T
TyPalmer
- 13
- 1
If you spend enough time up in the Emerald Triangle — an area in Northern California comprising the adjoining counties of Mendocino, Humboldt and Trinity — you might notice a few things. There’s the crab fisherman selling you fresh crabs from his boat with a lit joint hanging from his mouth. There’s the jingle on the local radio station with the chorus “Going to jail sucks!” (It’s an ad for a bail-bond agency, which runs right after an ad for a hypdroponic-growing store.) If you’re in the Triangle in October, at the start of the harvest season, you might notice people standing by the side of the road with cardboard signs that read “Looking For Work”, or signs simply depicting a hand-drawn pair of scissors. You might notice that locals call hundred-dollar bills “Humboldt twenties” and complain about how expensive everything is, or their use of the verb formation “getting flown,” meaning one’s property has been buzzed by a DEA helicopter (e.g., “We got flown a bunch of times this summer, so we knew a bust was coming”). At some point, your cellphone will probably stop working, and you might notice how the two-lane road darkens as it slices into a canyon of redwoods, and how your car shrinks, too, puttering at the foot of the giant, primeval forest, and how that Bigfoot-themed souvenir shop several miles back is starting to seem like a beacon of civilization. And if you keep going, eventually, somewhere deep in the mountains, you will arrive at Vic Tobias’ place.
Tobias is a marijuana grower, and he is having a very long day. His waterlines froze, or broke, he’s not sure which, but that has meant no running water at his house for the past couple of days. This coincided, as luck would have it, with out-of-town visitors — buyers looking to be introduced to other local growers with weight to unload. Tobias has been scrambling to set up the meets, a delicate process in a part of the country where new faces are not generally greeted with small-town hospitality, where it’s considered sloppy form (as one grower tells me) to give your real name to the pizza-delivery guy. Most urgently, though, Tobias has 45 marijuana plants in full bloom that need to be harvested by tomorrow morning if he wants to move his product on schedule. It’s close to midnight, and he’s been up since dawn.
In years past, work in this part of the country meant either logging or fishing, though with the depletion of natural resources, neither industry has been much of a going concern for years. Countercultural types began drifting up here from the Bay Area in the late Sixties, drawn not only by the spectacular landscape but by its remoteness. Which, of course, lent itself to the creation of a new local source of income: growing pot. In Tobias’ succinct but essentially accurate historical telling, “Hippies went to India, smuggled out seeds up their asses and came here.” It was really more often Afghanistan, but the point is the same. From an origin story as humble as that of Hollywood (Cecil B. DeMille filming his first feature in a horse barn) or Silicon Valley (Steve Jobs inventing the personal computer in his garage), a massive, quintessentially Californian industry was born.
Thanks to the ambiguous wording of Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot initiative that allows for the possession and cultivation (but not the distribution or sale) of medical marijuana in California, the weed business has expanded exponentially over the past decade. Most of the medical pot in California is sold through dispensaries: Some, in cities like Oakland, are massive places that see hundreds, even thousands, of patients every day, whereas in Los Angeles, storefront pot clubs — up to 1,000 of them by some estimates — have crept into mini-malls and commercial strips all across the city. This has so embarrassed the L.A. City Council that, in January, it passed an ordinance that could slash the number of shops to 70. All told, the state’s annual marijuana crop is estimated by some to be worth about $14 billion, “dwarfing,” in the words of a recent Associated Press story, “any other sector of the state’s agricultural economy.”
