WEED DEALINGS - A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CALIFORNIA POT TRADE

My name is Zachary Granger Moldof. I'm named after a cocaine smuggler. My dad started practicing as a criminal defense attorney in South Florida in the late 70s, and thus associated himself with some wild dudes. He named me after one of the wildest ones, he claimed, to add a little adventure to my life. Regardless of how effective this was, I grew up well aware that there's lots of money to be made from illegal drugs, as well as severe legal repercussions (not to mention being robbed, lit on fire, etc).

When I realized I probably wasn't going to be able to get a PhD studying the history of sampling and hip-hop's place in avant-garde music I had to decide what to do with my life. After waiting tables in New York for three years, I figured out a much better option: In this day and age a person can move to California (as well as an increasing host of other states) and legally grow and sell weed. That means that an artist can split their time between making art, and growing plants. And, working for yourself instead of someone else is that new new shit, so I was convinced. I got to planning.

According to some figures there are roughly 1,000 medicinal marijuana dispensaries in LA. I figured it was a good market to start in, but what I didn't realize from afar was that Los Angeles' City Council has been notoriously out to lunch when it comes to regulating medical marijuana. This had led to an unregulated boom in the amount of dispensaries, which has in turn sparked a glut of community complaints, both on legitimate grounds (dispensaries operating in close proximity to rehab clinics, and schools) and less-than (dispensaries that will bring gang warfare to our streets). Unfortunately, the community concern made its way back to the unresponsive local government, and their response has been a new zoning regulation designed to limit the potential operating spaces for dispensaries. These limits may have secured a few crusading bureaucrats reelection, but they've also turned LA into a hostile environment for entrepreneurs trying to get a foothold in the weed industry. That still feels weird to type with a straight face.

Where Los Angeles has more or less shut itself off from the weed sector, Oakland's led the movement in regulating the industry and become a seedbed for new business models. Oakland is home to Harborside Health Center, the US's highest grossing dispensary; the headquarters for Americans for Safe Access, one of the country's biggest medical marijuana advocacy groups; pot-centric Oaksterdam University, the brainchild of longtime medical marijuana advocate Richard Lee; and the first insurance agency to offer policies catering to the medical marijuana industry. In terms of pot, the other city by the bay has established itself as a model municipality. Politicians such as Rebecca Kaplan, Nate Miley, and Nancy Nadel have worked with an able-bodied group of industry professionals to regulate and tax marijuana. Oakland began formally regulating dispensaries in 2004 with Measure Z, six years before the state of California was ready to vote on whether or not this was a good idea. Basically, sparing some grand moral anti-reefer campaign, Oakland is the future of smoking weed in America. If you want to see what the industry is going to look like as it spreads across the country, come to Oakland.

The new legal industry is rising up from a grey market that's been growing in California since the 70s. The marijuana that we smoke today didn't exist before California enthusiasts began cultivating different, stronger strains of cannabis. While most of their efforts centered on getting a better buzz for your buck, their earliest innovations were born of necessity.

In its natural state, cannabis sativa will only fully mature and flower in warmer climates (unlike cannabis indica, a different plant indigenous to seasonal climates). Thus, the earliest cultivators were restricted to Southern California where they cultivated and crossbred different cannabis sativa strains from accessible tropical locales such as Columbia, Jamaica, Mexico, or Hawaii. Cannabis sativa creates a high that is energetic, and psychedelic. The product that serious cultivators offered was of a higher grade than naturally occurring marijuana, it produced a stronger high, and its effects were consistent. These cultivators were professionals--they cross-bred and back-bred specific phenotypes to retain and sublimate characteristics of the plant, slowly tailoring marijuana to their desires. As their work turned out consistent results, the weed high gradually changed to meet their standards, but marijuana was still a ways off from what we smoke it as today. Despite variance among plant genetics, there was still a lack in sufficient diversity. That diversity would come in the form of cannabis indica. Converse to sativa's racing psychedelic highs, cannabis indica creates a buzz that is sedative and corporeal.

The work of early cultivators began to fetch a higher price, and, as cultivators earned more money, many headed north to flee overactive police forces and bought properties in remote areas in Trinity, Humboldt, and Mendocino Counties. This area came to be known as the Emerald Triangle, the first proper cannabis-producing region in the USA and a collection of ecosystems sharing consistent soil, sun, and weather conditions. It's consistently produced the bulk of marijuana smoked in the United States.

The cultivators' northern migration coincided with the introduction of cannabis indica. Cannabis indica is indigenous to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other locales with a seasonal climate. Unlike sativa it comes to full maturity and flowers later in the season, which meant it was perfect for the cool climates of the Emerald Triangle. When growers began crossbreeding indicas and sativas, what emerged was the kind of weed we recognize today, and as they settled in the Emerald Triangle the beginnings of the industry took shape.

The Triangle continues to supply a great deal of the marijuana smoked in this country. It also continues to employ a massive migratory workforce for its harvest. A modest farm with 60 or so plants would only take 3 or 4 people to maintain for the entire season, but once the marijuana is harvested the the time-consuming processing requires another 7-15 people to make it worthwhile. So growers hire a bunch of seasonal workers every year to help process their weed. These workers are called trimmers and they're normally paid per pound of processed marijuana. They break down the branches of the plant, sort the buds, and then trim the usable buds to remove excess plant matter. Some trimmers are residents, and work year round for indoor growers, but most come for the harvest and then leave. As regulation proceeds to acknowledge the various aspects of this industry, the farms and trimming are one of the last unregulated sectors. Aside from caps on how many plants each person can grow, at this point no one is legislating farms at all.

Right now the field is wide open, and young capable people like you and me can carve out a future for ourselves and prepare for the biggest economic boom our generation has seen.

ZACH G. MOLDOF
twitter.com/imzachg Zach works for the medical marijuana industry and writes about that for that clothing company Mishka's blog. He will be writing about weedly matters for us on the reg starting now.