By William Slusher
Dylan (Google him kids) sang it decades ago: ” … the tiiimes, they are a changin’ …”
I had to be dreaming. It was enough to give a narc an erection. It was a police career launching gold mine I’d discovered. A faint odor of skunk scented the air. There were rows of greenhouses of marijuana plants chest high. There were entire buildings where machines separated the buds, there were irrigation systems, fans, lights, drying sheds hung with hundreds of marijuana plants, marijuana everywhere in all the stages of production from seedlings to packaged retail product.
It was what police helicopters with infrared surveillance scoured the forests for. Undercover agents spent weeks building the confidence to be seen as buyer-whales big enough to be invited to see this op, but only if blindfolded in and out from an hour away.
It was the sort of large marijuana growing op where the indigenous humans were surly and scowled at you with a suspicion that was of necessity never ending in their career-criminal lives. You looked for Glock shaped lumps in their shirts. You might be the whale from L.A. who was going to buy a truckload, but there was always the paranoid anxiety that you were the narc from hell or the scout for a rival op come to scope a hit.
It was the major pot production operation that cops dreamt of finding, the great bust in the sky that law enforcement from country sheriffs to the DEA spent collective millions trying to find, hit, and stage photo ops of.
And I found it!
But wait …
This isn’t only a few years ago, this is now in Washington state. The surly, gimlet-eyed Glock slingers are unarmed, smiling, pleasant young women and men happily anxious to show a known cop the marijuana growing op where they work and of which they are clearly quite proud.
A kid who looks like a skateboarder at the mall turns out to be the Carl Sagan of pot. He shows me every facet of the operation, explaining in detail exactly what’s going on, what plant is what, what the growing parameters are, the grades of product, the sun-hour cycles, how happy or depressed the plants can be according to their sun exposure, and how the plants move from seedlings to small sealed plastic bags ready for transport to retail outlets. He is like the youngster who walked up to me when I was shopping for a big-screen TV a couple of years ago. You wonder how his employer gets past the child labor laws until he starts to talk, when you fast absorb that this is no kid, he knows exactly what he’s talking about in an extremely technical field.
Listen and learn, fossil, I think. Dylan was right.
I am damned impressed with what I see, but remnants of culture war tug at me still. All my training and experience has told me for decades that marijuana is the stuff of skulking dopers, and criminals, or fat-cat high-rollers with more money than sense or character. We’re not talking Reefer Madness voo-doo here — all that was before even me — but we are talking a mindset trained for decades to see marijuana traffickers as ‘drug dealers,’ dangerous peddlers of crime and addiction.
The post-modern edition of marijuana ‘dealers’ I’m conditioned to are savage, gunned-up street gangs who’ll kill to garner larger shares of the pot market. They’ll also kill cops to stay out of prison.
I’m still trying to get my mind wrapped around strolling through a huge, legal marijuana growing operation that’s clean and open, a professionally run, well-set-up, legitimate business, the employer of about 25 decidedly unthuggy young Americans who are breaking no laws ever likely to be enforced.
Herewith resides a sizable part of the new legal marijuana industry’s dilemma. The same culture war stigma that once conflicted me also currently conflicts the bulk of mayors, town-council folk, city attorneys, and other ‘decent’ citizens of the community. Ergo the stout resistance to legalized marijuana production sites and retail stores. Call it NIMBY to the tenth power.
It is this mentality that insists on visual barrier fences to ‘hide’ marijuana grows as though the sight renders beholders addicted. It is this fear-based superstition that demands distances from schools, like the plants are something out of Rocky Horror Picture Show that are going to slurp youngsters off the sidewalks as they walk home.
But this isn’t as laughable as I’m hinting. At the root of it is fear, fear that the standards, and thus the quality of life, of one’s home community may be corroding. At the core of this is the gripping concern that our kids may be negatively affected. It’s that feeling marijuana growers used to get upon hearing helicopters overhead: fear that the jig is finally up.
Herewith, thus, also resides a major challenge for the legal marijuana industry. It is an issue that self-superior derision, denigration and anger are only going to make worse. A smoother transition of America to legal marijuana, to faster community acceptance, less headaches, less operational costs … you know, better net profits, is going to require significant, broadly applied, public relations finesse.
I once saw TV ads for earthworms as a food product. A June Cleaver (Google her too, kids) looking housewife was seen puzzled as to ‘what nutritious, delicious meal to serve her family tonight, yet not the same ole thing.’ Ah, says she, as the light comes on, earthworms! Cut to the wriggling delights on the kitchen counter.
Hell no I didn’t eat any, but I remember thinking, wow, if I ever hire an ad firm to promote anything it’s gonna be the one with the cojones to take on pushing earthworms as food.
My point is even less appetizing. Stigma is a costly fact of the current marijuana business, and it will take public relations power to fix it. Otherwise it’s going to drag on, cutting profits, far longer than necessary.
The times … they are a changing.’ People’s attitudes … not so much.
William Slusher is a retired police pilot, a ‘rotorpig.’ His latest novel is a bipartisan Pacific Northwest political comedy: CASCADE CHAOS, or, How Not To Put Your Grizzly In The Statehouse. He can be reached at williamslusher@live.com.