Market Swings In California Marijuana Prices

California's Emerald Triangle pot market is hitting bottom

By Peter Hecht
phecht@sacbee.com

Published: Saturday, May. 5, 2012 - 12:00 am | Page 1A

Last Modified: Sunday, May. 6, 2012 - 2:47 pm

ARCATA – The pot market is crashing in California's legendary Emerald Triangle.
The closure of hundreds of marijuana dispensaries across California and a federal crackdown on licensing programs for medical pot cultivation are leaving growers in the North Coast redwoods with harvested stashes many can't sell.
Some pot cultivators who sought legitimacy through the medical market are fleeing to the black market. So much cheap weed is getting dumped in the college town of Arcata, some local dispensaries say business is down 75 percent. Even the region's itinerant and colorful bud trimmers are going broke.
By the scores, people have long trekked into the marijuana fields and indoor greenhouses of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties. Workers used to earn as much as $200 a pound meticulously cutting leaves from marijuana buds, prepping them for display at dispensaries or for sale in a purely illicit market.
These days, a 47-year-old man called Mover, a dreadlocked migrant from Ohio who is a fixture in downtown Arcata, says the tedious work isn't worth his trouble as the per-pound pay rate has dropped to $100 or often just a few nuggets of pot.
"I got paid in weed," Mover, who refused to give his real name, said of his last trimming job. "It's worthless here. You can't give it away. And I'm not going to transport anything. I'm too old, and I don't want to go to jail."
The region's pot pilgrimage had accelerated in recent years as people were drawn by local cannabis traditions and dreams of cashing in on the medical marijuana market. They planted marijuana in the backwoods and in rewired houses with high-intensity grow lights.
But the saturation of pot growers set off a price tumble by 2010, as a pound of prime Emerald weed slipped from $5,000 to the $3,000 range for marijuana grown indoors and to the $2,000 range for product grown outdoors. Lately, prices are in free-fall.
"Last I heard, a pound of marijuana is $800 for outdoor grown," said Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman in Ukiah. "That's plummeting. You might do better with tomatoes."
The marijuana meltdown could have major regional effects. In Humboldt County, a recent study by a local banker estimated marijuana accounts for more than a fourth of the county's $1.6 billion economy.
In recent years, many locals already thought the influx of pot growers exceeded demand in the state's sanctioned medical pot market. When U.S. authorities in October announced a crackdown on medical marijuana businesses that they contended were profiteering in violation of federal and state laws, it darkened growers' fears.

Raid heightened fears

Lelehnia Du Bois, 41, was one who thought she had found a safe niche. A former fashion model in Southern California, Du Bois started growing marijuana indoors in Eureka after rupturing her spinal cord. She supplied her unused home-grown "Sweet God" to a Eureka dispensary, earning $5,000 a year on top of her disability income, she said.Du Bois had spent her childhood in Trinity County and remembers growers having "a big potluck" meal after the outdoor marijuana harvest. She said the weed culture changed markedly as indoor growers in Arcata and Eureka competed for access to the medical market – and many went into illegal trafficking.
As indoor pot prices dropped as low as $1,800 a pound, "People started taking risks. All of a sudden, people were not farmers. They were drug dealers," Du Bois said.
Last year, months before federal prosecutors began targeting California dispensaries for closure, Du Bois got out of the pot business and moved out of Humboldt County. She now lives in Utah.
At Arcata's Humboldt Patient Resource Center, a dispensary that grows its marijuana on site, cultivator Kevin Jodry said fewer people are coming to buy seedlings for this year's outdoor marijuana crop or quarterly indoor yields.
"Many people distributing in the medical marijuana market didn't get into it for the risk situation," he said. "The people who were formerly in the black market were able to stay functioning. People who were not criminals can't move their product."
Pressures on growers intensified after federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided a marijuana farm that had been licensed by Mendocino County and was considered a model for establishing local compliance rules for medical cultivation.
The raid prompted Mendocino County supervisors in January to rescind a program that allowed the sheriff to enforce a 99-plant limit on pot farms by attaching $50 zip ties to each plant and inspecting the gardens of nearly 100 growers who provided documentation to show they were serving medical pot users.
The program, which also offered cheaper tags for smaller quantity growers, brought in $630,000 in county fees in two years.
Sheriff Allman said it allowed his department – which spends 30 percent of its $23 million budget on pot enforcement – to target major cultivators who he says are illegally growing thousands of plants, diverting water and fouling the environment.
Humboldt County had sought to put a similar program in place last summer as District Attorney Paul Gallegos called for licensing to ensure "sustainable and responsible cultivation." After the federal government launched its crackdown, supervisors tabled work on the plan, and Eureka and Arcata placed moratoriums on new dispensaries.

