INDY Week April 17, 2024

April 17, 2024

Durham entrepreneurs are working to reduce waste (p. 18)

Duke made a commitment to tackling climate change—is the university following through? (p. 14)

Cops are in a quandary over legalized hemp (p. 20) + Hemp Generation offers a safe space for the cannabis-curious (p. 16)

Brood 19 cicadas are preparing for the ascent of a lifetime (p. 26)

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill

8 Former Durham Rescue Mission guests say the organization exploited them at their lowest points.

Earth Day

13 Introduction. BY JANE PORTER

14 Duke made a commitment two years ago to tackling climate change. Is the university following through? BY CHASE PELLEGRINI

16 Hemp Generation offers a gentler experience for the cannabis-curious.

18 Durham entrepreneurs are working to reduce waste. 20 Law enforcement officers are struggling to enforce marijuana laws in

26 An NC State University entomologist on the Brood 19 cicadas' ascent of a lifetime.

CULTURE

28 Civil War is a new kind of red-alert American war film.

36 On a new album, Durham musician Shirlette Ammons reckons with ways of seeing and being seen.

Hemp Generation co-founder Louis Rubio plants hemp at a growing facility (p. 16)

PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

Insulting the citizens who give their time to town created boards is not [the] way to right size and reshape town boards.

A cheeky response would be to question the value of some of our town council members. While getting it right as to [the] mission for town boards is critical, some of the comments seen tinged with the notion that some council folk did not like the message from the citizens who populate the boards. Given that many town council members over the years came from the same boards they now seem ready to jettison, we should carefully consider how we reshape town boards and for what reasons.

My experience is that citizens who become members of both town boards and town council sometimes forget their number one mission to serve the whole community. I salute them for their willingness to serve and gently remind them who they serve.

Also in our paper two weeks ago, Voices columnist Desmera Gatewood explained why she voted no preference in the presidential primary election in March, along with 14 percent of other voters in Durham who cast a Democratic ballot. The print version of the column ran with the headline

“My Noncommitment to Hypocrisy.” Readers had lots of thoughts about Gatewood’s piece.

From reader SAM WILEN in Durham: Gatewood says in her [opinion] piece about Israel and Gaza: “Even by Biden’s own admission, Israel must do more

In our paper two weeks ago, Chase Pellegrini de Paur wrote about Chapel Hill town leaders’ quandary over what to do with the town’s many citizen-led volunteer boards and commissions. We received the following message from reader STEVE PECK:

to “protect the lives of civilians. Still, there’s a simple answer: Stop the bombing.” True enough. But there is another answer that is equally simple: “Free the hostages that were taken last October.” Return them and the bombing would stop.

Better still would have been for Hamas to have acted with intelligence and responsibility. None of this would have happened if over a thousand people had not been killed in October and if hostages had not been taken. None of this would have happened if Hamas would have actually accepted the existence of Israel and used the money that has been given to them over the past two decades to build up the Gaza economy rather than build hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles of underground tunnels and smuggle weapons into the area. None of this would have happened if they had accepted the challenge that the Israeli government gave them in 2005 to govern Gaza responsibly rather than fan the fantasy that Palestinians will return to Israel after driving the Jewish inhabitants into the [Mediterranean] Sea.

The bombing has become a travesty. On that, I agree with Gatewood. But Hamas governance has also been a travesty. Let’s at least try [to] look at both sides of this awful tragedy instead of pretending that there is a simple answer.

From reader LEWIS BEALE in Raleigh:

It’s bad enough that Desmera Gatewood’s anti-Biden screed fails to mention the nearly 2,000 Israelis who were

killed, raped, tortured and held hostage by Hamas. Guess they count for nothing in Gatewood’s world.

But Gatewood’s refusal to acknowledge what a Trump win could do to this country is even worse. A racist misogynist backed by Christian nationalists and the most far-right elements in this society would be a disaster for reproductive, LGBTQ, worker and immigrant rights. It would favor the 1% over everyone else, do nothing about climate change and cut taxes even further, pushing us even deeper into debt.

Maybe Gatewood has forgotten what Trump’s presidency was like. Maybe Gatewood is living in Oz, and really doesn’t have a clue what Trump 2 could accomplish.

No matter what, if the Gaza ceasefire types refuse to vote for Biden, and Trump wins, the chaos that ensues will be on them.

To quote Gatewood: Full stop.

From reader JERRY DOLINER in Raleigh:

In 2005 Israel unilaterally returned governance of Gaza to the Palestinians who lived there. They left behind any built infrastructure, housing, farms. They even disinterred the Jewish dead and took them to Israel for reburial. Hamas won an election a few years later and have governed (with no subsequent elections) since. Hamas spent the next almost 20 years shooting missiles at Israel, launching terrorist attacks in Israel, and taking aid money to build a terrorist state.

Where does [Gatewood] think the money came from to build missiles and the underground tunnels? Hamas ripped up water, gas and sewer pipes to build missiles! The WRITTEN, STATED goal of Hamas is the destruction of Israel and the killing of every Jew who lives there. THAT is Genocide.

Desmera also fails to mention the deranged attack, torturing, hostage taking and killing of 1200 Jews on Oct 7. Hamas said at that time they want to do that over and over till there are no Jews left. THAT is Genocide. Hamas [is] funded by Iran, and almost directly funded by The USA through the UN and lack of will by the Biden Administration. On top of that, Desmera believes the kill numbers furnished by Hamas.

They need to get some facts before accusing Israel of Genocide. Outrageous and unacceptable!

From reader PETER D’ENTREMONT in Durham:

The headline caught my eye, “[My] Noncommitment to Hypocrisy.” What does that mean? I thought. The writer tries to make the point that a moral stand is necessary in the face of evil and that present evil is inextricably connected to so many other issues that the writer considers compelling. Fair enough.

Then the argument is made that our current policy toward Israel, in particular the Gaza war, should disqualify President Biden to be our moral choice. Two problems. This kind of moral absolutism is a prime example of the “perfect being the enemy of the good.” We can’t

turn a blind eye to (is that the hypocrisy?) what goes on, with our help, in Gaza—or Ukraine, or here in Durham. We can direct our efforts toward real progress. President Biden, right now, is the vehicle we have, and the best agent we can hope for to help the people of Gaza.

Then there’s the “none of the above” attitude that I find so very dangerous. We live in a particular country with a particular method of choosing leaders and developing policy for the greater good. When you abstain from voting, or misuse your duty as a citizen to cast a protest vote you are wounding your fellow citizens and damaging what shred of democracy we still have.

No preference means you abdicate your responsibility to the rest of us and open wide the door to even more evil. The people of Gaza will not thank you.

Finally, from reader RICHARD CRAMER:

Desmera Gatewood’s April 10 “Noncommitment” article requires response.

She considers the “evils” of both Trump and Biden to warrant not voting for either of them in November, even if she suggests that Biden’s “evils” are the lesser of the two. But Biden has done his best, given a divided Congress, on almost every other issue that she mentions: addressing food insecurity, immigration injustices, student debt, and health-care issues, as well as other important matters, like abortion restrictions, gun violence, poverty, and tax inequities.

Gatewood should see that a Trump return to the White House would assure a worse future for our country on all of these issues and would do even less to try to mitigate the tragic situation in Israel-Gaza.

Sharing the Responsibility

On its centennial, it is time for Duke University to strengthen its partnership with Durham through direct payments in lieu of taxes.

BY NATE BAKER backtalk@indyweek.com

This year, Duke University is celebrating its centennial—100 years since its founding as a university here in the Bull City. During the past century, Duke has grown into one of the most prestigious universities in the world, with topnotch research, highly selective admissions, a world-class hospital system, and a multi-billion-dollar endowment.

The campus footprint has grown as well, making Duke the city’s largest and wealthiest private landowner. As it has grown, Durham, too, has grown and evolved into an economically diverse, midsized city. Over the decades, alongside positive changes, many of Durham’s poor and working-class communities have felt the impacts of redlining, underinvestment, gentrification, and displacement. Today, Durham finds itself at a crossroads: We are a prosperous city, but one where growing wealth is lopsided, helping some residents while harming others.

At the cornerstone of this reality is Duke University, which is currently tax-exempt and pays taxes on only a small portion of its properties, while benefiting handsomely from the amenities, services, and opportunities provided by the city that surrounds it. After 100 years, it is time for Duke University and the Duke University Health System to begin making annual payments in lieu of property taxes to the City of Durham and Durham County.

It is true that Duke has its own community programs, and the university should continue those programs as a good neighbor and partner to the city. However, residents and small businesses across Durham contribute their time, resources, and ener-

gy to the community and pay their fair share in taxes. We function together as a society because we pool our resources and make collective democratic decisions through our local government.

Duke University and Duke University Health System can ensure that the tax burden is more fairly distributed and more people in our city share in our growing prosperity. These institutions have an opportunity to commit to making up the revenue that is lost from their tax-exempt properties. This would transform Durham for years to come by providing millions of dollars to support crucial city and county services like city worker wages, schools, community health and safety, affordable housing, relief for low-income homeowners, infrastructure, and other vital services.

On its 100-year anniversary, Duke University should sit down in good faith with local government officials and a broad and growing community coalition and make a serious financial commitment that will offer opportunity, safety, and dignity to our residents.

In beginning to make payments, Duke would join its peer institutions, such as Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, and others, who have already deepened their partnership with their respective communities by making significant payments in lieu of taxes. This would go far to ensuring that Duke pays its fair share like all of the residents and small businesses in our community. W

Nate

Baker is an at-large member of the Durham City Council.

VOIC E S

An Experiment in Anti-capitalism

Durham tattoo artist Terin makes $100 tattoos a form of high art.

BY ELIM LEE backtalk@indyweek.com

If you have tattoos, you’ve heard your share of unsolicited commentary on your body.

“I could never get a tattoo.”

Terin, the Durham-based 34-year-old tattoo artist behind @100dollartattoos on Instagram, hears that as “I guess I don’t even know who I am.”

Compared to modern flash sheets of American traditional tattooing styles, Terin’s work is markedly different. Where one might be used to sharp edges, he softens the curves. Scroll through his Instagram options and you’ll find lots of flowers and plants, bugs and butterflies, Powerpuff Girls, kitty cats, and crayons. Upon finding his style in 2015, Terin thought to himself, “Oh god, I’m adorable.”

When we meet, I tell Terin that I want to shave my head this summer and I want him to adorn me with a little fairy flower crown before I grow it back. He’s unfazed by the proposal and he agrees that it’s a cool idea. He tells me to carbo-load the night before, to bring a fountain drink to sip on. It’s interesting to think of getting tattoos as a sport.

Terin and I have bonded by now. For my birthday in October, I got a little mouse from his flash that sits in the crux of my knee, bobbing up to say hi whenever I sit criss-

cross applesauce. I named him Bartholomew. The tattoo that we spent two sessions chatting through is a rendition of Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes.” It’s a painting that offered me a lot of comfort during its stint at the NC Museum of Art when I was working near it; it felt like kismet.

Terin and I talked about everything from free Palestine to how annoying it can be to explain yourself to transphobic people to the shared plight of being in white spaces. A painter first, he was giddy with the nerdy excitement that someone who has geeked over art history can feel.

“No one’s gonna fuck with you with this on your body,” Terin says.

Terin went to art school and never expected to make money being an artist. But he did hold an 11-year grudge against his old professor who said he was never going to make it, that tattooing was stupid.

“He doubted me, and that helped me,” Terin says.

When Terin first got into tattooing, there wasn’t a guide to the playing field. A mere 10 years ago, the scene operated like a gatekept art fraternity, the biker presence of the ’90s sticking around. From the ’70s through the ’90s, tattoo shops were zoned with liquor stores and gun shops

and check-and-cash places. They were the outlier markets in Black neighborhoods run by white artists.

Even though he first considered tattooing at 17 years old, it took until 2013 for Terin to find his entry point into the industry. He started at home in Indiana with a dream of diversity in the space, and Terin got his introduction to North Carolina through the guest artisting network. He remembers thinking to himself, if he ever went back, he would want to do something beautiful for the state.

A lot of the first tattoos Terin could afford were $100 pieces, which, if you’re familiar with the joke, are classically pretty bad. His first piece, he says, was actually decent for the time. Terin got the money for his first tattoo when his sister got a new computer for college and her old one was passed down to him. Like any teenager, he sold the hand-me-down for cash and walked into the studio for his first piece. He says he thinks back to his younger self, and imagines how differently his body would be adorned if he’d had access to dope art within his budget.

When Terin came back to North Carolina, he was coincidentally hitting a decade of tattooing, and he wanted to try something different. His Durham studio was small but affordable, so maybe this could really work. Terin thought

The tattoo artist Terin at work in his Durham studio PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

about inverting the joke of a “$100 tattoo.”

“What if a $100 tattoo was actually really good?” He made a cutesy little rendition of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and made it a flash option, enjoying the irony of making high art a low art joke.

Capitalism makes supply and demand a shitshow when you want to do an experiment like this. If people think something is too cheap, they automatically think the quality is bad. Sometimes Terin would discount even further and offer $75 or $50 deals, and the energy with which customers would approach his art was hurtful. Capitalism creates the temptation of labeling products cheap in derogatory terms instead of viewing the discount as an act of accessibility.

Terin talks about how people feel suspicious when they see someone move in different ways. Doing this was a leap—he was taking a catalog he’d built up over three years and blowing it wide open. He thought to himself, “Was I gonna ruin my whole catalog and the perceived value of it?” Because Terin never expected to make a living tattooing, the risk felt like a might-as-well.

“If you start a business in the arts, it’s probably gonna fail,” he tells me. “So if it fails in a dope way, that’s just kinda cool.”

It took preparation. He had to lower all his expenses, entering a financial hibernation. He said it felt like healing, in a way, learning to rely on less. When the summer of 2023 came around, it felt like a stretch of an economic depression. Terin had to think to himself, “Do I just always raise my price in response to inflation?” He said it felt like “creative expression” to do the opposite.

“Historically, when times get hard, the arts become more important,” he says.

His is akin to a Depression-era studio.

