The study of cannabis is a personal one for me. Outdoor cannabis production in the rural Western U.S. has its roots in back-to-the-land movements of the 1960s. That’s when counterculture groups began growing cannabis surreptitiously as a source of income, a political statement, and a spiritual practice. I grew up in rural Southern Oregon, the child of hippies from that era. The communities where we lived were, at least in part, founded on and funded by cannabis.

In 2015, the year Oregon legalized recreational cannabis, I was home applying to graduate school. I was surprised to see that legalization was already starting to transform the landscapes I had grown up in—both ecologically and socially. I had friends who were growers, and had seized legalization as an opportunity to legitimize their businesses. But I had other friends who were raising alarms about the emerging industry’s potential environmental harms—from the high carbon footprint of indoor warehouses, to the water use for outdoor farms, to the poisons used on illegal public land grows. I decided to focus my dissertation research on understanding these developing conflicts, using tools from wildlife biology, landscape ecology, social sciences, and other disciplines to try to answer a wide array of questions about the cannabis industry. I wanted to understand: Where is cannabis production located, and why? What are cannabis farming’s impacts on a landscape? And finally, how does wildlife respond to active cannabis farms?

Because cannabis is still federally illegal, there is very little research on the crop or its dynamics. I realized I would have to start from scratch. To my surprise, I found that though these issues feel unique to cannabis, in reality, they run parallel to rural land use issues that predate its legalization. This means that addressing the concerns regarding rural cannabis production will provide a roadmap for resolving many entrenched issues relevant across the Western U.S.

One thing this means, of course, is thinking about water. Estimates of cannabis farms’ water use have varied greatly, and researchers are working to generate better calculations. But the amount of water that cannabis farms use isn’t the only issue at stake: geography, storage, and timing are also important. My research showed that cannabis hotspots are often located near rivers. This proximity could be a concern if farmers are drawing water from the stream or a shallow well, which could deplete or reduce the river’s water. Other studies from the Cannabis Research Center at UC Berkeley, one of my primary collaborators, have indicated that many farmers lack enough water storage capacity to be able to draw up and store water during the winter, to avoid straining rivers during the summer.

These issues mirror general worries that existing Western water policies are not prepared to handle the worsening water shortages associated with climate change. Current regulations don’t encourage farmers—whatever their crops—or other landowners to practice conservation or balance their water needs with those of rivers and fish. But perhaps concerns over cannabis, coupled with recent historic droughts, will be enough to finally update water policies for all.

Another Western issue that cannabis policy can help address is land use planning. In my research, I found that cannabis farming on private lands in Southern Oregon had a small overall footprint but one that had expanded rapidly. In the years following legalization, cannabis plots were generally clustered on larger parcels in areas that were not typically zoned for agriculture. This brought up questions about planning and zoning: Where should cannabis be located? Are current zoning codes effective for cannabis production? How would restrictions affect existing farms and equitable access to land?

Like water rights concerns, these planning challenges are not unique to cannabis production. Across the West, outdated land use codes and opaque planning processes frequently generate conflict between land users, reflective of disagreements about how to allocate land for conservation, recreation, development, and production. The increase of large-scale, area-based conservation initiatives, like California’s “30 x 30 plan,” are likely to intensify these debates in the coming years. If counties develop transparent and equitable planning processes for cannabis that integrate feedback from growers, neighbors, researchers, and regulators, they might be able to decrease such conflicts, and facilitate better community dialogue across all types of land use.

Finally, the rural location of many cannabis hotspots means that cannabis farms are often near wildlife habitats and in proximity to certain sensitive species such as Coho salmon and Pacific fishers. My research also suggested that some species can coexist with cannabis farming, while it deters others from the area. This raises concerns that cannabis development could cut wildlife off from needed resources, or disrupt local animal interactions and food webs. Conflict is also a concern: Many of the species that can coexist with cannabis, such as ground squirrels, can be crop pests that farmers may feel the need to kill.

Yet again, these concerns are not unique to cannabis—across California, new housing developments are encroaching on wilderness areas, and the concern about killing “pest” animals appears with almost any crop. Cannabis provides an opportunity to try to build sustainable farming into policy incentives, and to experiment with supporting farmers in ways that enable them to practice low-impact agriculture.

