the town dandy / By Scott Brown

Legalize it?

(June 7, 2007)  The longhairs are at it again, trying to ruin the economic base of Humboldt County. As local anti-environmentalist gadfly Stephen Lewis of Rio Dell put it recently in the Eureka Reporter, the goal of the enviros “has been consistent if never acknowledged: the destruction of corporate-based industries in Humboldt County.” Take that argument to its logical conclusion: First went logging, then fishing, now the cultural elite ruling the Plaza in Arcata is gunning for HumCo’s third great export — marijuana.

How else can you explain thousands of “4/20” protesters gathering in late April to advocate for the legalization of pot? If you need further proof of the conspiracy against the Humboldt Nation, look no further than the “legalize it” crowd. Don’t let these mellow protesters fool you. Pot pumps $100 million into local businesses each year, and that’s a conservative estimate. But making it legal could kick out the third leg from the teetering stool that is Humboldt’s natural resource-driven economy.

I wondered what would happen here if Mary Jane’s sweet buds could be sold like cigarettes at every convenience store in the land. I turned to local economic expert and HSU professor Erick Eschker, the director of the Humboldt Economic Index.

“More than likely, we’d lose our comparative advantage if it were legalized,” he told me. “It’s very likely that big agribusiness would get into it, and [marijuana production] would all move to the Central Valley. Some people say we have good growers up here, but I think they’d move. Land attracts human capital.”

Eschker said that Humboldt County’s economic advantage for marijuana cultivation is its remoteness and a lack of law enforcement. (I don’t want to get him in trouble with the cops, but you have to admit that when the district attorney publicly states he won’t prosecute anyone with a medical marijuana card, 99 or fewer plants and less than three pounds of bud, the potent weed is basically legal here in quantities small enough not to attract the attention of the feds.)

Cannabis, a native of the tropics, thrives on lots of light and heat, resources in short supply north of the redwood curtain. The cultivation guru Jorge Cervantes, the author of Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower’s Bible, said in a phone interview that he thought that marijuana would do well commercially anywhere corn was successful — and you know how much corn we grow in Humboldt.

As an indoor crop, pot is an ecological disaster. Cervantes estimates that a 100-square-foot garden requires 50 gallons of fertilizer-laced water per week. That’s a lot of runoff. Then there’s the carbon dioxide. Marijuana thrives on high CO 2 levels during the flowering phase. Cervantes said that 700 to 1,500 parts-per-million of CO 2 is ideal, compared with the 380 ppm average for outside air. One grow website helpfully observes, “CO 2 is cheaply produced by burning natural gas.” You might as well move to the North Pole and start melting the ice cap with a hair dryer. It’s hard to imagine legal indoor cultivation passing muster with the environmentalists in Humboldt County.

When asked how much economic damage legalization would do, Eschker said he had no idea. No one has ever done a study of the underground economy in Humboldt County. (This Town Dandy suspects no one really wants to know the answer.) One of Eschker’s students outlined a methodology for calculating it, however, and Eschker would like to undertake the project. The only problem is money. “If you know anyone who can help fund some of this research, let me know,” Eschker said.

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