Scientists at Oregon State University found that cannabis may help stop COVID.
This is good news. There is also bad news.
Readers around the country filled my in-box with links to stories about cannabis as medicine. I have written about cannabis and readers knew I would be interested. I grow melons and cannabis.
Bloomberg headlined that "Cannabis Compounds Prevented Covid infection in Laboratory Study." Newsweek headlined "Cannabis Extract May Prevent COVID-19 Infection." The New York Times headlined "Jimmy Kimmel is High Off Covid's Cannabis Breakthrough." This was all presented in an upbeat, fun way.
The source of the news was a report published by the National Institute of Health. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35007072/
Meanwhile readers around the country are sending me another news story. It is bad news about cannabis. Apparently Southern Oregon is a hell-hole.
Something strange happened here this summer, and it made a tough summer worse. We had a major drought year. The temperature hit 115 in the shade. We had weeks of forest fire smoke. And, of course, COVID.
My own sense is that the thing not right in Southern Oregon points is law enforcement. Cannabis regulators ignored flagrant scofflaws. The multitude of hoop houses here purported to be growing legal CBD cannabis in quantity were obviously growing THC-type cannabis. Everyone knew it. Law enforcement knew it. THC-laden cannabis buds are valuable--worth in prior years over $1,000 a pound at dispensaries. CBD buds are sellable, if at all, for the cost of production. Given the price of CBD it made no sense for the intensive agriculture of a hoop house. Yet the state and local regulators essentially ignored their proliferation. Instead they spent their time meticulously investigating legal, registered, taxed grows of CBD. If a grower endeavored to be legal, regulated and taxed, the grower was treated as a scofflaw. If a grower made no pretense of legality, he or she was ignored. Strange.
Let me give an analogy. Suppose there were pickup trucks parked in the parking lots of restaurants with big signs on them saying “NO I.D. REQUIRED” and they were selling cocktails off the tailgates to crowds of teenagers, getting paid in cash, all right in the open. Suppose also that the alcohol control people ignored those open scofflaws, and instead spent their time going into the restaurant office to examine time-cards of the restaurant wait-staff, saying their primary interest was making sure that tips paid to servers of alcohol inside the restaurant were in good order. What would one think? One would conclude that something very screwy is going on. They must have some agenda other than making sure that alcohol is served safely.
That is how I interpret what I observed in Southern Oregon.
Not surprisingly, given this enforcement pattern, the scofflaws did what scofflaws do. They ignored water rights, labor laws, and they left messes when they left the property. Since cannabis is forbidden to use banks, employers and employees deal in cash. That creates attractive, vulnerable targets for theft. I observed first hand that local law enforcement makes no effort to investigate thefts of legal, recorded, tagged, and taxed cannabis plants. That is the case even when thieves leave a getaway car stuck in a ditch, a participant in the theft as obvious as the license plate on the car. If one does not have the protection of the law, people do self-help. People carry guns. Our law enforcement was not de-funded. But for some reason they didn't do their job, at least from my observation.
I feel sorry for the legal cannabis industry. It creates thousands of local jobs. It may be put out of business by the flood of illegal product that did not need to deal with the complicated regulations of the legal industry. I feel sorry for Southern Oregon residents. Our efforts to create a "livable" community was undermined.
I do not feel sorry for law enforcement. I consider this a self-inflicted problem. The illegal cannabis was right there and available to be tested and seized. The growers were right there, on the property, ready to be arrested. This is not complicated. I am baffled by all this. What law enforcement appeared to have wanted was what they got: The case for a bigger budget, funded with outside money.
4 comments:
My uncle was a police officer in Portland in the 70s. At that time homicide by gun was heading up butHippies were the target. Long-hairs were stopped and frisked for “grass”. Car theft and gang activity was just beginning to make things difficult for the average Portlander. Drunk driving and weed busts were the major focus. There were walking beats for police in downtown. The vice squad was focusing on “weed” and prostitution. I remember when, in the early 80s, “crack” hit the street backed by the Bloods and Crips. Busting gang members and crack houses was dangerous. But crack was more prevalent and a bigger problem than weed and underaged drinking. That was the target. Much safer to attack the weed and underage drinking then tackle the the gang backed crack problem. I don’t know for a fact but I just think it’s true - law enforcement in Southern Oregon is outnumbered by illegal growers that have much more firepower than they have. So go through the motions of checking legal grows and refuse to react to illegal grows. Go home to your family each day after work life’s too short to die on this hill.
The illegal cannabis problem in Southern Oregon is not law enforcement, but organized high-volume illegality, especially by administered by cartels. A hapless drone worker was recently discovered in a shallow grave in Josephine County. Hundreds more drones have been detained.
The illegal grows are indeed high-capacity agricultural operations, typically appended to existing legal cannabis or hemp operations, especially around the corner or down the hill on big-acre rural properties. There is enormous money made by trips to e.g. Boise.
Frustrating! I too live in Southern Oregon and the quality of life has diminished, for a number of reasons. I'd like to blame our local Sheriff--and he's partly to blame, I'm sure--but the bigger problem lies outside our area, especially with federal legal attitudes toward a little green bush that some like to smoke. I pay taxes but feel like I have no control over the price of pot in Roanoke or Fargo. That, to me, is the essential problem.
There's an herbal medicine book from the early 1900s called Back To Eden by Jethro Kloss that included the use of cannabis as a preventive or treatment for a remarkable number of ailments. However, it's obviously no cure for man's greed and aggression.
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