At the 2018 town hall, and numerous prior meetings, they emphasized their status as legitimate community members — veterans, citizens, consumers of county goods, local property owners, “good” growers and medical users — not nuisances, criminals, foreigners or outsiders. In interviews and public forums many Hmong-American cultivators expressed a desire to comply with the rules. Their efforts, however, they said, were frustrated not only by linguistic and cultural differences, but also understaffed and underfunded permitting, licensing and community services agencies. Hmong-American cultivators routinely told us about their desires to settle down, build homes and plant other crops. “I’m growing watermelons, pumpkins and tomatoes,” one cultivator told us, but he was waiting for a permit to build his house, a process another interviewee reported took 3 years. Though the town hall meeting sought to address cultural misunderstanding, this framing overlooks how misunderstanding — of Hmong-Americans or cannabis producers generally — is produced by criminalizing enforcement practices. Properties given as gifts in the Hmong-American community were seen as evidence of criminal conspiracy, not generous family assistance; land financing networks evidenced drug trafficking organizations, not kin-based support and weak credit access; repetitive farm organization patterns suggested “organized crime” , not ethnic knowledge-sharing circuits. When Hmong-Americans, leery of engagement with government agencies and unfriendly civic venues, self-provisioned services, including firefighting teams, informal food markets and neighborhood watches, these actions were taken to confirm suspicions that they could not assimilate. Now that some Hmong-Americans are considering, or already are, moving away in response to county efforts, indoor plant table the sheriff’s prior description of them as temporary residents seems prophetically manufactured. These stigmatizing views of Hmong-American cultivators affect all cannabis growers.
Anti-cannabis pressure creates a precarious state of impermanence — a season’s crop might be destroyed, infrastructure confiscated and investments of limited resources lost at any moment, disallowing longer-term investments. The impermanence makes noncompliance and deleterious environmental and health effects more likely, thereby perpetuating perceptions of cannabis cultivators as nuisances and dangers. As enforcement makes private land cultivation more risky, cultivators move “back up the hill,” namely onto ecologically sensitive public lands, thus substantiating characterizations of cannabis growers as criminal polluters. These stigmas even spread to county residents who do not grow cannabis themselves but if perceived to assist cannabis cultivation can face social sanctions.Meanwhile, well-resourced cultivators have an advantage over small-scale producers. They can protect their crops from visibility and complaints by concealing them on large plots of land or inside physical infrastructures ; and for white growers there is the anonymity of not being marked as ethnically different and therefore subject to heightened scrutiny. Greater access to capital, land and racial privileges insulates some from visibility and criminalization, resulting in uneven development and disparities in California’s expanding cannabis industry. Additionally, jurisdictions like the Siskiyou municipalities of Mt. Shasta and Weed are welcoming regulated cannabis commerce, thus capitalizing on its expulsion from the rest of Siskiyou and benefiting entrepreneurs with social capital and network access to successfully navigate complex public regulatory systems.After a century of cannabis’s criminal exclusion in California, state voters have elected to integrate cannabis farmers into civil regulation. An important facet of evolving cannabis regulations is local determination. As one interviewee pointed out, a 1-acre farm might be permitted in rural San Joaquin County but would not make sense in downtown San Diego. Yet, when cannabis cultivation is disqualified from consideration as agriculture by localities, as it has been in Siskiyou County, it can be substantively recriminalized and placed beyond the regulatory reach of civil institutions. Prohibitionist strategies that blur lines between civil and criminal enforcement lead to penetrating forms of visibility and vulnerability that produce inequity and disparity. The result, as this case illustrates, can be a narrow, exclusive definition of agriculture that affirms dominant notions of land use and community.
The definition of cannabis cultivation as agriculture by the CDFA creates an opportunity for service providers and regulators — including agricultural institutions, public health departments and environmental agencies — to craft programs and policies that openly address the negative impacts of production. Owley advises that “if we treat cultivation of marijuana the same as we treat cultivation of other agricultural crops, we gain stricter regulation of the growing process, including limits on pesticide usage, water pollution, wetland conversion, air pollution, and local land-use laws.” Presently, however, many agencies are being enlisted in locally crafted criminalizing efforts, thus limiting their ability to work cooperatively with cultivators and address issues through customary civil abatement processes. Though unregulated cannabis cultivation can pose threats to public health, safety and welfare, police enforcement is only one of many possible ways to address it. Siskiyou’s cannabis cultivators experience familiar agricultural challenges around access to land, water and credit. These challenges are amplified without technical assistance or institutional support. If recognized statewide as farmers, these cultivators would be better positioned to access agricultural training and support services, thus addressing ecological and social concerns around cannabis production. Additionally, new cannabis cultivators might be considered “beginning” farmers according to the CDFA, and minority farmers, including Hmong-Americans, who experience poverty at twice the national rate , would be considered “socially disadvantaged” under the California Farmer Equity Act of 2017 . Farmers with these designations would, in fact, be prioritized for technical assistance and support from farm service providers — if, that is, they were recognized as farmers. Uniformly treating cannabis cultivation as agriculture would also help enable the collection of accurate and robust data by researchers. This information base is necessary if agricultural institutions are to take an assistive and educational orientation toward cannabis farmers. Continued enforcement tactics that amplify distrust, frustration and confusion will further hinder data collection , leaving little basis to understand basic dynamics of complex, interdisciplinary systems like agriculture .
