News&Comment

‘It’s Gonna Be A Bloodbath’: Epic Marijuana Oversupply Is Flooding California, Jeopardizing Legalization

If you want to get into the cannabis industry in California—where more than $5 billion worth of legal, adult-use cannabis is on pace to be sold this year, according to tax figures—and you want to do it quickly, don’t bother with selling adult-use cannabis. Instead, you want to grow it. Most cities in the state still don’t allow…
Read more

It’s Entirely Too Much Freaking Cannabis

Sonoma County doesn’t need to become dependent on a drug that is bottoming out Cannabis prices continue to drop as fall harvest season threatens further saturation Joey Espinoza wears many hats in the local cannabis industry: He works with growers as a code compliance consultant and is a founder of advocacy agencies Monterey County NORML…
Read more

Sonoma grower seeks to overturn ban on firearms at pot grows – fears for his safety and property

Sonoma County and growers often claim there are no problems at permitted grows—that illegal activity only happens at black market grows. Not true. A grower near Knights Valley, Nicolas Bettencourt, has filed the attached law suit against Sonoma County. He asks the court to strike down Sec. 26-88-254(f)(21) of the cannabis ordinance that includes the…
Read more

An inconvenient truth (about weed)

Dear environmentalists: Cannabis is not a good story in terms of carbon footprint, resources… Federal laws bar cannabis from crossing state lines, driving up the cost — and the emissions — of an industry using indoor grow operations Marijuana has never been more popular in the U.S. — and its carbon emissions have never posed…
Read more

Dr. Kevin Sabet: Cannabis industry causing ‘huge’ environmental problems

Report calls out ‘inconvenient truth’ about marijuana and carbon emissions Smart Approaches to Marijuana CEO Dr. Kevin Sabet told “Fox & Friends” on Friday that the cannabis industry is being a “huge problem” for the environment when it comes to water and electricity usage. Sabet reacted to a Politico report calling out the “inconvenient truth” about carbon emissions from the cannabis…
Read more

Our disappearing river… (SoCoNews)

Months ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom, target of a disgruntled developer and facing a recall campaign while managing extraordinary wildfire storms, COVID-19 and worsening drought, called for a voluntary water conservation effort that initially targeted only Sonoma and Mendocino counties. Not too much later, as the greatest reservoirs in the state came closer to reaching their…
Read more

Study: North Coast cannabis growers rely more on groundwater amid debate over drought restrictions

A new study has found that cannabis farms in California’s prime growing regions, including the North Coast, rely primarily on groundwater wells to irrigate their crop as opposed to streams, providing more insight into the debate over water scarcity as the state grapples with a historic drought. The Cannabis Research Center at UC Berkeley report…
Read more

Question: Why hasn’t Prop 64 ended the horrific decimation of our lands and resources by marijuana growers?

Illegal pot invades California’s deserts, bringing violence, fear, ecological destruction By JACLYN COSGROVE, LOUIS SAHAGÚN | LOS ANGELES TIMES EXCLUSIVE JULY 11, 2021 5 AM PT Before his corpse was dumped in a shallow grave 50 miles north of Los Angeles, Mauricio Ismael Gonzalez-Ramirez was held prisoner at one of the hundreds of black-market pot farms that…
Read more

The fetid underbelly of drug culture normalization: Chinese speculators swarm Navajo Nation

Chinese dreams on Native American land: A tale of cannabis boom and bust “All we see is plastic. We see trash. We see dead marijuana plants,” says Bea Redfeather. “That’s what they left us with.” In the pandemic, hundreds of Chinese migrants who lost their jobs moved to a remote city on the Navajo Nation…
Read more

Is Commercial Marijuana Really Sustainable in Sonoma County?

Promoters of marijuana cultivation such as Cannacraft and SPARC assert this should become a “marquee industry” in Sonoma County that will generate wealth and create new jobs, yet somehow not exacerbate the housing shortages. This argument merits close examination. Land and labor are expensive in Sonoma County compared to many locations where marijuana can be…
Read more