Marijuana was by no means the first boom crop to delight my home county of Humboldt, here, in Northern California, five hours drive from San Francisco up Route 101. Leaving aside the boom of appropriating land from the Indians, there was the timber boom, which crested in the 1950s, when Douglas fir in the Mattole Valley went south to frame the housing tracts of Los Angeles.

In the early 1970s new settlers – fugitives from the 1960s and city life – would tell visiting friends, “Bring marijuana,” and then disconsolately try to get high from the male leaves. Growers here would spend nine months coaxing their plants, only to watch, amid the mists and rains of fall, hated mold destroy the flowers.

By the end of the decade, the cultivators were learning how to grow. There was an enormous variety of seeds – Afghan, Thai, Burmese. The price crept up to $400 a pound, and the grateful settlers, mostly dirt poor, rushed out to buy a washing machine, a propane fridge, a used VW, a solar panel, a 12-volt battery. Even a three-pound sale was a relatively big deal.

There was a side benefit, in the form of decent organic vegetables. The back-to-the-land folk of 1974-79 were learning to grow pot at same time as all other vegetables. Just as the early pot was puny and weak, so were the vegetables. The organic/natural food store in Eureka typically stocked baskets with five withered carrots, some sad looking turnips. A potato farmer once told me that in that era he took the ugliest, most knobbly and pitted potatoes and threw them in the “organic” bin. But, just as the pot boomed in quality, so did the vegetables. The local coop in Arcata became a vast enterprise – and the present “Whole Earth” emporia, with their piles of vegetables more lush than anything in Renoir, parallel the astounding transformation of the pot flower.

The 1980s brought further advances in productivity through the old Hispanic/Mexican technique of ensuring that female buds are not pollinated, hence the name sin semilla – without seeds. By 1981, the price for the grower was up, around $1,600 a pound. The $100 bill was becoming a familiar local unit of cash transactions. In 1982, a celebrated grow here, in the Mattole Valley, yielded its organizer, an Ivy League grad, a harvest of a thousand pounds of processed marijuana, an amazing logistical triumph. Fifteen miles up the valley from where I write, tiny Honeydew became fabled as the marijuana capital of California, if not America.

That same year, the “war on drugs” rolled into action, executed in Humboldt County by platoons of sheriff’s deputies, DEA agents, roadblocks by the California Highway Patrol. The National Guard combed the King Range. Schoolchildren gazed up at helicopters hovering over the valley scanning for marijuana gardens. War, in this case, brought relatively few casualties and many beneficiaries into the local economy: federal and state assistance for local law enforcement; more prosecutors in the DA’s office; a commensurately expanding phalanx of defense lawyers; a buoyant housing market for growers washing their money into legality; $200 a day and more for women trimming the dried plants.

A bust meant at least a year of angst for the defendant and at least $25,000 in legal fees, though rarely any significant jail time. All the same, it did usually produce a felony conviction, several years of probation, and all the restrictions of being an ex-felon. Checking that little box, “have you ever been charged or convicted of a felony,” eliminates many government jobs, like teaching school or government loans. There are 32 people serving life sentences in California on a third-strike marijuana conviction. In 2008, 1,499 were in prison on marijuana convictions; in 2007, 4,925 in county jails. (Nationally, between 1990 to 2005, there were 7,200,000 marijuana related arrests – 1 out of every 18 felony convictions.)

By now, the cattle ranchers were growing too. Along the little county road in front of my house, where once you’d see battered old pickups rattling along, now late model stretch-cab Fords, Chevys and Dodges thundered by. Ranch yards sported new dump trucks and backhoes. Dealerships were selling big trucks and Toyota 4Runners, purchased with cash. By the mid-1990s, the price of bud was up around $2,400 a pound.

Best of all, the war on drugs was a sturdy price support in our thinly populated, remote Emerald Triangle of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties. Marijuana remained an outlaw crop. Then, in 1996, came California’s Compassionate Use Act, the brainchild of Dennis Peron, who returned from Vietnam in 1969 with two pounds of marijuana in his duffel bag and became a dealer in San Francisco. In 1990, when his companion was dying of AIDS, Peron began his drive for legal medical use of marijuana.

It was the launch point for greenhouses, big enough to spot on Google Earth, plus diesel generators in the hills cycling 24/7, and lists of customers in the clubs down south in San Francisco and LA. By 2005, with increasingly skilled production, the price was cresting between $2,500 and even $3,500 a pound for the grower. These days, in San Francisco and LA (the latter still fractious legal terrain), perfectly grown and nicely packaged indoor pot – four grams for $60, i.e., $6,700 a pound at the retail level – can be inspected with magnifying glasses in tastefully appointed salesrooms.

