As Pot Becomes Legal, We've Got to Fight Against Corporate Control of Cannabis [View all]

[cleanhippie]

At the Willits, California Food Bank, a 31-year-old cannabis farmer we’ll call Mark was energetically ticking off the community service hours he’d earned for growing our nation’s number-one cash crop. I watched for a few minutes as he passed bags full of apples, cheese and surplus generic sponge cake to a Mendocino County mom. I asked Mark what he thought about the approaching end of federal cannabis prohibition. He acknowledged that it was imminent, but was deeply wary of it. “It’ll be the end of the small farmer,” he told me. “Foks’ll be buying packages of joints made by Coors or Marlboro.”

Why does Mark, like many if not most of today’s American black-market cannabis farmers, dread the aboveground acceptance of his industry? Why did the voters in the Emerald Triangle cannabis farming counties of Mendocino (by 6%) and Humboldt (8%) vote against California’s Proposition 19 in 2010, which would have legalized cannabis?

The answer has as much to do with simple accounting as the more common outsider assumption: that farmers fear the price drops that come when a prohibitionary economy dissolves (though this is certainly part of the story). When, in three generations of farming, your family has never had to pay taxes, record payroll or meet building code, let alone meet a customer (the Emerald Triangle has an entire caste of middlemen and women who broker wholesale deals, so the farmer doesn’t have to leave the farm), the prospect of coming aboveground -- and dealing with the same red tape every other industry does -- can be terrifying.

--snip--

His point is that of course major players are going to enter the fray when we’re talking about what is already a $35-billion-a-year crop in the U.S., greater than the combined value of corn and wheat. Although the end of cannabis prohibition will almost certainly cause short-term wholesale price drops, what Balogh says to jittery farmers like Mark is, “even if your worst, most paranoid fears about modern corporate ethics are correct, there is still a lucrative (and expanding) niche for top-shelf, organically grown cannabis like the Emerald Triangle provides.”

http://www.alternet.org/pot-becomes-legal-weve-got-fight-against-corporate-control-cannabis

As a Craft Brewer, I think that Balogh is correct when he says,

“even if your worst, most paranoid fears about modern corporate ethics are correct, there is still a lucrative (and expanding) niche for top-shelf, organically grown cannabis like the Emerald Triangle provides.”

Craft beer is a market that seems to have no limit. While the big companies make yellow fizzy beer water, thousands of brewers like myself are making small-batch craft beer that sells like wildfire. Small, neigborhood breweries are becoming more and more popular. And it is a collaborative industry, not competitive. (yes, there is competition, but craft brewers are not selfish and secretive. We tend to share and help each other out.)

So yes, we should be wary of big corporations and their role in how cannabis legislation gets written, not allowing them to create a market that only they can compete in.