The social and ecological dynamics of cannabis production are a microcosm of questions of rural livelihoods and sustainability in the Western U.S. Other industries, such as timber, ranching, and industrial crops, like alfalfa, also need reform. But because the legal cannabis industry is still new, it offers an opportunity to learn to structure things differently.

There is still potential and political will for researchers, policymakers, and communities to come together to plan land use priorities, update water policies, guide development goals, inform sustainable best management practices, plan for climate disasters, and balance rural livelihoods.

This is hard work. But if we can figure out a way to collaborate on cannabis regulations, we will have a blueprint for solving the largest land use conflicts currently facing the Western U.S.

The post Could Cannabis Help the American West Solve Its Thorniest Environmental Issues? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Panelists discussed the complicated factors that contributed to a cannabis regulation regime that the event’s moderator, Rolling Stone columnist Amanda Chicago Lewis, referred to as a mess.

It’s taken the Golden State decades to create today’s dysfunction, panelists suggested.

While California holds the distinction of being the first state in the country to sanction the use of medical marijuana in 1996, it took another two decades for California voters to legalize growing and selling cannabis for recreational use among adults.

That legalization, approved in 2016 via the statewide initiative Proposition 64, went into effect on January 1, 2018. In an instant, California became the largest government-sanctioned market in the U.S., but its communities, including L.A., were profoundly unprepared to handle commercial cannabis jurisdiction.

Panelist Cat Packer, executive director of the Los Angeles Department of Cannabis Regulation, noted that the city of Los Angeles did not regulate or formally authorize any cannabis businesses in the city prior to 2018. In 2017, the city did pass, and win voter approval of, legislation that would allow it to tax, regulate, and license cannabis. Eventually, the City Council decided to cap the number of licenses in Los Angeles, allowing for one retail facility for every 10,000 residents.

But it is one thing to say you can regulate and tax cannabis, and quite another to pull it off.

Packer explained some of the complexity through the example of the city’s “social equity” program. The goal was to make sure that those who had suffered arrests and convictions during the drug war would get a chance at 200 or so of the city’s licenses for legal cannabis.

“The social equity program as a concept is this idea that we are going to acknowledge the harm that community members, particularly black and brown community members, experience, and give them some sort of benefit and priority in the licensing department,” Packer said. The city’s team spent “all of 2018 and the greater part of 2019 just trying to figure out what this licensing was going to look like for this last round,” she said.

It’s not an easy question. There are typically three licensing methodologies—”first come first serve”, some kind of merit or scoring mechanism, or a lottery. Ultimately, Packer said, the city council, facing vocal community demands, decided on a first-come, first-serve process.

It’s an imperfect decision.

Panelist Brad Rowe, a UCLA criminal justice and drug policy scholar, said that barring no cap at all, the lottery system is “probably the most democratic.”

But by putting too many barriers toward authorizing legal businesses, you get an environment that allows the illicit market to grow.

“It is the 800-pound gorilla,” Rowe said of the illicit market. “Anyone who’s running a large operation and making money off the books, they have to handle their disputes extrajudicially; they have to carry weapons, and they also are paying off officials. Someone has to turn an eye, so they’re corrupting your public officials or your law enforcement officers.”

From a public health standpoint, the persistence of the illicit business keeps people trapped in situations that cause all kinds of harm, said panelist Tim Fong, a clinical psychiatrist at the UCLA Cannabis Research Initiative.

“The illicit market, the unregulated market, is not good for anybody—physically, mentally, socially, financially—at all,” Fong said.

He shared a story about someone he knew in the business of producing unregulated cartridges for vape pens. “I said to him, ‘How do you do it?’” Fong recalled. The answer was the operators would open up different chemicals and pour them into a pot. “Like a scene out of ‘Breaking Bad,’ he would put on the sterile suit, pour out the juice into containers and pipette it,” he added.

“That [product] unfortunately lands on the stores,” Fong said, “because they get the fancy packaging and they get the budtender saying, ‘We just got a fresh shipment of this, and it’s great, we know you’re going to love it.’ That does not happen in any regulated market. Not alcohol, not tobacco. Can you imagine?”

Audience members showed frustration with the many problems in California’s transition to a legal market. One audience member said that, even as a supporter of legalization, she had voted against state and local ballot measures for legalization because of problems with the policy details. “I read through all the measures and it was a dumpster fire,” she said.

