with cops sticking their noses in places they don’t belong. While everyone pays for narco cops and prison guards, only cannabis consumers pay these ridiculous prices. Let’s take a look at the people who buy the cannabis grown in the Emerald Triangle, to see where all of this economic prosperity we enjoy, comes from.

A recent study found that half of all cannabis consumers have not graduated from high-school. Some of those kids don’t have a high- school diploma because they are still in school. I mean. why do you think they call it “high” school?

Some of those kids dropped out of school to grow or sell cannabis as a career, but most of them end up in shitty low-wage jobs. The people who cook and serve your food, wash your dishes, change your oil and clean your offices and hotel bathrooms all smoke weed, and they all pay way too much of their hard-earned money for it.

The people who work at Walmart smoke weed. The people who work at McDonald’s smoke weed. Almost every low-wage worker in America smokes weed, or they would, if they could afford it. Low-wage workers often spend more money on pot than they do on food. They do without basic necessities like clothing, like housing, so that they can afford marijuana, because marijuana makes their lives tolerable. High prohibition prices keep them poor and insures that they can never afford to buy their own home, start their own business or get more education. The people who buy marijuana today pay for it with their lives. They pay for it with their futures.

Other low-wage workers turn to alcohol, because under prohibition, a few dried cannabis flowers costs more than a big bottle or brewed, fermented, distilled and bottled liquor. People literally choose to sacrifice their health to alcohol, rather than the precious income it would cost to switch to cannabis. A lot of people have quit drinking, by switching to cannabis, and it has saved their lives.

A lot more people would do the same, if cannabis didn’t cost so much. All across America, the people who can least afford it, pay way too much money for marijuana, or do without, when it could really help them. High cannabis prices cause an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering especially among the poor.

People all over America consume cannabis to relieve stress, but high prohibition prices make cannabis itself, unnecessarily stressful. Artificially inflated, prohibition pricing completely undermines the ability of cannabis to relieve stress in the vast majority of it’s consumers. Unless you grow your own, or have more money than you know what to do with, you don’t know what it means to have plenty of weed, and not to have to stress about how much it costs. Cannabis is only effective as medicine, if people can easily afford it.

Millions of Americans enjoy cannabis, millions more rely on cannabis for medicine, and still millions more of us do both. We deserve a break! We are the ones who dragged this state, and the unholy cadre of drug-dealers turned special interest group, kicking and screaming towards legalization. Both the state, and drug dealers have taken advantage of us for decades. We’re sick of it! Now that legalization will finally happen, no thanks to them, they act as though they are still entitled to our money.

The Nerve!

Oh, So You’re a “Farmer” Now.

I picked up a brochure the other day from the Small Farmers Association. Their logo showed an old hippie bus with pot-leaf bumper-stickers, parked in a big ol’ farm-style barn. The faint green image of a full size cannabis leaf appears, like a ghost, peeking in from the lower right-hand corner, just in case you missed the bumper-stickers. Every day, it seems, a new group like this pops up, working to cloak the ugliness of cannabis prohibition in the quaint wholesome imagery of the American family farm.

As we move forward towards the inevitable legalization of cannabis, we can expect those who profit from the destructive,cruel, wasteful, but highly lucrative, War on Drugs, to lobby for regulations that preserve the economic advantage they gained by cheating the system and taking advantage of us for so many years. From narco cops to drug kingpins, a lot of people made out like bandits in the War on Drugs. The War on Drugs is, by far, the longest war in American history. For generations now, people have taken the War on Drugs for granted. They bet they’re lives on it, and up until now, that bet has paid off for them, while it consumed the lives of so many of their contemporaries. Now that the Drug War is ending, many people have no idea how to live without it, so they will fight to the death to save every last scrap of it regardless of the damage it causes.

That’s why dope yuppies are working so hard to rebrand themselves as “small farmers.” They want to advocate for regulations that will preserve their livelihoods, and prevent “large corporations” from driving them out of business. They know that legislators, as well as the voting public, have a much better opinion of small farmers than they do of drug dealers. Farmers feed America. Drug dealers destroy communities. Everyone knows that. So, dope yuppies would rather we think of them as unusually prosperous small family farmers, whose hard work built this country and feed its teeming millions, rather than run of the mill drug-dealing parasites who exploit our vulnerable youth, make people feel unsafe in their own neighborhoods, and breed crime, corruption and violence everywhere they go.

As much as our local dope yuppies would like to convince us of their proud agrarian heritage, drug dealers and farmers have totally different skill sets, motivations and proclivities. You should keep that in mind when thinking about who should grow cannabis in a legal environment. Real farmers know how to produce an agricultural product economically. That’s why they survive as farmers. That is their skill set. Sure, dope yuppies know something about growing cannabis, but they don’t know much about growing it economically. Prohibition has insured that the kinds of decisions that make or break legitimate farming operations, remain only peripheral concerns to pot growers.

We compensate drug dealers for the legal risks they take, and for their skill at evading, or bribing, law enforcement, not so much for their economic efficiency. The job requires a degree of stealth and duplicity, so we expect a certain amount of dishonesty from drug dealers. Drug dealers specialize in gaming the system, being sneaky, and taking advantage of people.  Dealing drugs requires a completely different skill set than that required of a farmer.