“When things are fucked, people still need the arts.”

The affordability and anti-capitalist belief in mutual aid makes tattooing close to a caregiving practice, especially if it’s in as affordable of a studio as this one. Terin’s favorite question to ask clients is about how they imagine their future tattooed self to look.

It’s a “fascinating way to hear someone describe themselves,” Terin says. W

Elim Lee is a Georgia peach who took a detour in New England and came back to her roots in the South this past year. Her least-in-progress, most-finished project is her children’s book Needle and the Too Big World. Follow her on Twitter at @wellwhatgives and Instagram at @elimscribbles.

“We Come Here Broken and Desperate”

The Durham Rescue Mission takes in people with nowhere else to go and gives them another shot at life. But former guests say the Mission, whose affiliated nonprofits brought in $23 million in revenue in 2022, exploited them at their lowest point.

BY CY NEFF backtalk@indyweek.com

Barbara Adeyemi’s life was bottoming out. She had stopped working in order to care for her mother, who then passed away. Behind on bills with no place to stay and nowhere else to turn, Adeyemi found herself at the doors of the Durham Rescue Mission in November 2018.

Adeyemi found warm meals, a safe place to sleep in a rehabilitated hotel, and a structured, biblically focused environment. But staying at the nonprofit Mission meant hard choices, low pay, and strict rules. The Mission requires its guests to quit outside jobs and perform what the group labels as “chores,” such as staffing its shelters or working in its thrift stores. Adeyemi, like other former and current guests, told The Assembly she worked 40 hours for pay that started at just $5 a week.

Guests are called “clients,” and its programs are referred to as “treatment.” For the first six months at the Mission, the pay for most residents doesn’t rise above $50 a week; a handful who are promoted to supervisors make $75 a week. What they are paid is billed as a “gift,” “love offering,” “benevolence,” or “stipend,” rather than a salary.

“If you have anything like a cell phone bill, or anything like that, and you don’t have nobody to help you pay for it?” Adeyemi said. “You’re getting $5 a week, you can’t pay for it.”

For many of the Mission’s guests, the focus on religion and work requirements seemed a small price to pay to get off the streets. But as they saw more of the operation, a number of residents said their resentment about feeling like a poorly paid cog in a lucrative enterprise grew.

“Each client plays a role in line with their abilities in helping keep the community running with daily chore assign-

ments. In addition, clients receive ‘benevolent gifts’ during their stay at the Mission, which increase with length of stay and further if clients undergo such things as vocational training,” Mission CEO Rob Tart said in a written statement to The Assembly

According to the organization’s 2022 tax returns, it paid $420,000 in “benevolent gifts” to guests. Tart alone made $282,000 in the same year, according to tax returns from the Mission’s three related nonprofits—Rescue Missions Ministries, Temps to the Rescue, and Rescue Legacy Fund.

Mission founder Ernie Mills and his wife, Gail, together made $312,319—putting total executive compensation for the three at over half a million dollars.

The Mission is a sprawling enterprise that brought in $23 million in revenue in 2022 across the three nonprofits, and its five thrift stores in the Triangle sold over $7.6 million in donated goods that year. The Mission had $51 million in net assets as of 2022, which dwarfs other Durham-based homeless services, and it attracts people in need from North Carolina and beyond.

Adeyemi left the Mission in September 2020, after a friend offered her a place to stay. To this day, Adeyemi worries about finding herself in a situation where she has to return.

“That’s one of my biggest fears. I do not want to go back there …. And I think that makes me push harder,” Adeyemi said. “A lot of people that have been there have been there more than once. It’s like a revolving door.”

The Assembly spoke to 24 former and current guests of the Mission, 19 people involved in homeless and recovery services in the state, and Tart and the Mission’s vice pres-

ident of operations, Gary Beasley. Ernie and Gail Mills did not respond to requests for comment.

Those interviews revealed that while the need for homeless services has grown exponentially in Durham and across the state, staying at the Mission comes with significant strings attached. Adeyemi and other guests described an environment that they viewed as less focused on recovery and ending homelessness and more on work and religion as a means of control.

The Mission doesn’t allow guests to have a car on-site. Many guests at the Mission grapple with substance abuse or serious mental illness, but the Mission forbids them from enrolling in methadone and suboxone-style drug treatment programs. In addition to working full-time, guests must attend church three times a week as well as a daily morning prayer meeting.

Last year, the Mission reported serving more than a half million meals and provided more than 167,000 nights of shelter. And on January 19, it set an all-time record of 593 guests in a single night, during power outages across East Durham. On an average night, the Mission houses more than 450 people between its campuses and off-site housing. Two of the Triangle’s other largest shelters, Urban Ministries of Durham and Wilmington Street in Raleigh, can shelter a respective 100 and 160 people a night.

“Most people just show up. A lot of time prison vans drop people off. That happens regularly. A lot of social workers and a lot of hospitals send people here,” Tart said in an interview. Tart emphasized what he views to be a core tenet of the Mission’s philosophy, regardless of a guest’s origin.

One of Durham Rescue Mission’s thrift stores PHOTO BY KATE MEDLEY FOR THE ASSEMBLY

“We will always have one more bed,” Tart said.

The Mission does not accept government funding, freeing it from much of the oversight about policies and data collection that other shelters must provide.

For many guests, the choice between sleeping on the street and living on the Mission’s terms isn’t much of a choice at all.

“We sign away pretty much all of our legal rights in order to stay here,” Jessica Sullivan wrote to The Assembly while at the Mission in February. Sullivan had been at the Mission on and off since 2021 and recently found outside housing with her child. “We come here broken and desperate, and they take advantage of that.”

“Work therapy”

Ernie Mills, now in his late seventies, grew up in eastern North Carolina tobacco country and watched his father die from alcoholism. Years later, Mills said he felt moved by God to open a mission in Durham that helped the homeless and people suffering from addiction.

Mills’s vision of healing broken souls by giving them the word of God and instilling a determined work ethic holds true in the Mission today, which describes itself as seeking “to meet, through the power of Jesus Christ, the spiritual, educational, emotional, physical, social, and vocational needs of the whole person so that those who are hurting may become fully functioning members of society.”

“We are unashamedly followers of Christ. I believe that what Christ did for us is the means to sanity, is the

means to joy and happiness, is the means to a good life,” Tart said. “So for us, it’s that message that is live-giving and motivating.”

Strategies for addressing addiction have changed drastically since the Mission was founded in 1974, but the organization’s approach has remained constant. Along with the low-paid labor and regular church services, a minority of residents interviewed reported receiving counseling services. Guests also reported mandatory drug tests, with some saying this helped them maintain sobriety and structure. The Mission bars guests from participating in medication treatment for substance abuse, which helps lower cravings and withdrawals for people recovering from addiction.

“When I filled out the paperwork, one of the questions on there asked if you was ever a user or if you go to a treatment program, and I said yes,” said Sherrie Turner, who applied in December 2023. “And they told me that I could not stay there because I was on the methadone program.”

She decided continuing her treatment program was more important and was still homeless at the time of our interview.

The treatment that is provided focuses on biblical teachings.

“We’re not a medical facility, and I’m not trying to be one,” said Beasley, the Mission’s vice president of operations. “We help so many people …. I can’t have 500 different plans for someone.”

But preventing residents from accessing this type of care is dangerous, said Jennifer Carroll, a medical anthropologist at NC State University and a primary researcher

and author of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s strategies for preventing opioid overdose. Carroll also helped design the CDC’s Overdose Response Program.

“What they’re asking people to do actively puts them at higher risk of an overdose. This has been established in medical science for ages,” Carroll said. “Denying them access to medication when it’s the difference between having a roof over your head and freezing to death in the winter shocks the conscience.”

While the Mission’s website states that “helping others overcome addictions has always been a priority,” the state of North Carolina does not list the Mission as one of the 115 licensed substance abuse or mental health treatment facilities in Durham County.

In 2020, the investigative series American Rehab by Reveal looked at more than 300 unpaid labor and “work therapy” programs across the country. While it’s not mentioned in that series, Durham’s other large work-based rehab, TROSA, has also received scrutiny in recent years from local reporters.

Reveal’s reporting found that while the Supreme Court outlawed using housing and meals as a form of wages decades ago, enforcement of the law appears to be extremely lax. The 1985 case Tony and Susan Alamo Foundation v. Secretary of Labor looked at a nonprofit religious foundation that built a business and real estate conglomerate using laborers who had sought drug treatment and housing.

The court ruled unanimously against the foundation, finding it was not exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act. Anyone working for the expectation of compensation,

“That’s one of my biggest fears. I do not want to go back there …. And I think that makes me push harder.”

— Barbara Adeyemi, former guest

The Women’s Campus of Durham Rescue Mission, which provides shelter for the unhoused in Durham PHOTO BY KATE MEDLEY FOR THE ASSEMBLY

“We are unashamedly followers of Christ. I believe that what Christ did for us is the means to sanity, is the means to joy and happiness, is the means to a good life.”

— Rob Tart, Durham Rescue Mission CEO

even in the form of housing and meals, is considered an employee, not a volunteer. Additionally, laborers were contributing to the “enrichment” of the foundation by working at its businesses.

Former Mission guests questioned how it can be legal to pay less than minimum wage for the kind of work they did. “If I’m working at the store to pay for me living there, that’s against the law. If I’m also not getting paid at least minimum wage, that’s also against the law,” said former guest Jacques Howell, who came to the Mission in December 2023 after a local organization in Fayetteville recommended it.

(In response to a request for comment on the legality, a Mission spokesperson reiterated their argument that the money given to guests is not a wage but a gift.)

Clermont Ripley, co-director of the Worker’s Project at the North Carolina Justice Center, has tried two cases in North Carolina, Presson v. Recovery Connections Community and Armento v. Asheville Buncombe Christian Ministry, which alleged violations of state wage laws by nonprofit, work-based recovery programs. The Presson case found that the laborers were being exploited, while Armento did not, with the different verdicts hinging upon the definition of when laborers were legally classified as employees. Ripley believes that there should be clearer state and federal legislation on these institutions.

“I think homeless shelters and therapeutic programs for people with drug and substance abuse dependency are valuable, and they need to figure out a way to cover their expenses,” Ripley said. “But I don’t think they should be profit generating for their CEO on the backs of the resi-

dents through free labor.”

In the 2006 book about the Mission’s history, A Step of Faith, Mills gave his reasoning for not paying guests wages or allowing them to hold outside jobs.

“In the beginning, I was under the impression that if a guy was homeless his problem was that he needed a job and money,” Mills said. “Really, that could be the worst thing for him. Literally, we were enabling them. We were giving them a place to stay until they could earn some money to get their next fix. That was hurting them. Until they have control of themselves, they can’t control the money.”

In his interview with The Assembly, Tart was careful to refer to the labor of Mission guests as “chores” and said the money they receive is not related to their work.

Guests are “not on payroll,” Tart said. “They’re not reimbursed for their labor. Everybody is given a stipend here.

It’s a gift.”

Labor and life at the Mission

A typical day at the Mission starts with a six a.m. wake up and seven a.m. morning prayer meetings, Howell said. He would then be bussed an hour north to the Mission’s Roxboro thrift store, where he would start work at nine a.m. He didn’t return to the Mission till between seven and eight p.m.

After staying for 21 days, guests can enroll in the Victory Program, which reduces weekly work hours from 40 to 20. Residents use the newfound time to attend biblically

focused classes (sample course title: “Evangelism Explosion”), from 12:30 to 4:30 Monday–Friday, for six months. These classes are followed by six months of employment training and a final “apprenticeship” phase, where guests can work in one of the Mission’s departments, or thrift stores.

According to a written statement from Tart, Victory Program graduates can be given rewards “such as a voucher toward a vehicle from the Mission, money toward housing closing costs, educational scholarships, and credits at the Mission thrift store.”

Labor was central to the experience of every former guest interviewed for this story. They described a variety of jobs including doing lawn care, cooking in the kitchen, staffing the shelters, and most frequently, working at the Mission’s thrift stores.

The website states that guests “must help out with chores around the Mission,” but it does not list other rules and policies. Tart declined to provide a written list of rules to The Assembly or a copy of the contract guests sign upon arrival at the Mission, or to give a reason for not providing the rules.

But former guests say the rules are strict. Once they arrive, they are forbidden from leaving campus during their first week. Guests said that they had to make up work hours missed for any reason, including sickness or medical appointments. The most common penalty for disciplinary infractions, such as dress code violations, or being late to church, is additional work hours.

Guests must attend Christian religious services regardless of whether aspects of their identity, such as sexual

The Center for Hope is just one of the Durham Rescue Mission sites in the Triangle. PHOTO BY KATE MEDLEY FOR THE ASSEMBLY

orientation, religion, or gender expression, conflict with beliefs being espoused. The mission sends transgender guests to the campus of their assigned sex at birth, contrary to federal guidelines.

Guests at the Mission can transition from “love offerings” to employment after six months. Guests can take jobs through Temps to the Rescue, which contracts out to local businesses; work for the Mission; or find an outside job independently. While men have the option of moving to transitional housing, be that suite-style dormitories or the blocks of houses the Mission owns downtown, women must stay on their campus.

After six months, the Mission starts charging most guests what they call “program fees,” which will not exceed more than one-third of their income, up to $100 a week, according to Tart. In a December sermon at the Mission’s chapel, Beasley argued that $100 was a low cost for what they offer.

“I know very few people lining up to take in 500 people and make sure they have a place to stay, to make sure they have food to eat. Somebody’s gotta pay for it,” Beasley said. “I wish I could live off of $100 a week. Y’all got a great opportunity here. We’re gonna give you the word of God.”

But not all guests can afford it. Mark Scruggs, who stayed at the Mission from December 2011 to April 18, 2012, found out about a blockage in his heart through Samaritan Health Center, a faith-based health clinic that provides no-cost health care to Mission guests. The blockage was severe enough to bump him up the list for cardiac surgery at UNC. A few weeks after Scruggs’s surgery, Mission staff asked him to unload a truck against his

doctor’s orders.