Packer said that L.A. has an enduring conservatism that has made it difficult to tackle cannabis regulation head-on. “There’s still this stigma even when approaching cannabis,” she said.

When Packer was first creating the city’s cannabis regulation department, she had to go to the Office of Information Technology, where they asked her what she wanted the website’s name to be. When she said, “cannabis.lacity.org.,” she recalled, “they were like, ‘Oh my goodness you can’t name it cannabis.’”

“I was like, ‘What am I going to name it?’” Packer replied.

The post California’s Cannabis ‘Green Rush’ Has Been a Slow Slog appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Gray zone” is a term the military uses to describe the space between peace and war, a time and place that provides opportunities for the powerful and well-armed while posing dangers for citizens caught in the middle.

In California today, the phrase explains the perilous place in which our communities find themselves as the state pursues major changes in how we regulate drugs, respond to homelessness, and sentence criminals.

In each of these policy areas, California and its voters have righteously demanded major transitions that move people out of the darkness of illegal drug sales, sleeping on the street, and lives stalled by criminal records—and into the light of legal cannabis businesses, permanent lodging for the homeless, and second chances for ex-cons.

But Californians and our governments keep tripping ourselves up when it comes to making these transitions happen. As a result, too many people get caught in the gray zone between black market and white market, between illegal and legal, between street and home.

Why are these transitions so challenging? One reason is that they pose a paradox. When you are pulling people across a societal dividing line you can’t simply erase the line. You have to maintain enough of a border to keep those you wish to aid from too easily going back.

This paradox is seen perhaps most clearly in California’s faltering shift to legal cannabis. For years, the state has tolerated a growing, multi-billion-dollar black market for recreational cannabis.

The 2016 statewide vote to legalize cannabis posed a conundrum, with state and local governments discovering they had to accomplish two seemingly contradictory feats. First, they had to build a new regulatory and tax regime to govern a new legal market. But second, to make sure that black market participants would move into that legal market, they had to enforce laws against cannabis that they had ignored in the past.

So far, California has failed to meet either challenge. Instead of creating a welcoming regulatory and tax structure that would promote a legal market, many local communities have resisted developing proper rules and permitting for legal cannabis, while state taxes and regulations have added to the costs of going legal. And instead of spending more money to enforce laws against black market operators, localities and the state have mostly looked the other way.

These twin failures have landed many cannabis businesses in a gray zone between the illegal and legal markets. Those who want to start new legal businesses find it hard to do so. And those in the black market have taken just enough steps to appear semi-legal and stay out of law enforcement crosshairs. According to one analysis, this gray market of California cannabis is now entrenched, with $5.5 billion in revenues last year—far more than the legal market’s $3.7 billion.

A similar dynamic is developing in policies around homelessness. State and local governments have sought to decriminalize homelessness, stopping police sweeps against encampments, and removing requirements around drug use and health status that used to keep some homeless people from being eligible for housing supports. Instead, our governments want to put people into housing first, and then help them with other problems.

But the transition to housing-first homeless policies has been bumpy. Housing is costly and takes time to build in California—which has meant that we still don’t have the amount of it that we need. Meanwhile, the cutback in enforcement of vagrancy laws has reduced some of the leverage communities once had to force eligible people off the street and into housing. The result has been more visible homelessness—and rising frustration from Californians who voted for billions of dollars for homeless housing, but now see the problem getting worse.

A comparable paradox dogs the state’s transition away from long sentences and mass incarceration. In this decade, Californians have approved two ballot measures in this direction. Prop 47, passed in 2014, reduced penalties for property and drug crimes. It also allowed for prisoners to seek resentencing to achieve early release, and for felons to petition to have prior crimes reclassified as misdemeanors to make it easier for them to secure jobs and public benefits. Prop 57, approved in 2016, allowed for parole for non-violent offenders, and changed other rules around sentencing.

While these new policies were bold, the state has been timid about actually supporting people who want to rebuild their lives. Governor Jerry Brown resisted calls for greater funding for programs—from counseling to training—to help felons re-enter the legal economy. Nonprofit efforts to support these transitions have been underfunded and organizationally troubled—perhaps most strikingly in Salinas, where the notorious gang Nuestra Familia infiltrated MILPA, a highly praised collective supporting criminal justice reform and youth leadership, according to an investigation by Monterey County Weekly and Voices of Monterey Bay.

