Humboldt (14 page)

O
n the night of November 2, 2010, Mare Abidon loaded up her small woodstove so that it would burn low and steady through the night, and curled up in the tangle of pillows, blankets, and stuffed animals that covered her bed. As Lucky settled into his usual spot at her feet, Mare reached over and switched on the radio, and the sound of the community radio station KMUD-FM filled the cabin.

Broadcasting out of a beige one-story house surrounded by apple trees in downtown Redway, KMUD had been the voice and soundtrack of the Southern Humboldt community ever since it first crackled onto the airwaves in 1987. Its regular programming included a weekly talk show called
Thank Jah It's Friday
, the syndicated news program
Democracy Now!
, and a monthly astrology-themed cosmic weather report. The station's music shows ranged from folk and blues to salsa and world beats. Some of KMUD's more down-home touches included seemingly endless notices about lost-and-found pit bulls and pledge drive thank-you gifts of free-range eggs from local chickens.

Like the listeners who supported it, KMUD also had a rebellious side. The station broadcasted warnings about the movements of CAMP and other drug agents in the area. A few months before Election Night, for instance, a female announcer interrupted regular programming with this emergency update: “According to a citizen's observation, at eight forty-five a.m., three helicopters were seen heading from Laytonville to Bell Springs Road.”

It had long been community tradition to phone KMUD, or a local organization called the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, to report sightings of, say, a ten-vehicle convoy near Whitethorn, or a helicopter with nets full of confiscated marijuana plants flying low near a local school. The station would then broadcast the information as a news alert so, throughout the hills, people would know where law enforcement were headed. KMUD took the “phone tree” Bob Hamilton experienced to a whole new level. When members of the Humboldt Marijuana Eradication Task Force were bouncing down some godforsaken dirt road on their way to a bust, they used to joke that if they wanted to know where they were, all they had to do was turn on KMUD.

But on the night of the vote, the focus at the tiny radio station wasn't on the actions of law enforcement in the community, but on the law itself—in particular, Proposition 19, the Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Act, the measure that threatened to send tumbleweeds blowing across Humboldt or turn the place into a destination for marijuana tourism, depending on how you looked at it.

Mare was hoping for the latter. A few weeks earlier, she'd mailed in her ballot, on which she checked the box
for
legalization. Prop 19 wasn't a perfect law, and she felt it favored the industrial, indoor growers, but it was a step forward. Judging from her neighbors, Mare knew the vote was going to be close. Half said they were voting for it and half against it. Even those closest to Mare were divided.

The difference between two of her best friends was a perfect example. Both had been members of the women's consciousness-raising group with Mare back in the day, and both were fellow Back-to-the-Landers and old-growth growers who had been at it since the beginning. One grew with her daughter and ran a shop in town, and she had joined the collective with Mare. The other was one of the first members of the counterculture to settle on the coast. She was a sweet, wonderful lady who was scared of legalization. Prices had already dropped so much, and she depended on marijuana money to make ends meet. The woman had children, and hoped to have grandchildren, and while she sympathized with Mare's desire to be legal, her economic security was just too important.

Mare didn't have descendants to worry about. She had a small pension from her years of teaching art that she could live off, and when it came down to it, idealism was what was most important to her. It was an ideological thing, even though, in the past seven months since her official coming-out as a pot grower, her fantasy about how wonderful life would be when pot was legal was giving way to the realization that there didn't really seem to be much place for her in the modern, rapidly changing industry. The Tea House Collective wasn't going well. It had tried to get a permit to open a dispensary in Berkeley and been denied, and sales through its online delivery service had been abysmal since its summer launch. Depending on how things went with the collective and the vote, Mare was still considering retirement.

One man who was doing quite well in the new, rapidly changing pot world was Richard Lee. In all the national and international news coverage leading up to the vote, Lee was mentioned in almost every article. The man most associated with Proposition 19 did not come from the counterculture. He was a soft-spoken Texan who had come to marijuana through medicine. Two decades earlier, when Lee was twenty-seven and working as a lighting technician for the band Aerosmith, he fell while setting up for a concert in New Jersey and broke his back in a way that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Marijuana, he discovered, was the only thing that seemed to soothe the muscle spasms that came with sitting in a wheelchair.

In the year following the accident, Lee was carjacked in Houston. While waiting for almost an hour for the police to show up, he decided they were probably out busting people for marijuana. “I felt like, here was this wonderful medicine of cannabis that helped me so much, and why were the cops going after people using and selling it instead of the psychos and sociopaths who are out there robbing people?” Lee would later tell the
San Francisco Chronicle
. “I thought I should do something about it.”

“Something” meant becoming an advocate for the plant. Lee ran a hemp clothing store in Houston before moving to California in the late 1990s. A decade later, he opened Oaksterdam University in downtown Oakland. The nation's first marijuana trade school offered coursework in how to grow pot, manage a dispensary, start a delivery service, and understand the intricacies of marijuana law. Lee also owned a coffee shop–style dispensary nearby called Blue Sky, and a nursery that sold marijuana clones.

By all accounts, he was doing quite well under the medical marijuana model, but in 2009, he decided it was time to take things a step further. California was in crisis, and facing a $20 billion budget shortfall in the coming year; violence among drug cartels in Mexico had claimed tens of thousands of lives, and was funded in part by marijuana sales north of the border; and the national economy was continuing its decline. Lee thought the time was right to put forward a measure to legalize and tax pot outright. It seemed like a win-win situation: the state would save money by not having to enforce its marijuana laws, and cities and counties would gain tax revenue. Many other marijuana-legalization advocates thought it would be wiser to wait until 2012, when more pot-friendly youth would turn out to vote in the presidential election, but Lee pushed on, and he put his money where his mouth was. In total, he put up more than $1.4 million to collect the signatures that put Prop 19 on the ballot.

As expected, Richard Lee was not a popular man in Humboldt County.

And he knew it.

“If the narcs don't kill me, the growers will,” he told a Humboldt journalist in the summer before the vote.

Lee, it seemed, had little sympathy for the mom-and-pop growers who had started the industry and who would most likely go out of business if the RAND Corporation analysis was correct and the price of pot dropped to $400 a pound after legalization—or at least that's how he came across in a story that ran on the cover of the Humboldt alt-weekly
The North Coast Journal
in July.

“It is black market prices right now,” Lee said, “and there's nothing we can do to keep little mom-and-pop places going that were making the money they were making before.”

The article made some growers in Humboldt think that maybe the vote was really just some kind of ploy for Lee to fatten his bank account and strengthen his hold on the industry. Already the majority of pot sold by dispensaries around the state was grown indoors. The City of Oakland had even gone so far as to approve permits for those four gigantic indoor commercial grows that everyone was calling pot factories.

The future of the Humboldt farmer seemed uncertain, but toward the end of the article, Lee offered some ideas for how they might survive in a free market.

“Well, the tourism factor,” he said. “You've got beautiful redwoods, you got beautiful country up there. You have stuff to offer that we don't have.”

When asked about the marijuana, the organic, sun-grown sinsemilla that Back-to-the-Landers had pioneered decades back, well, Lee had some suggestions there, too.

“The outdoor,” he said. “I was thinking they'll have to start making a lot of hash out of that.”

The comment was the equivalent of telling a proud vintner that they should turn their wine into sangria, or insinuating that a strawberry farmer's berries were fit only for jam.

Lee's views only fed the paranoia.

Growers in Humboldt and throughout the Emerald Triangle, those marijuana moonshiners, were worried about their place in the new legal industry for good reason.

At the end of alcohol prohibition in 1933, there were tens of thousands of illegal distilleries. Today, the American alcohol industry is dominated by a handful of multinational corporations, including Anheuser-Busch, Constellation Brands, Pernod Ricard, and Diageo. As for the more romantic, idyllic side of the business, the one that some folks in Humboldt were hoping to emulate—that Napa Valley vintner surrounded by rows of grapes with tourists knocking at his cellar door? The sad truth is that many of the valley's wineries are actually owned by those same international liquor companies, and the typical “small” Napa winery owner in 2010 was actually a retired millionaire who'd made his fortune elsewhere.

The campaigns for and against Prop 19 were both low budget and high profile, thanks to a steady stream of media attention as the rest of the nation and the world looked at California with curiosity and, in some cases, hope.

“May God let it pass,” said the former Mexican president Vicente Fox. He believed that California would set an example for the rest of the nation if it legalized marijuana, and that other states would soon follow. If that happened, the profits of the drug cartels who were waging a bloody war in his country might be reduced.

Among those who came out in support of Prop 19 were billionaire philanthropist George Soros, members of the California senate, labor unions, Bay Area congresswoman Barbara Lee, a few Silicon Valley billionaires, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the American Federation of Teachers, and former U.S. surgeon general Joycelyn Elders.

“What I think is horrible about all of this is that we criminalize young people,” Elders told CNN. “It's a nontoxic substance.”

Other groups who endorsed 19 included the National Black Police Association and the National Latino Officers Association, who supported the measure for the same reasons as the California chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Their reasons had less to do with pot and more to do with who was getting busted for using it.

The simple truth is that those who bear the brunt of the nation's marijuana laws are not the pot growers of Humboldt County and the rest of the Emerald Triangle; nor are they the members of law enforcement, who operate in a gray area; instead, they are young blacks and Latinos, who use pot less than whites, yet are arrested at double, triple, and sometimes even quadruple the rate.

That summer of 2010, the Drug Policy Alliance published a study that illustrated this with some shocking statistics. The study focused specifically on California, but other studies have documented the same pattern in New York and other American cities and states. In Los Angeles County, for instance, the study found that blacks make up approximately 10 percent of the population yet account for 30 percent of all those arrested for marijuana possession. In San Diego County, they make up 5.6 percent of the population and account for 20 percent of all those arrested. The study also determined that, across the state, 70 to 80 percent of people arrested for marijuana possession were under thirty.

These were the young people being criminalized whom Joycelyn Elders was talking about. Marijuana arrests create a permanent drug crime record, even if they were just a misdemeanor. These records show up during background checks by employers, landlords, credit agencies, schools, and others, and ultimately affect one's chances in life.

Before the vote, Alice Huffman, the president of the California chapter of the NAACP, wrote in
The
Huffington Post
that being caught up in the criminal justice system does a lot more harm to young people than using marijuana.

Opponents of Prop 19 included almost every Democrat running for state office, both state senators, and all the major gubernatorial candidates, including Jerry Brown, who'd signed the state's landmark marijuana-decriminalization law back when he was first governor in 1976, which eliminated felony charges for possession.

“We've got to compete with China, and if everybody's stoned, how the hell are we going to make it?” Brown asked.

The strange bedfellows included Dennis Peron, one of the coauthors of the state's medical marijuana law, who said he was against 19 because he viewed all pot use as medical. Mothers Against Drunk Driving feared the law would lead to an increase in drugged drivers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce believed employers wouldn't be able to discipline stoned workers under it. The California Beer and Beverage Distributors, a beer trade association, also contributed money to the “No on 19” campaign. And as to be expected, many lawmen came out against, including the California Police Chiefs Association, the California State Sheriffs' Association, and the California Association of Highway Patrolmen.