The Status of Marijuana in Southern Oregon

Wines, Wineries, Vineyards, Wine Tastings, and Wine Tourism are all high status.

Marijuana is not high status.  Yet.

Wine and marijuana are symbols.  They represent something bigger: an impression.   Fancy wine means status and sophistication.  Marijuana means something different.  Stoned to some, medicine to others.  It isn't rational but it is the reality.   

Regular readers of this blog understand that its major focus  is political messaging, both the overt conscious communication of ideas and the much more powerful body language and action signals that people send out.  Attending multiple political events live and up close made evident to me that politics is much more like performance, or a staged contest such as a beauty pageant or a reality-TV elimination game, or professional wrestling, than it is a rational evaluation of policies.   I understand a great many people care deeply about policy detail, and they tend to work as lobbyists or journalists or public affairs professionals on behalf of interest groups.  But it is my sense that the great majority of voters are moved by big signals of affinity.  Voters get a sense of the person, and they vote on the basis of that sense and impression and stereotype. 

People have an impression of wine and marijuana and what each signify just as they had a sense of Trump and Hillary and what each of them signified.   Trump meant domination, for better or worse; Hillary meant experienced, again for better or worse.

Wine and marijuana, too, each have their flash-impression meanings.

From High Times magazine

Small boutique vineyards and wineries have a social meaning--high status.   Marijuana growing has a low status meaning, for now.

 In the past 20 years there has been an explosion of wineries in Southern Oregon.  It is a wine region with hot summers, cool wet winters, and the climate and soil to grow excellent wines of some varieties.  We are not Napa, but Southern Oregon wines win awards.

Award-winning is part of the wine allure.  Prosperous people buy rural acreage to put in vineyards, with their house on a bluff looking down onto their grapes.  The State of Oregon places official roadside signs directing people to vineyards. High prestige charity events take place in vineyards or inside wineries next to vineyards.  Vineyards are a wedding venue.  Class reunions take place under tents at vineyards.  

Oregon likes the association with wine

Vineyards and wineries are high status places.  

Let me remind readers of the obvious:  alcohol is an addictive psychoactive substance which has been widely abused and was illegal in America in the lifetimes of millions of Americans.   There was a fifty year war on alcohol via a temperance movement which culminated in a Constitutional Amendment allowing its national prohibition, which passed.  The war on alcohol had unexpected consequences: it was more dangerous illegal than legal. Prohibition was repealed.

Vineyards and wineries take themselves seriously.  They don't just make a wine.  They have specialty labels, a kind of coat of arms.  They reflect pride of place and ownership. They have visitor centers.  They have tasting rooms.  They even post a Philosophy.  

Meanwhile, marijuana is in transition in Oregon.  There are thousands of grow sites in Southern Oregon.  People who claim experience and authority with the marijuana markets say that Southern Oregon marijuana is a very superior growing area: we are the "Napa Valley" equivalent for marijuana.  Local marijuana gets a premium price.  Users notice the difference and prefer it.

Click Here: Southern Oregon has the best genetic stocks.

Owners of rural land zoned EFU can plant medical and recreational marijuana plots and lease their land for $20,000 to $30,000 per acre, per year. Really. The growers care about access and water but usually not about the soil because the marijuana is grown in pots with purchased, formulated grow-mix soil.  Growers can sell the product of the acre for $250,000 to $500,000.  Sometimes much more.  

Banking laws prohibit growers from depositing money in banks.  Southern Oregon is awash in $20 bills.  Employment numbers here are skewed by the marijuana business.  Since the crop is legal under Oregon law, but people cannot be paid conventionally by payroll check, young people are often officially unemployed, but are in fact working seasonally tending marijuana crops.