As a result, too many California are now stuck in a gray zone—no longer in prison, but unable to make a transition into legitimate economic life. A Public Policy Institute of California study found a potential connection between Prop 47 and a recent increase in larceny and thefts across the state. And prosecutors and police claim that, under the reforms, they no longer have the threat of incarceration to force non-violent offenders into diversion and counseling that might change their behavior.

Californians desperately need to look at these gray zones—and then look in the mirror. We’ve grown too comfortable living in this murk—and too accustomed to touting our high ideals without making the sacrifices required to enact them.

We can’t just declare some grand new transition in social policy at the ballot box or in the legislature. We actually must spend all the money and enforce all the laws necessary to complete what we promised to take on. Otherwise, we’re just disrupting the lives of less fortunate Californians with our half-finished plans.

The biggest gray zone in California now is the space between our good intentions—and our realities.

The post Why California Is Stuck in the ‘Gray Zone’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Adjust your California maps: The little dot marking Santa Rosa needs to be a lot bigger.

Dramatic changes in housing, aging, transportation, and criminal justice are altering the Golden State’s geography, and no place in California stands to benefit more than Santa Rosa.

The charms of this Sonoma County seat have been sung at least since 1875, when the legendary horticulturist Luther Burbank, who created new classics like the Shasta Daisy in his Santa Rosa garden, declared it “the chosen spot of all this earth.” In the 20th century, journalist Herb Caen saw the divine in this part of California, calling heaven “a place that is said to resemble Sonoma in spring.”

These days, Santa Rosa seems poised to become the most successful example of a certain type of urbanism—the rapidly growing midsize city that serves as a crossroads between major regions. The city’s current motto—“Out There. In the Middle of Everything”—encapsulates the new and paradoxical centrality of edge cities, from Fairfield and Santa Clarita to Riverside and Escondido. In an era in which California’s coastal regions have soured on traditions as durable as motherhood (by making children and housing prohibitively expensive) and apple pie (too much sugar, too many calories, and not locally grown), these edge cities are bastions of hoary traditions like economic growth and middle-class opportunity.

“We’re on the move and we’re interested in growing,” says Santa Rosa city councilmember Julie Combs of her town.

As the fifth-largest city in the Bay Area, Santa Rosa, population 175,000 on the way to 200,000, plays many roles. It’s the northern spillover area for people and businesses seeking refuge from the closer-in Bay Area’s higher costs. Employers like it too; the city now boasts 88,000 jobs, its highest employment level ever. Santa Rosa also remains an entry point for the wine industry and the tourists who like to visit it.

Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, a longtime Santa Rosa resident, and his beloved Peanuts characters (seen here greeting airport travelers) helped put the city on the map. But the publicity value of Charlie Brown and friends could be waning, as Santa Rosa expands, urbanizes, and pursues new ventures. Photo courtesy of Prayitno/Flickr.

And by dint of geography and deliberate strategy, the city is emerging as California’s weed crossroads—or, in the words used by the city, the “farm-to-market” center for medical and recreational marijuana, connecting the cannabis growers of the North State with the retailers and consumers of the Bay Area and points south.

While many other California cities have decided to ban the marijuana industry or limit it, Santa Rosa has embraced it, rapidly issuing permits for cannabis operations and creating a run on warehouse spaces in the city’s industrial zones. Sure, some of these facilities will grow marijuana, but what the city wants is higher-wage professional jobs—in sales, finance, distribution or lab testing—that the newly legal $22 billion-a-year industry will require.

“Most of California’s cannabis is produced on the North Coast,” Tawnie Logan of the Sonoma County Growers Alliance recently told Sonoma Magazine. “Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties are the breadbasket. Then it moves south to major markets in the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Highway 101 handles a very large percentage of that traffic, and Santa Rosa is the logical capture point. We can handle not only growing, but processing and distribution. And I think we’re heading that way.”

And while Marin County to the south is famously anti-growth, Santa Rosa has been busily preparing for all the new people heading its way. In downtown Santa Rosa, there are plans for taller buildings, including a hotel, as well as an effort to convert an old Highway 12 right-of-way into a signature park, modeled on Golden Gate Park.

