I Call Them “Dope Yuppies”

I got a phone call during my engineering shift at KMUD last Friday. “Did I hear you say your name is John Hardin?” the caller asked.

“Yes.” I replied.

“Are you the John Hardin who calls pot farmers ‘maggots’?”

“I don’t think I ever called them ‘maggots.’” I responded, but I did let him know that I am the “Hardin” who writes for LoCO. That seemed to satisfy his curiosity. I imagine that if I stayed on the line, he would have shared his opinion of my writing, but I had buttons to push and cards to read so I kept the call short. I don’t think he was a fan.

I’ve said a lot of things about growers, but I don’t think I ever called them “maggots.” I can understand why growers might feel like maggots after reading my column, but I don’t think I’ve ever called them that directly. I could be wrong. It’s all out there. If you can find it, I’ll admit it, but I don’t think so.

 

I know that a lot of people around here don’t like hearing what I have to say. I skim the comments. I even get hate mail on occasion. None of it bothers me. I don’t respond to the comments at LoCO because they pay me to write; they don’t pay me to bicker. Besides, the people who object most vociferously to my work, rarely make points worth responding to. They call me names, accuse me of saying things I did not say, and then they drop the “H” bomb.

“Stop the Hate!” or “What’s with the Hate?” or “Why does LoCO publish Hardin’s Hate Speech?” If I hate anything, I hate prohibition. I hate the War on Drugs. I hate it for how it has effected me, and for what it has done to my friends. I hate the War on Drugs for the economic injustice of it, as well as the criminal injustice of it. I hate the War on Drugs for what it’s done to the American people, and to people around the world. I hate the War on Drugs for what it has done to this country, and I hate what the War on Drugs has done to this community.

I was out there with Jack Herer, in 1990, selling The Emperor Wears No Clothes on the streets of Boston. I helped organize the first Boston Cannabis Freedom Rally that year, and founded Mass Grass, the Newsletter of the Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition. I love marijuana, and I think cannabis prohibition is a crime against humanity. OK, I admit it. I hate. I hate the War on Drugs. I hate the War on Drugs almost as much as I love marijuana, but the critique I offer is valid.

I understand that the War on Drugs has been good to some of you, and that many, if not most of you, can scarcely imagine a world without it. I understand, and I sympathize. I tell the truth about the War on Drugs, and sometimes the truth hurts. I might say it in the most provocative and insensitive way possible, but it’s still the truth. That’s what makes it sing, and that’s what makes it sting.

I know that a lot of dope yuppies don’t like to be reminded that it’s not beautiful marijuana, but the ugly injustice of the War on Drugs that puts money in their pockets. I know they’d rather be called “farmers” than “drug dealers,” and that they would appreciate some respect, but I think that there are entirely too many people sucking up to them as it is.

At one time, it was heroic to grow weed out here. Today, it’s heroic not to. Today, we need more heroes in this community, and we aren’t going to grow more heroes by glorifying drug dealers and sucking up to them. We grow more heroes by telling the truth about the War on Drugs. We grow more heroes when we call drug dealers on their bullshit, and we grow more heroes when we honor honest working people with a decent living.

However legalization shakes out, we’ll feel it here, and we can expect significant economic fallout. Competition in the cannabis industry will continue to drive down prices, and profit margins. Lower margins lead to consolidation, consolidation leads to layoffs and unemployment. Even if the legal cannabis industry makes Humboldt its home, it will certainly employ fewer people than it does now, and most of those people will work at fairly modest pay scales.

I don’t think I’ve ever called growers “maggots.” I might have said they seem like maggots. I might have said something like, “Growers infest these forested hills the way maggots infest an infected wound on a dying animal.” I might have said something like that, and if I haven’t said it before I’m sayin’ it now. Either way, I say it because it needs to be said.

This community faces serious problems and imminent rapid change that threatens our way of life, our quality of life, and our community. Unless we can face reality, we will never solve anything. We’ll just keep pointing fingers, getting frustrated, and acting ugly, like we’ve done for years, to no avail. This stuff all needs to be said, and I figure, if it needs to be said, I might as well say it.

I Watch the Supes Make Sausage

cher-make28- – Cher-Make Sausage employee Eve Rutherford works on processing brats in the Manitowoc plant on Wednesday, February 24, 2010. Cher-Make has revamped its product labels with photos of real people on its products. Photo by Mike De Sisti/MDESISTI@JOURNALSENTINEL.COM

I went to the Supes Meeting last Monday to watch them make sausage. It wasn’t pretty. I applaud Steve Lazar and staff at the Planning Department for coming up with a draft medical marijuana land use ordinance that offered significant environmental protections. I especially liked one provision that limited the location of new licensed grows to within one mile of a paved county road. That provision would have done a lot to protect wildlife and prevent further habitat fragmentation.

