How did Humboldt County get beat to the punch on this one? (Insert lazy stoner joke here, if you must.)
According to a story from the quarterly magazine Modern Farmer, Northern California’s first marijuana farmers’ market is being run from a big purple warehouse outside the City of Sonoma. And the venue is helping to spark “a new demand for pot grown locally, sustainably, in small batches, outdoors, and rather cheaply,” the story says.
Such markets are legal in the state (with proper documentation) but still verboten by the feds, whose ostrich stance on the issue is looking sillier by the day.
Reporter David Downs describes the Sonoma scene, which includes such familiar Humboldt tropes as old school reggae, “plaid-clad stoners” and “an elderly hippie couple” selling pot-laced hard candy.
On the day that Downs visited the market, the star vendor was a man in his late 50s offering potent buds “as thick as a child’s arm.” And wouldn’t you know it?
“The grower won’t give his name, but says he works outdoors in the Humboldt hills … .”
This article appears in Re-Imagining CR.
What really erks me, are the out of towner’s that come to Humboldt to grow large amounts of marijuana. Both outdoors and indoors blatantly with in city ordinances. They bring the ugly big city vibes of their corrupt ness to rural down home roots esk towns of Humboldt county. It blows my mind that these young guys come up here and think they can clear historic landslide areas for their grows & trash areas that have been used to neighboring houses for years. Much like that ugly orange ish stain site of a warehouse that sits up off the hill in Blue Lake,Ca. No fence high enough around your property can keep out google images- not even the massive grow in Blue Lake. Anyone that knows how to use the website at the Humboldt County building and zoning site, can look up any parcel in the county to see what the corrupt ness of the gold rush growers are doing to the land around them & the places they’re destroying and how it can affect YOU!! It’s a great site that lets you look back to as far as 2005 I Beleive. I was at Wood Stock and Monterey pop festivals, I’ve spent time in Amsterdam with some of the finest growers in the world, & have spent years in politics, there is nothing wrong with smoking a little grass from time to time for what ever it is that it helps you with- Though I don’t think it’s no longer nessacary for large or semi large operations to take place in Humboldt nor the rest of the west coast. It is time to legalize so every person can plant one plant instead of one family planting a hillside!