Santa Rosa’s once-tiny airport has been adding flights; expansion plans could double its number of travelers by the end of the next decade. The first 43 miles of a new 70-mile commuter rail line, the SMART train, opened this summer, connecting Santa Rosa all the way down to San Rafael, and, eventually, the Larkspur ferry to San Francisco.

The city council has distinguished itself by making housing its top priority, with a multi-phase plan that promises more housing both for the city’s younger, mostly Latino families as well as its seniors. The city has put its own money into affordable housing, is working with the county to establish a housing trust, and is encouraging denser, taller construction—while still preserving its urban growth boundaries. Ever alert for sources of new housing, the city has been pushing cannabis companies to provide housing for their workers.

Santa Rosa also has responded aggressively to rising homelessness—declaring a local state of emergency that allows for flexibility in zoning to help house people quickly. (The city has asked the governor to recognize the emergency, but Jerry Brown, ever diffident, hasn’t acknowledged Santa Rosa’s letters.) In the meantime, the city has adopted a “housing first” approach to homelessness—which means getting the homeless into housing first and then working on addiction, counseling, or other issues.

All of this progress has been helped by a series of inclusive community conversations, some called Santa Rosa Together, that have taken place around the city in recent years. The community’s cohesion also opened the door to an extraordinary step: absorbing Roseland and other poorer communities on the city’s southwest side, with the goal of giving the 8,000 or so people there a greater political voice and better services. Expected to be complete by year’s end, the annexation is billed as the largest such expansion in the city’s history.

All this change can be jarring for some Santa Rosans, particularly longtime residents accustomed to a smaller town that identified itself with the cartoon strip Peanuts. Its author, Charles M. Schulz, spent much of his adult life in the area, which named the airport after him. Santa Rosa still remains home to a Charles M. Schulz Museum, part of a complex that includes an ice rink.

But the world is changing. MetLife last year fired Snoopy and the Peanuts gang after 30 years of sponsorship, and the Peanuts brand was sold off to a Canadian company. And Santa Rosans will soon have to adjust to living in a city of 200,000, rather than the 1970 town of 50,000.

Next year, Santa Rosa will celebrate the sesquicentennial of its incorporation as well as the 75th anniversary of Santa Rosa’s most famous star turn, in Alfred Hitchcock’s classic “Shadow of a Doubt.” Hitchcock—who would recognize the old train station, but not much else about the city now— portrayed Santa Rosa as such a small, out-of-the-way place that Joseph Cotten’s serial killer could hide there without fear of detection.

Today, the geography of 21st-century California makes Santa Rosa inescapable.

 
*This essay was written and published prior to the outbreak of wildfires that devastated Santa Rosa and adjoining areas.

The post Could the “Edge City” of Santa Rosa Become a Center of California? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The stakes of getting it right are high. Not only will the industry produce an expected $1 billion in annual tax dollars for youth drug prevention, restoration of the environment, and enforcement against the black market, but legal marijuana will influence the state’s economy, reshape the national market for marijuana, and likely determine when and how the rest of the United States adopts paths to legalization.

For all the drama inherent in bringing an industry out of the shadows, the success of the transition may depend on seemingly boring details: specifically, the technical business processes that could allow rapid progress towards an industry that looks and feels like a traditional consumer market.

And at the center of a progressive structure is distribution.

I’ve operated businesses in a variety of consumer industry sectors—including several years re-building a historical New England beer brand—and that gives me a deep appreciation for the significance of logistics and distribution. When building its nascent supply chain, California should prioritize the success of the distribution function in this regulated industry.

Modern distributors, regardless of industry, build the logistical and transportation infrastructure that their supply chain partners use to conduct commerce. By developing a sophisticated, modern logistics system, California can reduce waste, protect current industry operators, and hasten the industry’s transition from its black market roots.

The distributor is a natural middleman. And, given the estimated 30,000 to 50,000 marijuana producers in California, plus an expected 10,000 eventual retailers, California’s cannabis industry requires an organizing center with a group of operators tasked to monitor and police the system from the inside.

Good distributors serve as built-in rule followers and can therefore be trusted to take on system functions—such as taxation and test-monitoring—in order to reduce the government’s expensive and significant oversight burden. Distributors will be even more important in this case, due to marijuana’s status as an illegal drug under federal law. As such, the cannabis industry lacks access to the U.S. banking system and remains dominated by cash transactions. As middlemen, cannabis distributors will be in a great position to create “chain of custody” systems, provide credit terms, and deliver the temporary financial lubrication that this industry so desperately needs.