Fragmentation threatens endangered fishers, and other creatures who depend on deep forest habitat. Sediment from the hundreds of miles of poorly maintained dirt roads that criss-cross Southern Humboldt severely impact watercourses and threaten endangered salmon. Black market growers generally prefer to be as far from the pavement as possible, and many of our largest grows have ten miles or more of shoddy, poorly maintained, dirt road between them and the nearest county road. Unfortunately, the one mile limitation got struck from the ordinance almost immediately.

An important provision about water forbearance made it to the final ordinance, so licensed growers will have to collect and store enough water for the entire growing season before May 15, and they will not be permitted to use generators or artificial lights. I know I’m sick of the generators and the lights, and I sure won’t miss them. Also language made it into the ordinance that prohibits new grows on timber land, so at least there’s that.

The industry turned out to lobby for larger grow sizes, and largely got them. Robert “Woods” Sutherland of HUMMAPS advocated for a 2,000 sq ft limit for the basic permit, arguing that 2,000 sq ft was as much as a couple working together could handle, but other, mostly younger growers insisted they could handle much larger grows.

On one hand, it cheered me to see so many ambitious young people eager to invest their futures in this fledgling industry. On the other hand, not many of them looked like farmers to me. Woods looks like a pot farmer, and so does Kristin Nevidal. I saw a couple of other guys in feed-caps who looked like they could handle a shovel, but who were all of those women with the hairdos and the makeup and the fingernails? They don’t work on no farm.

Don’t get me wrong, I want the legal cannabis industry to thrive, and I even want it to thrive here, to the degree that it doesn’t negatively impact natural habitat. I don’t fault growers for advocating for larger grow sizes. No one knows what the market for legal cannabis will look like in five years, let alone ten, so it’s hard to know what it will take to remain competitive in this business in the future. Those folks are setting out on treacherous uncharted waters, and I hope they succeed. I think the Supes want them to succeed too, because they approved grows up to 5,000 sq ft with a basic permit.

OK, like it or not, we’ve got an ordinance, that goes into effect in 2018, that, so far, only about 300, of an estimated 8,400 growers have even expressed interest in. Try as we might, I don’t think we can regulate our way out of this mess, and ultimately, I doubt this ordinance will have much impact.

Contrary to Luke Bruner’s declaration that “The Drug War is over,” over 800,000 people were arrested for marijuana across the country last year and at least five times that many people had their pot confiscated by police, customs, airport security etc. The insane policy of prohibition that gave rise to our vigorous black market marijuana industry remains in effect at the federal level, and in 45 other states. I expect black market growers to continue to serve those markets so long as they remain profitable, and so I expect the unregulated environmental destruction associated with the black market marijuana industry to continue, and even worsen, despite this new ordinance.

Ultimately, the things that made Humboldt County attractive to black market growers, should make this place noncompetitive in the legal market. Like I said before, most of our big grows are located a long way down a dirt road, that’s a long way down a winding county road, that’s at least 100 miles from the nearest interstate. The soil there sucks, so you have to truck in all of your topsoil. Most of the land is way too steep to use, covered with trees, and prone to fire and earthquake. Also, your cell phone won’t work there. How long does pot have to be legal before people realize how crazy this is?

Sure, the Humboldt name might mean something to cannabis consumers, probably not as much as the name “Marley,” “Willie Nelson” or even “Indo,” but something. Because of the black market marijuana industry, we have a lot of the talent and infrastructure necessary to support the legal cannabis industry, but talent and technology are mobile. What remains here is the remote location, bad roads, expensive gas and poor soil. I can see how that makes the pot we grow here more expensive, but I don’t see how it makes it better.

image credit:  http://runrepeat.com/expensive-running-shoes-are-not-better-than-more-affordable-running-shoes-study

Humboldt County’s Nuclear Caviar

We have a long history of shortsightedness here in Humboldt County. I suspect that we’re as eager to throw our long-term assets away for a fast buck as we ever were, and the impending legalization of marijuana gives us another opportunity to do just that.

Right now, the black-market cannabis industry holds this county hostage, politically and economically. The illegal marijuana industry has already brought enough social problems to Humboldt County, problems ranging from poverty and homelessness to hard drug abuse, violent crime and murder. Feeding this disease, and fueling the destruction it causes, the misguided War on Drugs has turned a harmless, easy to grow weed into expensive contraband. Now that the tides have turned on the War on Drugs, politicians and drug dealers will try to convince you that marijuana is nuclear caviar.

Nuclear, meaning that they will tell you that marijuana is so dangerous that it requires as much government oversight, control and regulation as a nuclear power plant. Caviar, because they intend to concoct some scheme to control cannabis production, to keep the price of cannabis artificially inflated, so that good pot remains an expensive luxury that working people can ill-afford.