For instance:  Drug dealers often need to lie about what they do for a living. It becomes second nature to them, so rebranding themselves as farmers is as easy for them as changing color is for a chameleon. Once upon a time, they told people they were carpenters. Then they told people they were in the medical profession, now they say they’re farmers. What’s the difference?

Drug dealers need to know how to evade law enforcement. This is where drug dealers excel well beyond the average American. Cannabis cultivators have a long history of finding ingenious ways to avoid detection, and moving here, was just part of that rich history.

The Emerald Triangle remains one of the most rugged, inaccessible places in the US. All of the factors that make it difficult for narco cops to enforce marijuana prohibition will also make it difficult for agricultural inspectors to verify compliance with strict regulations. I don’t understand why anyone would believe that the people who have most successfully evaded law enforcement throughout the War on Drugs, will now eagerly and honestly submit to strict regulation. They’re already looking for ways to game the system, and the system doesn’t even exist yet.

There are other ways to tell farmers from drug dealers as well. For example:

Real farmers buy land because it has fertile well drained soil, suitable for agriculture.
Drug dealers buy land in places where they know that it will take at least an hour for a cop to get there.

Real farmers make a phone call to the Ag board for advice on what will grow best in their soil.
Drug dealers make a phone call to have soil delivered, like pizza, with the toppings of their choice.

Real farmers grow their crops in the soil under their feet.
Drug dealers grow marijuana in Sri Lankan coconut coir and Indonesian bat guano.

Real farmers wear overalls, drive tractors and work from dawn to dusk just for the privilege of farming.
Drug dealers wear Hawaiian shirts, drive luxury SUVs and spend the Winter in Belize, just because they suck.

I’d like to see what real farmers can do with cannabis. If they can produce broccoli for less than $5 a pound, I don’t see why they can’t produce good organic cannabis for less than $50 a pound, and it’s high time we let them try. As a low-income artist and long term cannabis user, I’m even more tired of subsidizing greedy dope yuppies, than I am of subsidizing greedy narco cops. Half the reason for legalizing cannabis is to put drug dealers out of business. We should let real farmers use their skills at producing agricultural products economically and efficiently to weed the drug dealers out of the cannabis industry, once and for all, and the sooner the better.

Album Review, The Fly Stoner by Green R Fieldz

Album Review

The Fly Stoner by Green R. Fieldz

 

Ordinarily, I’m not a big fan of gangsta rap. In fact, I even find Lou Reed a little too urban for my taste. That’s why I live out here. That doesn’t mean I like country music. I don’t, but I’m particularly averse to urban sounds.

The other day, however, I stopped at Sylvandale’s to pick up some cat food, and found a stack of free CDs near the checkout register. Attracted as I am to bright shiny objects, I picked one up and examined it. I found myself holding a copy of the promotional EP for Green R Fieldz’, soon to be released album, called The Fly Stoner.

A postcard that accompanied the CD shows the photograph of a young man seated at the base of a particularly robust cannabis plant, with several equally robust cannabis plants in the background, all under a clear blue sky. The young man is flipping us off. I don’t know why he has his middle finger extended. Perhaps the photographer had pissed him off, I don’t know. I’m trying not to take it personally.

I saw that Green R Fieldz hails from Mendocino County, which I could have guessed by the photograph, so I took the CD home to see what our local young men have to say to the world. The music blew me away. The three songs on this EP all rock!! I’m very impressed.

Despite a few regrettable lyrics, which I suppose are obligatory in gangsta rap, Green R Fieldz knows “the Game” in the Emerald Triangle, and “Gets Down” on the Fly Stoner. These three cuts just leap out of the speakers and grab you by the collar with monster beats, great hooks and pretty good lyrics too. I really didn’t expect to like this music, but here I am, a 50 year old white guy, rockin’ out to gangsta rap from Mendocino County.

Green R Fieldz and Glasses Malone

Sure, this music is full of bravado, swagger, and foul language, it is gangsta rap after all, but I found it quite musical and clearly the work of a some very talented artists. Besides Green R Fieldz, this EP features guests Glasses Malone, Matt Blaque, Tony Mendocino, Remy RED and K-Loc. These people may or may not be part of “The Turkey Bag Gang”. I have no idea who these guys are, or how they make gangsta rap, but I’m sure music like this doesn’t happen by accident. These tunes are all really catchy.

Tony Mendocino and Green R fieldz

Number 1 Supplier has an incredibly infectious chorus that sounds like it should be a number one hit. The song Don’t Get Down, gets down with a beat that takes no prisoners. While I wouldn’t endorse Green R Fieldz’ agricultural practices, as described in The Game, I can heartily endorse his music, and appreciate his honesty on the subject. . Grab one of these free CDs and see if I ain’t lyin’,… right in front of the register at Sylvandale’s, right there with the free swimsuit calendars and gro-mags.

I feel for the youth in this area, and its great to hear an articulate young voice tell it like it is. Some might not see this idyllic rural community as the kind of environment that would spawn gangsta rap, but you’d be hard pressed to find a place with fewer opportunities for young people. We’ve had failing schools, rampant drug abuse, and entrenched organized crime around here for years. Now we have our own gangsta rap, and it ROCKS!!!

Look for the full album by Green R Fieldz titled The Fly Stoner to be released on April 20, I don’t know where exactly to look for it, since Wildhorse Records closed down, but look for it. You really should hear what local kids with talent and brains do with themselves these days.