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The age of Obama saw Attorney General Eric Holder tell the federal DEA to give low priority to harassment of valid medical marijuana clubs in states – fourteen so far, plus Washington, D.C. – that give marijuana some form of legality. Remember, in the U.S.A., there is federal law and there are state laws. Federal law trumps state law, but it’s still up to the U.S. attorney general to decide on priorities in enforcement. On March 25, 2010, California officials announced that 523,531 signatures – almost 100,000 more than required – had been validated in support of a state initiative to legalize marijuana and allow it to be sold and taxed, no small fiscal allurement in budget-stricken California. (Many growers, zealous not to get on the wrong side of the IRS and the state tax board, declare “agricultural” revenues in some form dependant on the creativity of their accountant or lawyer. After all, to get a bank loan, a college loan, you need a healthy looking returnh. The feds and the state are happy to take the money and, as a rule, not to ask questions. The state utility, PG&E, is similarly happy to rake in large sums from growers using huge amounts of power to run their indoor grow lights and electric fans.

The California initiative will be on the November ballot. Various polls last year indicated such a measure enjoyed a 55 percent approval rating. It will certainly be a close run thing, though old people, unable to afford prescription painkillers, are turning with increasing enthusiasm to marijuana. Call the California ballot the second shoe dropping in the “health reform” drama.

People here, in Humboldt County, reckon legalization is not far off and that it spells the end of the 30-year marijuana boom, which was under stress anyway because of one of the oldest problems in agriculture – oversupply. The local weekly, the North Coast Journal, has made a somewhat comic effort to construct a silver lining for the county. It talks hopefully of branding the Humboldt “terroir,” of tours of “marijuanaries.” Dream on. Down south there’s more sun, more water, and very capable Mexicans ready to tend and trim for $15 an hour. The smarter growers reckon they have two years at most. Here, on the North Coast, the price of marijuana will drop, the price of land will drop, the trucks will stop being late model. There’ll be less money floating around.

The New Deal began with an end to prohibition of the sale of alcohol across the United States. The individual small producers of bourbon – some good, a lot awful, or downright poison – shut down, and the big liquor producers took over, successfully pushing for illegalization of marijuana in 1937. How long will the small producers of gourmet marijuana last before the big companies run them off, pushing through the sort of regulatory “standards” that are now punishing small organic farmers?

杂种政治与美国思想

Tax day found CounterPuncher JoAnn Wypijewski stranded in Columbia, South Carolina. “I went up to the state capitol to check out the local Tea Party. It – the Tea Party, that is — was of moderate size, blazingly white. On the capitol steps, facing the Confederate flag on the grounds below, some anarchists sat with a prominent sign, “End the welfare-warfare state.” In the shade at the edge of the proceedings, I fell into conversation with a bandy, blue-eyed man who wore a cap that said, “Gun Owners for Paul.” He had terrible teeth and a long white beard reminiscent of O, Brother, Where Art Thou? and said he was 65. He spoke in a high-pitched country drawl, a matter-of-fact style with a wild fringe of humor.”

In our latest newsletter we feature JoAnn’s riveting and highly entertaining interview. Some samples of grassroots political philosophy outside the Beltway in the year 2010:

斯图尔特：现在，罗恩保罗：我在初选中投票给他，因为他代表和平，这是美国人想要的，也是他们投票给奥巴马的原因。 他们不想重新分配财富。 他们想要的只是没有战争！

JW：所以你反对伊拉克和阿富汗的战争。

S：好的，现在让我告诉你一些会让听这个的人大吃一惊的事。 我们不是生活在民主国家，甚至不是被称为共和制的代议制民主国家。 我们生活在一个媒体机构中。

JW：意味着媒体？

S: Right. Most people vote according to how they are influenced by the media. Ever since back in the Fifties I could read the newspapers, I didn’t care who won the elections, I was not political, I never voted for 30 or 40 years, but I could tell who was gonna win the elections. All I had to do was open the newspaper, The New York Times, and I’d say, well, look, they favor Johnson more than they do Goldwater; Johnson’s gotta win. I didn’t know why, but ever since then I have been thinkin’ about it. Finally, I figured it out.The people that own the media determine who’s gonna get elected because most of the idiots out here are just gonna turn on that TV; they don’t have the sense to turn on the Internet and find a different viewpoint. And the people that own the seven or eight big media conglomerates, they start at the primary level, so, by the time you get to the national level – like Obama against McCain – they’ve already been vetted on both sides. It doesn’t matter which one wins, so, in the end, if we had voted for McCain, we’d have gotten the same war that we got from Obama. I called up a radio station before Obama got elected, I said, “He’s not gonna end the war. I know who owns the media, and I know why they put him in there, and they want us in Iraq.”