Cannabis is not nuclear caviar. Cannabis is a giant fucking ripoff. Until now, the price of cannabis has been highway robbery at the point of a cop’s gun. If the CA legislature passes the current passel of pending cannabis legislation, they will simply turn iron-fisted prohibition into a state sponsored racket. It will still be highway robbery at the point of a cop’s gun, and pot will remain a giant fucking ripoff. For now.

Still, dramatic changes, already underway in the cannabis industry, will continue. The marijuana industry of today looks nothing like the marijuana industry of 20 years ago. Humboldt County will probably produce more marijuana, this year alone, than it did in the entire two decades between 1980 and 1999, and the cannabis industry of the future will look nothing like the cannabis industry of today.

The cannabis market will become more competitive, production will expand and automation will increase. Profit margins will shrink, leading to rapid consolidation. That means lots of people lose their jobs or go out of business. That’s how legal industries work. The cannabis industry is rapidly becoming a legal industry, full of businessmen who know how to run a business, and aren’t afraid to make tough decisions.

That is a dramatic change from the cannabis industry we all know and love. We like pot growers to be spendthrift fools who have no idea how much money they really make, buy everything retail, and drip money as they walk down the street. More than the cannabis itself, our local economy relies on the stupidity and shortsightedness of black-market dope growers who’s lack of business acumen lured them into this line of work to begin with. The black market takes money out of the hands of hard-working people, who might otherwise save it, and puts it into the hands of the people most likely to squander it. That’s how prohibition boosts the economy, and that’s what we see here in Humboldt County.

The fact is, no matter how legalization plays out, most of the people who benefit from the marijuana industry in Humboldt County today, will eventually get squeezed out. Will it happen in three years, or will it take five? That depends on a lot of things, but it will happen, regardless. A lot of people around here will have to find something else to do, and the sooner, the better.

The War on Drugs is a cruel racist policy. Mostly, the War on Drugs provides a legal framework for the violent control of minority communities, but here in Humboldt, we see another racist aspect to the War on Drugs. Here, the War on Drugs provided a relatively low-risk avenue to affluence for privileged white kids with no particular skills, talent or ambition. Hey, I’m a privileged, white, college drop-out myself. I certainly understand the attraction, but it’s still racist. It’s still wrong, and it’s still a huge fucking ripoff, but rest assured; that side of the War on Drugs, will evaporate too. The marijuana industry will no longer be dominated by white middle-class dilettantes looking for a low-stress, way to support their high-consumption lifestyle.

When you think about it, these are the people who make Humboldt County attractive and interesting, at least to me, the artists, performers and musicians, the idealistic art history, English and ancient language majors and the disillusioned scientists and engineers who decided they didn’t want to build weapons systems or devise new, environmentally destructive, products. For people like this, growing pot was a way to finance their art or their writing or their political activism, or their other interesting hobbies, without distracting too much from them. The cannabis industry of the future will have no place for these people.

Instead, the cannabis industry will be dominated by greedy white farmers who know how to grow pot and run a business, but have few, if any, other interests. Greedy white farmers do not attract tourists. If they did, people would flock to Iowa to watch corn grow. Greedy white farmers drain rivers, kill fish and destroy habitat, and they use their political clout to make sure that no one gets in their way. That’s what greedy white farmers do everywhere, and that’s what they intend to do here.

Yes, farming is boring and ugly and no one wants to see it, and the same is true of farmers, but we have something else here in Humboldt County that is worth more than all of the black-market marijuana we’ve grown here in the past, and all of the nuclear caviar we hope to produce in the future, put together. That is natural habitat.

Natural habitat has become remarkably rare around the world. I mean really rare, not artificially price-controlled, “rare,” but genuinely uncommon, and truly valuable. The Earth has lost half of its natural biodiversity since the first Earth Day, and the primary reason is loss of habitat. If we should treat anything around here like nuclear caviar, it is the natural habitat here in Humboldt County.

People want to see natural habitat, and they want to see it teeming with life.. Natural habitat attracts tourists. Biodiversity attracts tourists. No one will ever figure out how to produce habitat on the cheap and flood the market with biodiversity. Habitat will only become more rare and valuable. Pot, on the other hand, is easy to grow and cheap to produce, and it won’t be long before some state, like Nevada, Texas or Kansas, decides to get out of the way and open up the floodgates to an ocean of cheap cannabis.

That will leave us, here in Humboldt County, facing the same decision we face now, but with fewer options, and greatly diminished assets: Do we sacrifice our lives, and the natural habitat we love, in a vain attempt to compete with market forces beyond our control, or do we use our imagination, and learn to do something else, that harmonizes with the natural splendor of this unique place, and works for the kind of people who make up this community, and make this community special.