Then there is security. A truck full of marijuana products is a multi-million dollar asset that requires protection, whether it’s on the roads or parked at a warehouse. The bulk of the security responsibility rests with distributors, who will need to build sophisticated apparatuses to track and protect assets throughout the supply chain. You can bet that newly-displaced organized crime outfits and common criminals alike will try to pick off low-hanging fruit. In fact, the Central Valley has recently encountered a criminal enterprise stealing truckloads of nuts, a product that delivers a significantly smaller dollar payload than marijuana does.

The best chance to successfully transition cannabis into a safe, regulated, and tax-paying economy will come if California designs its cannabis policy by borrowing frameworks and best practices from similar industries and then adjusting for elements that are unique.

The obvious analog is the alcohol industry, due to its own similar transition from an illicit economy after the repeal of prohibition in 1933 and its 84-year history of success since then. As a small beer operator I certainly had my frustrations with the system, but the big picture looks quite good: There’s no tainted product, no mob control, and no moonshining anymore. Alcohol also mirrors marijuana as a “sin product” that has age limitations, social stigma, and public safety challenges.

As we approach 2018, when California will begin regulating the commercial sale of cannabis, much of the Sacramento sausage-making hinges on the issue of distribution. Nearly everyone agrees that there ought to be three distinctly licensed supply chain segments—production, distribution, and retail. But an intra-industry schism threatens the question of whether a distributor should also be allowed to hold additional license-types. That is, should the system allow operators to vertically integrate, or should it contain rules that limit certain business activities from co-ownership?

Many current industry operators support a hands-off approach that allows cultivators and manufacturers of cannabis to continue distributing their own products directly to retail stores. On the other side, a coalition including law enforcement, small growers and current distributors support the concept of “mandatory independent distribution.” In short, the coalition wants to prohibit those holding distribution licenses from owning businesses in other market segments simultaneously. (There would be an exception for small operators, who could hold end-to-end microbusiness licenses or something similar.)

In the fight over “mandatory independent distribution”, as with any good Sacramento battle, big labor has a dog on both sides. The Teamsters have long supported the distributors’ coalition, and the United Food and Commercial Workers have thrown in with the current industry big players. In short, the debate pits a strict rules-based design against one that lets the free market determine the industry’s outcome over time.

I launched a company last year with former California Attorney General Bill Lockyer that has participated in this debate, which will ultimately determine how the legal cannabis system will work. We have spoken to multiple stakeholders, both inside and outside the industry, and we are very much in the rules-based design camp. A free market approach can be attractive, but it comes with a significant risk of non-compliance.

If distributors collect taxes and monitor testing compliance, then allowing them to be producers or retailers leaves the fox guarding the proverbial henhouse. Transitioning an industry whose operators have never existed inside a regulated environment will be challenging. Allowing companies to monitor themselves seems naïve.

By designing independent distribution into the system at the outset, the state of California will have a good chance of transitioning this complex industry successfully. Without it, failure points appear around every curve.

The post Marijuana Needs Middlemen to Reach the Mainstream Market appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You keep saying that marijuana is supposed to help manage anxiety. But those of you who work in or partake of the cannabis industry sound like the most stressed-out people in California.

And that leaves me wondering what’s in your bongs, especially since 2016 is supposed to be a year of great triumph for you. Cannabis is booming in California; the limits on profits and the number of plants you can grow are being lifted. New regulations on medical marijuana are coming together, and a November ballot initiative to legalize recreational use seems likely to pass. California is thus well on its way to becoming Mary Jane’s global capital, and a national model for how to pull cannabis out of the black market shadows and into the legal light.

If the future looks so dank (that’s stoner-speak for awesome), why do you all look so wrecked?

Did you get some bad schwag or something?

In recent weeks, I’ve posed these questions to people on farms and in dispensaries and I keep hearing two big reasons why cannabis people seem so cashed (reduced to ash). The first involves all the necessary pressure you’re putting on yourselves. The second reason is about all the unnecessary pressure the rest of us are putting on you.

A bottle of “Chongwater,” a flavored hemp drink marketed by comedian and marijuana icon Tommy Chong.

