Features » January 25, 2010

Tending ‘the Grow’ (cont’d)

Tending the garden

It’s not, however, old white guys that work the farms. For Ricardo, a day laborer periodically hired from the local Latino labor pool by one grower to do work on a farm, $20 an hour is a solid wage. While he has never tended marijuana, he has done landscaping and set-up. Based on the backwoods locations, funny smells emanating from barns and elevated hourly earnings, his employer’s profession is no mystery.

An undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, he works most of the year between odd day-labor jobs, and lives in a house with eight other undocumented workers. He sends most of his wages home to Guatemala, a country where remittances total more than exports and tourism combined. While he used to return home in the winter when work was slow, tightening borders and increased protection costs have made it impractical and dangerous. Instead, he often finds himself working for growers.

Recent reports suggest that it is men like Ricardo who are picked up by absentee growers and dropped off in state-owned land with supplies and a gun to “tend” garden with promise of payment at season’s end. Each grower will likely establish multiple grows, numbering in the tens of thousands of plants, banking that at least a few gardens will remain undiscovered. Meanwhile, it is undocumented immigrants like Ricardo who are caught in the crosshairs of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the growers go untouched. As journalist David Samuels indicates, to the extent that raids on “immigrant” outdoor grows occur, these seizures actually subsidize the “white,” indoor grows by decreasing competition and risk as law enforcement is diverted.

Media reports and law enforcement agencies contend this is the work of “cartels,” often despite any proof or convictions. The association of Mexicans and marijuana goes back to the original “reefer madness” of the 1930s, but today finds its California expression in a new mantra: undocumented immigrants and marijuana lead to violence and guns, pollution to California’s state forests (where many of the more sensational raids on “cartels” occur) and methamphetamine trafficking.

This perceived trifecta of pollution-meth-guns is effective in mobilizing liberal, middle-class angst against marijuana. Recent coverage contrasts this looming “danger” against an image of organic, indoor medical growers (“white boy grows,” or “mom and pop” operations), who are the heart-and-soul of marijuana–and endangered. Even some pot advocates rail against “criminal activity” and “sleazy grow houses,” exemplified by a nativist “Always Buy Colorado” campaign to encourage homegrown–not Mexican–marijuana. As decriminalization and legalization advance, it seems the categories of “good” and “bad,” legal and illegal, medical and criminal may shift in important ways, while reproducing old patterns.

Reaching the crossroads

“The first thing is to get marijuana decriminalized, get people out of jail and stop arrests” says Joey Ereñeta of Oaksterdam University, a training institute for those in the medical marijuana industry. With at least five state-level legalization and taxation measures and several more medical marijuana bills on the 2010 docket, the stage is set. Holder’s memo has pushed advocates into high gear while this period of reprieve from federal prosecution exists. “With more legalization and safer access,” he explains, “you’re going to see that consumers and patients will be the winners. The people in the industry will have to work harder to maintain themselves. The trade-off is worth it, even for growers, when you factor in your stress level from operating illegally, and the continual risk of losing your livelihood and basic freedoms.”

While Patrick agrees, he also notes that it will mean lost jobs and industrial consolidation, which is why he has established a base of three high-quality grows and is seeking municipal certification for his San Francisco distribution center. But for people without capital to invest in scaled production sites, and for workers without access to basic citizenship and labor rights, the situation requires more consideration.

Multiple legislative solutions are possible: inclusion of care receivers in government healthcare programs; inclusion of marijuana farmworkers in labor, wage, and workplace regulations; requirements for living wages and benefits, particularly as the high price of marijuana declines toward its production costs; caps on the size of marijuana production sites and horizontal integration to ensure limits to consolidation; and channeling new government revenue sources into education, healthcare and entitlements to benefit those displaced from the industry, from South Central LA to Humboldt County.

The stakes are high. A 2006 report by marijuana policy researcher Jon Gettman found that, using conservative pricing estimates, California’s marijuana economy is the largest cash crop in the state–more than grapes, vegetables and hay combined. Put another way, the largest cash crop in the world’s eighth largest economy in the world is poised to enter into legal circulation.

Many are taking note. The Open Society Institute (OSI) of George Soros, the billionaire famous for building a fortune through Eastern European “emerging markets,” has funded legalization efforts in the United States for quite some time. The libertarian Cato Institute, dedicated to free markets and minimal government, has its own favored legalization and medical marijuana organizations. And George Schulz, who has deep ties with Bechtel Corporation, known for its involvement in Bolivian water privatization and Iraq “reconstruction” contracts, Glenn Beck, avid opponent of government healthcare and immigration reform, and the late Milton Friedman, whose economic “shock” doctrine has served as the template for neoliberal reforms worldwide, have all enthusiastically endorsed marijuana legalization.

While the U.S. government still retains the cannabis patent, effectively barring commercial development, one corporation is preparing patents for THC-harvesting technology, likening it to the cotton gin. Since the AMA’s November call for a review of cannabis’ federal prohibited status and the opening of clinical research, two medical marijuana corporations have gone public.

Marijuana is already big business–fueling micro-economies stretching from Detroit to California to Guatemala and macro-economies covering military technology, border patrols and law enforcement at all levels. Legalization would necessarily shift all this. Free-market libertarians and social justice progressives have made common cause on decriminalization, but what happens after that is an open question.

Crassly put: Who gets what cut and under what circumstances? Is it a new green economy? The next conquest of Big Pharma or agribusiness? An emerging state-regulated-and-taxed wine industry? As the marijuana garden grows, its scent blossoms, and cross-pollinating swarms gather, the harvest in California and across the country promises to be a telling time.