In a criminalized situation, it is inevitable that information is metered and brokered by community leaders in ways that inhibit full understanding of cannabis cultivation. We suggest, for all these reasons, that a decisive break with enforcement-led, prohibitionist trajectories is needed and that agricultural institutions lead civil policy development and support farmers who cultivate cannabis. Agricultural service providers could play a leadership role in addressing the pressing needs of farmers — both those impacted by and engaging in cannabis cultivation. Yet, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension advisors, for instance, consistently report that they are currently prohibited from engaging with cannabis issues . Additionally, many county-based agricultural commissions, Siskiyou County’s included, feel that cannabis is not an agricultural enterprise and therefore do not see its cultivators as their clientele. Without leadership from agricultural institutions and agencies, the expanding cannabis cultivation industry is left to develop unevenly across the state — with wealthy private interests capitalizing in some locales while vulnerable and unregulated growers may retreat, to avoid criminalization, into ecologically sensitive areas. UC ANR and CDFA have an opportunity to fulfill their missions and facilitate, for a burgeoning farming population, greater parity in farmer rights, capacities and resource access.More than two decades ago, on November 5, 1996, California voters passed the ballot initiative known as the Compassionate Use Act . The Compassionate Use Act removed criminal penalties for the possession, use and sale of cannabis for medicinal purposes, thus making California the first U.S. state to decriminalize cannabis since the substance had first been classified by the federal government, in 1970, as a Schedule I narcotic. By 2019, 36 U.S. states had enacted legislation to remove criminal penalties for the possession and use of medicinal cannabis . In general, medicinal decriminalization means that cannabis can only be sold to customers who obtain a medical doctor’s recommendation to use cannabis as a treatment for a state-specified medical condition. In some of the states that have decriminalized medicinal cannabis, only a few specific medical conditions are approved for cannabis treatments; in other states, such as California, there has been little practical restriction on medicinal recommendations. As of 2019, 10 U.S. states have also decriminalized “recreational” or “adult-use” cannabis. The decriminalization of adult-use cannabis in these states means, at a minimum, that a doctor’s recommendation is not necessary in order for a state resident or out-of state visitor to legally possess and use cannabis.In everyday usage, “legalization” has a variety of connotations. The word might refer to the legal possession of cannabis, the legal purchase and sale of cannabis or the reporting of cannabis sales to state-level authorities and those authorities’ taxation of cannabis sales. In the United States,hydroponic vertical farming common usage of the word “legalization” does not imply that cannabis is legal under federal law. Since the passage of the U.S. Controlled Substances Act of 1970, cannabis has been a Schedule I narcotic. The federal government has approved no medicinal use of tetrahydrocannabinol , the psychoactive component of cannabis.
The sale of cannabis remains a felony under federal law. In California, Proposition 64 — a 2016 ballot initiative known as the Adult Use of Marijuana Act — decriminalized the possession and use of cannabis by any person in California aged 21 or over. Proposition 64 left in place medical cannabis decriminalization for consumers between 18 and 21 — and opened a “legal” cannabis market both to state residents without medical recommendations and to visitors from out of state, who under medicinal cannabis law had previously been excluded from buying cannabis through the decriminalized system. Although Proposition 64 broke down some legal barriers on cannabis sales , it is probably true that, even before the proposition passed, most California residents who wanted to buy cannabis without breaking state laws regarding cannabis possession were able to obtain medical cannabis recommendations with relative ease. By early 2016, for instance, it was possible for a California resident over the age of 18 to receive an official, state-endorsed medicinal cannabis recommendation by simply submitting an online medical form claiming headaches and paying less than $50. As of the early fall of 2016, the process of obtaining a medicinal cannabis recommendation for the first time, and then using it to order cannabis from a delivery service, could be completed in less than half an hour from start to finish.Even before Proposition 64, the 2015 Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act — which was later extended as the Medicinal and Adult-Use Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act — had begun the process of regulating cannabis in California. The law assigns licensing and regulation to three agencies: The Department of Food and Agriculture is responsible for cultivation, the Department of Public Health for manufacturing and the Bureau of Cannabis Control for distribution, testing and retailing . Regulations pursuant to the law were initially issued through a series of emergency and temporary rules. Final regulations came into effect in January of this year . The final regulations, which apply statewide, establish guidelines under which local jurisdictions can set their own additional taxes and regulations on cannabis businesses. The regulatory agencies collect license fees from cannabis businesses under their purview. At each stage, the fees range from a few hundred dollars for very small operations up to $100,000 or more for large scale cultivators, manufacturers, distributors, testing laboratories and retailers. License fees generate the revenue needed to fund the regulatory apparatus and are generally in the range of 1% to 2% of the gross value of output. Based on specifications in Proposition 64, the state imposes: taxes on sales at the cultivation stage, including a cultivation tax of $9.25 per ounce , on cannabis flower produced and transferred and an excise tax of 15% on the value of retail cannabis, calculated using a formula that multiplies the actual wholesale price by an assumed retail-to-wholesale price ratio of 1.6. Retail sales of cannabis are also subject to the California state sales tax of 7.25% and county and city supplemental sales taxes that range from zero to 2.75%. In addition, local governments may apply additional cultivation taxes or assessments, as well as cannabis-specific excise taxes, for which the most common tax rate is about 10%. Regulations based on specifications in the legislation require that cannabis be tested for potency and product consistency, as well as for pesticides and other contaminants. Regulations specify detailed tests for a wide range of compounds, with low accepted thresholds and tight specifications that are costly to meet.