Let’s start with the self-pressure. Cannabis is not just an industry, it’s a movement to end prohibition, and the hardest times for movements can come right when they are on the verge of winning what they want. Your movement’s victory—the end of cannabis prohibition—requires a difficult transition that is stressful and scary.

In California, by one estimate, there are as many as 10,000 cannabis-related businesses—only a couple hundred of which have the proper zoning and licenses to operate a medical marijuana business. That leaves thousands of you trying to work out your futures very quickly—at least before 2018, when regulations for medical marijuana (including a state marijuana czar) and for recreational use (assuming the ballot initiative passes) are supposed to be in place.

Some of you, particularly weed boutiques that operated outside the law, are preparing to shut down. But others of you are engulfed in the difficult, expensive process of making your businesses legal quickly, but not so quickly that you run afoul of the authorities. In the process, you’re learning that while managing an illegal business has its perils, it may be even more dangerous to run a legal capitalist enterprise in the Regulatory Republic of California, and not run afoul of its dizzying array of licensing, workplace, and environmental rules.

A number of you are taking on outside investors; there’s even a new private equity firm making “strategic investments” in cannabis. Those kinds of big-money decisions raise new anxieties, even as you still have to operate semi-underground. Some local governments don’t want marijuana operations and are sending the police on raids of your facilities. And the federal government, by maintaining that your businesses are illegal no matter what state law says, has made it difficult for you to use banks and pay taxes.

On top of all this stress comes the burden of being a political cause. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom is trying to build a gubernatorial campaign by backing the ballot initiative to legalize recreational use. At the local level, there are competing initiatives that sometimes divide the cannabis industry. And the presidential race creates uncertainty about federal intentions. A Trump presidency might bring Attorney General Chris Christie, who wants to wipe out medical marijuana. Some of you fear Hillary Clinton would turn the industry over to her rich donors in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

“All of this creates a tremendous amount of stress and anxiety for people,” says Derek Peterson, CEO of Terra Tech Corp, a publicly traded “cannabis-focused” agriculture company. “This is going to be an entirely different animal than anyone is used to. A lot is being born right now.”

Of course, such pressure is inescapable, given the realities of ending prohibition. What can make this moment unbearable for all of you are the outside demands that this transition has brought from what cinematic stoner Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski called “The Square Community.”

In other words, California leaders have gotten way too high on the possibilities of fully legal marijuana. Today you hear rhetoric from politicians and media that legal cannabis in California will end the drug war, rationalize our prison and court systems, create new jobs and economic opportunities in poorer and rural areas of the state, save agricultural businesses and lands, and replenish strained local and state budgets with new taxes on weed.

All this amounts to Bogarting weed for our selfish priorities. Los Angeles County recently debated a plan to “solve” homelessness—it has the largest homeless population of any American county—with a marijuana tax. Environmentalists have been talking about how marijuana, which requires considerable water to grow, can pioneer water-saving practices to mitigate the state drought. And no small number of musicians—chief among them Snoop Dogg, the wizard of “weed wellness,” and Tommy Chong, the “godfather of ganga”—seem to think that by licensing their names to marijuana products, they can replace the revenues that music used to provide before iTunes and Spotify.

Rapper Snoop Dogg, the “wizard of weed wellness,” performing in Cancun in 2014.

Cannabis has come to be seen by its most zealous champions as a substance that can alter California realities—in ways reminiscent of our craze for gold in 1849 or for oil in the early 20th century. Broader legalization of marijuana will bring opportunities, but there are just too many expectations riding on this one plant.

Before exploiting legal marijuana for all manner of schemes, California governments need to get this transition right. The tax system for cannabis should be comprehensible and not so extortionate that it drives out small players (or creates incentives to keep the black market alive). The regulatory regimes for medical marijuana and recreational use should fit together, and be transparent enough that California cannabis goes forward as a competitive market, not a state monopoly. To ease the transition, state government needs to do everything it can to help you—growers, processors, dispensary operators, and customers—negotiate these changes, including protecting you from the feds and the banks.

If California gets this right, maybe some of the biggest dreams for marijuana can come true. At the very least, cannabis could be a thriving and well-regulated industry.

But for now, as the marijuana-friendly rap group Cypress Hill like to say, you gots to chill. These are stressful enough times for stoners already.

The post California Stoners Are Stressing Me Out appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.