Global Ganja Report

There is grim news from California, where cannabis industry profits are dropping, robberies of dispensaries are soaring, and police raids on unlicensed growers continue in the Emerald Triangle. Can the seeming slip back into pre-legalization dystopia be arrested?
 

Some of the key cannabis cultivation zones around the world are also those feeling the earliest and harshest impacts of the impending global climate disaster. How can the global cannabis community respond?

In Episode 94 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg presents a cannabis harvest season interview with Karla Avila in Northern California's Emerald Triangle. A licensed producer of artisanal outdoor cannabis for the legal market through her homestead-based Flowerdaze Farm, Avila is an advocate for small-scale "legacy" growers through her work with the Trinity County Agriculture Alliance. She is also a founder of the statewide Origins Council, which is seeking to establish official "appellations" for cannabis, certifying a strain's regional origin. Avila discusses the challenges facing small legacy growers who are struggling to keep alive heirloom genetics and ecologically sound cultivation methods in a legal market increasingly dominated by large-scale enterprises on an agribusiness model. Listen on SoundCloud or via Patreon.

The year 2020's record-breaking wildfires in California and other Western states have compounded the grim impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic—and have similarly been politicized. Thus far, the blow they have dealt to the burgeoning cannabis industry has been well weathered. But this will clearly pose a growing challenge in the years to come—as those parts of the country where legal cannabis cultivation is most advanced are also the most vulnerable to this devastating sign of ecological disequilibrium.

The Emerald Triangle mourns the passing of BE Smith, the legendary Trinity County grower who did time in federal prison for openly cultivating cannabis under California's medical marijuana law—throwing down the proverbial gauntlet to Washington DC from his mountain homestead. His bold action put the Justice Department on the spot, and helped prompt a change in federal policy.

Cannabis may be legal in California, but illicit cultivation persists—especially in the National Forests, where it often takes a grave ecological toll. The CROP Project—for Cannabis Removal On Public Lands—is now bringing together environmentalists, law enforcement and the legal cannabis industry for a coordinated approach to the problem.

Some states that have legalized cannabis are seeing a surge in the illicit market—and attendant police raids and repression. The dystopia that legalization was supposed to leave behind has proved disconcertingly persistent. But is the problem, as conservatives claim, legalization itself—or that is hasn't gone far enough?

Big militarized raids by state police and National Guard forces on illicit grows in Northern California's Trinity County brought back bad memories for locals. Several homes were raided and helicopters brought in for the operation—exactly the kind of thing Californians thought they had seen the end of after legalization.