Bryan Zepp Jamieson: Weed

It’s harvest time.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson, October 9, 2009

It’s harvest time here in Siskiyou County, and judging from some of the
crops around town, it’s going to be a bumper crop.

Mind you, we don’t have much of a growing season here, one kilometer up.
Last frost is usually early May, and first frost is about now, and this
year it’s already snowed once: last week. August is the only month where
nobody has seen it snow, And August only gets a frost once every 20
years or so.

So it’s not a real friendly place to grow vegetables. As the joke has
it, Siskiyou is an old native term that means, “Shit! My tomatoes!” This
year, all the tomatoes go bye-bye. That first frost did for them.

But marijuana, ah, that’s a different story. Most of it around here gets
grown out in the National Forests, which is a bloody nuisance. The type
of people growing weed out there tend to have Uzis and attack dogs, and
definitely aren’t your friendly hippy-dippy love children from the 60s.
They present a hazard to unwary hikers, since they don’t like the idea
of people seeing their 40 acres of top-quality weed and going back and
spreading the word. As a result, savvy hikers just avoid areas where
there are streams, since that’s where the growers are.

Here in town, it’s a different story. This is California, so if you can
get a prescription from a doctor for marijuana for medical purposes (and
that’s not hard to do), you can grow your own, quite legally, and a lot
of people do. The law says, “personal use” and that you can’t sell it,
but there’s a loophole that allows people to raise smoke for fun and profit.

A lot just have a small patch in their back yard, a dozen or so plants,
discreetly set behind a fence so it isn’t visible from the street (cops
aren’t a problem, but thieves are), and come this time of year, they
harvest a couple of pounds of bud, and use the leaves for salves or
tinctures or baking.

Then there’s the serious growers. A lot of them were around before 215
passed, and they learned a lot. Their operations are indoors, and
involve hydroponics, fertilization measured to exact grams and exact
minutes, and the amount of light they get from the high-tech gro-lights
is gauged very carefully. Outdoors, marijuana plants bud around the
autumnal equinox. The gro-lights liberate the growers from the tyranny
of the earth’s orbit, and they can arrange to have plants bud when they
think the plants should bud, for optimal quality and/or quantity of
harvest.

Time out for a quick confession:

Fact is, I don’t use marijuana. I used to, but I quit back in the 80s.
It wasn’t a conscious decision. One time I was siting with some friends,
and a joint got passed around, and I passed it along without partaking,
and I got around to wondering when the last time was I took a hit.
Thinking back, I realized it had been over a year. Oh. Well, I guess I
quit then. Gee, that was hard. You gotta admire my moral character. The
main reason was that when it came to holding my smoke, I was a real
featherweight. One toke was all it took to leave me spending the rest of
the evening pointing at the Moon and giggling. Weed is inconvenient when
you have to stop and consider whether you might be driving in the next
six hours whenever someone passes you a joint. This being California, I
usually do have to drive somewhere in the next six hours, and I much
prefer the comfort of remembering which side of the road I’m supposed to
be driving on. Reduces the stress levels, you know.

But I’m doing this digression in case anyone out there thinks that I’m
some sort of expert on weed growing. I’m not. I know a female plant is
desirable and a male plant isn’t, but I couldn’t tell you with any great
certainty which was which.

Even before Proposition 215, the Compassionate Care Act, was passed,
Northern California had a reputation for growing and exporting weed. In
most northern counties on the coast north of San Francisco, it was
probably the leading cash crop, and might have been so here in inland
Siskiyou County, as well. The temperate rain forests and Mediterranean
climate of the inland valleys encourage the growth of nuclear marijuana,
stuff that would affect Cheech and Chong much the way one hit of Mexican
junk weed affects me.

Since the Act passed, things have changed. Medical Marijuana
dispensaries have sprung up all over the state, thousands of them. We
actually have more in Siskiyou County than we do McDonalds’ Restaurants,
although with a score of 3-2, that’s not a real impressive statistic.

