Metro talk
WEED
Where the Apple Once Reigned; Is Marijuana Washington’s New Cash Crop? by Paul K. Haeder photos by Makenna Haeder
Cash-only Business
M
aybe apples will take a back seat to cannabis sativa. It’s now a cash crop in the minds of Washington farmers who once voted hard right for Nixon, Apple Pie, Mom, Baseball and Throwing the Book at Potheads. Some counties, like Walla Walla, want to capitalize on the wine and recreational reefer business. Imagine – wine tasting and the terroir of good homegrown pot. No matter how many ways one parses it up, legalized recreational pot, for 21 and over, is a reality in the Evergreen State. There will be recipes for the best cookies, lemonade and tinctures made from the hallucinogenic and medicinal portions of the main compound in pot, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. Even old timers are breaking down their hard-gained antidrug sentiments. “I meet weekly, on Saturdays at the Starbucks in Kennewick,” says one of my sources, who is going through the process of applying for grower and processer licenses. He hesitates to identify himself during this nail-biting process of being vetted by Washington State honchos. It’s coming down to the wire for Farmer Popa (alias). “A retired cop from Pasco, two milk delivery men, a bus driver, two mechanics, a railroad man. Imagine, here we are, with a couple of salt of the earth farmers in our sixties from the same graduating class in Pasco – ‘65 and ‘67 – and we’re talking about the miracle of pot.” He smiles and then shows me plants that would make a Woodstock attendee cry. You see, my source and these fellows who I met were looking at one guy’s disappearing melanoma spots on his head. Farmer Popa shares, “So, Larry’s stoner son has this cannabis butter all made up and Larry starts spreading it on his head on the cancerous spots, as if it’s something from Body Works. In six months, I kid you not, here we are looking at where those lumps were, and they are gone. He was supposed to be dead months ago. The cop, who used to bust Mexican and blacks for reefer in Pasco, now wants to get in on the marijuana wave.” That’s the security, guns, night vision goggles and surveillance side of things, not the growing or retail end.
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Spokanecda.com • March • 2014
Because the state of Washington has all sorts of provisos for growing, processing and selling the stuff, including being 2,000 feet from a park, daycare, hospital or school, and having security and fencing and CTV set up, there are capitalists wanting to make a buck from this crop. One source at the Liquor Control Board, Chris Marr, speaking in Spokane two months ago, said the Office of Financial Management sees the potential total taxation haul for the state to be $1.9 billion over the next five years. Think of that special education teacher, those iPads, new playground equipment and football fields financed partially by those wanting to get high! On the national scene, prognosticators see this as a legal industry at $1.43 billion in 2013, with a 65 percent growth rate predicted for fiscal year 2014 at $2.34 billion. Some predict several billionaires will be made out of the Washington pot business, and this sales expansion rate looks to be better than the next best business sector – global sales of smartphones.
Medicinal Tree of Life
This is the conundrum for an herb, really a single species as modern DNA analysis has confirmed: 483 identifiable chemical constituents and at least 85 different cannabinoids in this cannabis sativa. This plant, also known as hemp, has nutritious, medicinal and industrial uses. It’s referred to as “Sacred Grass” in the Hindu sacred text Arthava-Veda. Think of the first woven clothing stitched around 10,000 years ago. Hemp is a highly adaptable fiber, and ironically in 1619 a law was passed in Jamestown, Virginia Colony, requiring farmers to grow hemp. “I never thought I’d be talking about legalization