My Drugs Wars

In the 19th century, the big international drug dealers were the English and the French imperialists who managed, with arms, to hook the Chinese on opium and force them to legalize it. I can understand why the Chinese were hooked. Opium is addicting. I tried it and liked it; opium took away all my pains. I used it briefly in the 1980s when I was growing weed. I traded marijuana for opium which I scored from an electrician. The only part I didn’t like about opium was coming down. When that happened I felt every ache and pain.

Frederick Engels wrote about the opium ”quarrel” as he called it in a report for the New York Daily Tribune in which he condemned “the old plundering buccaneering spirit exhibited by the Brits.” Unlike Engels—the scion of a German bourgeois family— I have never owned a factory nor have I ever had a working class girl friend like Mary Burns, but like Engels I have been and still am a Marxist fascinated by the “plundering buccaneering spirit.” And while we’re on the subject of drugs, let's not forget that Marx observed that “religion is the opiate of the people.” Religion is also addicting and can take away all earthly pains with the promise of heaven and eternal life .

For decades, I was a capitalist in the world of cannabis, and a criminal, too, in the Marxist definition of the word. I was also a reporter. I led three lives. In Theories of Surplus Value, Engels’ buddy Karl Marx writes that criminals undermine “the monotony of bourgeois life.” He or she, Marx argued. is also a major producer of both use and exchange value in capitalist society. Marijuana money paid for my groceries, gas, shoes and socks. I also bartered weed for a car and a teepee which provided me with a home for a couple of years.

“A criminal,” Marx explains in Theories of Surplus Value “produces crimes, criminal law, the police, criminal justice, penal codes, arts, bell-letters, novels.” As a criminal in the cannabis world in California when I was in my 30s and 40s I wasn’t alone. There were tens if not hundreds of thousands of us in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, cultivating, harvesting, transporting, selling and consuming weed. We came from Thailand and Poland, Chicago and Los Angeles and joined the “Green Rush,” the reincarnation of the Gold Rush. I left the commercial industry at about the same time that California voters approved Proposition 215 which legalized medical marijuana in the Golden State.

Becoming a marijuana grower and trafficker certainly enlivened my own life, and, while I don’t take sole credit for producing crime, criminal law, cops and penal codes I played a small part in the big picture. Also, as a marijuana journalist and as writer of fiction and nonfiction, as well as the creator of a feature film about marijuana I helped to produce the literature and the culture that reflected the industry and its workers.

I had read about capitalism in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere before I entered the cannabis world, and took economics 101 in college, but I had no direct experience as a capitalist until I grew and sold weed. From first hand experience, I learned about the laws of supply and demand, the fluctuations of the market, the role of the police in regulating the industry and in helping to set prices. Raids by law enforcement put a dent in the supply and jacked up prices. I also witnessed the vital role that marijuana dollars played in fueling the California economy when it needed fueling. Growers and dealers struck me as modern day buccaneers

Ever since the early days of capitalism, crime and criminals helped with the “primitive accumulation of wealth.” Indeed, marijuana farmers and traffickers extended the story of primitive accumulation into the 20th century. Marx explained that “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”

True, capitalism had long existed in California and elsewhere before the cannabis industry came along, but cannabis boosted local economies, especially in Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt and Lake counties when the lumber and fishing industries failed, men and women were out of work, tax dollars dried up and when commerce in small towns and cities suffered. Marijuana revived towns like Garberville, Willits, Eureka, Arcata, Sebastopol and truck stops in-between. Vineyards, grapes and wine would follow in the wake of weed.

My father was the first commercial marijuana grower I knew. A bootlegger and a rum runner in the 1920s who delivered Prohibition booze to speakeasies, he belonged to the Communist Party in the 1930s and had a long lucrative career as a lawyer on Long Island during the real estate boom of the 1950s. While he called himself a Marxist he was more of an economist determinist than a follower of Marx and Engels. His favorite book was Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which is due for a reevaluation today as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday. The second commercial marijuana grower I knew came from a prosperous Marin County family and ran his operation like a corporation with employees, wages and bonuses and with armed guards to protect against thieves. If only hippies had been growing it I would probably not have been interested in the subject. My dad was growing marijuana, he told me, because his monthly social security check and his savings didn't cover basic expenses.

I didn't know about his crop until he was dying of cancer. A month or so before his death, which happened a day before his 67th birthday, he called me to his bedside, told me about his secret garden and made me promise not to share information with my mother or anyone else in or out of the family. When he died before his crop had gone the distance and reached maturity, I harvested it, cured it and transported it to an apartment in Santa Rosa in a working class Mexican neighborhood where I was living and writing. Every morning for several months I rolled half-a-dozen or so joints, smoked them, got stoned and worked on a book with my by-line which was published in 1980 under the title My Search For Traven. I would write other books aided and abetted by marijuana which helped me focus on the words in front of me.

The smell of marijuana leaked out of my Santa Rosa apartment, so much so that a neighbor knocked on my door and asked me to sell him weed. That was my first deal. He handed me cash and I forked over a baggie. On one occasion, I transported weed on a flight to New York in a suitcase, which popped open as I was walking across the immense foyer and headed for the taxi cab to take me to Manhattan. A dozen of so baggies with marijuana scattered, and for a moment or two I panicked. I need not have done that. Arriving and departing passengers scooped them up, handed them to me and helped to save me.

