Thought this was interesting:
Joey Burger was 14 when his naturalist parents moved from Santa Cruz to settle in the coastal forest of Humboldt County. Local hippies and homesteaders welcomed the new kid in the woods. They schooled him in the regional art — growing marijuana.
“It was never looked upon as a bad thing,” Burger said.
Except before the fall harvests, when helicopters full of narcotics officers whipped through the sky. Neighbors rushed “to call their friends to make sure they were OK,” he said.
These days, it isn’t just helicopters that frighten Humboldt County’s pot culture.
America’s most renowned bastion of illicit marijuana growing is threatened by cavernous, city-taxed cultivation warehouses soon to be licensed in Oakland. It is alarmed by cities from La Puente to Berkeley to Sacramento that approved taxes on dispensaries or endorsed medical marijuana cultivation, sanctioning a weed economy wider and more competitive than ever.
So now Humboldt seeks to save itself by going legit.
In an area where marijuana growers typically evade attention, Burger is the public voice of the new Humboldt Growers Association. Aligned with a Sacramento lobbyist, it is working for county approval to license and tax outdoor pot plantations of up to 40,000 square feet.
Maybe if we can convince right-wingers that allowing legal pot growth is a victory for the free market, we can finally legalize pot?
BTW- in an era when news is just so poorly done, McClatchy continues to stand out in front of the pack. I just really enjoy their work.