“I said, my doctor told me not to pick up anything heavier than my own dinner plate …. They told me that if I wasn’t gone in 10 minutes they would have me removed as a trespasser,” Scruggs said, noting that the staffers who removed him are still there in leadership positions.

“I immediately found out what my worth was when I could not work anymore. I was just like an empty McDonald’s bag in the back of your car. It goes in the trash,” Scruggs said. (Disclosure: Scruggs and the reporter previously worked together at Open Table Ministry’s emergency winter homeless shelter.)

In response to a questions about removing guests that were no longer able to work, Tart wrote, “We do not remove anyone from Durham Rescue Mission for not being able to work, but when a guest comes to point where they cannot maintain their own hygiene or self-care, we may ask them to find more proper facilities.”

Former staff also described conflicted feelings about the Mission. Mary Wilson was a nurse at the Samaritan Health Clinic for nine years. When she left to found Fresh Start, a mobile service offering no-cost showers, laundry, and haircuts in Durham, she chose to do so without the Mission.

“The Mission helps a lot of people with Samaritan that wouldn’t get that level of care otherwise. And that kept me there for years,” Wilson said. “Working with homeless people, it’s so relationship-based. It’s trust. And the people I serve, I need them to know that I’m low-barrier, that I welcome everyone.”

For Beasley, the explanation for why some question their practices is simple.

“A lot of people don’t like us because a lot of people don’t like God,” he said. “And I just, I’ll pray for them. That’s all I can do.”

A regional footprint

During a tour of the men’s campus, guests identified themselves as from other parts of North Carolina, Virginia, D.C., and New York. Recent articles on the Mission feature guests from Texas and South Carolina.

When these people leave, voluntarily or otherwise, many end up on Durham’s streets or with other organizations serving the unhoused.

Russell Pierce, executive director of Housing for New Hope, said it would be helpful if the Mission informed other agencies when former clients from elsewhere end up on the streets of Durham—“for there to be a more coordinated service or alert process, so that those of us working in homeless services would know that there’s somebody new entering.”

Zachary Hair first came to the Mission from New Bern in June 2016, stayed through November 2017, and returned for a few months in 2018. He supervised one of the Mission’s thrift stores and compared the pay structure to indentured servitude. But he also said that comforts like a soda machine in the cafeteria, clean towels, and free hot meals are enticing to people at their lowest point in life.

“The Mission makes a lot of money, and they’ll even tell me, you know, they said we don’t care what kind of lifestyle you have. This is a business. We want you to help us earn

Mark Scruggs underwent heart surgery in 2012. Scruggs says he left the Rescue Mission after being required to unload a truck while recovering. PHOTO BY KATE MEDLEY FOR THE ASSEMBLY

“That’s why they valued me, because I could earn them money. I knew how to manage people. I knew how to work hard.”

— Zachary Hair, former guest

money, ” said Hair, who was living in subsidized housing in Durham at the time of his interview. “And that’s why they valued me, because I could earn them money. I knew how to manage people. I knew how to work hard.”

While the stipends paid to the people who keep the thrift stores running are a stark contrast with what the Mission pays its top executives, it’s also at odds with other homelessness organizations in Durham.

The salaries for the executive directors of five other Durham-based homeless service agencies—Urban Ministries, Families Moving Forward, Open Table Ministries, Durham Crisis Response Center, and Housing for New Hope—were all under $110,000.

Tart’s salary is more at home with higher-revenue organizations across the state: the CEO of Charlotte Rescue Mission, which brought in $24.6 million in revenue in 2022, made around $210,000, while the leader of Goodwill of Eastern North Carolina, which brought in $43.6 million in revenue, made $305,000.

“I think the ratio of money they take in to money they give is way, way, in the bad area,” said Isaac, who stayed at the Mission between 2014 and 2018.

A friend brought Isaac to the Mission from Moore County, after hearing that it helped homeless people. He’s now homeless in Durham and requested anonymity to speak about the Mission, out of concern that he might have to return there someday.

The Mission owns at least 75 parcels of land in Durham County alone, including its multi-building men’s campus, multiple thrift stores, over 35 houses in the blocks surrounding the men’s campus, and a 6.5 acre plot of land

housing the Mission’s South Durham training center.

The Mission’s scale and flexibility allow it to take in prospective guests same-day at a time when Durham’s homeless systems are increasingly strained. As of March 25, all shelters in Durham were full, and there were 296 individuals on the shelter waiting list.

Families Moving Forward director of programs Tasha Melvin said for many, the Mission is the only option.

“I’m getting calls and telling people we can’t take you tonight, there’s a process to get on the waitlist …. I’m the same person to say, ‘Please call the Mission. Get your child off of the street tonight if you can,’” said Melvin. “Whether I agree with the service model or not, I completely disagree with a child sleeping on the street.”

Most service providers in Durham provide data to the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a federal program that tracks trends in homelessness and documents people’s history with providers to create a sort of electronic housing and medical record, allowing for consistency in care between organizations.

But the Mission does not, nor does it share data with the city or take part in the annual Point In Time count, an effort to track homelessness across the country. Guests do not have to be homeless to enroll in the Mission’s programs, and it does not track how many of its guests are unhoused. The lack of data makes it difficult to follow outcomes for Mission guests, critics say.

“I want to see transparency, and I want to know how successful you are in doing what you say your mission is, which should be getting homeless people housed,” said Ryan Fehrman, the former executive director of the North

Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness. “If a significant portion of these resources that are going to the Rescue Mission went to other publicly funded agencies … those agencies need those resources, and we know from HMIS that they’re successful at what they do.”

Pierce said that he sees the Mission as more of a religious program than a homeless services one.

“They don’t provide homeless services in the sense that we tend to understand it. People are coming with a variety of different challenges into a specifically valued and constructed program,” Pierce said. “They operate outside of the whole system entirely.”

But residents don’t necessarily know the rules and requirements when they arrive, often in desperate situations.

“I think it’s a business first. Maybe Jesus would come in third or fourth place,” said Isaac. “They did take me in when they didn’t have to and I had nothing. That counts for a lot.” W

If you are current or former Mission guest, we’d like to hear more—particularly from people who are LGBTQ+ or of non-Christian faiths.

Please contact us at info@theassemblync.com or editors@indyweek.com.

Cy Neff is Durham born and raised and took a nonlinear path to freelancing that included working in homeless shelters, in restaurants, on chainsaw crews, and for various Durham-based community organizations. He currently works for USA Today as its Wyoming Elections Reporting Fellow and can be found online at @cyneffnews.

One of the Rescue Mission’s thrift stores in Durham, where guests work PHOTO BY KATE MEDLEY FOR THE ASSEMBLY

Earth Day

If March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb, there’s a similar simile from the natural world to be made for April of this year, at least for those of us in the central and eastern United States.

This month came in with a stunning rare solar eclipse, and it will go out with a buzz from the emergence of trillions of periodic cicadas, another rare occurrence in which two broods will surface from under the ground at the same time. It’s an event we haven’t seen in 200 years, and here in the continental United States we won’t see another total solar eclipse again until 2044.

The infrequency of these two events, paired with the opportunities to observe them in one month in our lifetimes, is humbling. And, as kismet would have it, smack in the middle of all this natural phenomena is Earth Day on April 22. While it comes around every year, we at the INDY want to make sure to celebrate Earth Day in 2024 with this extra-special special edition of our paper.

This week, learn about said cicada emergence from Lena Geller’s Q&A (p. 26) with NC State entomology and plant pathology professor Clyde Sorenson, which we think you’ll find fascinating. Equally fascinating: find out what Durham does with its waste, and learn about the residents working to make the city less wasteful in a story from Justin Laidlaw on p. 18. And take a deep dive with Chase Pellegrini de Paur (p. 14) into what Duke, powered by its $11.6 billion endowment, is doing to address climate change; it’s more than just talk, but we’ll let you be the judge of how much.

There’s another great occasion to love the Earth in April and that’s for the bounty it bestows that those among us who indulge are inclined to celebrate on April 20. That’s right, we’re talking about weed. Writer Sam Overton profiles Hemp Generation (p. 16), a local cannabis retailer that seeks to offer consumers a gentle experience with THC and CBD in the alternative medicine space despite a clear lack of regulation. And writer Michael Hewlett delves into that lack of regulation a bit more in a story we’re publishing with our partners at The Assembly on p. 20.

The air is warming, the flowers are blooming, the pollening is almost past. The backdrop is perfect this week for settling in and spending some time with this Earth-focused special edition of the INDY. We hope you enjoy it and just ask that you recycle the paper when you’re done.

Happy Earth Day, readers. And happy 4/20.

- Jane Porter Editor-in-chief

Climate Committed?

Duke University has pledged to take decisive action on climate change. But some worry that without clear goals and authority, the climate commitment will end up a wellintentioned failure.

BY CHASE PELLEGRINI DE PAUR chase@indyweek.com

In September 2022, Duke brought together some prerecorded videos of high-profile figures to announce the launch of the university’s revolutionary “climate commitment.”

John Kerry, President Biden’s then special envoy for climate, congratulated Duke on its attempt to “continue to lead” the world. Alumnus Tim Cook, wearing a Duke polo, popped up on-screen to “commend … the entire Duke community for its focus on climate action.”

And, to really drive home Duke’s dedication to action, coach Mike Krzyzewski streamed in to emphasize the importance of “the whole Duke team” playing both “good offense” and “good defense.”

“This is the time to bring out our A game,” said Coach K.

For the university, that A game tipped off with an initial fund of $36 million for the climate commitment, framed as an unprecedented attempt to consolidate and leverage the university’s capabilities to address the climate crisis under one coordinating office.

Stocked with able and determined staff and administration, the climate commitment has coasted for nearly two years, buoyed by the fulfillment of a 2007 pledge to reach carbon neutrality by 2024. If given the money and mandate to succeed, the commitment could be a model for how an organization—especially one of the wealthiest universities in the world— could use its unique position to address the climate crisis.

But despite Coach K’s enthusiastic analogy, power at the university may not be so easily harnessed in the game of climate change. If the administration is the

coaching staff, the school’s $11.6 billion endowment is the league itself, notoriously resistant to change. That’s why some students and faculty are worried that the commitment, with unclear goals and a lack of authority to make change where it matters most, will end up a well-intentioned failure.

Toddi Steelman, a coal miner’s daughter and West Virginia native, leads Duke’s climate commitment efforts.

Steelman earned a PhD at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and taught environmental and sustainability policy for decades around the country before returning to Durham as dean of the Nicholas School until 2023. She now holds the dual titles of vice president and vice provost for climate and sustainability for the university.

The goal, Steelman says, is to “take the entire mission of the university … and force it through the lens of climate and sustainability.” That, first, meant taking the most obviously climate-related units—Duke’s campus farm, gardens, and forest—and uniting them under the climate commitment umbrella.

On a call recently, Steelman was excited to hear that some students were at least aware of the commitment. And she has a simple ask for skeptics: “I would invite people to look at what we’re doing,” she says.

“Our actions speak louder than the words.”

Some students and staff do have well-founded reservations about the climate commitment. One of their largest concerns is that Duke still invests in fossil fuel companies.

“Until Duke pledges to total [fossil fuel]

divestment, the Climate Commitment will remain a statement of utter hypocrisy,” wrote the Duke Climate Coalition, a student group, in the Duke Chronicle shortly after the climate commitment was announced.

Divestment, inspired by the 1980s movement that encouraged the university to divest from companies doing business with South Africa’s apartheid regime, is not new at Duke or other colleges.

The fossil fuel divestment debate has played out over the past decade in memos between an alphabet soup of Duke organizations, including the Duke Climate Coalition, formerly Divest Duke, and the Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility (ACIR), a group of faculty, administrators, alumni, a member of the board of trustees, and a few students, who provide recommendations for Duke University Management Co. (DUMAC). ACIR reports to the university president and was reorganized in 2013, in part to deal with earlier criticism about socially irresponsible investing.

DUMAC is a separate nonprofit support corporation founded to manage Duke’s endowment, pension assets, Duke Health’s investments, and the Duke Endowment, the trust established by the university’s founder. Students are quick to point out that DUMAC’s role is to grow the university’s assets, not to create a livable future.

The short story: In 2014, student-led Divest Duke proposed fossil fuel divestment, writing that Duke had the opportuni-

ty to “to claim the value and fame associated with being the first mover.” ACIR wrote back that there was “a lack of clarity that divestment will have the desired impact” and recommended against it. Students, faculty, and administrators have held their stances since, with some more back-andforth dialogues (other universities, including Harvard, have since divested).

“We’ve had good conversations with administrators, but we’ve yet to see actually any concrete commitments to change,” says Brennan McDonald, a senior and co-president of Duke Climate Coalition. “Every time we try to address their issues with divestment, they come back with different reasons that negate all of our previous work.”

In 2022, the Climate Coalition placed a divestment referendum on Duke Student Government’s annual ballot asking students if they were “in favor of calling on Duke to permanently end all direct and indirect investments in companies that explore for or develop fossil fuels; and reinvest in sustainable businesses, industries, and funds.”

Of the 2,757 students who voted, roughly 90 percent said yes. And yet, nothing much happened.

That’s partly why some students see the university’s climate commitment as the administration’s attempt to slap a green sticker on Duke’s image without doing much work. And it doesn’t help that there

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE, PHOTOS VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

are some lightweight sustainability measures promoted on Duke websites.

Professors can get a “green classroom certification” through a 25-question form that includes pledges to be mindful of paper consumption, turn lights off, and drink from reusable cups. Students can get their “green dorm certification” by promising to not abuse the thermostats—many of which are centrally controlled anyway. It seems a bit silly, especially if the focus is on shifting the economic weight of an $11.6 billion institution.

Some professors applaud the students’ work and are taking steps of their own.

Elizabeth Albright, a professor in environmental sciences and policy at the Nicholas School, also penned a Chronicle op-ed in October 2022 when the climate commitment was announced. Albright applauded its formation and echoed the students’ concerns that without “open communication, transparency, inclusive engagement, equity, and accountability,” the commitment would “ring hollow and be steeped in hypocrisy.”

