The Rise And Fall Of The Marijuana Industry

How did we go from hippies sucking on the Green Nipple in the Roaring Eighties to the scene today with large legal pot plantations, surviving mainly by breaking the rules and selling weed on the black market, locally and out-of-state?

Starting at $1000 a pound in 1975 the price rose to $5000 by the early nineties, then after the passage of Proposition 215 in 1996 (legal for medical use), the price annually dropped as the hills filled with the greenrushers operating multiple light dep greenhouses, and everyone else had to grow more to make a still-good living.

When it dipped down to $1500 you had to grow so many plants that the Green Nipple was replaced by the Green Monkey: were you riding it or was it riding you? The challenge was juggling trimmers, weather, mold, powdery mildew, ripoffs, drying sheds, and the hardest part of the whole operation: trying to sell it. (Cops and helicopters had mostly disappeared from the list of stresses by then.)

When the price went below $1000 a pound, a lot of people around here stopped growing, then Proposition 64 passed overwhelmingly in 2016, bringing statewide legalization of cannabis for recreational use, and the price went to $500 and lower. None but the brave, naive, or desperate decided to wade into the legal system, make a deal with the devil, ie, the Humboldt County Planning Department and Board of Supervisors, and attempt to keep growing, while following often changing and expensive rules and regulations.

I ran into one grower from Salmon Creek at the bank a couple years into legalization who said, “Estelle told me it would cost $20,000 to go legal, now I’ve got $100,000 into it and it’s a big hassle, but I’m in too deep to stop and have to keep trying to finish the paperwork.”

Another guy from Ettersburg around the same time was complaining that it had already cost him a few hundred thousand dollars to “come into compliance,” he was still far from getting his license, and if he could do it all over, he wouldn’t. (He used to be handsome and youthful-looking but was spotted the other day looking old and haggard, and still struggling with his large weed farm.)

When another person, a former clone dealer from Sprowel Creek, had told me with a big smile that he was going legal I said, “Really? Why? You know what you’re getting into?” He had a beautiful piece of land, including a spring which started and stopped on his forty acres, one of the state requirements for licensing. California Department of Fish and Wildlife examined his land, discovered damage from logging decades before he bought it back in the seventies, and the expensive remediation costs would be more than the land was worth. (He dumped it at a loss.)

There are many stories like this, as businesses in town have closed, the hills have emptied out, and would-be farmers who got in late and have large land payments are abandoning their land. Many of those who are able to stay are looking for regular jobs with which to survive in this depressed economy, as the pound price plummets to $250. (Yet there’s still farmers with good connections growing and selling like it’s 2008, and may have a few good years left.)

Another big question is what’s going to happen to all those back-to-the-landers and old growers, now in their seventies and eighties, still living in their off-grid cabins in the middle of nowhere, without the steady income they had over the last forty years, and no retirement plan?