Weed Land. Peter Hecht
Ordinance 9.31, Blake set out to be the champion in restoring a “mystical place of clean cannabis.”
Starting in 2003, Blake’s Area 101 hosted the Emerald Cup, his celebration of the Emerald Triangle’s outdoor marijuana traditions. With live music, joint-rolling contests, and “Guess the Old-School Strains” contests, the Emerald Cup became Mendocino’s state fair of cannabis. For three weeks beforehand, Blake and other selected judges sampled the region’s finest outdoor-grown marijuana. They graded the texture of the buds, discerning the tastes, aromas, and medicinal effects. In 2010, an anonymous Mendocino grower’s Sour Best Shit Ever—a cross-breed of Old School Laotian and Sage strains—won the coveted prize of best marijuana cultivar of the year. A twenty-four-year-old grower known as T-Beezle, the son of a former timber worker, took home top prize—and a signature edition bong—in the cannabis-concentrate category for his Pure Blueberry Hash. Inevitably, the winners also earned something else—the ability to sell their organic products as premium selections in California medical marijuana dispensaries.
At the Emerald Cup, amid its happily stoned throng, Blake disseminated a political, environmental, and marketing message. To Blake, the growth of the medical cannabis market and the proliferation of indoor growing were perilous for Mendocino outdoor cultivators. Their once legendary Northern Lights and Super Skunk marijuana strains had trouble competing with indoor OG Kushes and Purple Urkles, amped with maximum psychoactive THC in climate-controlled growing rooms. To Blake, indoor growing, with its heavy electrical use and carbon footprint, was wrongheaded. He called on outdoor growers to honor their art, to thrive, to protect the planet. For too long, cultivators had planted in the shade to avoid detection by DEA helicopters. Now it was time to bring pot out of the shadows, to let its potency thrive during nine months of outdoor growing under the Mendocino sun. It was time to compete. “We have to get out of the denial,” Blake argued at a public forum. “We are a cannabis place. There is no fishing or logging. We have to take our birthright and embrace the future, or it’s going to bury us.”
But by 2010, there was a new threat, a marijuana legalization effort backed by Richard Lee and Jeff Jones in Oakland. The push to pass Proposition 19, and the inspired efforts in Oakland to authorize warehouse marijuana farms for the medical cannabis market—and eventual legalization for adult recreational use—sent shivers through the Emerald Triangle. People feared an emerging Oakland legal cannabis cartel. Throughout the Emerald Triangle, growers increased their yields, pushing more products onto the market in fear of Proposition 19. Pot prices, already affected by the proliferation of medical cultivation across California, dropped below thirty-five hundred dollars a pound for indoor-grown marijuana and twenty-five hundred dollars for outdoor and continued falling. People feared a meltdown, with the black market for weed collapsing and the price per pound flatlining in the blinding light of transparent capitalism. Some Humboldt County residents replaced their anti-DEA bumper stickers—“U.S. Out of Humboldt”—with a new one: “Save Humboldt County—Keep Pot Illegal.”
Even Gasparas, the cannabis adventurer from suburban Chicago, worried over the changing marijuana economy and prospects of broader legalization. Gasparas had etched the history of his journey into his forearm with an abstract, tribal-patterned tattoo depicting a woman giving birth to a tree of life that leafed with cannabis. The medical marijuana economy in California, and his dispensary in Arcata, had crowned his passage. Gasparas was part of the cannabis establishment now. He lived north of town in an upscale subdivision with a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean. His once disapproving mom worked in his dispensary. Suddenly, he worried about being pushed out of business by Proposition 19. Gasparas crunched the numbers. He didn’t see himself surviving in a market extending beyond medicinal use. He didn’t understand the need for change. With medical marijuana, he insisted, “it’s already legal.”