Outdoor growers struggle

Among the most worried cultivators are the outdoor growers who increasingly struggle to compete with the exotic strains produced in climate-controlled indoor grow rooms.Alison Sterling Nichols, executive director of the Emerald Growers Association, which seeks to protect the Emerald Triangle's sun-grown pot traditions, said outdoor growers were most directly affected by the collapse of local licensing programs. The group backs legislation to regulate medical marijuana statewide as long as it would preserve growers' ability to supply dispensaries.
"People shouldn't have to sleep with one eye open," Sterling Nichols said. "People should be able to move from the black market into the light. We haven't been able to bridge that gap. We have hills of healthy outdoor product we can't take to the market."
Meanwhile, many worry that the Emerald Triangle will go back to being the hub of California's illegal marijuana trade.
Last month, authorities in Pennsylvania arrested the former operator of a Humboldt dispensary for allegedly shipping more than 25 pounds of pot in heat-sealed packets to a home he was visiting. State officers in Nebraska also stopped a Mendocino County man and a companion with 62 pounds of weed stuffed in duffel bags.
On consecutive days in late February, Humboldt authorities conducted two separate raids on growers suspected of criminal distribution, seizing nearly $700,000 in cash and 7,000 plants.
In Mendocino, Allman said his officers last year eradicated 642,000 plants, some loosely tied to Mexican trafficking networks but most involving Californians or residents from other states who secretly grew on public lands and private property.
With a federal crackdown and a shrinking market, Allman said, many out-of-towners may leave and "everything is going to go underground."

http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/05/4467516/californias-emerald-triangle-pot.html

Better Living Through Chemistry

April 13, 2013

Think Those Chemicals Have Been Tested?

By IAN URBINA

MANY Americans assume that the chemicals in their shampoos, detergents and other consumer products have been thoroughly tested and proved to be safe.

This assumption is wrong.

Unlike pharmaceuticals or pesticides, industrial chemicals do not have to be tested before they are put on the market. Under the law regulating chemicals, producers are only rarely required to provide the federal government with the information necessary to assess safety.

Regulators, doctors, environmentalists and the chemical industry agree that the country’s main chemical safety law, the Toxic Substances Control Act, needs fixing. It is the only major environmental statute whose core provisions have not been reauthorized or substantively updated since its adoption in the 1970s. They do not agree, however, on who should have to prove that a chemical is safe.

Currently this burden rests almost entirely on the federal government. Companies have to alert the Environmental Protection Agency before manufacturing or importing new chemicals. But then it is the E.P.A.’s job to review academic or industry data, or use computer modeling, to determine whether a new chemical poses risks. Companies are not required to provide any safety data when they notify the agency about a new chemical, and they rarely do it voluntarily, although the E.P.A. can later request data if it can show there is a potential risk. If the E.P.A. does not take steps to block the new chemical within 90 days or suspend review until a company provides any requested data, the chemical is by default given a green light.

The law puts federal authorities in a bind. “It’s the worst kind of Catch-22,” said Dr. Richard Denison, senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Under this law, the E.P.A. can’t even require testing to determine whether a risk exists without first showing a risk is likely.”

As a result, the overwhelming majority of chemicals in use today have never been independently tested for safety.

In its history, the E.P.A. has mandated safety testing for only a small percentage of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available for use today. And once chemicals are in use, the burden on the E.P.A. is so high that it has succeeded in banning or restricting only five substances, and often only in specific applications: polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxin, hexavalent chromium, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbons.

Part of the growing pressure to update federal rules on chemical safety comes from advances in the science of biomonitoring, which tells us more about the chemicals to which we are exposed daily, like the bisphenol A (BPA) in can linings and hard plastics, the flame retardants in couches, the stain-resistant coatings on textiles and the nonylphenols in detergents, shampoos and paints. Hazardous chemicals have become so ubiquitous that scientists now talk about babies being born pre-polluted, sometimes with hundreds of synthetic chemicals showing up in their blood.