Just about anyone can open a clinic so long as they get an ok from the
local authorities, so the clinics range from scrupulously law-abiding to
flat-out dodgy, usually reflecting the morality of the local police. Up
here, the cops are pretty skeptical about the whole thing (the first
dispensary opened only a couple of months ago) and so the local outfits
are meticulous about demanding proof of a prescription (usually the
’script itself) getting a clinic ID that they have to show before they
are even permitted to go back and look at the produce. Not all the
cops—I know a California Highway Patrol officer who recently retired and
is now happily growing marijuana in the back 40.

Further, a lot of the clinics are run by people for whom medical
marijuana has been a godsend. It’s effective in alleviating intractable
pain without the risks of morphine, heroin or oxycontin. It greatly
alleviates nausea from cancer treatments, and is effective in treating
the discomfort of glaucoma. In fact, I knew a guy back in 1987 who had a
marijuana prescription, then extremely rare, for exactly that, secondary
to severe diabetes. He showed me his little tin of state-grown weed. It
looked like the state made their joints using one of those clunky old
roll-your-own machines you could buy with Bugler tobacco.

What caused the dispensaries, and above-ground marijuana cultivation, to
explode in the past year is that the state decided that “personal use”
was too vague, and dealt with it in a relatively sensible way: a grower
is permitted to sell his excess crop to the dispensaries.

This basically ensures that there is an unlimited supply of weed. The
price of weed is already crashing (anyone growing a big crop in their
basement hoping to become rich is going to discover that they might get
$100 a pound, instead of the $400 an ounce of of last year). So at this
point, there’s probably two or three little back yard weed patches on
every suburban block in the state, millions of people growing. And some
of the serious growers are renting warehouses.

Grass is probably the most thoroughly socialized underground hobby
America has, even more prevalent than porn. Back before 215, I would
have guessed that about 1 in 5 adults in California smoked weed. Now I
would say it’s actually about 1 in 3. I’ve encountered people I would
never have in a million years have figured for pot smokers, grinning and
showing me their scripts.

Pot dispensaries are no more remarkable than liquor stores at this
point, although there tends to be a lot less vomit on the sidewalks
around the dispensaries. If Americans are going to embrace another
medically questionable habit, they could do far worse than marijuana,
and frequently do. Cigarettes, booze, double cheeseburgers, television,
twitter, you name it. Weed is less destructive.

So with marijuana out in the open, and widespread, it’s no surprise that
there are no less than three different initiative petition efforts going
to get propositions on the ballot next spring that will just simply
legalize marijuana.

I’ve always favored it; I suspect that zero-tolerance for marijuana,
including poisoning it with paraquat and giving life sentences to
dealers, played a big role, first with the rise of easy-to-transport
“white drugs” such as cocaine, and then the scourge of cheap,
easy-to-make meth. People like to get high. That’s human nature (and one
shared by most warm-blooded animals), and if marijuana is too expensive
or unavailable, they’ll turn to something else.

The second big plus to legalizing it is that this will make it possible
to grow large amounts of hemp. This is an incredibly valuable plant, one
that makes superb textiles and paper, is far more eco-friendly (doesn’t
deplete the soil like cotton, doesn’t decimate forests or require
bleaching like wood pulp paper) and the seed is nearly the perfect
nutritional food. It makes great paper—I have some hemp paper that is 15
years old, exposed to air, and it’s never yellowed or become brittle,
the way wood pulp paper does.

Even if the state doesn’t tax weed (and it will, you can be sure), it
will save hundreds of millions in police time, courts, and jails. If
weed is legalized, the governor will have little choice but to pardon
all non-violent prisoners who were jailed for selling weed, releasing
tens of thousands of people. And California needs the money. I heard an
estimate that just the sales tax on weed could raise $25 million a year
in revenues. I got a good laugh out of that. Even with the price
collapse, Siskiyou County alone could produce that much weed.

An article today reported that the district attorney of Los Angeles
County is fighting to close down the dispensaries. That article noted
that if subject to sales tax, weed would bring about $1.3 billion into
state coffers.

As for neighboring states, they’re just going to have start thinking
about legalizing it too. Because constitutionally, they can’t put up
search stations on the state borders.

It’s a change long overdue. Forty years overdue.