Two different people over the age of 60 – one man, one woman –
approached me in the past week wanting cannabis cultivation advice. It
being fall, they were specifically soliciting harvest advice. Now, I
happen not to be a cannabis farmer (I sure will cultivate hemp (
once it’s legal), but
I am a cannabis journalist, so I understand why they asked. I might
have visited more cannabis and hemp farms in the past three years than
any other journalist.
What stayed with me was not their questions,
which surrounded the usual farmer concerns of flower curing and the
threat of rain just prior to harvest, but their ages. Older Americans
are one of the two key demographics that explain why, at long last,
cannabis prohibition, America’s Longest War and her second Civil War, is
finally nearly over.
Let’s start with that first group, seniors.
Pollsters are finally accepting (though scratching their heads over the
fact) that older Americans are the fastest growing segment of the
population to support the Drug Peace era. The reason is pretty simple:
in a pill-popping society, any plant that will, with negligible
side-effects, reduce the number of capsules in the weekly pill box is
welcome. As I put it in my recent book,
Too High to Fail:
In
(to put it mildly) right-leaning Orange County, California, I saw
senior ladies—the largest demographic component of a cannabis collective
therein called Wilbur OC—being schooled in modern delivery methods
(such as the vaporizer and the lozenge) so as to soothe their aching
glaucoma pressure and deliver the only treatment that makes their
arthritis bearable.
Craig Raimondi,
Wilbur OC’s tie-wearing manager, told me, “We see a lot of folks
returning in desperation to the cannabis of their college days. They
have positive memories of the plant, and feel comfortable giving it a
shot when prescription medicines don’t provide relief for their
symptoms. In the communities of people living with various ailments,
word gets around that it’s effective.”
Wilbur
OC and its sister collective in San Diego have 5,050 patient members,
several dozen of whom annually take a field trip to the sustainably
minded Mendocino County farm that is the source of 100 percent of the
collectives’ medicine. This is known in the industry as a “closed loop”
model, which has marketing value during federal cannabis prohibition
because it shows that an outfit can be relied on not to divert cannabis
to, say, a college dorm in Alabama (where, by the way, prices for
California bud in 2011 were about three times higher—six thousand
dollars per pound—than they were inside the Golden State).
The
two collectives were so popular that their executive director and
Mendocino farm manager, forty-seven-year-old Jim Hill, closed membership
in 2010. The collective simply couldn’t produce any more medicine than
Hill and his full-time botanist already did and Hill didn’t want to risk
getting it from outside sources. Only members could receive cannabis........
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