It often takes a crisis to draw attention to how little the government knows about industrial chemicals in circulation. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, at least two million gallons of chemical dispersants were spread to break up the slick. But federal officials could not say they were safe because minimal testing had been done.

The current presumption that chemicals are “safe until proven dangerous” stands in marked contrast to how pharmaceuticals and pesticide companies are handled. Companies making these products have to generate extensive data demonstrating the safety of pharmaceuticals or pesticides before they are sold.

This was not always the case. Pharmaceutical companies used to be able to sell drugs with minimal prior testing, but that changed after a drug called Thalidomide, given in the 1950s to pregnant women for morning sickness, was found to cause severe birth defects the public outcry helped push the medical field to take a precautionary approach to introducing new drugs.

Federal reform of the toxic substances act may be coming. Last week, Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, and Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York,  introduced a bill called the Safe Chemicals Act of 2013, which would require the chemical industry to demonstrate that a chemical is safe in order for it to be sold. The bill, which has more than 25 Democratic co-sponsors, would put limits on trade secret practices and requires industry to reduce use of the chemicals designated by the E.P.A. as being of “greatest concern” because they are most toxic. 

The bill has strong support from environmentalists but opposition from the chemical industry. It has some similarities to rules that went into effect in the European Union in 2007.

Rather than adding more regulations, Calvin Dooley, president of the American Chemistry Council, said in testimony that the “E.P.A. should take advantage of the massive amounts of data and information that the agency already has access to.” His organization has also argued that the bill risks raising costs, squelching innovation and putting American companies at a competitive disadvantage.

Senator David Vitter, Republican of Louisiana, is expected to introduce a competing bill that is likely to win the support of the chemical industry. While details about the bill are sparse, it aims to be less of a burden on industry. It would probably not require prior testing on many chemicals, and it would demand less data of companies than would Mr. Lautenberg’s bill.

The competing bills may end up splitting the Senate down party lines, which could doom reform altogether.

In the absence of federal action, more than 20 states have created their own toxic-substances programs to police chemical safety. Many business owners say this trend is creating a confusing patchwork. Health and environmental advocates counter that, pending effective federal reform, these programs are better than nothing at all.

For now, consumers and companies looking for safer products are largely on their own.

Ian Urbina is an investigative reporter for The New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sunday-review/think-those-chemicals-have-been-tested.html?pagewanted=all

Upscale Veg In NYC

Escapes: New York’s vegetarian restaurant scene

By Joe Yonan,May 10, 2012

 

Back in the day, the meat-avoiding traveler had to pack plenty of trail mix, because even an urban vacation could feel like a hike along the Appalachian Trail when mealtime rolled around. Even a place such as New York, with its falafel chains and ubiquitous Indian restaurants, raw-food cafes and even vegan diners, could seem like a wasteland if a vegetarian tried to move into a higher-end dining room.
Or so I’ve heard, anyway. My own move toward less meat eating, if not full-on vegetarianism, has coincided with a boom in plant-centric restaurants, particularly in the Big Apple. Even though some of the city’s trendiest places don’t even serve a veggie option (I’m looking at you, Momofuku Ko), other chefs have made it particularly easy — pleasurable, even — to eat meat-free. The last couple of times I’ve spent a weekend in the city, I’ve made a point of seeking out some of the more creative approaches, especially since I’m working on a vegetable-focused cookbook and can always use some inspiration.