When California voters passed Prop 215, it seemed like typical behavior from the people who brought us Scientology and the career of Gary Busey. But now, as the economy has cratered and millions of Americans have found themselves forced to rethink their livelihoods, there’s a growing feeling that the country can no longer afford its longstanding prohibition on marijuana — a sense, for the first time since the Seventies, that pot could soon be decriminalized in many states, or even made fully legal. Fourteen states have already approved medical marijuana, and 14 others have some form of marijuana legislation pending. And that doesn’t include Massachusetts, which last year effectively decriminalized pot for recreational use, making possession of up to an ounce punishable by a $100 ticket. On the national level, a Harvard economist has estimated that legalizing pot could save the government $13 billion annually in prohibition costs (including cops and prisons) and raise $7 billion in annual revenues if marijuana is taxed — a potent argument at a time when local municipalities are being forced to slash services and cut public-sector jobs. “In past years, people have interpreted legalization to mean liberalization — to mean condoning marijuana and letting it get out of control,” notes Ethan Nadelmann, the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance Network, a nonprofit group devoted to ending the War on Drugs. “Now, more and more, people are interpreting it as taxation and regulation.”
This is why I have come to the Emerald Triangle: to witness, firsthand, this singular, transformative moment in what’s been, for so long, an underground culture, one that became both refuge and perfect fit for an oddball combination of righteous outlaws and straight-up hustlers, conscientious dropouts and scary guys with guns, all of whom are now having to adapt their unique skill sets to an ever-shifting legal and economic landscape. The bulk of the marijuana cultivation in California is done by growers like Vic Tobias and his neighbors; a recent study commissioned by Mendocino County had pot accounting for two-thirds of the local economy. Over the past year, in fact, the so-called “green rush” has created such a spike in the number of California pot growers that there has been a negative impact — a glut of product. A recent article in the local Anderson Valley Advertiser observes that “supply is way up, prices way down, even if you can find a buyer, and a kind of desperation is rippling through the north hill country of Mendocino County as land and pot partners turn on each other and ruthless bands of home invaders cruise the mud dirt roads from Branscomb to Spy Rock to Alderpoint and points between.”
I meet Tobias in the town closest to where he lives, which is still about a 45-minute drive for him, mostly down winding switchbacks. (Tobias’ name has been changed to protect his identity.) “The thing you have to understand about up here is, everyone has a hand in the game — everyone,” Tobias tells me as we stroll along a small-town main street. “See that kid over there?” He nods at a guy in his 20s in a baseball cap. “I guarantee he’s growing. See that old lady who looks like a grandma?” He shifts his gaze to a sweet-looking gray-haired woman wearing a red Christmas sweater and cooing over a baby. “She’s either a trimmer, or she’s got people working her land for her. Up here, everyone’s playing the law of averages: Ninety percent grow, one percent get busted.”
Tobias has been growing weed since the mid-Nineties. He’s in his late 30s, and today he’s wearing muddy boots and a one-piece Carhartt coverall. At first, when he was living elsewhere on the West Coast, the pot growing was mostly for himself, a hobby, like home-brewing beer. He had a day job in an office, and he sold any weed he had left over on the side. But he discovered he had a green thumb, and he eventually moved to the Emerald Triangle to turn his hobby into a career.
He makes a decent but not extravagant living, one that places him somewhere in the middle of the Triangle’s growers — a bigger fish than the single mom who keeps a dozen or so plants in her backyard for some extra cash, but not in the same league as the major players, who often have ties to some form of organized crime and grow on a massive scale. (The biggest grow in recent memory was uncovered in 2007, when authorities in Humboldt County discovered an astonishing 135,000 plants in a remote section of forest owned by a private timber company. No arrests were made, but authorities said evidence on the scene pointed to Mexican drug cartels.)
A hardworking grower with more modest aims, though, can still run a four-season operation in the Triangle — one outdoor season in the summer and three hydroponic indoor seasons. Tobias’ current indoor grow, about 200 plants, is in a long, windowless shed on his property that’s divided into two rooms, one dark and one lit, alternating at 12-hour intervals. The 45 plants being harvested tonight should yield about five pounds of weed, which could fetch about $20,000.
When we enter the grow from outside, the light is initially blinding. The room is packed tight with marijuana plants of varying heights. The tallest are chest high. Each plant has its own little black bucket, fed by snaking tubes that lead back to four plastic barrels filled with nutrient solution. Banks of grow lights, covered with silver shades, hang from the low ceiling like the canopied lamps over a pool table; four fans on the wall slowly move back and forth to cool the space. The walls are white and reflective, making it very bright and, with all the visible tubes and wires, like the set of a science-fiction movie. A lower-end grow tends to evoke a spaceship from an Ed Wood production. Tobias’, though, is pure Kubrick — a 1960s vision of a gleaming, sterile future.
