We lost the Emerald Cup. Not just the competition but the whole event. Last year, for the first time, the annual Emerald Cup Competition and Exposition was held here in Humboldt County, and since it launched a decade ago the event had never been held outside the Emerald Triangle — until last weekend. This year, […]
The Week in Weed
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Branded
Earlier this month, the Sacramento Bee quoted Humboldt County Supervisor Rex Bohn pushing to promote Humboldt County’s weed cachet post-legalization. “Although he’s no advocate of his county’s most infamous product,” the Bee said, “he is lobbying to make it a brand.” Savvy entrepreneurs have been doing that for years, and not just with the plant […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Pot POWs
When a mega-grow gets busted in Humboldt County, it makes a splash in local media — photos of lush greenhouses, irrigation pipes and bricks of processed weed, plus names and numbers (money, pounds, plants) that read like sports stats. What we don’t see are the repercussions of those busts, what becomes of the growers after […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Sticky Stigma
How many of Humboldt County’s 134,623 residents are involved in the weed industry? Twenty percent? Thirty? Half? Last week, a pot cop working in the county to our south suggested that the figure is even higher than that. Rich Russell, commander of Mendocino County’s major crimes task force, raised eyebrows and a few hackles by […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Liberation at Last
Humboldt County residents sure love state and federal law enforcement. And rightly so. Some readers are probably too young to remember this, but 30 years back, the largest law enforcement task force in the United States — the multi-agency Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, or CAMP — was deployed in California with the goal of eliminating […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Smoke Organic
This week’s cover story goes digging around in the contaminated dirt of a trespass marijuana grow site deep in the Trinity National Forest. Last August, law enforcement confiscated more than 5,000 plants at the site, which was likely maintained by five or six men. Only one was arrested — a 21-year-old Mexican man who’s already […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Rules for the Tipping Point
As the Journal was going to press Tuesday night, the Eureka City Council was poised to reconsider the city’s medical marijuana ordinance, a set of regulations that for the past two years has been locked up and ignored like a trapped skunk — dangerous, irksome and waiting to be dealt with. The ordinance was adopted […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Stalk Market
On my trip to New York last week I was reminded of two seemingly obvious facts. First, you shouldn’t fly in and out of our recently rechristened “California [Fogbound] Redwood Coast — Humboldt County [Crapshoot] Airport” unless you have a day to spare on either end of your trip. And second, marijuana is everywhere. Like […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
That Darn Cat
Regular weed columnist Ryan Burns is in New York this week, and he declined my suggestion — in the name of investigative journalism — to pack some of Humboldt’s finest on his cross-country flight to test just how lenient the TSA’s gropey screeners are (see the Oct. 10 “Week in Weed”). So instead, I’m here […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
The High Court
You could argue that nine grown-ups who sit around all day in silky black robes always look ridiculous, but the U.S. Supreme Court looked especially foolish last week when it decided not to hear an appeal of the federal government’s classification of marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug — that is, a substance with no […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Land of Oz
It’s marijuana harvesting season in Humboldt County, which means, among other things, that would-be trimmers are loitering in Garberville, sticky bills are flowing into local cash registers and law enforcement is making ginormous drug busts every day or two. A couple weeks ago, for example, local sheriff’s deputies and the DEA-funded Cannabis Eradication and Reclamation […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Green-eyed Cops
We get a lot of press releases here at the Journal, a steady drip of emails announcing everything from ribbon-cuttings to dance recitals to (let’s see what’s at top of my inbox here) a Holiday Gift Guide pitch for German-made electric irons. (Eat your heart out, Clark Kent.) Our favorites by far are law enforcement […]