CANNABIS BUSINESS AND THE PORCH PARTY REUNION

The cannabis business hit high gear in Oklahoma.

Cheap land, friendly laws, and relaxed enforcement, combine to make the Sooner State a national leader in cannabis production.

Investors and workers from other states come to Oklahoma for weed work, and it’s booming.

Call it a marijuana land rush.

The land rush is sparked by multiple factors, Woodward said. One is Oklahoma’s low land costs compared to other states, whether those grow businesses are legal or not. People growing marijuana in California or Colorado can come to Oklahoma, pay multiple times what the land is worth, and still pay a fraction of what they were paying before.

Reporters who follow the money track down the details of leases and land use and recruiting workers.

Others outside mainstream media, like a blogger (hellooo), follow the smoke.

Even with roughly 383,128 state residents now with medical marijuana prescriptions — basically one in every 10 residents of the state — there is strong evidence way more marijuana is being grown in Oklahoma than residents can inhale or consume.

Too Much Weed?

There is strong evidence in Oregon law that legislators and casual stoners both agree on:

Since July 1, 2015, possession of less than an ounce of marijuana by adults 21 years old and older is legal anywhere in Oregon, except that its use is prohibited in public places and in public view. Adults, at their home, may also lawfully cultivate four plants per household (again, out of public view), and they may lawfully possess all of the following:

• eight ounces of dried flowers from the plants;
• 72 ounces of infused liquids;
• 16 ounces of infused solids; and
• one ounce of extracted oil.
  (Note that the oil must be purchased from someone with a license to extract the oil.)

Does this sound like a lot of weed? It does to me, but I’m not in the cannabis business.

One Day In Scappoose

A longtime friend called to say she was going to spend time in Scappoose and would I like to come over for a visit.

Yes, I would.

This is a woman who left a job in 9-5 America for cannabis work. She worked in the industry as a sanctioned provider of cannabis products for the medical wing of weed.

Medical marijuana, I always suspected, was a front for stoners who wanted free weed.

I suspected as much even when I was circling the drain during chemo and radiation cancer treatment. With wife and adult kids threatening to send me out for supervisory care because I was failing on my own, I made the big decision.

My friend had delivered medical marijuana brownies a month earlier and I’d tossed them in the freezer. Medical? Suuuuure it’s medial.

Before I got shipped out I asked for a brownie and a cup of tea, please. I didn’t expect anything to come of it, but I nibbled the brownie instead of oxy.

And I’ll be damned, there is such a thing as medical marijuana. I don’t know the science, but weed helped me dodge narcotics, a nursing home, or a hospital admittance, and smoothed the path to recovery.

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We sat together in a group on a Bed & Breakfast porch talking about the old days. She had worked in the legal marijuana industry and done well. Her husband was an old hand in the cannabis business.

They met, found they had lots in common, and they’ve been together ever since.

She build a four plant grow room indoors that did everything she needed; he’d built grow operations with thousands of plants. They were both farmers whether they admitted it or not.

He knew everything about the business, how they succeeded and how they failed, and said Oklahoma was the hot spot. Since he was from Oklahoma and spoke in a wonderful accent, I felt transported.

He even knew the history of Oregon coast weed busts.

There’s Been A Few Oregon Coast Weed Busts

I’d heard stories but never got the inside line on the coastal cannabis business.

One story told of a ‘mother ship’ loaded with weed near Bandon. In my version the police caught wind after locals complained about getting shut out of their favorite hunting grounds by new land owners.

Then there was the official version from 1978.

In all, at least 17 men were arrested in connection with the drug sting, which came about when a Panamanian-registered ship, Cigale, carrying tons of marijuana, dropped its load offshore from the ranch. The ship was about three miles offshore when the crewmen unloaded their cargo of marijuana — believed to be between six and seven tons with a street value of about $16 million — using the amphibious craft known as “ducks’ which had been stored at the ranch for some two months in preparation for the smuggling operation.

One from 1987:

GOLD BEACH, Ore. (AP) _ The suspicions of a passerby led to the arrests of nine men unloading an estimated six tons of marijuana from a fishing boat anchored in an isolated cove, authorities said. 

With cruisers speeding to the beach and two Coast Guard cutters approaching, the crew of the 50-foot shrimper California Sun out of Eureka, Calif., tried to flee but the boat ran onto rocks and sank in shallow water early Monday, said state police Lt. John Tichenor. 

Curry County Sheriff Bob Babb estimated the marijuana on board would have a street value of $2,300 per pound, or $27.6 million total.

One from 2019:

The Mandalay was towed to port and later searched pursuant to a federal warrant. Investigators searched the vessel and discovered 28 jugs containing more than seven gallons of liquid methamphetamine each and a duffel bag containing several plastic-wrapped bricks of pentobarbital. Investigators later learned the drugs had been loaded onto the Mandalay from another vessel in the Sea of Cortez for delivery to Canada.

Cannabis Business On The Porch

We sat together, a group of sixty-somethings, and talked about a shared past, old apartments, new trends.

I played my guitar and made up songs.

The Beatle’s Blackbird was a song I learned from a woman we all knew.

Throughout the afternoon I kept thinking about Elephant by Jason Isbell.

The elephant was present.

She said Andy, you crack me up
Seagram’s in a coffee cup
Sharecropper eyes, and the hair almost all gone
When she was drunk, she made cancer jokes
Made up her own doctors’ notes
Surrounded by her family, I saw that she was dying alone
So I’d sing her classic country
Songs and she’d get high and sing along
She don’t have much voice to sing with now

We burn these joints in effigy and cry about what we used to be
And try to ignore the elephant somehow, somehow

By the end of the day F. Scott Fitzgerald showed up with the last sentence from The Great Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

We said goodbye, made plans for the future, and headed back up the river.