我的祖先是狂热的基督徒，疯狂的基督徒，因为没有其他类型的，因为他们被骗了，你不可能一辈子都被骗而不发疯。 这只是垃圾进，垃圾出。

所以，我们是一个被骗的人。 我们是一群疯狂的人，他们相信各种没有证据、事实、任何东西支持的事情，因为犹太人有智慧——你知道，保罗在骑马时差点从马上摔下来。杀死基督徒犹太人； 他说，我的上帝，如果我们能改变这些人的信仰，他们就会寄钱到耶路撒冷！ 天才的大招，从那时起他们就一直在这样做！

是的，我明白我们为什么要在伊拉克作战，因为以色列想把所有这些人轰炸回石器时代。 恐怖分子来到这里的原因是因为他们正在被殖民，就像美洲印第安人与我的祖先作战一样，因为他们正在夺取他们的土地。 这说得通。 但是犹太媒体谈论恐怖主义，说它与巴勒斯坦没有任何关系。 这是因为他们讨厌我们的自由、各种谎言和美国人民：是的，是的，犹太人是对的。 嗯，要保护以色列，传道人这样说，上帝的选民，哈利路亚以色列。 我想去天堂，当弥赛亚出现时，我会成为他的人。

JW：那么，你是异教徒吗？

S：我崇拜上帝，我的祖先崇拜了 40,000-50,000 年的同一个上帝，我的上帝就是生命。

Also in this latest terrific, subscriber-only newsletter, we print “Hu Jia’s Imprisonment and the Mockery of Citizens’ Rights in the Chinese People’s Republic”, a savage indictment of recent developments in the CPR by Chaohua Wang, who has been in political exile from China ever she escaped in 1989, having been a leader of the left student faction during the Tienanmen demonstrations. Beginning with the fate of human rights activist Hu Jia, Chaohua excavates recent alarming trends in China and describes what she calls “a qualitative shift”:

“如今，谈论中国特色不仅为当局服务，以安抚动荡的社会，而且以更激进的方式为有钱有势的人谋取暴利。 这种转变的一个明显方面是政府处理社会动荡和政治异议。 也就是说，在政府篡夺中国人民公民权利的决心上。 当然，社会动荡和政治异议并不相同，北京很清楚。 但党对这两者的态度几乎同时变得强硬起来。 这种强硬背后的关键事件是 2008 年 XNUMX 月的北京奥运会和一个月后雷曼兄弟倒闭引发的世界金融危机……。

“……中国经济在全球的重要性似乎剥夺了其领导人任何自我反省的能力，往往在没有丝毫幽默感的独裁表演中达到讽刺意味。 …

“…What has changed from bad to worse is the growing indifference of the Party even to keeping up appearances. Recent cases combine the outrageous with the absurd. For example, socially and politically abused people in China tend to seek redress by petitioning higher levels of government against their immediate abusers. At the annual session of the National People’s Congress and the National Political Consultancy Conference last month, proposals were circulated among the organizers, to the effect that petitioners should be arrested if they shouted slogans or staged sit-ins outside government offices. The reason? Respectable officials need proper rest and shouldn’t be disturbed by such unruly elements….

“......去年，四川省会成都的一名妇女开始自焚以示抗议，当时拆迁人员包围了她的三层楼房屋并开始用推土机将其夷为平地。 她的极端举动并没有阻止他们。 当她被紧急送往医院时，她的家人被禁止在她生命的最后几天见到她，新闻媒体也被禁止报道此案……

“……这是中国社会最惊人的新发展之一：受害者变成了国家的敌人和法律的敌人。”

The articles by JoAnn and Chaohua are important testimonies. Let me urge you to 现在订阅！

经济如何迷失

我们很自豪地发布经济如何迷失，保罗·克雷格·罗伯茨 (Paul Craig Roberts) 灼热的作品，证明了美国经济如何被黑帮精英俘虏。 罗伯茨为我们提供了史上最短、最清晰的新世纪经济学纲要。

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