While it’s been raining incessantly, the sun has been coming out in the afternoons giving me a chance to do a little sightseeing.
Eureka has been the economic center in Humboldt County for a long time, logging and fishing mainly. Those are pretty much gone, so cannabis is now the industry of choice.
Everywhere you look you’ll see water tanks stacked in big industrial yards. A county permit for a cannabis farm requires that all water used for growing cannabis be drawn from water captured during the wet months. This prevents pumping water from the streams, which will become important should the state try to re-introduce salmon into the ecosystem, which will still require about a thousand other things before that happens. But it does make sense to require capture, especially here. But to get that permit, water storage tanks are a very hot seller around here right now.
Folk here regularly and casually use the phrase “the hills” to describe people and activities associated with cannabis. “He’s from the hills” means he’s a farmer. “They say up in the hills…” precedes the latest rumors about law enforcement and regulations. “The hills…” is a start on a talk about the culture, the economy, and the jobs that cannabis means to this region.
When you say “the hills” you mean the cannabis industry.
California is going to contribute a lot to the cultural lexicon during this regulation period. They are bringing up both medical and recreational regulatory systems on January 1, 2018. We’ve been discussing this topic for years and have used many terms and euphemisms for the different systems: Medical, adult, over 21, recreational, retail. The media around here seems to have settled on “commercial”, which describes the enterprise perfectly, and reflects the fact that the California model will be a merging of the medical and non-medical.
So it will be a “commercial farm” as opposed to a garden with a half-dozen plants or so. The difference is that rather than just enjoying eating and giving away your zucchini, you are engaged in zucchini for profit. Whether you are growing medical cannabis or recreational pot, it’s commercial if you are selling it.
I’m going to use “commercial” from now on, because the merger of the two factions is also happening in Oregon and Washington where I’ll be most of the time. The distinction will be made when I’m talking about other states that are still getting their act together.