The plants are leafy and pungent, filling the room with a hothouse musk. The largest buds, fist-size footballs, form closest to the lights, making the stalks top-heavy; a gridded net of string prevents them from falling over. Tobias, slipping on a pair of sunglasses, slides beneath the netting and begins to cut the plants ready to be harvested, using a pair of clippers at the base and gingerly maneuvering the tops between the string. He wants to avoid touching the buds, if possible, particularly the hairlike trichomes (or “crystals”), which contain most of the plant’s THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the intoxicating substance in cannabis). “That’s a sales tactic,” he says. “‘Never touched by human hands.’” Now, one by one, he passes the stalks out to me. I balance as many as possible in a plastic tub, my hands and clothes quickly covered with sticky resin.
After filling tubs with two dozen plants, we carry them out to Tobias’ truck. The night sky is clear and filled with stars. “There’s Orion’s Belt — see it?” he says, pointing out the constellation. Then we drive to another house on his property. This one looks long-abandoned. Old comforters cover the windows in lieu of curtains. Inside, there’s a dim light in the kitchen, and the jam band Oysterhead are playing on an iPod hooked up to a boombox. Tobias’ partner is toiling over a tabletop jack press, which he is using to make bricks of hash. Occasionally, he’ll pause to take a hit of a joint (Mendocino Beauty crossed with Willie Nelson).
We carry the weed into another room, where several wires stretch from wall to wall, as high as clotheslines. Using clippers, we cut the plants into smaller branches, then hang them upside down from the wires, where they’ll dry for a few days, at which point Tobias will hire a team of trimmers — who are paid $225 a pound — to cultivate the valuable buds. Trimming is tedious, difficult work, but potentially lucrative: A good trimmer can do a couple of pounds in a day, though many take some of their payment in weed. To make their job easier, tonight we clip off as many of the large pot leaves as possible. This is called “big leafing.” After 20 minutes or so, the red-tile floor is covered with a thick green-and-yellow carpet. When we’re finished, Tobias grabs a broom and methodically cleans up the leaves, like a barber sweeping hair.
Once the weed is ready for the market, Tobias will sell it to a middleman, who will, in turn, transport it to a larger city and find another buyer — either a medical-marijuana dispensary or a street dealer. Like many an ambitious small-businessman, Tobias is pretty much never not working. His career choice is one that’s stressful, labor-intensive and, obviously, very high-risk. There are the typical farmer’s worries of pulling off your crop, the constant pressure of getting busted and the danger, from the other direction, of robbery, home invasions, biker gangs. Since Tobias has been out here, he’s had terrible years where he’s lost almost everything, been reduced to near-homelessness — certain strains died, other patches had to be torn up to avoid law enforcement.
And now, like workers in just about every other sector, from auto manufacturing to big-box retail, Tobias is being forced to re-examine his place in the market. In the case of marijuana, this upset is not being caused by new technology, globalization or recession, but by a change in public consciousness. Like other once-divisive social issues — gays in the military, to take the most recent example — the specter of reefer madness seems to have lost its effectiveness as a political wedging tool. Robert Mikos, a Vanderbilt University law professor who has written extensively about the rights of states to defy the federal ban on marijuana, says the ongoing medical-marijuana experiments in California and elsewhere have opened the door for further decriminalization. It’s allowed people “to see that all of the horrible things that the Clinton and Bush administrations predicted did not come to pass,” says Mikos. “The world did not come to an end.” Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, agrees, noting he’s recently been seeing “the most dramatic polling results in all of my years working on this stuff.”
