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SoHum's Latest Embarrassment
Posted in: Arcata, begging, Cannabis, drugs, economics, Emerald Triangle, environment, Eureka, Garberville, hemp, Humboldt Co. CA, Humboldt State University, Humor, Manilla, marijuana, money, news and politics, Redway, Redway, Shjelter Cove, SoHum, Uncategorized.	Tagged: brand, branding, burned out vehicles, campground, cannabis, cannabis industry, county roads, culture, drug dealer, drug war, Drugs, dysfunction, economic diversity, economics, embarrassment, fence, free spirit, g, ganja, garbervilee town square association, Garberville, garberville town square, hardin, homeless, hostility, humboldt brand, Humboldt County, Humboldt county Sheriff, humor, infrastructure, its a thing, john Hardin, laugh, LOL, poor, porta potties, porta-potty, Pot, pot smoker, quote, radioactive, real estate, Redway, self-consciousness, social contract, SoHum, stale crackers, teddy roosevelt, temporary fence, the humboldt brand, thing, town square, tresspassing, trimmers, trimmigrants, vandalism, ville, war on drugs, weed.	15 Comments
If you want to see, first-hand, why you can't build a community with people who cheat the social contract, come to Garberville to see just how dysfunctional a town dominated by drug dealers and real estate leeches can be. From the vandalized and burned-out vehicles along our county roads, to the open hostility towards the poor and homeless in town, to the online comments that stack up, like so many stale crackers, beneath every slab of "Hardin" cheese, SoHum shows off its dysfunction with a breathtaking lack of self-consciousness. It's embarrassing, frankly.
A number of people approached me on Friday to ask if I planned to write about our latest embarrassment, namely, the hideous orange fence around the new Garberville Town Square. The Garberville Town Square, as the Garberville Town Square Association reminds us, is on private property. So, the owners of the Garberville Town Square have decided that they don't like the way the public uses their space. They've fenced it off with repulsive orange plastic temporary fencing, and asked the Sheriff to evict anyone who dares set foot in it. The Garberville Town Square Committee announced this 60 day closure, just as the annual influx of seasonal workers and cannabis tourists began to arrive to celebrate and bring in the Fall harvest.
Every year, right about this time, every pot-smoking free-spirited freak and hippie in the world thinks about coming to Humboldt County to get high, camp in the woods, and make some money trimming weed. Some of them actually go through with it. Trimming remains a huge bottleneck in the cannabis industry, and with so much recent expansion, the need for temporary workers at harvest time has only increased. People wouldn't keep coming back if they didn't find work, and people do come back, year after year. It's a thing.
Cannabis attracts a really diverse group of people, trending towards the young and enthusiastic, from all over the world. Trim jobs especially appeal to foreign travelers looking for a way to make some money without a green card. Some of them have never seen a mature cannabis plant before. Few of them will make a career of trimming weed, but all of them want to spend a few weeks buried in marijuana and have some cash money to show for it. It's also a great opportunity to meet people, share stories and make friends.
Every year, these people show up. Every year, they have nowhere to go, so they hang out in town, and every year, people in town get angry, call the cops, and rout them out and fence them off from anyplace they try to congregate. Neighbors' complaints about people congregating in the Garberville Town Square, especially after dark, prompted the Town Square closure, and the ugly orange fence. I understand that having a whole lot of rambunctious young people in town can impact your life in a lot of ways, and I sympathize, but it's not like you didn't know they were coming.
It really amazes me that a community that depends so heavily on the marijuana industry, could treat the people who make that industry profitable, so badly. If you want the people who love marijuana and smoke marijuana every day to think highly of "the Humboldt Brand," it seems to me that you would want them to enjoy themselves, and feel good about the time they spend here in Humboldt County. Instead, we try to make it into a war zone for them, in hopes that they will leave, but they stay anyway. Thanks to the War on Drugs, they are used to living in war zones, and have come to expect this kind of treatment.
If we had any sense around here, we could turn harvest season into the biggest tourist draw of the year. It could become a two month festival, that makes Reggae on the River kind of money, week after week until it starts to rain. Just open a huge campground, down at the Community Park perhaps, park a few food trucks down there, open a canteen, offer "trimmer training" courses, set up a flea market, a cafe, and plenty of porta-potties, and keep it all out of town.