FOUR
Reefer Research
Dr. Donald Abrams knew what he was in for. He knew his partner, Mark Henry, was going to die. Two years before he met the security officer from the Maui-Intercontinental Hotel, Abrams had been treating more patients with AIDS than any other physician in San Francisco. His experiences told him Henry’s deterioration from the disease would be rapid and excruciating. Yet that knowledge didn’t stop him from developing a relationship with Henry after the security officer sought him out at a lecture in Hawaii in 1986. It didn’t stop them from drawing close, from vacationing together, from laughing together, from reflecting together, or from smoking pot together.
Abrams was a Stanford University–educated hematologist and oncologist drawn by life-affecting events into the research and treatment of AIDS and HIV. It started for him after an unexplainable progression of young gay men with swollen glands began showing up at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco in 1979. Dr. Lee Wilkinson, the hospital’s chief hematologist, summoned Abrams, a twenty-nine-year-old openly gay medical resident. “Hey, Duck,” Wilkinson said, invoking the Disney character nickname he had bestowed on the promising young doctor. “Can you take a look at this?”
Abrams ordered lab tests on the men’s lymph nodes, seeking a cause for the symptoms. The results offered nothing from which to draw conclusions. So Abrams found himself cautioning the men on unhealthy lifestyles. “Stop having so many sexual partners,” he lectured. “Stop taking drugs. Move out of the fast lane.”
At the urging of Wilkinson, his mentor, Abrams moved on to the hematology and oncology training program at the University of California, San Francisco. There, he started encountering more young gay men with new, more severe symptoms. By 1981, doctors at the university were seeing the first cases of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a haunting, systemic affliction that left them splotched with lesions. Abrams began focusing on a strange “gay cancer” that would become known as acquired immune deficiency syndrome. He noticed many of the men had swollen glands. “How long have you had those?” Abrams asked. About two years, they told him, suggesting a troubling progression of the symptoms Abrams had noted in 1979.
Abrams applied for a grant to study lymphadenopathy syndrome, hoping to find clues about the first symptoms of illnesses leading to diagnoses of AIDS. As a research fellow treating the first-known AIDS patients in San Francisco, Abrams examined two hundred gay men with swollen glands who had yet to develop Kaposi’s sarcoma or pneumocystis, the ravaging pneumonia that would signal their rapid decline. He took lymph node specimens to the UC San Francisco laboratory of Dr. Harold Varmus, a Nobel prize–winning researcher for work on cancer-causing genes. They began studying what would be identified as a retrovirus that attacked cells and altered the body’s DNA and its ability to fend off disease.
In 1983, Abrams moved to San Francisco General Hospital, where oncologist Dr. Paul Volberding and infectious disease specialist Dr. Connie Wofsy established the world’s first AIDS inpatient ward, Ward 5B, with Abrams as their protégé. For a time, the trio knew every AIDS patient in San Francisco. That year, a French researcher, Dr. Luc Montagnier, would be widely credited with discovering the virus that led to AIDS. Abrams later became one of three researchers to name it the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. Soon the rate of HIV diagnoses and the number of AIDS patients were skyrocketing. All too soon, Abrams recalled, “we didn’t know everybody anymore.” San Francisco became a death camp for men wasting away, disfigured, stigmatized with a gay disease. Over twenty years, nineteen thousand city residents would perish from AIDS.
Still Abrams let himself fall in love with Mark Henry after Henry sought him out. His lectures in Maui had been initiated after Henry’s previous partner became the first person on the island to die of the disease. When the two men met, Henry had just had an episode of AIDS-related pneumonia. Abrams knew nearly everyone with the disease died within twelve months after a pneumocystis outbreak. Since early in his life, Abrams had had an ingrained fear of losing people he loved, going back to when he lost three grandparents as a small child and his “probably neurotic Jewish mother” took to raising him with a decided anxiety about death. Yet remarkably, Abrams’s upbringing had inspired his work in oncology and his desire to treat—and learn from—cancer patients in the transition from living to dying. And after he met Henry, Abrams realized there must be something in his makeup “that allowed me to go, eyes wide open, into a relationship with a man who was going to die.”
By 1986, physicians