The legalization fight has acquired a new urgency in recent months thanks to the economy. In the past, of course, there were plenty of moral arguments to be made for drug-policy reform — from the money wasted on prohibition to the lives ruined by absurd prison sentences to the simple hypocrisy of banning a substance no more harmful than alcohol, tobacco or many prescription drugs. But compared to issues like civil rights or unjust foreign wars, protesting for the right to get high always felt, frankly, frivolous; even to a liberal pot smoker, listening to some dude from NORML go on about how the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag and the Gutenberg Bible and Abe Lincoln’s stovepipe hat were all made of hemp can be just as annoying as a sobriety lecture from Bill O’Reilly. Mikos didn’t think the general public was onboard with “wholesale recreational legalization” — until this past year. “What pushed it over the top,” he says, “was the realization that ‘Hey, we could make a lot of money off this.’”
More here:
Tobias is a marijuana grower, and he is having a very long day. His waterlines froze, or broke, he’s not sure which, but that has meant no running water at his house for the past couple of days. This coincided, as luck would have it, with out-of-town visitors — buyers looking to be introduced to other local growers with weight to unload. Tobias has been scrambling to set up the meets, a delicate process in a part of the country where new faces are not generally greeted with small-town hospitality, where it’s considered sloppy form (as one grower tells me) to give your real name to the pizza-delivery guy. Most urgently, though, Tobias has 45 marijuana plants in full bloom that need to be harvested by tomorrow morning if he wants to move his product on schedule. It’s close to midnight, and he’s been up since dawn.
In years past, work in this part of the country meant either logging or fishing, though with the depletion of natural resources, neither industry has been much of a going concern for years. Countercultural types began drifting up here from the Bay Area in the late Sixties, drawn not only by the spectacular landscape but by its remoteness. Which, of course, lent itself to the creation of a new local source of income: growing pot. In Tobias’ succinct but essentially accurate historical telling, “Hippies went to India, smuggled out seeds up their asses and came here.” It was really more often Afghanistan, but the point is the same. From an origin story as humble as that of Hollywood (Cecil B. DeMille filming his first feature in a horse barn) or Silicon Valley (Steve Jobs inventing the personal computer in his garage), a massive, quintessentially Californian industry was born.
Thanks to the ambiguous wording of Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot initiative that allows for the possession and cultivation (but not the distribution or sale) of medical marijuana in California, the weed business has expanded exponentially over the past decade. Most of the medical pot in California is sold through dispensaries: Some, in cities like Oakland, are massive places that see hundreds, even thousands, of patients every day, whereas in Los Angeles, storefront pot clubs — up to 1,000 of them by some estimates — have crept into mini-malls and commercial strips all across the city. This has so embarrassed the L.A. City Council that, in January, it passed an ordinance that could slash the number of shops to 70. All told, the state’s annual marijuana crop is estimated by some to be worth about $14 billion, “dwarfing,” in the words of a recent Associated Press story, “any other sector of the state’s agricultural economy.”
When California voters passed Prop 215, it seemed like typical behavior from the people who brought us Scientology and the career of Gary Busey. But now, as the economy has cratered and millions of Americans have found themselves forced to rethink their livelihoods, there’s a growing feeling that the country can no longer afford its longstanding prohibition on marijuana — a sense, for the first time since the Seventies, that pot could soon be decriminalized in many states, or even made fully legal. Fourteen states have already approved medical marijuana, and 14 others have some form of marijuana legislation pending. And that doesn’t include Massachusetts, which last year effectively decriminalized pot for recreational use, making possession of up to an ounce punishable by a $100 ticket. On the national level, a Harvard economist has estimated that legalizing pot could save the government $13 billion annually in prohibition costs (including cops and prisons) and raise $7 billion in annual revenues if marijuana is taxed — a potent argument at a time when local municipalities are being forced to slash services and cut public-sector jobs. “In past years, people have interpreted legalization to mean liberalization — to mean condoning marijuana and letting it get out of control,” notes Ethan Nadelmann, the founder of the Drug Policy Alliance Network, a nonprofit group devoted to ending the War on Drugs. “Now, more and more, people are interpreting it as taxation and regulation.”