“If we’re going to say we’re climate leaders, then we need to be climate leaders,” Albright says. “I’m not saying we need to divest tomorrow, but we need to engage on these issues and be willing to study them, be willing to be transparent, and be willing to act, but we’re not. I am not at all opposed to the climate commitment, but it needs to include the endowment. And I would like to see greater clarity in goals and measurement of those goals.”

Inspired by the basketball fans who sleep in tents outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium for tickets to the Duke-UNC game, Albright staged a mini-protest this year, sleeping outside of the Nicholas School for a week in order to have conversations with students about “transparency, engagement studies, goals, and accountability.”

Steelman and her office are in an odd spot: they don’t control the endowment, but they have much more contact with divestment-focused students and professors than the average DUMAC member does.

“Our students are passionate, they are filled with purpose, and that is one of the great engines of change in society at large,” Steelman says. “Now, it doesn’t mean we’re always going to agree.”

Steelman says divestment is an important part of the conversation but that “it’s a very tiny slice of what we’re trying to achieve institutionally.” She points to the university’s potential to have a positive impact through its thousands of graduates, research footprint, and external engagement.

Ultimately, Steelman and students believe in different rates of change. Students are only around for four years, and they’ve grown up hearing about how the world is falling apart. They’re driven by the urgency of knowing that they’ll be the ones alive to deal with the consequences of the foretold climate disaster. (The Climate Coalition’s most recent Chronicle op-ed flamed the administration for not committing to a “livable future.”)

Steelman recognizes that the climate commitment is inherently conservative— not in the political sense, but because it is built on the use of preexisting structures to make slow change.

“That [approach] presses up against the urgency of climate change. Which is like, ‘Good Lord, it is here. And now shouldn’t we be moving faster?’” Steelman says. “And the answer is yes. But the way you have durable change is by taking time and building the governance and institutional structures that really allow the effort to slowly gain momentum and enthusiasm.”

But doesn’t she wish students would stop asking her about divestment?

“Heck no,” Steelman says.

In the 2022 climate commitment announcement, Durham’s deputy city manager appeared via video to show the Bull City’s support. In the 2023 climate commitment report, though, the “community partnerships” portion is still suspiciously empty. That points to larger tensions between the university and the City of Durham, two entities which are, in many ways, the wayward children of the industrious Duke family.

Around the turn of the century, the tobacco entrepreneurs bought naming rights for the university, funding the construction of the campus. And downtown, the low bulk of Duke companies’ brick tobacco warehouses still holds firm against the proliferation of high-rise apartment buildings forcing their way skyward.

Climate is an issue that makes the importance of the town-and-gown relationship obvious—what happens to one happens to the other. But Bull City residents are skeptical after incidents like the failure of the intercounty light rail project, which Duke is blamed for permanently derailing.

It didn’t help Duke last year after a Nicholas School researcher found unsafe levels of lead in several Durham parks. The school—alongside some city officials—sat on the results for several months until a resident found the study online. Steelman, then the Nicholas School’s dean, publicly apologized for “not more proactively com-

municating” with residents sooner.

During his state of the city address this month, Mayor Leonardo Williams shouted out the university for its employment of more than 40,000 people and economic impact of over $1 billion. But there’s still an economic tension (as a nonprofit university, Duke doesn’t pay taxes on much of its massive landholdings in Durham) and a cultural tension (students tend to jet in for four short years, often not seeing much of Durham beyond a blurry view of Shooters on a Saturday night).

Those are just some of the reasons Steelman is moving forward cautiously.

“You don’t want to be working with local communities in ways that you cannot sustain because once you make a commitment to do something, you want to be able to follow through on it,” Steelman says.

As 2024 continues, Duke’s staff is confident it will meet the 2007 carbon-neutrality pledge. Matthew Arsenault, assistant director in the Office of Sustainability, says that’s the result of a three-part plan to “reduce, renew, and offset.” “Reducing,” referring to emissions, came about through steps like ending coal burning on campus. “Renewing” refers to renewable energy.

And “offsetting” means that at the end of the year, Arsenault and his coworkers will calculate Duke’s carbon impact and then essentially fund carbon reduction elsewhere in the world. That can look like anything from regenerative grazing to wetland restoration or landfill gas destruction.

If Duke wants to call itself carbon neutral, offsetting will be necessary for as long as the university is not running on entirely renewable energy. And because Duke Energy, one of the largest utility holding companies in the nation, powers the university, it would be difficult to ever say that Duke is entirely “clean” (both entities are named after the same 20th-century industrialist but are not otherwise directly related).

“Even if we shift to [a] full electric campus bus fleet, that electricity is coming from Duke Energy’s grid,” says Arsenault. “A lot of natural gas—and I believe even some coal is on there still. So yeah, there’s going to be emissions.”

Scholars and scientists beyond Duke have warned for years that those kinds of carbon offsetting and credit plans can create a false sense of progress—or give a university a way to call itself “carbon neutral” without actually making any change. Arsenault, who was himself a graduate student in Duke’s public policy school, says he’s an offset skeptic as well. He says that pushed him, alongside his coworker Emma Fulop, to create an extremely rigorous selection process when considering offsetting

opportunities. He wants students to keep asking questions.

“When we release all the details on the offsets that we purchased, I want to have conversations with students, I want to show them, in the weeds, why we think this is good and answer any questions or even criticisms that they have,” Arsenault says.

The students certainly have questions. According to McDonald, the Duke Climate Coalition co-president, carbon neutrality was an ambitious goal when it was originally conceived in 2007.

“They’ve yet to really follow up with anything as comprehensive,” says McDonald.

Arsenault is part of the ongoing conversations about the next set of climate goals. And like McDonald and Albright, he wants to see some ambition.

“2024 carbon neutrality is … a giant milestone for the university, but it’s just that—it’s a milestone. It’s not like we’re done,” Arsenault says.

He ultimately believes in the core mission of the university as the best path to change.

“The stuff on campus that we do is important, but it pales in comparison to the influence we have with these young people that are going to go change the world,” he says. “The way Duke makes a big impact is by teaching the next generation of climate activists, of climate workers, of climate scientists.”

Past organizing efforts have depended heavily on a small number of passionate individuals leading to movement in fits and starts. And in less than a month, much of the leadership behind Duke’s current climate organizing body will graduate.

They’re working on transitioning to the next generation of leaders while continuing to push for divestment. This month, the Climate Coalition organized a protest on the quad during alumni weekend, trying to convince alums to withhold their donations until Duke divests.

There are also small signs that ACIR is open to keeping the conversation going.

McDonald has been a co-moderator in a seminar series on investment responsibility, organized in collaboration with the climate commitment. Next month, the ACIR chair is having a public conversation with students from the Climate Coalition. McDonald is optimistic that future students will continue to engage, helping the administration put on aggressive offense and defense to make Coach K’s strained analogy proud.

As long as the shot clock hasn’t run out by then. W

The High Road

Hemp Generation provides a safe space for cannabis-curious North Carolinians despite a lack of clear hemp legislation.

BY SAM OVERTON backtalk@indyweek.com

With a baby strapped to her chest, a supermom ready to change a diaper at a moment’s notice, Chloe Blesh doesn’t mince words about the industry she landed in six years ago.

“I tell everyone, ‘I lose more sleep from stress about the business than I do from her,’” Blesh says, gesturing to her young daughter. “Especially with the industry now—it changes quickly. It’s like, are you doing enough? Are you growing quickly enough? We need a bigger space, we need more funds, more sales, we need to maximize production.”

Blesh’s well-justified wishes could apply to any small business in the Triangle, but Hemp Generation—Blesh’s flagship business that she cofounded with Louis Rubio in 2018—deals in the cannabis industry. Scattered across three storefronts in Wake County, Hemp Generation sells CBD and THC products for those seeking a gentler experience with cannabis.

The company’s home-grown manufacturing setup isn’t a massive one. Blesh’s desk is strewn with lab reports while employees in the adjacent rooms funnel cannabis flower into jars and stick aesthetically pleasing labels onto glass tubes. Blesh stands at the desk and rocks side to side, her baby cooing quietly despite the hustle and bustle.

Blesh and Rubio pride themselves on providing education to and comfort for their customers. Each storefront feels clean, almost clinical. Colorful posters on the wall describe the differences between THC and CBD or the benefits of terpenes—bioactive compounds present in hemp. Hemp Generation’s blog posts, dating back to 2022, dive into the benefits of different types of THC or ways to incorporate CBD into your routine.

Blesh says she contracted Lyme disease, and that’s what got her interested in alternative ways of healing.

“That’s what took my interest. [Cannabis] was a new industry, so it dealt with business and that whole holistic aspect, too—helping other people,” Blesh says. “The medi-

cal system doesn’t work for everybody, so being able to offer high-quality, alternative products is interesting.”

So, why the stress?

Cannabis is, understandably, a polarizing topic. Its legality is barely understood, and what few laws do exist are enforced variably from county to county in North Carolina. Phil Dixon, a teaching assistant professor and the director of public defense education at UNC-Chapel Hill, spells it out in simple terms.

“The theory seems to be that as long as those products don’t contain more than a 0.3 percent concentration of delta-9-THC, they’re legal,” Dixon explains. “We only have federal regulation now, and then we have a state law that defines marijuana in the same language that the federal definition uses.”

To break it down a bit further, delta-9-THC is the most common naturally occurring cannabinoid in cannabis plants. It’s also what gives you the “high” when you smoke a joint or take an edible, and it’s one of the most well-studied and well-known forms of THC.

And the 0.3 percent concentration threshold? That’s the only hemp-related law on the books in North Carolina. There’s no widespread product testing, no restrictions on other cannabinoids, not even an age limit for purchase.

“If that plant can leave the farm and pass the test as having a permissible level of delta-9, it doesn’t matter what the other cannabinoid levels are,” Dixon says. “It doesn’t matter what the concentrations are. And it really doesn’t matter what you do with it from there. You go into a store, and they might be advertising a vape pen with all of those things plus a legal concentration amount of delta-9-THC.

And there’s nothing that says that’s improper or illegal.”

Without the appropriate regulations in place, North Carolina’s cannabis industry is the Wild West of alternative medicine. Some companies, like Hemp Generation, strive for health advocacy in the cannabis community and stress the importance of research and taking it slow. On the other hand, some unsuspecting consumer could pick up a gummy at the gas station that’s technically under the threshold of 0.3 percent delta-9 and be in for a hell of a ride, thanks to the presence of additional unadvertised cannabinoids.

“I’ve heard all these really bad, sad stories,” Blesh says. “Now [consumers] are coming to us and we kind of have to fix it and paint the picture better. Like, this is what you should’ve been told, you should have tried something smaller. Work your way up in dosage.”

To curb the potential for an unpleasant experience, Hemp Generation’s products are explicitly “natural and accurately represented,” according to the company’s website. Each product listing includes a lab report certifying the percentage of cannabinoids, CBD, and THC present within the delta-9 gummies or CBD tinctures you may be interested in buying.

That said, not every company will go to such lengths. The lack of legislation combined with a deficiency of standardized guidance for law enforcement creates gray areas, ripe for businesses to take advantage of gaps in hemp law.

According to Dixon, the emphasis law enforcement places on marijuana prohibition varies from county to county, even from agency to agency. Different law enforcement officers within one county may even treat it differently. “Some jurisdictions have thrown up their hands and said,

Hemp Generation co-founder Louis Rubio plants hemp at a growing facility PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

‘We’re not going to enforce [cannabis prohibition] anymore, or we’re not going to prioritize it,’” Dixon says. “It’s one thing if you have a trailer full—but if you have just a small amount, many places aren’t really prosecuting it.”

A blanket policy legalizing recreational marijuana in North Carolina wouldn’t fix everything, either. Not only would it be extremely difficult to pass in the Republican-controlled House, but smaller, homegrown companies like Hemp Generation would suffer at the hands of “Big Hemp.”

“A few years ago, we said, ‘Let’s legalize cannabis and make a marijuana program,’” Blesh says. “But now, it’s come to the point where we have it already. It just needs to be regulated. Letting the big [hemp companies] come in would actually monopolize the industry for smaller companies.”

Despite the gray areas and general sense of ambiguity about the future of cannabis in North Carolina, Blesh is keeping an eye on what’s in her control: namely, production, testing, and customer experience. Hemp Generation isn’t the only business of its kind in the Triangle, but Blesh and Rubio aim to create a safe space for locals curious as to what cannabis can do for them: everything from pain relief to easing anxiety. Their website includes FAQs under some of their most popular products so consumers can understand what they can expect—plus, their business model is consultation-based.

“My consultants ask customers, ‘What have you tried before? Have you tried anything?’” Blesh says. “‘If you haven’t tried anything, then let’s start out with something very, very small. What are your goals? Do you have pain?’”

For newcomers, common sense still

applies above all else. Just because there aren’t laws on the books doesn’t mean the basic rules don’t apply: don’t consume hemp in public, don’t drive impaired, and do your own research.

“Go to a shop you’re referred to or explore to see what shops answer your questions,” Blesh says. “You really have to be your own advocate and do your own research, unfortunately, because there are a lot of bad players in the industry who really don’t care about your health.”

It’s also worth keeping the receipts around. If a hemp business provides a certificate of analysis or third-party lab reports guaranteeing a legal product, a consumer can present the proof of purchase to mitigate some of the suspicion surrounding legal cannabis products. It’s not necessarily a foolproof method, though, so a private space is still the best place to experiment with hemp.

These unwritten guidelines aren’t obvious at every shop that sells edibles or THC pre-rolls, but Hemp Generation is dedicated to driving a paradigm shift for the cannabis-curious. Blesh and Rubio want their customers to understand their body’s limits, outline their goals, and start small—preferably with any of Hemp Generation’s products. While she still has to deal with hemp’s ambiguous legal statutes in the state for the foreseeable future, Blesh is generally optimistic about the industry at large.

“We’re mostly here to educate people on cannabis—to offer them high-quality products,” Blesh says. “Most of our products are organic, and we care about what goes in behind it all. We’re not saying, ‘Oh, let’s make the strongest thing possible and offer it to people.’ I want people to have good options that are realistic.” W

A display of THCa flower sits on a counter at a Hemp Generation store. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

Reduce and Reuse

Durham entrepreneurs are working to make the city less wasteful.

BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW jlaidlaw@indyweek.com

The headquarters for the ReCollective, a waste management company based in Durham, is crammed inside a small loading dock. Piles of variable plastic, cardboard, and glass line the walls. Orange pill bottles and chunks of styrofoam are sorted into large bags, while other materials wait to be categorized. Textiles are churning in the washing machine.

Bryce Brooks, who cofounded the ReCollective in 2022 alongside Kevin Younge, has been laboring over the mound of junk for hours but maintains her enthusiasm for the job. She takes a beat to admire the day’s work.

“It still smells like honey in here sometimes,” Brooks says. The lingering odor is thanks to the previous tenants, The Brothers Vilgalys, creators of the Krupnikas honey liqueur.

The ReCollective offers door-to-door service to residents who want to more thoroughly sort and discard the waste they generate at home. Brooks previously worked as a consultant helping businesses understand how to reduce waste throughout their own operations. She saw an opportunity to help bring those best practices to residential neighborhoods. The ReCollective now has more than 400 members across the Triangle.

“When we think about end solutions, in terms of the reuse of perfectly good pill bottles or boxes and stuff like that, that becomes the upstream solution for the beginning of someone else's journey,” Brooks says. ”Because if they're not buying virgin plastic to use for this box or this thing, then we've prevented the waste from happening in the first place for them.”

Every time you throw something away, it is hauled away to the local solid waste facility to be processed and sorted. But tons of items lying around the house—materials used for shipping packages, plastic bags used to carry groceries, and old batteries—are not biodegradable, which means they are destined to sit in landfills for hundreds or thousands of years.

The environmental impact of landfill waste is most acutely felt by residents of Sampson County, one and a half hours southeast of Durham, where the bulk of Durham’s trash is shipped and stored. Twenty-five million tons of garbage are rotting in the Sampson County landfill, according to a 2023 report from NC Newsline Due to the decomposition process, the facility emits the second-most methane gas of any landfill in the country, causing environmental harm and poor health outcomes for the community.

With the threats spurred on by climate change feeling more present by the day, Brooks, Younge, and a handful of other entrepreneurs in Durham, including the founders of Don’t Waste Durham, have taken up the challenge of supplementing the city’s waste reduction efforts by making “reduce and reuse” a seamless part of everyday life for residents.

Even the most earnest tree huggers can find it difficult to properly dispose of all the different waste they create on a daily basis. Without clear directions from manufacturers or the city, most residents default to tossing items into the trash can or the recycling bin, unaware of how it will be processed downstream. Brooks says she sticks to a few fundamentals when in doubt.

“I'm pretty confident when I stick to bottles, cans, tubs, jugs, and jars. That's the mantra I have in my head,” Brooks says.

The City of Durham provides a “recycling guidelines” search tool on its website to inform residents on the best method for disposing of items they may be unsure about. Many of those items, the ones that are often not suitable for the city's regular trash and recycling pickup, are the

types of products that the ReCollective hauls away. Folks who sign up for the ReCollective get a collection of bags that separate waste into four categories: plastic film, textiles, styrofoam, and batteries and bulbs. Those materials are picked up monthly from each customer and brought back to the ReCollective facility, where they are sorted and redistributed to other recycling depots or nonprofit organizations that repurpose the products. Items that fall outside the regular collection categories are sometimes included in the company’s monthly “ReCo picks,” a onetime pickup for a different specialty item that could be as small as wine corks or as big as a car seat.

Brooks says that while she enjoys helping to combat waste and bring this necessary service to residents, her hope is that private industry and the public sector can work to prevent waste at the source.

“If we designed waste out of the problem,” Brooks says, “if we lived in a world where these things were returned to their manufacturer, or all of our local things were made in reusable containers and just simply washed and reused, recycling wouldn't have to be the savior or the Hail Mary that people think of it as.”

Waste is managed in three ways: mitigation, diversion, and prevention. Mitigation includes actions like picking up litter or having your trash hauled away to a landfill, efforts to mitigate the waste that gets into the environment. Recycling and composting are examples of diversion services and help keep some materials in circulation by breaking them down and repurposing them. Many of the services the ReCollective offers are about diversion.

But for Crystal Dreisbach, cofounder of Don’t Waste Durham, the ultimate goal is prevention: building a network of products and services that keep wasteful materials from

Bags of trash sit at The ReCollective warehouse in Durham. The ReCollective picks up trash from subscribers who want to recycle items that cannot go into a curbside recycle bin, such as medicine bottles, latex paint, textiles, plastic film, batteries, bulbs, and more. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

being created in the first place.

In 2017, Don’t Waste Durham started the Green-To-Go program. It partnered with other local businesses to provide reusable containers for customers to use when ordering takeout. After a customer finishes their meal, they can return the container to any business participating in the GreenTo-Go program. The containers are then washed at a licensed facility and returned to the businesses.

To launch the program, Don’t Waste Durham needed special permitting to create the washing facility. Dreisbach found allies at the Durham County health department, who worked with Dreisbach to come up with a proposal. Through their partnership, the health department and Don’t Waste Durham took their collaboration to the next level, advocating for the recognition of reusables as an industry, and convincing the NC State Board of Health to change the food code to allow reusables, unlocking new potential for the development of a “circular economy” in Durham.

“A huge lesson I learned is that policy and innovation must go together,” Dreisbach says. “A policy cannot be changed unless people have their minds open to a different way, and then that innovation cannot be scaled until the policy passes, so they really need each other.”

At a city council work session last September, the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic and Don’t Waste Durham presented a proposal to limit the use of plastic bags at local retailers through a small 10¢ fee at checkout. Nancy Lauer, a staff scientist at the Duke clinic, said that the manufacturing of plastics such as the bags found at grocery stores or containers at fast-food restaurants takes a heavy toll on the health of marginalized communities, and that their convenience is not cheap.

“The plastics that we are suggesting solutions for, these are ones that cannot be recycled,” Lauer said. “If we were to zoom out and look at this full life cycle, it’s really hard to justify their convenience based on the cost that those plastics bear to the low-income and communities of color at the beginning of their life during production and the extraction of oil and gas; during the plastics manufacturing; and at the end of their life, when we dispose of them in the Sampson County landfill.”

Community members raised concerns during the research process about the equitability of the bag tax. Brooks says a 10¢ fee should not be easily dismissed for residents who are already struggling to make ends meet.

“People are like, ‘What's the big deal, it’s

only 10¢ for a bag.’ Well, you've never been so poor that if you overdrafted by 10¢ for that single bag, you got charged $35,” says Brooks.

In response, Don’t Waste Durham created the Boomerang Bag program in partnership with the ReCollective to help alleviate some of those equity concerns. They created a system of reusable bags that customers could access for free at checkout to entice them away from choosing plastic.

Michelle Nowlin, co-director of the Duke Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, also recommended that the city exempt SNAP, WIC, and Medicaid recipients from paying the bag fee as part of the proposal to the city council.

Unfortunately for advocates, the NC General Assembly preempted the initiative in its own budget proposal just days before the clinic’s presentation, restricting municipalities across North Carolina from implementing rules like the plastic bag tax. Don’t Waste Durham still piloted the reusable bag program with two stores in Durham: Save-A-Lot (which has since closed) and Kings Red and White. But the interference from the NCGA restricted how progressive the city could be with its waste management solutions.

“Not only are we disappointed and frustrated with this action, but we’re also very frustrated and disappointed for the city, because you still bear the responsibility for managing waste,” Nowlin said. “That is a statutory mandate and part of your duties to protect the public health and welfare of the community members. The General Assembly is now poised to make you do that with both hands tied behind your back and prevent you from taking actions to reduce waste and protect the interests of the community.”

Even with this setback, the City of Durham is making strides to bring reuse to its own operations. Last year, city staff began a feasibility study through a partnership with the nonprofit FUSE Executive Fellowship Program to build a state-of-the-art recycling facility called the Reuse Hub Project. The facility would allow the department to tackle the use of disposables across Durham.

Katie Hunt is the program coordinator for the FUSE fellowship. She holds a doctorate in environmental communication and political economy from the University of Utah and has worked for decades as an advo-

cate for environmental justice and equitable sustainability.

Last fall, Hunt published an analysis based on feedback from the community and data from the city about how to approach building a circular economy with equity as the core value. She says that, unlike other communities who have introduced the concept of a circular economy, equity has been a top priority for Durham.

“Very few of them center equity in terms of the orchestration of those activities and the participation of frontline communities in developing the projects and then benefiting from the outcomes of those activities,” Hunt says. “And it is truly a marker of distinction for the City of Durham that they have centered that commitment in the strategic planning around the circular economy initiative from the beginning.”

The Reuse Hub would provide the City of Durham with a suite of tools to increase its capacity for managing waste products. Operation of the facilities and development of new sustainable products that would be used throughout the community are potential jobs for Durham residents, Hunt says. Job training and certification programs would be available through partnerships with local organizations like Durham Technical Community College and Step Up Durham, as well as the city’s office of economic and workforce development.

“This is going to require systems change, and that systems change requires multiple

entities working in tandem … in that coordinated way,” Hunt says.

Activists are often despondent about the effect of individual shifts in behavior when it comes to climate change. The root cause of the issue is with major corporations, like plastic manufacturers, whose business practices contribute the bulk of emissions in the United States. But folks like Brooks and Dreisbach are confident that changes at the local level will have an upstream impact on the ways corporations conduct their business, and that it's important to teach residents about the agency they have in effecting change in their own communities.

Dreisbach notes that Durham Public Schools uses more than 50,000 disposable items, such as lunch trays and plastic utensils, each day. She says that the amount of waste the school system creates sends the wrong message to students who are actively learning about sustainability during class.

“That's insane,” Dreisbach says. “And it's ridiculous for teachers and Durham Public Schools who are telling Don’t Waste Durham that it's not just the endocrine disruptors that are [messing] up our children in the schools. It's the moral harm we are doing to them. Because they're in class learning to care for the earth. And then they go to lunch. It's like messing up the development of their sense of what integrity is and trust in systems and adults. They’re forever screwed. Is that what we want for our kids?” W

Bryce Brooks, the co-founder of the ReCollective.

PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

The Smell Test

For years, law-enforcement officers could use the smell of marijuana as probable cause to search someone’s vehicle. Now that hemp is legal, the criminal justice system faces a quandary in discerning the difference.

BY MICHAEL HEWLETT backtalk@indyweek.com

Codie Bruce Schiene was sitting in his SUV in a hotel parking lot, scrolling through his phone, when two Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers approached him back in 2020. He told them he was a guest at the Baymont Inn. The officers quickly ordered Schiene and his nephew out of the GMC Acadia and handcuffed them, then searched the vehicle.

It was a warrantless search, but Sgt. William Buie said he had probable cause: He smelled unburned marijuana, according to court records. The officers said they found one open jar of marijuana, one closed jar of marijuana, and a loose nugget of marijuana, all of which was unburned. They also found a handgun.

Schiene was arrested for possessing a firearm while a felon and possessing a stolen firearm. He was later indicted on being a “habitual felon,” meaning he had at least

three prior felony convictions on his record. Classification as a habitual felon pushed his eventual sentence to a maximum of eight years in prison.

His attorney, Benjamin J. Kull, argued to the North Carolina Court of Appeals in February that there is no way that Buie can prove he smelled marijuana. Hemp is legal in North Carolina, and it looks and smells just like marijuana. No trained law-enforcement officer or K9 dog could tell the difference, he said. He called the legalization of hemp several years ago a paradigm shift.

“The ‘smell of marijuana’ no longer exists,” Kull told the three-judge panel. “That’s a scientific impossibility based on the definitions the General Assembly has given us.”

That “scientific impossibility,” however, led to Schiene receiving the maximum sentence. He pleaded guilty to all three charges after a judge denied his motion to suppress evidence that police seized as a result of searching Schiene’s vehicle. Schiene was never charged with marijuana possession, even if it was what led police to search his car.

Schiene's case is one of several before the Court of Appeals that raises the question of whether law enforcement can still use

the odor of marijuana as probable cause to search vehicles, homes, or businesses. On Tuesday, the Court of Appeals ruled in State v. Dobson that the odor of marijuana can still be used as probable cause. In that case, Tyron Dobson was arrested in January 2021 after Greensboro police searched the vehicle he was in after claiming they'd smelled a faint odor of marijuana. The court ruled that police officers had other reasons, other than smell, to justify the search.

Kull told the court in February that the legalization of hemp means he now has as much right to smoke a hemp cigarette while he drives as he does a Marlboro. He has no worries if he gets pulled over for speeding while in possession of the latter.

But if police stop him while he’s smoking a hemp cigarette, he’d be concerned because the smell alone “puts my constitutional rights in danger,” even though he hasn’t done anything wrong.

Experts say that the legal system in North Carolina has yet to recognize the paradigm shift that hemp legalization has created. Nor have state legislators done anything to fix the problems created by legalizing hemp without decriminalizing marijuana, as both are from the same plant species, Cannabis sativa—despite plenty of warning from law enforcement agencies.

A warning unheeded

North Carolina started a pilot program allowing farmers to grow hemp in 2015, and three years later, Congress passed a federal farm bill that legalized hemp-growing across the country. In 2019, North Carolina legislators proposed a bill that would bring the state in line with federal law.

State lawmakers passed that bill without banning smokable hemp or regulating the sale or use of hemp, and in 2022, the General Assembly permanently declassified hemp as a controlled substance.

But in 2019, a conflict arose between those who wanted to take advantage of an industry that is expected to grow to $18.1 billion globally by 2027 and those who were concerned that legalization would cause problems for law-enforcement officers, particularly in light of new hemp products that were similar in look and smell to marijuana.

Law-enforcement leaders and prosecutors urged lawmakers to explicitly ban smokable hemp, and the State Bureau of Investigation issued a five-page memo warning about the very scenario playing out today: “The unintended consequence upon passage of this bill is that marijuana will be legalized in NC because law enforcement

cannot distinguish between hemp and marijuana and prosecutors could not prove the difference in court.”

The psychoactive ingredient in marijuana is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. It is what gets people high. Under federal and state law, marijuana is defined as cannabis having 0.3 percent delta-9-THC. Anything

there are few regulations on who buys or sells those products. Billboards advertising such products are up across the state.

People can smoke or vape those hemp products, and they look and smell just like marijuana.

There’s also THC-A, which stands for tetrahydrocannabinolic acid, which is a natu-

“If they see what they think is a cannabis bud or something of that nature, they want to search the car and figure out what they can find without getting a warrant.”

lower than that is legal.

Hemp has low levels of THC and high levels of cannabidiol, or CBD, which is not psychoactive and is often used to treat medical conditions such as epilepsy.

The emergence of hemp-infused products such as delta-8 and delta-10 has made things even more complicated. Those products are different cannabinoids that have similar psychoactive effects as delta9-THC. But they are considered legal and

rally occurring chemical abundant in cannabis that is sold in stores as flowers and prerolled cigarettes. Heat, however, changes its chemical composition into delta-9-THC through a process called decarboxylation.

If you light up a THC-A hemp cigarette or leave it in the car under the hot sun, you could suddenly possess marijuana, said Rod Kight, an internationally known lawyer who represents the hemp industry.

The SBI warned in its memo that it would

be “impossible for law enforcement to use the appearance of marijuana or the odor of marijuana to develop probable cause for arrest, seizure of the item, or probable cause for a search warrant.” Even the paraphernalia for both look the same, the memo said.

Only a chemical test could distinguish the two. But the State Crime Lab doesn’t use such a test, and law-enforcement agencies have no field test that can easily identify marijuana. In some cases, items might be sent to a private lab. Nazneen Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the NC Department of Justice, said the State Crime Lab can test for the presence of THC but not the quantity. Nor can it identify whether a cigarette, for example, contains marijuana or hemp.

Ahmed said the testing equipment that could make such a determination is expensive, and the General Assembly has not provided funding for it.

Bob Crumley, an attorney who founded a hemp company, said law-enforcement leaders have opposed legalizing hemp because it destroys their ability to use look and smell as a reason to search someone’s property.

“They want to be able to do pretextual stops,” he said. “If they see what they think is a cannabis bud or something of that nature, they want to search the car

L: Books about marijuana sit on a table inside the Essential Hemp store in Greensboro.

R: The Hempary dispensary, where THC-A products are sold, in Graham PHOTO BY CORNELL WATSON

and figure out what they can find without getting a warrant.”

Despite hemp’s legalization, officers still routinely use look and smell to justify searches, and a lab test isn’t required for prosecution, said Phil Dixon, a professor at UNC School of Government. Hemp has changed things.

“The officer’s opinion that ‘I think it’s marijuana’ no longer carries the reliability it did pre-hemp,” he said. “And neither does a lab report that says we found THC.”

The SBI’s warning went unheeded.

Smoke and mirrors

On November 13, 2023, Christine Pierre and Anthony Lee were sitting at a Charlotte bus station. They had recently moved to the city from New York to start a new life.

The couple, who are both Black, had just gotten off from work at Bojangles when an officer with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department approached. “It smells like you’re smoking weed,” the officer was recorded saying in body-camera footage. Pierre and Lee said it wasn’t marijuana— they had bought a THC-A cigarette, a legal hemp product, from a nearby smoke shop.

The officer started placing Lee under

arrest, and Pierre protested. The confrontation escalated quickly as more officers became involved; footage from police body cameras and cellphones show Officer Vincent Pistone striking Pierre in the face and trying to punch her a second time when she swung at him. Then, as at least four officers held her down, Pistone punched her in the leg 17 times.

Both were charged with marijuana possession and resisting arrest. Pierre was also charged with assault on an officer, while Lee was charged with carrying a concealed weapon because a gun was found in a backpack.

The Mecklenburg District Attorney’s Office later dropped all the charges, and Pistone was suspended for 40 hours and ordered to get additional training. An internal investigation concluded that the first three of the 17 times Pistone hit Pierre were “justified” and the others weren’t. The investigation cleared six other officers who were involved.

Chief Johnny Jennings defended the officers’ arrest of the couple for alleged marijuana possession.

“As long as marijuana is illegal, I will expect my officers to address open marijuana use and marijuana sales,” Jennings said.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department has maintained that stance,

despite a recent recommendation from an advisory committee that officers stop investigating and arresting people for marijuana possession.

Race plays a significant factor in who gets searched and who doesn’t. A 2020 study by New York University professors found that Black drivers were 20 percent more likely to be stopped by police than white people, and Black drivers were 1.5 to 2 times more likely to be searched.

Mirroring an earlier study, the ACLU reported in 2020 that racial disparities have persisted even as more states decriminalize marijuana. Nationwide, Black people were 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. Montana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Illinois had the highest racial disparities, the report said.

Elizabeth Simpson, an attorney for Emancipate NC, wrote in a brief for the case involving Tyron Dobson that racism has played a part in how the country deals with marijuana. The drug became “associated with white hippies, Latin American immigrants, and Black people” in the 1960s and ’70s, she wrote, and while North Carolina reduced the penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana in 1977, the drug has remained illegal amid the national War on Drugs.

Natacha Andrews, executive director of the National Association of Black Cannabis Lawyers, said the use of smell as probable cause is arbitrary. An officer conducting a traffic stop not only can’t smell the difference between marijuana and hemp, she said, but also can’t know whether someone bought a product legally in a place where it’s allowed. Twenty-four states and Washington, D.C. now allow recreational marijuana use, while another 17 states allow only medicinal use. Within North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians is opening its first legal dispensary later this month.

Efforts in North Carolina to legalize marijuana have failed. A bill for medical marijuana made it through the Senate last year but died in the House of Representatives. But similar legislation is not likely to come up in the General Assembly’s short session that starts April 24. It’s not clear whether state legislators will revive any efforts to ban smokable hemp or propose additional regulations on the hemp industry.

This murky status has also affected legal hemp businesses like Greensboro’s Essential Hemp. On September 14, 2021, police officers raided the store on Elm Street and seized more than $30,000 of delta-8 and delta-10 hemp products. The store had

A customer at the Hempary in Graham smokes a THC-A pre-rolled product inside the store. PHOTO BY CORNELL WATSON

only been open three months, said owner Kattya Castellon.

“They robbed us,” she said. “They just took the products.”

A few weeks later, Greensboro police arrested and charged Hector Sanchez, Castellon’s partner who was then also the store’s co-owner, with possession of a Schedule VI controlled substance, possession with intent to sell/distribute a controlled substance, and maintaining a dwelling for the purposes of keeping controlled substances.

Police said an undercover officer had bought hemp products at their store and alleged that lab results showed the products had more than 0.3 percent delta-9-THC, the legal limit in North Carolina. Castellon said police never gave her or Sanchez a copy of the lab tests, even though she hired a civil attorney to try to obtain them. The charges were dropped a few months later.

They never got back most of the hemp products police seized. The only thing that was returned were two boxes of edibles that had since expired.

The kicker, Castellon said, was that the paperwork described the edibles as “marijuana products.”

“If they were marijuana products, why

would they return them to us?” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Clear as vodka

So far, North Carolina’s appellate courts have upheld the status quo—that is, that the smell of marijuana is sufficient probable cause for warrantless search and seizure.

In some cases, courts have avoided the issue altogether by ruling that officers considered other factors—nervousness, evasiveness, or a defendant’s own admission—not just odor.

Law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors in different parts of the state have taken varying approaches to low-level drug offenses. The elected district attorneys in Mecklenburg and Durham Counties, for example, don’t prosecute low-level drug cases at all, including possession.

Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg police departments declined to make anyone available for an interview about how they handle the odor issue. Anjanette Grube, a spokeswoman for the SBI, declined to comment on whether the agency maintained the concerns it expressed in its memo.

The NC Attorney General’s Office has

argued that the smell of marijuana is sufficient probable cause. (The AG’s office declined comment due to pending litigation.) In the Schiene case, Special Deputy Attorney General Scott Stroud argued that Buie had reason to search the vehicle because he was trained to detect marijuana, as was the other reporting officer.

“Defendant can point to no federal or state authority that finds an officer must be able to distinguish between the smell of marijuana and the smell of hemp to support a basis for probable cause to conduct a warrantless search of a vehicle, and therefore his argument fails,” Stroud wrote in a brief.

In response, Schiene’s attorney quoted from the 1995 film The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.”

State prosecutors, Kull said, want to do the same thing in “convincing the judiciary that the legislature never legalized hemp, such that the consequences of that legislative choice—consequences that the State itself once predicted—do not now exist.”

At the February 21 hearing, Court of Appeals judge Hunter Murphy picked up a glass of water. If he took it to his car after court was over, he mused, police could stop

him and not know whether he had water, vodka, or something in between.

Special Deputy Attorney General Zachary Dunn pointed out that an officer could easily smell alcohol.

“Looking at a clear glass with clear liquid is very different than looking at a green, leafy substance that smells like something that has been illegal in North Carolina for dozens and dozens and dozens of years,” Dunn said.

That left Murphy confused: “Isn’t the SBI memo basically saying it is the same because there is no way to tell a legal product from an illegal product?”

Dunn said the way the courts have previously ruled, the smell of cannabis, whether it’s hemp or marijuana, is enough for an officer to conduct a search. This prompted another question from Murphy.

“Is there any other legal product in this entire state where there is an ability to do that for?”

“Standing up here, your honor, I can’t think of one,” Dunn replied. W

Michael Hewlett is a staff reporter at The Assembly. He was previously the legal affairs reporter at the Winston-Salem Journal. You can reach him at michael@theassemblync.com.

Products available at the Hempary dispensary in Graham. Clockwise from top left: THC-A cannibis; delta-8 edibles; delta-8 hemp; delta-9 edibles. PHOTOS BY CORNELL WATSON

Cicada Season

Below our feet, a brood of beefy, red-eyed bugs is preparing to make the ascent of a lifetime.

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

The periodic cicadas that will surface in the Triangle in coming weeks have spent 13 years underground. In wooded areas and around bodies of water, we might see (and hear) up to a million an acre, according to Clyde Sorenson, a professor of entomology and plant pathology at NC State University.

Ahead of the upcoming emergence, the INDY spoke with Sorenson to learn more.

INDY: Talk to me about this year’s cicada season. What makes it so special?

SORENSON: Any time we have our local group of periodic cicadas emerge it’s a special thing. There are two different kinds of periodic cicadas: 17-year broods and 13-year broods. This only happens in eastern North America and nowhere else in the world. Our local brood is Brood 19 of the 13-year cicadas, and to a geographic extent, it’s the largest brood in the country. So it’s always cool.

But this year, it’s a little cooler because—even though it

won’t have any impact on us here in North Carolina—this brood is co-emerging with a brood of 17-year cicadas, which is located largely in Illinois and surrounding areas.

When’s the last time that the two broods emerged at the same time?

1803. Thomas Jefferson was president.

Wow. OK. So you said that in the Triangle, we won’t be affected by the double brood, but the 13-year cicadas will still be something to behold. What should we expect to see, and when?

Many people are going to have them in their yards, if they have wooded yards. If folks want to go see them, there should be good numbers of them at Lake Crabtree Park, around Falls Reservoir at Falls Lake State Park, around Jordan Lake, and all around in Orange County and Chatham County. In Raleigh, they’re going to be mostly on the north and west sides of town. They will extend in patches all the

way north of Rocky Mount. If you’re in an area where they are, you could experience as many as 1 million per acre. They’ll be coming up within the next couple of weeks. In 2011, they started coming up in late April, peaked in the first 10 days of May, and by the first week of June, they were pretty much gone. That could be shifted a week or more either way this year depending on how the rest of the spring runs and what the temperatures look like.

How do the 13-year cicadas impact local ecosystems?

It’s important to remember that they’re native animals that have been here for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. So they have some impacts, but those impacts over the grand scheme of things are pretty ephemeral.

Our brood spends 13 years in soil feeding on tree roots. There’s some evidence that the year before they emerge, they depress the growth of the trees they’re feeding on because there’s simply so many of them. But then they come up, they mate, they lay eggs, and they die—and after that, there’s this large pulse of nutrition that goes back into the soil that those same trees can harness. There’s some evidence that the year after they come up, the trees grow more. So from the perspective of the trees, it’s probably pretty much a wash.

As far as other animals are concerned, everybody will eat them until they get sick of eating them. They come up in such huge numbers that the local predators simply can’t make much of a dent. But again, there’s this pulse of nutrition. There’s evidence that when they come up, some bird species are more productive in terms of nesting success because there’s all this protein sitting around waiting to be picked off.

They don’t cause any lasting harm to anything in the system. I would ask people to regard them as just a really spectacularly cool phenomenon that they only get to see every 13 years.

Could climate change have an impact on the cycles of periodic cicadas?

That’s a legitimate question that is receiving a fair amount of attention. Thirteen and 17 are both prime numbers— there are lots of interesting theories about why that is—but there is some evidence that as it gets warmer, the clocks are gonna get messed up, particularly for 13-year species, and they may shift to a shorter prime number emergence.

The other problem with climate change, of course, is that when climate changes, habitats change. These are insects that evolved in hardwood forests, and if something

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ANN SALMAN, PHOTOS VIA PEXELS AND UNSPLASH

happens to those hardwood forests due to climate change, then that habitat is gonna contract. Development and land conversion have already pushed them back from where they were 500 years ago, before European colonization. And our activities continue to put pressure of that sort on them. They’re certainly not in any danger of going extinct in the next little while, but our activities could have a profound effect on how this looks in decades or maybe 100 years.

What are some of the theories around the cicadas’ prime number life cycles?

People have been puzzling over this observation since it was recognized. It’s pretty striking. One theory is that they’re deploying a strategy called predator satiation, where you come out in huge numbers all at once and there’s simply too many of y’all for any one individual to have a high risk of being eaten. If you’ve got a prime number development time, then that makes it very difficult for predators to synchronize with you.

