The Second Greening of America

“Everything is organic and locally grown; I keep all the jars sealed and the strains separated. People are pretty on about that. Most of the strains are between $7 and $10 a gram. The big buds sell as are, I really don’t like to break them up, they’re so beautiful. I’ve got indigoes and oranges and a whole range of body and head hits. It’s a serious thing man”

Brian sells marijuana. A resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, he has sold the drug for decades but does not think of himself as a ‘drug dealer’. “I just supply people with a product they want. Now that weed is kinda legal and the dispensaries have opened, the supply chain has really opened up. Too much is hydroponic though man, people want their weed natural, like, straight from the earth man. Nothing really changed for me though, my customers or suppliers. This has been the cannabis capital of the states for decades man. Its part of Cali.”

The marijuana industry is currently offering major challenge to much of the received wisdom regarding the American economy. California is not the only state to allow some form of legal marijuana but it is the current success story. A title all the more significant due to the state’s enormous debt. Various industries have sprung up around drug and are quickly changing the business and artistic landscape and the changing attitude to drug classification is in fact supporting harder drug legislation and making streets safer.

Despite the various legislations, marijuana is still considered a controlled substance by the federal government at a national level. Even within the legalized states limits are placed on the number of plants which an individual can cultivate – six – and how much an individual can possess – up to 1 ounce in a single container.

Pale green – State with legal medical marijuana

Sludge green – State with decriminalized marijuana possession law

Dark green – States with both medical and decriminalized marijuana laws

Purple – States with full Marijuana legalization

However, a walk around the streets of any part of the Bay Area, from El Cerrito to Embarcadero you will smell the recognizable sweet scent of weed smoke. This is one of the downsides which isn’t being addressed at the moment. Many conservative local and state level lobby groups have claimed that medical marijuana dispensaries are magnets for crime and that a relaxed attitude to soft drugs leads to harder ones – the old ‘gateway’ argument.

Holland has already disproved that theory. When the government decriminalized the drug in 1972 it was part of a policy to treat ‘soft drugs’ – mostly those of natural origin but excluding opiates – separately from ‘hard drugs’. The former is treated as a social issue and legislated against to protect consumers, minimize nuisance and eliminate the black market. This freed up resources for the police to enforce a zero tolerance policy on hard drug trafficking and supply which was praised by Interpol.

Following the voicing of political concerns in America a number of studies took place. In 2010 a Denver Police Department investigation found that crime had fallen by 8.2% in areas around medical marijuana dispensaries. Another investigation in Colorado Springs produced similar results noting significant drops in petty street crime such as vandalism and theft from vehicles. A UCLA study in 2011 found that crime rates had dropped across the most at-risk group, 15-24 year old males. Using ‘routine activity theory’ the researchers found that the delineation within drug legislation and increased sense of ‘guardianship’ had changed the attitudes towards ‘crimes’ and people’s neighborhoods. Some researchers further speculate that it is due to the removal of the gangs from the drugs supply though the report did not officially comment on this.

Only licensed marijuana dispensaries can sell the drug and then only to people who have a valid Medical Marijuana Card but these are readily available to anyone for just $30. Along with this has come a growth in ‘head shops’ which specialize in elaborate pipes and bongs. These shops have sprung up rapidly over the last decade. Mostly owned by independent traders they make most of their profits from the various paraphernalia – the biggest earner and most exciting medium is glassware.

These pipes range in price from $10 to and incredible $30,000. The vast majority are made by individuals or small collectives within whom competition has seen art override simple functionality. Austin’s Salt and Berkeley’s Revere are two examples of the apex of the movement. Their creations are barely recognizable as smoking devices.

“We’re master craftsmen. There is art, great art, in lot of my pieces and across the community but there is also massive skill too.” Dustin Revere told me at his studio. “The whole glass pipe thing is an element of the marijuana scene in the same way that breaking or graffiti is part of the hip hop scene but at the same time it’s an exciting thing in its own right.”

Many studios offer classes and there are other public funded organizations, such as The Crucible in Oakland, teaching young people the skills to one day go into these and other businesses themselves. These are no meager skills too, glassblowing and working is very technical affair with rules and safety at its heart, yet for many young people it is revelation. Suddenly they have skills and are able to create not only beautiful things but saleable, useable products. The documentary Degenerate Art is a fascinating look into this creative and industrial medium.

“It’s a big eye opener to a lot of these younger kids. They see the flames and hot glass and they get scared but when they start doing it they can get creative, make sculptures or jewelry or pipes or anything. It gives them power.” Lance Wright from Newtonian Glass said.

California has many highly respected universities where students pay an average of $32,000 a year for an average of four years to get their degrees. Yet some of the country’s leading glass artists trained for as little as $6,000 and many more of the mediums leaders are self taught.

The current economic crisis is deeply felt amongst America’s recent university graduates with an estimated 1.5 million of the country’s 5.4 million ‘long-term’ unemployed are graduates burdened with debts.

The negative narratives of crime and the positive of business and artistic access, whether you agree with them are not, are the reigning ones. There are increasingly environmental questions surrounding the industry. The legislation on the multitudinous marijuana farms isn’t clear but a story in the LA Times declared, late last year, that marijuana farms were siphoning 18 million gallons of water every year.

There are further allegations of farmers illegally cutting down trees and even grading rugged areas flat causing disruption to water run-off from the state’s sparse rainfall. The effects have even been felt as far away as Yosemite National Park where pesticides and rodenticides have found there way into the food chain, allegedly from Californian marijuana farms.

There is more to marijuana than just smoking though. Its prohibition essentially goes back to face off within American industry at during the interwar years. When Rudolph Diesel invented his engine in 1896 it was planned to run on hemp derivatives. Hemp had also been used for paper across America. The story goes that between Gulf Oil and William Randall Hearst’s lumber and paper interests the once common plant was vilified and criminalized.

Hemp, the non psychoactive train of marijuana is one of the most useful and hardy plant on the planet. Studies have shown that due to the low requirements for herbicides and pesticides hemp paper could be a carbon negative cash crop. The plant has been proved to remove radioactivity from the soil and can stop tumor growth in cancer. As a fibre it can make everything from clothes to car dashboards. As a food stuff it is unrivaled and far less environmentally devastating than soy beans.

Maybe the key to surviving the economic crisis and progress in general is to live in a land of sensi.