In a rented vehicle, I drove pounds to Los Angeles where I sold them at $4,000 a pound to my friend Mark Rosenberg who I knew from our days in SDS together and who was then the president of Warner Brothers pictures and a “baby mogul.” Mark gifted ounces as end-of-the-year bonuses to men and women who’d worked on movies he produced such as The Fabulous Baker Boys and Bright Lights, Big City.

In 1980, I sold the idea of a marijuana movie titled Homegrown which wasn’t produced until 1996, soon after California approved medical marijuana. I also wrote articles and stories about weed for San Francisco Examiner and High Times magazine under the alias Joe Delicato. High Times also published my book, Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War which was also published in France under the same title.

“Everyone in France knows the word marijuana,” my translator told me. Around the world, it’s known as marijuana, though it’s also known as ganja, grass, cannabis, dagga and more.

Yes, I was growing it at the same time I was writing about it; growing it provided me with honest insider information. From 1981 until the end of the decade I doubled as an instructor in the English Department at Sonoma State University, paid about $6,000 a semester – not enough for my partner and I to live on.

After growing for a couple of years in Sonoma County and after tense helicopter surveillance, I grew in Mendocino east of Willits on a mountain top where 75 or so families also grew marijuana. I made friends with Ray and Nancy, two Irish Catholics from New England who made marijuana their god, their church and their country and who made enough money to buy the properties adjoining theirs.

Every fall they hosted a potluck party with lots of weed and piles of cocaine from Peru. Without the coke, the guests would have fallen asleep early in the evening and slept soundly.

In Mendocino, grew on a parcel of land next to Ray and Nancy’s that was owned by a San Francisco lawyer and his librarian wife who I knew from anti-war days in New York. They sent their three daughters to an expensive private school in San Francisco and needed money to pay for their tuition.

I was a sharecropper. In return for using the land and with access to the water on the property, the landowners received one quarter of the crop. We never argued, though arguing came easy with one partner who carried a gun and snorted a lot of coke and who said to me one evening in the midst of a debate about the best cultivation methods, “Don’t make me have to use this on you.” He meant his gun.

During my last season in Sonoma, my partner, Angel— a twenty-something-year-old Floridian and who had grown up in the Miami drug culture— heard the thud thud thud of sheriff’s helicopter seconds before I did. She was sunbathing naked on the redwood deck at the back of the house. Her initial impulse was to cover up. Then she reached for a bath towel, and, while the helicopter hovered directly overhead, tossed it aside and revealed all, hoping to distract the pilot’s eyes from the pot patch.

We didn't take chances; we harvested the weed, drove to Bolinas where we manicured it and then transported it to a dealer in San Francisco who was happy to have it. ( The police were raiding pot patches in Bolinas when we arrived so we lay very low.) Season after season, the money rolled in and rolled out quickly. I became addicted to it, and to the outlaw lifestyle.

After a while I came to regard addiction as a metaphor that explained all of human history and behavior. As a species homo sapiens were addicted to money, power, sex, drugs, beauty, bad habits and good habits, too.

On Main Street in Willits, where I shopped for essentials, I saw marijuana dollars change hands, and as growers bought cars and trucks, groceries and gifts at Christmas for the kids. Hypocrisy ruled. Local business folks took pot money with both hands and insisted there was no marijuana money in Mendocino. “Go to Oregon if you want that story,” a head of the Willits chamber of commerce told me.

I met and interviewed several Mendocino County sheriffs including Tom Jondahl and Tom Allman who I liked and who tried to legalize weed on his own. Jondhal told me that law enforcement officers in New York would call him and explain that they’d just raided an apartment with marijuana labeled “Grown in Mendocino.”

Couldn’t he do something about it? they asked. No, not really he explained; there was far too much of it and he had too few resources to make a dent in the crop. Besides there was pressure not to raid for the growers and from law abiding citizens who liked the cash economy.

I grew during Reagan’s presidency and during the war on drugs, which was really a war on people, when civil rights were violated, and also when greed often ruled on pot farms. My friend Ray Raphael, a Humboldt County school teacher, tells the story of how hippies became capitalists in Cash Crop: An American Dream. Indeed, weed was and still is as American as apple pie and mom; a countercultural sacrament that was embraced by agriculture and became an industry.

Michelle Alexander tells the harrowing story of how weed laws and the enforcement of weed laws led to the persecution of young men of color in her landmark book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. In Northern California white men and women were also arrested and incarcerated. In big cities people of color were the big target of law enforcement as they are also the main targets of ICE today. It ain’t fair and it's crying shame.

My experiences in the weed world provided me with a real education in economics and politics. I got out of the biz when I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach American literature in Belgium where I didn't know a single dealer.

When I came home I was hired to teach fulltime and with a pension at Sonoma State University. For a decade I had worried that I’d be arrested and lose my part-time teaching job. Fortunately, I was able to lead three lives as a marijuana grower, a college teacher and as a pot reporter.

After I gave up growing commercially, I continued to grow a modest crop for my own personal use. I even grew it in my backyard at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, but the cold, the fog and the wind didn’t favor marijuana cultivation. I use a salve today that combines THC and CBD and helps with arthritis.

I’m happy it’s legal, happy there aren’t the kinds of mass arrests there once were, still distressed that the White House and war drug warriors lied to the American public about the danger of a flower that humans have relied on for their health and for spiritual harmony for thousands of years.

Did Marx and Engels smoke weed? Probably not. But they might have. After all, Marx said “Nothing human is alien to me.” Weed has rarely been alien to humans, from ancient China and ancient Egypt to Chile and California today.