Weed Land. Peter Hecht
make them bountiful with flowers, proclaiming he could produce up to a pound and three-quarters of dried buds per lamp. “The spirit,” he proclaimed, “talked to me as I was going.”
In Gasparas’s explorative, meditative journey from suburban Chicago to India to Humboldt, the spirit also led him to the conclusion that being a pot outlaw wasn’t his dharma. He loved his newfound lawfulness as a medical cultivator under California’s Proposition 215. He loved being part of the great pot migration. Downtown Arcata, with its art deco theater, gingerbread-adorned storefronts, roustabout bars, and a plaza topped by giant palms, was a bustling depot for the north coast marijuana economy.
Arcata had a diverse legacy as a destination. After World War II, it flourished with thirty lumber mills and an influx of workers processing north coast timber. In 1990, a year after the college town passed a resolution proclaiming itself a nuclear-weapons-free zone, Arcata and neighboring north coast communities became activist outposts for the Redwood Summer. Environmental protesters streamed into the region, by then well established as the mecca for nature-loving—and cannabis-savoring—back-to-the-landers. Demonstrators blocked logging trucks in Humboldt and Mendocino Counties, demanding an end to corporate clear-cutting in California’s northern Headwaters Forest that threatened wildlife habitats and imperiled stream systems for endangered coho salmon.
Now a boundless sense of new marijuana freedoms lured people in again. Itinerant bud trimmers, from spike-haired skateboarders to dreadlocked hikers emerging from the woods around Arcata, streamed in for jobs scissor-cutting unwanted leaves from marijuana flowers to prep them for dispensaries or the underground market after the fall outdoor harvest, or throughout the year for indoor yields. Gasparas delighted in Goths, gutter punks, and hippies coming together in a marijuana melting pot.
In 2007, Gasparas opened a dispensary, called the iCenter, later the Sai Center, in downtown Arcata. He added to his marijuana offerings, bartering to buy product from local growers, many of them recast and newly certified as medical marijuana patients. They stepped out of the shadows of the north coast Redwood Curtain, from an illicit, ever suspicious culture that had long since evolved from the hippie nirvana of the Haight-Ashbury transplants. Growers came into the iCenter with turkey oven bags filled with weed. Many recoiled when Gasparas asked them to provide seller’s permits or fill out Internal Revenue Service 1099 tax forms as transparent cannabis venders. Some offered to drop the price a thousand dollars a pound, even two thousand, if they didn’t have to sign anything. Gasparas turned away those uncomfortable with the business protocols of medical marijuana and the dispensary market. But he made one key concession to his weed-growing venders. He wrote no checks. He paid them only in cash.
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In the Emerald Triangle, where marijuana growers cultivated a legacy of earthy outdoor pot strains produced beneath the sun and the stars, years of state and federal drug raids had changed both the community and the art of growing. The raids drove many cultivators indoors. In the forests, diesel fuel leaked from generators in half-buried shipping containers rigged with grow lamps for marijuana. In the Humboldt towns of Arcata and Eureka, or the Mendocino hamlets of Ukiah and Willits, newcomers embracing indoor pot dangerously wired bedrooms, garages, and often whole houses with rows of thousand-watt lights. The sweet stench of weed, much of it produced by new arrivals with little emotional connection to the region or its heritage, washed over neighborhoods. By 2008, when Arcata passed an ordinance restricting indoor marijuana to fifty square feet and a maximum of twelve hundred total watts of lighting, nearly one in every seven homes was presumed to be growing pot. The same year, the sheriff’s department had to call in an environmental cleanup crew for diesel and oil spills after authorities raided a rural southern Humboldt property with four buildings outfitted with cultivation rooms, hundreds of growing lamps for nearly fifty-five hundred plants, and not a single room fit for human habitation. A 2007 study by Humboldt State’s Schatz Energy Research Center estimated that indoor marijuana growing accounted for 10 percent of electricity use in the county of 135,000 residents, enough to power thirteen thousand homes. Between 1996, when Californians passed the medical marijuana law, and 2010, per capita electricity use in Mendocino County spiked by three times the state average. In Humboldt, it went up by sixfold.