The other idea is that they have prime number broods to maintain species distinctions and range distinctions. There’s some weird math that goes into it that, quite frankly, I don’t understand. I’m a naturalist. But in general, evolving toward a prime number tends to maintain the integrity of a particular brood and keeps it distinct from adjacent broods.

Because this is a phenomenon that only

happens every 13 or 17 years at one site, it’s really difficult to understand what’s going on. If somebody like me is trying to study this, you only get to see it four or five times in your life and then your ticket’s punched.

Do you have big plans for the upcoming emergence?

I’m anxiously looking forward to them. I’m gonna organize some field trips for some of my students. It’s a phenomenon I think everybody ought to try and experience because it is so unique. The behaviors are really cool. When they come up, contrary to the annual cicadas—the dog-day cicadas that come up every year—these guys are completely unaware. They don’t care if you pick them up. They don’t mind it a bit. So you get an opportunity to observe him.

They’re beautiful animals. They sing otherworldly songs. The tredecim, in particular, has a song that sounds more like a spaceship than it does an insect. It’s just impressive to see, you know, thousands and thousands of one insect on a tree, yelling their little heads off from the canopy.

Between this and the eclipse, April is turning out to be quite the month for rare natural phenomena.

Yeah. The good thing about this one is it lasts a whole lot longer than two and a half minutes. W

SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

The Enemy Within

Alex Garland’s harrowing Civil War is a new kind of red-alert American war film.

BY GLENN MCDONALD arts@indyweek.com

Grim and exhilarating, the brilliant new film from the always ambitious director Alex Garland (Annihilation) is a near-future nightmare of that ultimate doomscrolling scenario: a second civil war in America. This is hard, serious speculative fiction—the dystopian war picture as shrieking klaxon alarm.

The story concerns a team of four journalists traveling from New York to D.C. through the front lines of the conflict. Washington is under siege, but they hope to sneak through and interview the president before the noose closes. It’s an insane idea. “They shoot journalists on sight out there,” one colleague warns.

Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a legendary photographer with the thousand-yard stare of a war zone veteran. Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) is the driver and fixer, self-medicating with a steady supply of liquor and weed. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is a grizzled old

pro who writes for “whatever is left of The New York Times.” Then there’s young Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a twentysomething aspiring photographer about to have her first traumatic experiences with war.

Heading out in an armored SUV, the team encounters scenes of increasingly surreal violence. A brutal firefight in a Pennsylvania office park. A refugee tent city in a derelict football stadium. Bloodied POWs hanging from the rafters of a roadside shed. The episodic structure echoes the upriver journey in Apocalypse Now, one of many nods to that great war film. As harrowing as the foregrounded action is, the background details are just as disturbing. With bits of tossed-off dialogue and imagery, Garland encourages viewers to fill in the blanks of what has happened to America.

We eventually piece it together: The federal government is at war with multiple military factions and secession-

ist movements, including “the Florida Alliance” and “the Western Forces.” Garland is careful to never apply any labels—this isn’t an anti-left or anti-right film. It’s an antiwar film. Still, we get some indicators: The administration in D.C. is coded to read as a fascist regime. The president (Nick Offerman) is in his third term and the FBI has been dissolved. The other guys play rough, too. We overhear one soldier refer to “the Antifa massacre.”

Considered in the context of American politics circa 2024, the effect of all this piecemeal world-building is an accretion of creeping dread. The roughest scene features a secret mass grave tended by the great actor Jesse Plemons as a white nationalist soldier. “We’re Americans!” the journalists plead. “What kind of Americans?” the soldier asks. Garland lets the terrible significance of that question linger.

As mainstream commercial moviemaking, Civil War is a professional piece of work all the way around: The performances are excellent (especially Dunst’s) and the sound design evokes the whiplash tension of dissociative trauma. Cinematographer Rob Hardy toggles between shaky-cam bloodletting and passages of dark, stubborn beauty. But it’s the function of the film, more than the form, that lingers. Garland clearly intends his movie to be a wake-up call, and I responded to it more as a citizen than a critic, I’m afraid. Some of the images in this film are going to stay with me for a while, I can feel it.

A fierce intelligence pulses beneath the action, and one quiet scene serves as an interesting kind of meta moment. Lee, the veteran photographer, is reflecting on her career as a foreign correspondent, back before the horror show came to America. “Every time I sent photos out from a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning: Don’t do this.”

Garland, who also wrote the script, is trying to do the same thing with his film, sending a not-so-distant early warning out into the theaters and multiplexes of America: Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this. W

Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a photojournalist heading into the thick of an American war zone

COURTESY OF A24

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Americans?” the solsignificance of that

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Bury Me at the Casa Bacardí

Hip-hop feuds, dancing-bear brand activations, and other dispatches from Dreamville Festival 2024

BY RYAN COCCA music@indyweek.com

In the middle of Raleigh’s Dorothea Dix Park sits one of the most majestic and architecturally distinct buildings in the state of North Carolina. Inspired by the Moorish and colonial influences of Old San Juan, it features stucco-like walls, grand arches, and impeccable accent lighting. It has four well-stocked bars, a dance floor, a DJ booth, and a stunning balcony overlooking the rolling hills of a wideopen public park.

There’s just one catch: it only exists at J. Cole’s Dreamville Festival, and by the time you read this, it’ll already have been broken down, packed up, and hauled away.

When it comes to the gaping chasm in scale between Dreamville Fest and the Triangle-based music events that have preceded it, numbers are useful enough: Hopscotch’s recent 25,000-person attendance compared to Dreamville’s 100,000, for example, or the erstwhile Moogfest’s $199 GA ticket prices versus Dreamville’s sticker-shock

$349 base. But the difference in magnitude is best illustrated—at least, in my experience—by the brand activations and pop-ups that have come to indicate the kind of festival Dreamville aspires to be.

Milling around the festival grounds early Saturday before big-name acts started to take the stages, fans queued up at the Charmin Experience, at which they could, after signing up for the email list, do their business in a marginally nicer portajohn and take pictures on a gold toilet next to a dancing, life-sized Charmin bear. When I mentioned to a coordinator, who travels with the display along the festival circuit, how bizarre it was to see a 20-deep line for a toilet photo, he laughed: “It amazes me every time.”

Alcohol and liquor advertainment areas were, unsurprisingly, well accounted for—from the glossy Patrón lounge to the neo-rustic micro-château by Ste. Michelle Wines, to the industrial-chic Hennessy encampment built out of

storage containers, where, on Saturday afternoon, singer and actress Teyana Taylor served drinks amid a swarm of adoring fans (including our photographer, Brett Villena, who didn’t recognize Taylor but got a margarita from her anyway).

But none of it held a candle to the two-story colossus parked directly between the festival’s two massive stages, a glowing temple to Dreamville’s ambitions, a tantalizing slice of Puerto Rico in downtown Raleigh and the place where I immediately knew I needed to close out my weekend festivities on Sunday night: the Casa Bacardí.

All of this—the châteaus, the hastily constructed two-story buildings, the dancing bears—would seem remarkable were it not for the fact of just how unremarkable it was to most festivalgoers themselves. Comprised mostly of out-of-towners, whose frames of reference were not the local fare of Hopscotch or Moogfest, the drumbeat of commercial encroachment seemed hardly noticeable at all, and the trademark Dreamville aura of community and earnestness felt dutifully preserved.

The range of attendees, as diverse and wholesome as the festival’s inaugural edition in 2019, underscored the point: a mother from Winston-Salem with her teenage son, who had been gifted the tickets as a birthday present (during the Teezo Touchdown set, she said: “I’ve never heard of him before but I love him!”); a father from South Carolina with his college-aged son, excited to see the OG acts on the bill like Jeezy and 50 Cent; a trio of twentysomething sisters named Tasha, Tia, and Tamara who buy early-bird tickets every year; a massage therapist from Baltimore who hung back from the most packed, tighter areas because of her anxiety but said that when her younger cousin wants to see certain acts up close, “I’ll do it for her.” Every now and then, parents could be seen snaking through the crowd holding tightly to small children who, one can only hope, were not present to see Sexyy Red.

Also intact, despite the festival posting its highest attendance numbers yet (104,000 in total, by Dreamville’s count) was the promised feeling of a glorified cookout or family picnic, made possible by the sprawling 300-acre setting of Dix Park and the relaxed disposition of those in attendance. But while the characteristically laid-back atmosphere was a relief to some, it seemed a source of resentment for others. Numerous fans, often first-timers, took exception to “low-energy” crowds for their favorite artists—like a Raleigh native bewildered by a mild reaction for Lil Yachty, and another attendee from Orlando going so far as to leave Earthgang’s set early because “I didn’t want that to be my first experience of seeing them live.”

Less subjective, and more inexplicable for an event of Dreamville’s stature, were the logistical issues: microphones going quiet or failing (prompting at least one artist, Rema, to

Casa Bacardí PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

end his set prematurely), co-headliner Nicki Minaj starting her Sunday performance an hour late, and throughout the weekend, cellular data being nearly impossible to access (the five or six drones overhead, streaming the event live for Amazon Music, may have had something to do with that).

And yet, the prevailing feeling in talking with attendees was that little, if anything, could shake their commitment to the annual two-day pilgrimage. Even at an all-in cost of $500 or more, most hadn’t come for perfection as much as they’d come for a vibe—one that, even when dogged by sound issues, last-minute lineup changes, and late-arriving performers, the organizers of Dreamville Fest have shown themselves reliably capable of creating.

While the drone fleet, blue-chip advertisers, and growing attendance hint at Lollapalooza-sized ambitions, many fans still treat Dreamville Fest with the grace and good faith of an underdog, homegrown start-up. It’s hard not to wonder: How long will that last?

But more immediately, as I talked to festivalgoers on the sticky, alcohol-soaked second floor of Casa Bacardí on Sunday afternoon, my mind wandered to my closing-night vision of watching Cole’s show from the Casa balcony. I asked a Bacardí organizer about it, and the dream was dashed: the rooftop would be closed by the time he went on.

On the ground floor, a conga line was now tracing the perimeter of the dance floor. A moment later, the line had contracted into

a dense circle, everyone laughing, smiling, and taking pictures of the main attraction at the circle’s core: a confused, semidancing toddler, like a scene out of The Hangover

Only in San Juan. Or, more to the point, only at a San Juan–inspired, all-day, fleeting nightclub in the middle of Raleigh.

T he anticipation for J. Cole’s Sunday night headlining set, meanwhile, was amplified tenfold by the elephant in the room: a simmering feud between him and Kendrick Lamar (and Drake) that had, in recent weeks, captivated the rap world.

The excitement was palpable even outside the festival grounds on Sunday morning. At a prominent downtown Raleigh mural that features gray-scale renderings of Cole, Lamar, Drake, and Minaj, fans offered a wide range of commentary—from two young women who didn’t mind the sparring and called it “good for hip-hop,” to a dedicated Cole fan who kept his assessment blunt: “Man, f*** Kendrick!”

As Nicki’s time-constrained set came to a close that evening, I hustled across the park with a naïve hope that I’d been misinformed and my Casa Bacardí rooftop dream was still alive. Approaching from the back, careful to not break stride or make eye contact with the Bacardí event staff, I walked up the stairs until I arrived: looking out over the Dix Park festival grounds, about to watch J. Cole perform, from the second-floor balcony of the Casa Bacardí. As the crowd filled in on the grass below, two of my fellow Casa-mates shouted out “Hello, peasants!”

and waved at those beneath us. We basked in our temporary liquor-stand superiority.

It was going to plan, it seemed—until things got started. Plagued by the same microphone issues that had bedeviled other artists throughout the weekend, Cole’s opening words were inaudible, and sound complications would only continue as he soldiered through an unusually guest-heavy set that positioned him as a sidekick as often as the main star.

It more than an hour later—long after I’d been identified as not a member of the Bacardí team and politely asked to leave the rooftop—when Cole made the retraction heard around the world, calling his diss track from the week before the “lamest, goofiest s***.”

There would be no clean satisfaction on this night: not an electric, galvanizing moment of taunting and saber-rattling, not a shocking onstage truce with a guest appearance from Lamar, nothing. Only a hazy, disorienting fog, consisting of Dreamville mainstays “Love Yourz” and “No Role Modelz,” an obligatory sequence of fireworks, and then nothing.

Watching as the hushed masses trudged quietly off into the night, it was hard to tell if the collective zombie-like state was a product of the off-kilter headlining set we’d just seen (including multiple foreboding comments by Cole about only having “so many [Dreamville Fests] left in me”), the early-onset hangover after two long days of music, the late hour, or more likely, some combination of all three. W

Crowds at Dreamville PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Glimpses Dreamvilleof

Photos from the 2024 festival at Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, North Carolina.

PHOTOS BY BRETT VILLENA music@indyweek.com

Clockwise, top right to bottom: Domani, festival attendees, Lute

Clockwise from top left: Teezo Touchdown, Sexyy Red, Lil Yachty, Earthgang, Schoolboy Q

Clockwise from top right: Key Glock, festival attendees dish up at Pure Soul Vegan Food, TiaCorine

Clockwise from top left: Bass, festival attendees, and a Rae Sremmurd set

Self-released; Friday, April 26

Ways of Seeing

On a collaborative new album, Shirlette Ammons considers the impact of putting oneself on display as a queer Black artist.

BY JORDAN LAWRENCE music@indyweek.com

Shirlette Ammons’s latest album, a fascinating dissection of what it feels like to see and be seen as a queer person of color, was sparked by an unexpected break from this attention.

The bulk of Spectacles—the third fulllength album and first since 2016 from the Durham poet and rapper—was written during COVID-19 isolation. Like many people during that interruption from the world as we know it, Ammons sought new challenges to occupy her time. One of those was a music production course that her wife had bought for her birthday, the February before the pandemic hit, and she used those newfound skills to cut demos.

Toiling in solitude, the typically engaging, involved performer and community presence discovered something about herself.