At a place called Dirt Candy, I got it in spades, if you’ll pardon the gardening pun. Soon after a friend and I squeezed into chef Amanda Cohen’s 18-seat place on the Lower East Side for a 10 p.m. reservation, we were grinning. That’s partly because the staff members’ energy was infectious as they danced around one another in the cramped space but also because we got such a kick out of merely reading the menu. Carrot buns? Fried cauliflower and waffles? Popcorn pudding? Yes, please. Our favorite: the Asian-style steamed buns made with the juice of three different varieties (and colors) of carrot, with caramelized carrots inside instead of the requisite pork belly.
Turns out that one of those energetic staff members was Cohen herself, and when we asked her how she comes up with her dishes, she smiled mischievously and shrugged. “I just have crazy ideas,” she said. Then she told us about the finishing touches that she and her collaborators were putting on a cookbook due out this fall. It’s illustrated comic book-style, which seems to suit her personality perfectly. After all, this is someone whose Web site proclaims, “Anyone can cook a hamburger, but leave the vegetables to the professionals.”
Just down the street but at the opposite end of the spectrum is Kajitsu, one of the most reflective restaurants I’ve been to outside Japan. The cooks here celebrate the ancient Buddhist tradition of shojin cooking, a precursor to formal kaiseki cuisine. After my friend and I raced there in separate cabs through rainy traffic, frazzled and almost 20 minutes late for our reservation, the smell of cedar incense and the minimal space’s earth-tone decor immediately set us at ease. The word kajitsu means “fine day,” and soon enough, we’d forgotten about the not-so-fine weather outside.
The place has gotten two Michelin stars, and Momofuku’s pork-worshipping chef, David Chang, included it on his list of places to eat in 2012. We happened to go on the first day of a brand-new chef, which had us worried that the praise would be misplaced, but it wasn’t. Everything that came our way was exquisite in presentation and often in flavor, too. In true Japanese tradition, as much attention was paid to the dishware as the food, with stunning pieces of sometimes old (and, in Buddhist style, repaired) pottery chosen to complement the carefully cooked and arranged ingredients.
Take the dish our waitress announced as “spring vegetables”: It was a cherry leaf fried on just one end to look like frost, covering up a nest of Brussels sprouts, asparagus, zucchini and oyster mushrooms. Oh, and what’s that little pinkish white thing? Nama-fu, steamed wheat gluten. Trust me: It’s better than it sounds.
The multi-course menu, punctuated only by our waitress’s lilting voice, included compositions of chewy, crunchy, crisp and sometimes slimy ingredients. The dish that made us swoon was a matte white square bowl filled with a bright green pea broth and a single quarter of a fennel bulb, super soft but with caramelized, slightly chewy edges, along with a few sparsely placed snap peas, sansho pepper flower and little rolls of yuba, the creamy skin formed when making fresh tofu.
The next-best dish came at the tail end of the run. The new chef, Ryota Ueshima, fresh from Japan, “has prepared a special course to celebrate his first day,” our waitress announced: apple chunks topped with plum jelly. Tart and sweet, simple yet amazing. And yet we couldn’t help imagining a decidedly non-vegan application: It would be perfect on ice cream.

There’s vegetarian, there’s vegan, and then there’s raw vegan. Pure Food and Wine caused a sensation in New York when it opened in 2004 to serve the latter, something more common on the West Coast. The tenets of raw food hold that heating anything above 118 degrees destroys important vitamins, minerals and enzymes. I don’t know that I agree with the philosophy — after all, there’s a compelling argument that cooking led to civilization — but none of that really mattered when my friend and I slid into the sleek, dark dining room near Union Square. The food would speak for itself.
When it did, it wasn’t as playful as that of Dirt Candy, but it sure had its moments. We had seen lasagna made of zucchini ribbons before, but other dishes surprised us. A crunchy, spicy, fresh Philly roll combined avocado, kimchi and a faux cheese made of cashews. The pistachio topping on a portobello mushroom dish tasted as pungent and funky as if it had blue cheese in it, but it must have been miso or something else fermented. Miniature mushroom tacos were so deconstructed we couldn’t quite tell what was going on, possibly because we gobbled them before we had a chance to analyze, or ask.
Near us, a loud table gathered for a birthday celebration seemed segregated by gender, and the female side was in a better mood than the male. As the women took pictures and everybody clinked glasses of sangria, one of the guys shouted out: “Next year we’re going to Atlantic City!” Why? “Because there are no vegan restaurants in Atlantic City.”
I felt a pang of sympathy for two women staffing the host station just a few feet away, but I’m sure they’ve heard it all before. On our way out, I tried to make up for our neighbors by praising the food. “Which was your favorite?” one asked.
“The Philly roll,” I said.
“Oh, I love that one,” she replied, “especially with that cream cheese.” And she winked as if to put quote marks around “cheese,” and I returned the gesture when I said, “Yes, that’s really good cheese.” And there we stood, winking at each other as if vegan food were some kind of code. Which, now that I think of it, might just be true.


Yonan is on book leave from The Washington Post in southern Maine this year. His Web site is www.joeyonan.com. Follow him on Twitter: @joeyonan.