The Emerald Triangle was no longer the haven of Lelehnia Du Bois’s childhood memories. Her mother, Carole Du Bois, was a naturalist who settled her daughters in a wooded sanctuary in Trinity County in the 1970s. She immersed them in growing pesticide-free corn, beans, peas, tomatoes, and peppers. Lelehnia was with her mother and a younger sister on a mountainous highway when a tumbling boulder crashed onto the road. Her mother swerved the car to avoid it, and their vehicle flipped into a riverbed. Lelehnia crawled up a rocky slope to the road to summon help. Her younger sister died; her mother suffered a broken back. They stayed in Trinity County, grieving, recovering, and embracing nature and their neighbors. Her mother smoked a nightly joint in the tub to quell her pain, and Lelehnia became familiar with the neighbors’ marijuana gardens. By the age of nine, she was helping trim the buds at harvest time. She grew up loving the autumn and the celebratory community passage when neighbors would get together for potluck dinners to mark the end of another outdoor growing season and hail the potent, plentiful crop.
Lelehnia moved on to Southern California, became a model, worked in the retail fashion industry, and ran a restaurant and a school of dance. She didn’t envision a future in pot. But in 1994, Lelehnia moved back to the Emerald Triangle after her mother, by then living in Humboldt, fell ill. Lelehnia studied nursing at Redwood College in Eureka and took a job in a senior-care facility while working toward her RN degree. In 1999, she caught a falling patient and suffered ruptured disks in her back. Suddenly, she was a patient herself, winding up on disability and, for an extended time, in a wheelchair. She got a medical marijuana recommendation and reembraced the region’s cannabis arts, only this time bathed in the yellow light of an indoor growing space built next to the living room of her small Eureka apartment. Her Sweet God strain soothed her spine and brought in extra income on top of her disability checks. She supplied marijuana, homemade cannabis tinctures, and baked goods to a Eureka dispensary called the Hummingbird Healing Center. Week by week, there seemed to be new neighbors. They churned the electrical circuits, producing a cumulative mountain of weed.
In 2009, an Arts & Entertainment Network documentary depicted Arcata in Pot City, U.S.A., while MSNBC’s Marijuana Inc. chronicled the cannabis crush in the Emerald Triangle. People coming in didn’t care to grasp that the marijuana market, even in California, and especially on its north coast, was already glutted. At the Humboldt Collective dispensary in Arcata, known as the THC, Tony Turner, a public school counselor who went into the marijuana business after retirement, greeted a continual procession of out-of-state dreamers. One day, Michelle Cotter, an Arizona woman who had studied alternative medicine and the healing powers of nature at the Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine, stopped by. Cotter had never even smoked pot. But she came to the THC with friend Jaye Richards, a former Arizona property manager who had experience growing corn and soy beans on a family farm in Illinois. They had just gotten their California recommendations for medical marijuana, their tickets, they hoped, to a new lifestyle and livelihood. They looked over Turner’s jars of Pot Pourri and Bud Crumble, bought a few marijuana caramels and peppered him for advice on growing. “Best to look for a place in the countryside,” Turner suggested. “And get a security system.” He smiled in bemusement as the women moved on, happily exploring their California cannabis adventure. Turner wondered where it would end. Just because Humboldt was pot country and marijuana was legal for medicinal use didn’t mean that so many people were fit to grow medical weed or that there was a market waiting.
But with new residents burning brilliant plant lights and paying soaring electric bills and ballooning rents, Du Bois sensed a darker edge. There was competitiveness between growers, distrust, and a loss of neighborliness. Envious residents who couldn’t access the dispensary market threatened to report more successful ones to the feds. Many simply winked at the idea of medical marijuana as they packed up product and shipped it out of state for maximum returns. The explosion of indoor growers hardly reminded Du Bois of Trinity County in the 1970s. “There is no honor system,” she thought. “The integrity has gotten lost.” The entire culture was changing.
The newcomers weren’t