This is why I have come to the Emerald Triangle: to witness, firsthand, this singular, transformative moment in what’s been, for so long, an underground culture, one that became both refuge and perfect fit for an oddball combination of righteous outlaws and straight-up hustlers, conscientious dropouts and scary guys with guns, all of whom are now having to adapt their unique skill sets to an ever-shifting legal and economic landscape. The bulk of the marijuana cultivation in California is done by growers like Vic Tobias and his neighbors; a recent study commissioned by Mendocino County had pot accounting for two-thirds of the local economy. Over the past year, in fact, the so-called “green rush” has created such a spike in the number of California pot growers that there has been a negative impact — a glut of product. A recent article in the local Anderson Valley Advertiser observes that “supply is way up, prices way down, even if you can find a buyer, and a kind of desperation is rippling through the north hill country of Mendocino County as land and pot partners turn on each other and ruthless bands of home invaders cruise the mud dirt roads from Branscomb to Spy Rock to Alderpoint and points between.”
I meet Tobias in the town closest to where he lives, which is still about a 45-minute drive for him, mostly down winding switchbacks. (Tobias’ name has been changed to protect his identity.) “The thing you have to understand about up here is, everyone has a hand in the game — everyone,” Tobias tells me as we stroll along a small-town main street. “See that kid over there?” He nods at a guy in his 20s in a baseball cap. “I guarantee he’s growing. See that old lady who looks like a grandma?” He shifts his gaze to a sweet-looking gray-haired woman wearing a red Christmas sweater and cooing over a baby. “She’s either a trimmer, or she’s got people working her land for her. Up here, everyone’s playing the law of averages: Ninety percent grow, one percent get busted.”
Tobias has been growing weed since the mid-Nineties. He’s in his late 30s, and today he’s wearing muddy boots and a one-piece Carhartt coverall. At first, when he was living elsewhere on the West Coast, the pot growing was mostly for himself, a hobby, like home-brewing beer. He had a day job in an office, and he sold any weed he had left over on the side. But he discovered he had a green thumb, and he eventually moved to the Emerald Triangle to turn his hobby into a career.
He makes a decent but not extravagant living, one that places him somewhere in the middle of the Triangle’s growers — a bigger fish than the single mom who keeps a dozen or so plants in her backyard for some extra cash, but not in the same league as the major players, who often have ties to some form of organized crime and grow on a massive scale. (The biggest grow in recent memory was uncovered in 2007, when authorities in Humboldt County discovered an astonishing 135,000 plants in a remote section of forest owned by a private timber company. No arrests were made, but authorities said evidence on the scene pointed to Mexican drug cartels.)
A hardworking grower with more modest aims, though, can still run a four-season operation in the Triangle — one outdoor season in the summer and three hydroponic indoor seasons. Tobias’ current indoor grow, about 200 plants, is in a long, windowless shed on his property that’s divided into two rooms, one dark and one lit, alternating at 12-hour intervals. The 45 plants being harvested tonight should yield about five pounds of weed, which could fetch about $20,000.
When we enter the grow from outside, the light is initially blinding. The room is packed tight with marijuana plants of varying heights. The tallest are chest high. Each plant has its own little black bucket, fed by snaking tubes that lead back to four plastic barrels filled with nutrient solution. Banks of grow lights, covered with silver shades, hang from the low ceiling like the canopied lamps over a pool table; four fans on the wall slowly move back and forth to cool the space. The walls are white and reflective, making it very bright and, with all the visible tubes and wires, like the set of a science-fiction movie. A lower-end grow tends to evoke a spaceship from an Ed Wood production. Tobias’, though, is pure Kubrick — a 1960s vision of a gleaming, sterile future.
The plants are leafy and pungent, filling the room with a hothouse musk. The largest buds, fist-size footballs, form closest to the lights, making the stalks top-heavy; a gridded net of string prevents them from falling over. Tobias, slipping on a pair of sunglasses, slides beneath the netting and begins to cut the plants ready to be harvested, using a pair of clippers at the base and gingerly maneuvering the tops between the string. He wants to avoid touching the buds, if possible, particularly the hairlike trichomes (or “crystals”), which contain most of the plant’s THC (tetrahydrocannabinol, the intoxicating substance in cannabis). “That’s a sales tactic,” he says. “‘Never touched by human hands.’” Now, one by one, he passes the stalks out to me. I balance as many as possible in a plastic tub, my hands and clothes quickly covered with sticky resin.
