‘Too High to Fail’ explores the ‘green economy’ of cannabis
Staff Report
Imagine this response from law enforcement: “Two years ago, I found you with cannabis, you went to jail. Today, I see you’re just more farmers in our community, like I see at the farmers’ market with my wife on Saturdays.”
Randy Johnson, a sergeant with the Mendocino County (California) Sheriff’s Department who witnessed the transformation marijuana made to his county, is just one of the many society-spanning figures who populate Doug Fine’s new book, Too High to Fail. This account of America’s sustainable and growing cannabis industry sums up the rapidly-evolving “green economy” and changing attitudes on all sides of the issue. The results have bearing on the role of government in all of our lives, from spending to civil liberties, and much more.
In Too High to Fail (Gotham Books, August 2012), Fine moves his family halfway across the country to a place where a small group of resourceful and determined individuals are creating a roadmap for America’s economic future. Spurred by journalistic curiosity and a dawning awareness of the role cannabis (aka marijuana, hemp) played in his own family life, Fine searches for the model locale that could demonstrate the benefit of decriminalizing cannabis — an event that could simultaneously tap a multi-billion-dollar resource for the American and world economies and provide medical relief to millions. He found it in Mendocino County, California, a “northern coastal paradise” where a small group of farmers are legally growing cannabis for medical purposes and creating a template for sustainable farming.
From greenhouse to outdoor crop, through an extended California rainy season and federal raids, Fine follows the Mendocino growing season and, in particular, “Lucille,” one farmer’s chosen plant, for nine months until, at last, she is harvested, dried and trimmed. Fine accompanies the grower as he delivers a jar of Lucille’s flowers to an elderly husband and wife, who use the doctor-recommended cannabis for chemotherapy-related appetite stimulation.
Relying on the journalist’s tool of “following the money,” Fine spells out how the end to cannabis prohibition is a threat to many influential industries that benefit from the ongoing war: pharmaceuticals, banking, the private prison industry and the prison guard lobby (not to mention the Drug Enforcement Administration).
Ultimately, Fine concludes, in a narrative that reads like wildly humorous investigative journalism, the benefits of ending the 40-year, trillion-dollar Drug War, are particularly the enormous potential such a decision has to revive the American economy and cripple the drug cartels. As Mendocino Sheriff Tom Allman puts it: “I was raised to believe these people were ruining our county. Now, I think they’re helping save it.”
Local law enforcement gets it. The question is, will the open, taxpaying farmers Fine follows avoid federal prosecution at the tail end of the War on Drugs?
Doug Fine is an investigative journalist, author and solar-powered New Mexican goat herder. He has reported from five continents for The Washington Post, Wired, Salon, High Times, The New York Times, Outside, NPR and US News & World Report, and he has a regular column in New Mexico magazine. For Too High to Fail, Fine has been interviewed by MSNBC, CBS News, the BBC, Conan O’Brien, The Huffington Post and The New York Times, among others. Fine is the author of two previous books, Not Really an Alaskan Mountain Man and Farewell, My Subaru. Visit www.dougfine.com for more details.
Editor’s note: Both Colorado and Washington state approved the legalization of recreational marijuana in their states in the Nov. 6 general election.
From the Nov. 14-20, 2012, issue
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3 Comments
Perhaps the joke of the mystery as to why Matt Cohen and Doug Fine are so vehemently suppressing the messenger behind the green curtain, who discovered that a blatant lengthy help wanted classified ad was placed by Northstone Organics, in the Ukiah Daily Journal a week before widely publicized federal bust of Northstone’s processing and central cultivation facility, is that both of Matt and Doug actually wanted the eradication for the publicity it would bring to their true agenda of non drug tainted financial success.
Doug had been writing a book on Matt’s project, from the start of seed germination to distribution with the collective dispensary contribution sales, so Doug wasn’t making drug money, but would be keenly interested in the myth perpetuated by the factual omission in Doug’s book, echoing the media myth commentary from around the nation, of reporters who did not find the published classified ad smoking gun.
For perhaps a year’s time, Matt had been doing extensive public interviews, with video segments appearing repeatedly on national television programs. Rumors persist Matt was probably paid $10K each for some of the interviews which were televised, as that supposedly was the sum offered by several media video crews to another Mendocino dispensary operator who chose to remain unpublicized.
Matt’s money is clearly not drug related as it is clean from the televised presentations, and thus he remains a free and clear martyr of the medical cannabis movement.
So there is a certain irony, in that Matt now represents the medical marijuana Emerald Growers Association which supports the new AB 2284 (Chesbro) Irrigation bill, which if implemented by any County Board of Supervisors in California, after the first of the year 2013, which would allow a peace officer to stop all vehicles for inspection, which are visibly transporting irrigation pipe over any unpaved road, public or private, if LE has a legal right to be on that road.
The rational of the Emerald Growers Association, appears to be that their water sources are legitimate, so they don’t mind diminished civil rights for others transporting supplies who could be doing it for illegal growing, because their own growing is legal.
But are not the EGA members, in a sense, ducks in the same pot of soup under certain threats of illegality, except of course for the legit media stars, Doug and Matt, so why would any of them support traffic stops for investigating movement of water pipe on unpaved roads that are not on public nor timber resource lands? Is it like no honor among thieves? Did Matt and Doug sure pulled a fast one on this, and hoodwinked almost everyone, lock, stock, and barrel?
I think is going to be more people not working because they are going to be high all the time.
I don’t get the logic advocates of legalizing pot say it is because the current laws fail and cannot stop flow of drugs etc. They claim by legalizing it we could get millions in revenue etc. People who smoke pot are anti-establishment they skirt the laws. Why would you think they would want to pay taxes? If they skirt the law now they will skirt the tax on pot. How can you tell the difference between pot that has had a tax on it and one that hasn’t? Under the new proposals how can you tell pot bought legally and one that hasn’t? Enforcement fails now advocates claim why won’t it in the future?