Marijuana growing is highly regulated in Oregon.   It is illegal under federal law but legal under local law and state law and the federal government does not enforce their laws, except in interstate shipping, use of the mails, insurance, banking, and other places where federal laws and regulations intersect with business.   Marijuana is a huge boon to the Southern Oregon economy.  Struggling marginal farmers are getting paid to lease land in amount 200 times what they would get if the land were used to grow pumpkins or corn or grain.   Young people are learning a high paid trade: marijuana entrepreneurship.  

There is a great deal of science in growing truly excellent marijuana and experienced growers have a valuable, marketable skill, sort of like being a computer wizard or mechanical engineer, except that the medical marijuana grower can be self employed, needs relatives little capitol, can make ten times as much as the child with a technical degree, and he or she is paid in cash.

Neighbors object to the smell, and on principle

There is money, but not status in growing marijuana.  I personally am invited once every two weeks or so to a charity event in which wine is donated with pride by a worthy local winemaker, and wine is served at every fundraising event, every gala, every award banquet.  Wine is the central theme of many of them.  I have yet to be invited to a marijuana grow site.  

Marijuana growing, like grape growing, creates problems.  Marijuana has a skunk-ish smell at harvest time.  Grapes need noisy frost protection wind turbans.  Both use crews of laborers.  But at this moment grapes have a clear advantage.  A vineyard next door increases property values.  A marijuana grow next door does not.  People have decided that the seasonal changes in a vineyard are beautiful.  Regulators generally demand that marijuana fields be obscured with an opaque 8 foot fence, something which is universally considered intrusive and ugly.

Charity event for a hospital.

But subtle changes are underfoot in the social meaning of marijuana.   Americans respect money and big money washes off social opprobrium.  Young people, just graduated from college, might work in entry level jobs as school teachers or trainees in bank management programs or office clerks: the bottom rung of a professional career, where they make $30,000 a year, minus taxes of course.   Other young people work seasonally and make ten or more times that, paid in cash, owning or tending an acre or two of marijuana.   Parents who might otherwise squirm at the notion of a child growing marijuana note the obvious.  Their children are self sufficient, entrepreneurial, in a successful business and making boatloads of money.

In Oregon marijuana simultaneously means "semi-disreputable"  but it also means wealthy, indeed, weird crazy-money wealthy.   

The fact marijuana money cannot be banked creates a sweet/sour environment.  The cash world is forced onto growers, which facilitates tax avoidance, and indeed almost requires it.   One local owner of EFU land learned from two different growers that his intention fully to declare income from the lease was a deal killer for the growers.  After all, if the landowner paid taxes on the lease income the IRS would have evidence that the grower who paid it had income sufficient to pay that lease.  The prohibition on banking moves up and down the system, making even legitimate market activities seem--or be--shady.

Many people rejoice at getting secret unreported, unreportable money, since it facilitates tax avoidance.  Nothing feels like wealth more than does a tall stack of green currency.   On the other hand, it makes it harder for marijuana industry participants to do the high status activities that bring social regard, e.g. above board relationships with venders and customers, charitable donations, fancy entertaining, etc.   

The situation is changing.   The laws are evolving so that a greater and greater percentage of the industry is considered fully legal "recreational" marijuana, with no winking or slight of hand about transfers into the unregulated market of out of state sales.  And quasi-banks are starting up, which will allow normal payroll activities and payments.  

Soon there will be a charity event at a vineyard or winery and dressed up visitors will see a fenced portion of the winery and ask what that is.  It will be the marijuana grow.  The owner will explain that it is what paid for the new additions to the winery Visitor Center.

And soon I fully expect  there will be a charity event at a marijuana grow site.  Well dressed visitors will look carefully at the marijuana flowers and be warned not to touch.   Each plant is worth $5,000, they will be told.  They will notice the big house, the expensive car, the other guests.  Perhaps the guests will be reminded of Gatsby at Oyster Bay--parties that are a bit naughty but very lavish.   Or perhaps not long after, charity events at marijuana grow sites will have settled into just another charity event at the home of a proud owner of a legal psychoactive crop, making a great deal of money and happy to share some of it with the community.