After filling tubs with two dozen plants, we carry them out to Tobias’ truck. The night sky is clear and filled with stars. “There’s Orion’s Belt — see it?” he says, pointing out the constellation. Then we drive to another house on his property. This one looks long-abandoned. Old comforters cover the windows in lieu of curtains. Inside, there’s a dim light in the kitchen, and the jam band Oysterhead are playing on an iPod hooked up to a boombox. Tobias’ partner is toiling over a tabletop jack press, which he is using to make bricks of hash. Occasionally, he’ll pause to take a hit of a joint (Mendocino Beauty crossed with Willie Nelson).
We carry the weed into another room, where several wires stretch from wall to wall, as high as clotheslines. Using clippers, we cut the plants into smaller branches, then hang them upside down from the wires, where they’ll dry for a few days, at which point Tobias will hire a team of trimmers — who are paid $225 a pound — to cultivate the valuable buds. Trimming is tedious, difficult work, but potentially lucrative: A good trimmer can do a couple of pounds in a day, though many take some of their payment in weed. To make their job easier, tonight we clip off as many of the large pot leaves as possible. This is called “big leafing.” After 20 minutes or so, the red-tile floor is covered with a thick green-and-yellow carpet. When we’re finished, Tobias grabs a broom and methodically cleans up the leaves, like a barber sweeping hair.
Once the weed is ready for the market, Tobias will sell it to a middleman, who will, in turn, transport it to a larger city and find another buyer — either a medical-marijuana dispensary or a street dealer. Like many an ambitious small-businessman, Tobias is pretty much never not working. His career choice is one that’s stressful, labor-intensive and, obviously, very high-risk. There are the typical farmer’s worries of pulling off your crop, the constant pressure of getting busted and the danger, from the other direction, of robbery, home invasions, biker gangs. Since Tobias has been out here, he’s had terrible years where he’s lost almost everything, been reduced to near-homelessness — certain strains died, other patches had to be torn up to avoid law enforcement.
And now, like workers in just about every other sector, from auto manufacturing to big-box retail, Tobias is being forced to re-examine his place in the market. In the case of marijuana, this upset is not being caused by new technology, globalization or recession, but by a change in public consciousness. Like other once-divisive social issues — gays in the military, to take the most recent example — the specter of reefer madness seems to have lost its effectiveness as a political wedging tool. Robert Mikos, a Vanderbilt University law professor who has written extensively about the rights of states to defy the federal ban on marijuana, says the ongoing medical-marijuana experiments in California and elsewhere have opened the door for further decriminalization. It’s allowed people “to see that all of the horrible things that the Clinton and Bush administrations predicted did not come to pass,” says Mikos. “The world did not come to an end.” Nadelmann, of the Drug Policy Alliance, agrees, noting he’s recently been seeing “the most dramatic polling results in all of my years working on this stuff.”
The legalization fight has acquired a new urgency in recent months thanks to the economy. In the past, of course, there were plenty of moral arguments to be made for drug-policy reform — from the money wasted on prohibition to the lives ruined by absurd prison sentences to the simple hypocrisy of banning a substance no more harmful than alcohol, tobacco or many prescription drugs. But compared to issues like civil rights or unjust foreign wars, protesting for the right to get high always felt, frankly, frivolous; even to a liberal pot smoker, listening to some dude from NORML go on about how the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag and the Gutenberg Bible and Abe Lincoln’s stovepipe hat were all made of hemp can be just as annoying as a sobriety lecture from Bill O’Reilly. Mikos didn’t think the general public was onboard with “wholesale recreational legalization” — until this past year. “What pushed it over the top,” he says, “was the realization that ‘Hey, we could make a lot of money off this.’”
More here:
