When the United States Supreme Court took up the only criminal case on its calendar this year, a local attorney was at counsel table. Arcata attorney Jeffrey Schwartz — husband to the North Coast Journal’s Media Maven, Marcy Burstiner — didn’t argue the petitioner’s case, but was asked to sit in and advise by appellate […]
marijuana
Posted inNews
This is What Legalization Looks Like
A quarter-mile down a gravel driveway from the cluster of mailboxes on Washington state’s Vashon Island, past second-growth conifers and bare alders, James Clark’s homestead could just as easily be in Fieldbrook as on this Manhattan-sized moraine lumped in the middle of Puget Sound. Clark is at work on a project that, for the moment […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Mile High
Pot is legal. At least, in Colorado it is. By now you’ve heard about the lines outside of dispensaries, the eager pot vacationers, the concerns from Colorado’s premier ski resorts about doped-up snowboarders, the PTSD-suffering Iraq vet’s highly publicized purchase; it’s been a big week for national weed news. Reports say that dispensary owners in […]
Posted inNews
Top 10 Stories of 2013
Summing up the tumult and transformations of a year in Humboldt County with only 10 stories is impossible. Collected here are some — definitely not all — of the events that stayed with us. For more on these stories, go to northcoastjournal.com. The Fires The communities tucked along the rivers in our mountains know fire. […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Systematically Misled
Gil Kerlikowske is worried about our nation’s teenagers. Or so he claims. As the Obama administration’s drug czar, he says he’s concerned that kids today just aren’t scared enough of marijuana. Last week, Kerlikowske spoke soberly to the media about the latest survey from the National Institute of Drug Abuse. He blamed softening attitudes (read: […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
No Growth
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, […]
Posted inNews
Body Found On Murder Mountain Identified
A body found buried near Jewitt Ranch Road in late November has been identified as Garret Rodriguez, a San Diego man who was reported missing in April. Rodriguez told his father he was coming to Humboldt County to work on a marijuana farm in the SoHum area known as “Murder Mountain.” The identification confirms rumors that […]
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 inNews
Probing Pot
Ten years ago, the premise for a marijuana institute would have been laughed off of even Humboldt State University’s fertile and notoriously weed-friendly campus. Even one year ago, despite changing political climes and the increasing call for daylight on the North Coast’s shady marijuana industry, the academic minds who created the institute were unsure if […]
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 […]