A lot of people come here looking for work, and the industry, as it stands, genuinely needs most of their labor. The more we cater to their needs, the more of that money we can keep in our community. The infrastructure necessary to accommodate the people who come here every year would not cost that much. It wouldn't look like much of a status symbol, nor would it provide a scapegoat to vent pent up frustrations on, but it would solve the problem, help the Humboldt brand and create new opportunities for economic diversity which we desperately need.
Instead, we cultivate this escalation of hostilities. We vent. We build fences and hold town meetings. We pass around photographs of human feces like we've never seen it before. We pass new ordinances to criminalize poverty, and sleep, and asking for help. We go out into the woods with tazers and video cameras and cops to harass, humiliate and evict our poorest neighbors, and now, for this year's twist, we fence off our charming little Town Square as though it's contaminated with radioactivity.
It never works. It didn't work last year. It didn't work the year before. It didn't work the year before that, and it won't work this year. They're coming. You can't stop them any more than you can hold back the tides, or prevent the next earthquake. They're coming. They're young. They're excited. They're having fun, staying up late at night, taking drugs and blowing off steam, just like you did when you were their age, and they'll be here until it starts to rain. It's a fact of life. The sooner we face that fact, the sooner we can solve the problem.
The people who come here for the harvest season really appreciate cannabis. These people love weed, and Fall harvest provides the opportunity to build the Humboldt brand. If people have a good, positive experience while they are here, whether or not they make any money, that could easily translate into a lifetime preference for cannabis products bearing the Humboldt name. Now that prohibition has all but ended, people have lots of cannabis choices. Brand loyalty can easily make the difference between success and failure in the legal market.
If we can just face the fact that people need a place to be, and make space for people, we can solve a lot of problems, relieve a lot of stress, and create a lot of new economic opportunities. We can't keep pretending that we're just a normal quiet small town and that we have no idea why all of these hippies keep coming here every Fall. We can't make them go away, but we can solve problems, make peace, and make money, if we can just face facts and take responsibility. That is, we could, if we were that kind of people.
The Humboldt Brand
Posted by john hardin on February 1, 2016
Posted in: Arcata, Cannabis, drugs, Emerald Triangle, Eureka, Garberville, hemp, Humboldt Co. CA, Humboldt State University, Humor, Manilla, marijuana, news and politics, Redway, Redway, SoHum, Uncategorized.	Tagged: alternative energy, archetype, belt buckle, brand, branding, cannabis, classic poster, cowboy, cowboy boots, cowboy hat, cubicle rat, culture, dirty hippie, dope yuppies, dope yuppy, drug dealer, environmental destruction, funny, gandalf, ganja, grass, hater, hemp, hippie, hippie archetype, hippie culture, hippies, hippy, hippy culture, honey, Humboldt, Humboldt County, Humboldt County board of Supervisors, humboldt honey, Iowa, john Hardin, key, laugh, LOL, marijuana, marketing, owner built homes, pacific fisher, phuket, Pot, pot dealer, pot smoker, restoration ecology, retail, SoHum, Southern Humboldt, Southern Humboldt County, stoner, street dealer, supervisors, supes, the hippie, weed, wholesale, wild salmon, willie nelson bob marley, witness.	Leave a comment
At the Supes' meeting recently, a witness put it like this: "When you tell someone that you are from Humboldt, the first question they ask you is, ' Do you have any cannabis.'" I can attest that this is at least partially true, but I think it belies our poverty, more than it speaks to our strength. Often as not, when I tell someone I live in Humboldt, they say something like: "Oh yeah, I've been there. Ain't nothin' but pot farmers up there. What do you do for culture?"
Sure, we're famous for our weed, but mostly because the black-market marijuana industry has choked-off and snuffed-out everything else around here. That said, why should people care more about their pot coming from Humboldt County, than they do about their corn coming from Iowa? Drug dealers always want to tell me where the pot they're selling me comes from, but as a cannabis consumer, I've never really trusted street dealers, so I've never put much stock in their stories. Really, as long as it looks like weed, smells like weed, and get's you high like weed, who gives a fuck where it comes from?
Ask yourself, "What is it about the name 'Humboldt' that cannabis consumers will pay a little more for?" Pot smokers sure won't pay extra to help kill off the last wild salmon or poison the last Pacific fisher. We won't kick down our hard-earned cash to help put sub-literate rednecks in brand new trucks, or send dope yuppies to Phuket for the Winter, at least not if we have a choice, and can pick up a sack of Willie Nelson Weed, or Marley's Marijuana for less. Those things could just as easily convince people to boycott the Humboldt brand, rather than patronize it, but we've got one thing that makes the name "Humboldt" a goldmine for marketing cannabis. Can you guess what it is?
I'll give you a hint: Like the salmon, they come back, year after year, despite the abuse we heap on them. I refer of course to the bipedal primates colloquially known as "Hippies." Hippies. Marijuana created hippies, and hippies made marijuana famous. Marijuana turned people into hippies back in the '60s, and it continues to turn people into hippies today.
All you need to do to become a hippie is smoke weed and not cut your hair. That's it, and millions of Americans do it every year. Some of them stick with it for quite a while, until eventually, they crumple, under unbearable economic pressure, and settle for the grim life of a dead-eyed cubicle rat. Still, they keep their hippie identity with them, in a box on the dresser, where they also keep their marijuana.
Hippies have a long history in Humboldt County, and considering how shameful the rest of the history of this county is, we really should promote it. In the '60s, hippies from San Francisco came to Humboldt to escape "The Man" and corporate exploitation, by getting "back to the land." Those hippies learned to grow their own marijuana, and they grew better marijuana. With this better marijuana, Humboldt's hippies took over the domestic marijuana industry.
Growing marijuana is a proud hippie tradition, like organic gardening, long hair and promiscuous sex. Along with the burgeoning marijuana industry, hippie culture flourished here in Humboldt County, and Humboldt's hippies came to define hippie culture, especially in the areas of owner built homes, alternative energy and restoration ecology. That's why so many hippies come to Humboldt, and that's why "The Hippie" holds the key to Humboldt's future.`
I know you don't want to hear this. The county already paid big bucks for this information, not that long ago, but nobody wanted to hear it then. The county hired a PR consultant to help define the county's image. Those consultants introduced their presentation to the Supes with the old hippie anthem, White Rabbit by the San Francisco psychedelic rock band The Jefferson Airplane. You could actually hear the floor drop out from under them with each note. No one wanted to hear it. I don't know what people wanted to hear, or expected to hear, but like it or not, those consultants earned their money, and we ignore their advice at our own economic peril. Really, if you don't like hippies, you should get out of the marijuana industry, because without hippies, there is no marijuana industry, at least not in Humboldt County.
It's time to face facts. Hippies created this industry. Hippies drive this industry, and hippies hold the key to the future of this industry. As an enduring popular American archetype, The Hippie comes in second only to the cowboy. Think about that. Even though cowboys themselves have mostly disappeared from the American West (which is a good thing, because cowboys smell even worse, and cause a lot more problems than hippies) the archetype of "The Cowboy" still sells billions of dollars worth of cowboy hats, cowboy boots, belt buckles, tobacco and firearms, just for starters, every year.
Next to The Cowboy, The Hippie is the biggest marketing goldmine in America, and the single most essential component of the hippie lifestyle is marijuana. Every hippie carries marijuana, just like every cowboy carries a gun. If you live in Humboldt County, you better learn to love the smell of hippies, because that is the smell of money, and Humboldt County will only remain synonymous with marijuana, so long as it remains synonymous with hippies.
Classic Humboldt Honey Poster.
Hippies have driven the economy of Humboldt County for decades. It's about time we showed some appreciation. We absolutely must associate the Humboldt brand with hippies, and we need to make Humboldt county, especially Southern Humboldt County, as hippie-friendly as possible. Not only should we cater to the hippies who visit here, we should encourage everyone who visits to become a hippie for the day. We'll sell tie-dye T-shirts, granny glasses and peace sign medallions galore.
To attract hippies, and earn their patronage, we'll want to cultivate a vibe around town that feels about half-way between a Rainbow Gathering and the Oregon Country Fair. We'll need hippie-friendly campgrounds, clothing optional swimming holes, and vegan eateries because we don't just want hippies all over America to demand Humboldt Grown weed; we also want them to come here to see it grown, and buy it fresh from hippie farmers. We want hippies to come here because hippies will still pay retail price, even after the big wholesalers have beaten the living profit-margin out of you.
People around here like to say that the "back to the landers" had "hippie values" although nobody seems to remember what those were. Well, we better Google them, because we need to preserve, celebrate and venerate our hippie traditions and heritage here in Humboldt County if we want to remain economically viable. I know you don't want to hear it, but we need those dirty hippies, and we need them now, more than ever.