“‘I realized that I’m not really an extrovert,” Ammons recalls. “Because you just end up playing, you be on autopilot and play out these roles all the time without thinking about them. But then when there’s a wrench thrown in the norm, you really have to reckon with yourself. I was like, ‘Oh shit, I just be doing things just because I’m used to doing them.’ I really liked myself being holed up in a room with all my little gadgets and doodads.”

With the curtains drawn, the performative aspect of living with eyes always considering and judging her was gone. The songs she wrote away from life’s stage consider the impact of the audience’s gaze, many of whom are looking on with cisgender, heteronormative perspectives.

The first of those songs, “Neighborhood Headlines,” considers prying eyes and the rumors they spread on local social media pages. “So we’ll just let them say it / Say

what happened / Even though it ain’t what happened / And that’s the end,” she spits, her patient flow mirroring the inevitability of speculation and distortion.

Ammons’s lens on the concept zoomed out as the writing process continued, with the title track feeling the glare of constant attention but also drawing confidence from it: “Spectacles you think we wearing dancin’ shoes / The way they clockin’ every move.”

But the stress engendered by that rubbernecking is constant. “Ain’t it funny make you covet what you can’t touch / Them intimidators thinkin’ we inferior,” Ammons observes on “Spades.”

This feeling of being ogled as an oddity has followed Ammons since she was born in the tiny eastern North Carolina hamlet of Beautancus. The cover of Spectacles, a picture featuring her and her identical twin as young girls, enforces this theme, and the songs return to it several times. Her twin, Shorlette (who also lives in Durham), is featured in a spoken interlude, describing, in her genetically duplicative voice, a “game of ‘guess the twin’ I didn’t choose to play.”

“That puts you on display all the time,” Shirlette says of the sisters’ twinship. “We dressed alike until we were like 18. People would make us stand side by side at different gatherings, family gatherings and at church and different things, and literally just dissect us and try to determine what the differences between us were. You just kind of become like a little dinner party act in some way.”

The album’s power comes from using this intensely personal experience and others that followed as an anchor to explore the similar experiences of Ammons’s Black and queer peers, with the contributions of

other local musicians adding to an affirming expression of community.

Ammons’s experience as a producer on PBS documentary projects A Chef’s Life and Somewhere South shines through as she pulls together various spoken accounts from folks with diverse and profound talents—musician Mykki Blanco, chef/writer Tunde Wey, DJ Doowap, and poets Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Fred Moten. On two interludes, the chorus of voices describe the impacts of constantly feeling on display, coded language, social media rumormongering, and more.

“The coolest thing I learned about working in documentary film and TV is the importance of knowing how to gather people who have certain skills,” Ammons says, “because if you try to do all that shit yourself, you will fail.”

That approach elevates the album, as she turned over her demos to be transformed by musical director and drummer Brevan Hampden and a full band when COVID let up. Megafaun’s Phil Cook produced and contributed some vocals, piano, and other instrumentation. Cook, a frequent collaborator, imparts a spacious, otherworldly feel to the tracks but lets the band’s funky, proto-hip-hop vibe shine through, merging his signature aesthetic with that of the rapper and her other backers.

That kind of collaboration shines all over Spectacles: Talented and distinct artists consistently meet each other halfway and allow their sound to be changed by

the interaction.

Cook’s and Ammons’s voices merge with rootsy boom-bap intensity at the close of “Neighborhood Headlines.” Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, another frequent collaborator, sounds like different artists entirely on her two appearances, matching the outsize empathy of “Hello” with a welcoming coo and the percolating provocations of “Delight” with devilishly aloof speak-singing.

Ammons is equally adaptable to these shifting vibes, skillfully skipping atop the jittering bass of “Delight,” confidently striding through the loping groove of “Hello,” and slinking anxiously amid the skronk of “Neighborhood Headlines.”

On “Clown Faces,” she melts through watery effects into an ethereal ballad along with former Carolina Chocolate Drop Justin Robinson and Veldt singer Danny Chavis, expressing both unity and consternation when confronted by an audience that doesn’t care to distinguish between tearstained faces as they “pay a shell / For show and tell.”

While the pandemic showed Ammons how much she often values seclusion, her work as a poet, which often finds her working alone, has taught her the value of bringing in other talents to sharpen her music.

“I hope it comes off as a respect for my limitations,” she says of her collaborative approach. “I don’t want a song to suffer because my ego wouldn’t allow me to get out of the way of it.” W

Shirlette Ammons PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

SHIRLETTE AMMONS: SPECTACLES

WED 4/17 THURS 4/18 FRI 4/19

MUSIC

Blends With Friends (Open Decks) 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham

FASTBALL 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham

Robyn Hitchcock 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

Satsang 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

Vial / Sunday Cruise 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill

MUSIC

Christian Kuria 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

Miss B Haven Presents: Como La Flor 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham

The Toasters – 43 Years of Ska! 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill

Zingara / Steller / Gardella 9:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh

STAGE

A Little Night Music by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler 7 p.m. Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh

The Game 7:30 p.m. PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill

SCREEN

Movie Loft presents Rancho Deluxe 8 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham

Damon Tweedy presents Facing the Unseen: The Struggle to Center Mental Health in Medicine with Tom Linden 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill

Special Topics in Futures 7 p.m. Letters Bookshop, Durham

COMMUNITY

Fly-Thru: A Drive-Through Wildfire Experience 5:30 p.m. Piedmont Wildlife Center, Durham

MUSIC

Ayo VIP Presents: Into the Vault 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham

Cameron Stenger 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham

Cigarettes @ Sunset / Newspaper Taxis / Hot Wendy 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill

Emo Night Brooklyn 9 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham

Hometown (Inherited): Ten Year Perspective 6 p.m. The Fruit, Durham

STAGE

History Explorer’s Day 10 a.m. West Point on the Eno, Durham PAGE

Mikaela Davis 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

The Vegabonds / Harvey Street Co. 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh

WXYC Decade Dance –Rhythm of the Night: 90s House Dance Party 10 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

GOOD EFFORT (co-presented with the American Dance Festival) 7 p.m. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Tick, Tick… Boom! 7:30 p.m. Theatre Raleigh, Raleigh

COMMUNITY

Botany Spotlight: Mosses of Duke Forest 3 p.m. Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Durham

FASTBALL is performing at Motorco Music Hall on April 17.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MOTORCO

MUSIC

420 Reggae Fest feat.

Kash’d Out, Sons Of Paradise, Crucial Fiya, The Hourglass Kids, Dj Ras J

8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh

The Conjures 7th Anniversary Party! 9 p.m.

The Pinhook, Durham

Fortune Factory Presents:

Club 420 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham

Heavy Denim / Newspaper

Taxis / New Sweat 9 p.m.

Local 506, Chapel Hill

Meet Me on the Veranda

1 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham

Speed Stick / Pipe

9 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

STAGE

Confessed: A Family Secrets Variety Show with WUNC’s Embodied 7 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham

COMMUNITY

Children’s Day Festival

11 a.m. Downtown Cary Park, Cary

DJ Masterclass with DJ

Wicked 10 a.m. Bach to Rock Apex, Apex

Museum Tour in ASL 10 a.m. North Carolina

Museum of Art, Raleigh

Over the Edge for Duke Children’s 10 a.m. 21c

Museum Hotel, Durham

MUSIC

An Evening with Cowboy Junkies 8 p.m. Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw

Cor De Lux / Drook / Charlie Paso 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham

Kobie Watkins Qt with Special Guests 7 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham

COMMUNITY

Centennial in the Gardens: A Musical Celebration

1 p.m. Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Durham

MUSIC

Helado Negro 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

MUSIC

Aterciopelados 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

Earthless / Minami Deutsch

8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons

8 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham

Nervous Surface / Zealotrous / Old Suns

8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham

MUSIC

Lou Turner + Little Mazarn with special guest Nathan Bowles 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham

Slow Hollows: Dog Heaven

Tour 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

COMMUNITY

Still Skating Adult Inline and Roller Skating Class

7 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham

The trio of Earthless is playing alongside Minami Deutsch at Cat’s Cradle on April 23. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

MUSIC

Center Stage: The Wavemakers Series (with Rissi Palmer and Gabe Lee)

7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham

Hayes & The Heathens featuring Hayes Carll and The Band of Heathens 8 p.m.

Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

Laurel Hells Ramblers / Three Top Serenaders

8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham

Shinyribs 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh

Teenage Fanclub

7:15 p.m. Haw River

Ballroom, Saxapahaw

PAGE

Sex Romp Gone Wrong

6:30 p.m. Letters Bookshop, Durham

ART

Polaroid Workshop

6 p.m.

Nasher Museum of Art, Durham

MUSIC

Gorgon City 10 p.m. The Fruit, Durham

Max Lane 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham

Proxima Parada / OliverHazard 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

Set for the Fall / The Coursing / Defile the Crown / Mortal After All / Two Stroke Smoke

6:30 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill

TAYLOR’S VERSION: A SWIFTIE DANCE PARTY

9 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham

Three Dog Night 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham

Up In Smoke – Burlesque + Drag + More! 7:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham

VSPRTN Presents: Renaissance Disko

10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham

STAGE

Podcast About List

7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

COMMUNITY

April Japanese Tea

Gathering: Children’s Day

12 p.m. Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Durham

MUSIC

ANDREW CUSHIN

8 p.m.

Motorco Music Hall, Durham

Angela Bingham Trio

7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham

Black Country, New Road

8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

Bombadil “Dancing In Color” / Mark Gabriel Little

7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham

Lamp (Russ Lawton, Scott Metzger, Ray Paczkowski)

8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh

Pnltybx / Pink Skull Garden / Oh! You Pretty Things / Manic Third Planet

8 p.m.

Local 506, Chapel Hill

The Postal Service / Death Cab for Cutie 7:30 p.m.

Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh

With Love

8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

PAGE

The Art and Science of Nature Sketching and Journaling with Patricia Savage 10 a.m. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

COMMUNITY

Sandlot Revival April 27-29, various times. Durham Historic Athletic Park

The third annual Sandlot Revival is being hosted at the Durham Historic Athletic Park from April 27 to April 29. PHOTO

MUSIC

Aaron Lee Tasjan 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

Band Together Broughton

Concert featuring Cigarettes @ Sunset & DJ Joe Bunn 6 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh

CarolinaWaves x RenaissanceBrunch

Presents: The HIVE Hoedown 2 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham

Secret Monkey Weekend

/ Brian K & The Parkway

/ Lonnie Rott 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham

TWRP – DIGITAL

NIGHTMARE 2024 TOUR

8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

COMMUNITY

Durham Underground Market 11 a.m. Durham Central Park, Durham

MUSIC

DURHAM TECH SINGS

7:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham

Dyke Night 9 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro

Raven / Vicious Rumors / Lutharo / Wicked 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh

Teen Suicide 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro

Durham rock trio Secret Monkey Weekend is performing at the Pinhook on April 28. PHOTO COURTESY OF HERB CAMPBELL VIA THE BAND’S WEBSITE.

CROSSWORD

To download a pdf of this puzzle or view its solution, visit indyweek.com/puzzles-page

SU | DO | KU

© Puzzles by Pappocom

Difficulty level: MEDIUM

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

If you’re stumped, find the answer keys for these puzzles and archives of previous puzzles (and their solutions) at indyweek.com/puzzles-page or scan this QR code for a link.

Best of luck, and have fun!

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EVENTS & ACTIVITIES

Michael Conforti, PhD

Jungian Psychoanalyst

Michael Conforti, PhD

Friday April 26 7:30pm Lecture $10, Saturday April 27 10am-4pm Dream Workshop $60 GATES TO THE NUMINOUS: Archetypal Approach to Dreams” Church of Reconciliation, Chapel Hill. www.JungNC.org

EMPLOYMENT

Principal Solutions Architect

SAS Institute, Inc. seeks a Principal Solutions Architect in Cary, NC to develop & implement risk content. Reqs: MS in Fin, Eng, Math, Phys, Comp Sci or rel + 5 yrs or PhD in Fin, Eng, Math, Phys, Comp Sci or rel+ 2 yrs. May work remotely pursuant to SAS’ Flexible Work Program. For full reqs & to apply visit sas.com/careers & reference Job #2024-35584.

Software Engineer III

Software Engineer III, F/T at Truist (Multiple Openings (Raleigh, NC) Deliver complex solutions w/ significant systemlinkages, dependencies, associated risk. Lead & perform dvlpmt efforts such as analysis, dsgn, coding/creating, & testing. Oversee & participate in testing, implmtn, maintenance, & escalated support of Truist’s solutions. Must have Bach’s deg in Comp Sci, Computer Engg or related tech field. Must have 6 years of progressive experience in s/ware engg or IT consulting positions w/ the following: proficiency w/ Angular, Java, Spring, & Hibernate; Big data technologies incl MapReduce, Hadoop, Spark, & Hive; Distributions including Cloudera, EMR, &/ or HDInsight; & working in a CI/CD environment. Must have at least 2 yrs of experience w/ the following: dsgng, implmtg, & documenting features for multiple functional modules; dvlpg & deploying applications in multi-cloud & enterprise grade environments w/ high availability, scalability, & security; mentoring/ coaching team members; Agile dvlpmt using Scrum, Kanban or other equiv methodologies; Microservices architecture w/ Springboot & Kubernetes; & Cloud-based dvlpmt & deployment w/ AWS & Azure; infrastructure & platform services. Position may be eligible to work remotely but is based out of reports to Truist offices in Raleigh, NC. Must be available to travel to Raleigh, NC regularly for meetings & reviews w/ manager & project teams w/in 24-hrs & notice. Apply online (https://careers. truist.com/) or email resume w/ cvr ltr to: Paige Whitesell, Paige.Whitesell@Truist.com. (Ref Job R0086217)

Web Analyst

Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (Labcorp) in Durham, NC seeks a Web Analyst to design, implement, test, and review data-driven web interfaces based on style guidelines. Can work remote. Reqs BS+5yrs or MS+3yrs exp.; To apply, send resume to: labcorphold@labcorp.com; Ref #240328.