Global Ganja Report

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.

Sacramento is preparing to unleash the National Guard on small illegal growers in the Emerald Triangle just as it is pushing the "Twin Tunnels" project to facilitate water diversions to Central Valley ag-biz—which is increasingly growing cannabis. Small growers face punitive measures for irresponsible practices while big growers stand to gain from official water diversions that may be ultimately far more irresponsible.

Recent years have seen ethnic tensions in the northernmost parts of the Emerald Triangle, as Hmong growers—immigrants from the Southeast Asian nation of Laos—have established themselves in local cannabis cultivation. This has led to civil rights litigation and a polarized atmosphere in Siskiyou County. But just to the south in Trinity County, a group is working to head off tensions by helping Hmong growers negotiate the transition to licensed cultivation.

The bureaucracy overseeing California's cannabis industry is moving fast to facilitate insurance coverage for businesses—a question very pressing as wildfires rage through the Emerald Triangle.

A big multi-agency "reclamation" effort on national forest lands in the Emerald Triangle points again to the serious environmental impacts of outlaw cannabis cultivation. Will this be the last gasp of this sort of thing now that California has legalized?