Although California voters have legalized marijuana, Siskiyou County, on the border with Oregon, has an ordinance in place outlawing commercial cannabis operations. The sheriff says illegal grows are using up too much water and leading to environmental degradation. Local Hmong farmers say the county is weaponizing the water issue as a way to discriminate against them. Theo Whitcomb has written about all of this for High Country News, and joins us to explain.
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: Although voters in California have legalized cannabis, Siskiyou County on the border with Oregon has an ordinance in place outlawing commercial cannabis operations. The sheriff there says illegal grows are using up too much water and leading to environmental degradation, but local Hmong and other Southeast Asian American farmers say the county is weaponizing this water issue as a way to discriminate against them. Theo Whitcomb has written about this for High Country News and joins us now to explain. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Theo Whitcomb: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: I want to start with a little bit of relatively recent history. Why is it that Siskiyou County banned commercial cannabis grows a year after California voters legalized the drug?
Whitcomb: Californians legalized weed in 2016 but a key part of that legislation was that counties could kind of set their own rules and regulations on cannabis and in this case Siskiyou basically banned the farming of commercial cannabis in unincorporated areas. And now to your question is to why, you’ll kind of get different answers depending on who you ask. If you talk to the sheriff at the time, he talked about how the drug would harm kids, present a threat to public safety, kind of a classic D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) kind of talking point. But as the researchers, Margiana Petersen-Rodney and Michael Polson of UC Berkeley, wrote about at the time that the band was also in response to a growing number of Hmong American and Southeast Asian setting up medical cannabis gardens and farms and a pretty highly visible part of the county.
Miller: And it’s worth pointing out that this is a part of the country where there had historically been a lot of legal grows, just like in southern Oregon, a place known for growing marijuana. Did that ban actually lead to a reduction in the number of commercial operations?
Whitcomb: Yes, that’s a good point. Pot has been growing out there for a long, long time but this ban once it legalized, it wasn’t that effective. The industry has really grown even more since then, especially the black market. There’s a high incentive to grow outside of California’s regulations. And the illicit market essentially can be a more profitable business model for many, many cannabis farmers.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of some of these operations now?
Whitcomb: Yes. I’m sure many of your listeners have driven up and down I5. So if you look out Mount Shasta, what was supposed to be this kind of bucolic retirement community under the mountain has turned into what reasonably could be called working farmland. Data is really hard to pin down on this, but at a high point, I think a year or two ago, there were upwards of 2000 green houses clustered across the valley and it’s pretty visible. I’m sure you could see it if you drive through, but it’s pretty diverse. They range from small–kind of mom and pop greenhouses– to more intensive, more industrial operations. It’s hard to know the scale though, and that’s part of the problem actually. A lot of pot is grown there but that’s not what everyone is doing. Some people in the Hmong community in particular grow vegetables and raise their livestock as kind of a retirement.
Miller: How has Siskiyou County’s recently-appointed Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue responded to the situation?
Whitcomb: LaRue has really been on the forefront of a new strategy for accomplishing the county’s agenda. From their perspective, things have gotten kind of “out of control” and so they’re essentially escalating a campaign to eradicate or get rid of the industry completely. And instead of criminalizing just the cannabis plant, which hasn’t really worked that well, as we kind of talked about, LaRue has pivoted to going after things like water and land use and talking about environmental issues. The county has been trying to shut down the main water source to one of these areas since LaRue was appointed.
Miller: The main water source, meaning just to anybody in that area that they wouldn’t have access to water? How do you do that as opposed to targeting individual illegal operations?
Whitcomb: It’s extremely hard. So there’s a few main wells that people actually go and fill up water trucks for there. And they pay some local ranchers to fill up their water trucks and then they take it back to their property and apply the water to their plants. That’s if they’re growing cannabis so if you’re but if you just need water for your gardens or to water your animals, you’re going to be doing the same thing. So it’s an imperfect strategy to say the least. And they’re facing a lawsuit on behalf of the Hmong American community in this area for the policy.
Miller: But it doesn’t seem like the sheriff is alone in this. You report that the county board of supervisors has voted for some significant budget increases to back him up. Give us a sense for what they’ve done.
Whitcomb: Yeah, for sure. So the budget really reflects the county’s kind of signing off on expanding the sheriff department’s kind of purview. They effectively greenlit a $4 million dollar increase in what are called approved expenses for what’s called public protection. But in other words there,
it just shows that they’re okay with giving the sheriff’s department and police a bigger slice of the pie. I think just what the budget numbers show are the priorities of the government and with what tools they are planning to govern a complex problem like cannabis with.
Miller: Hmm. So as you noted, Hmong Americans in the county say they are being targeted. What do the numbers show?
Whitcomb: So it’s a tough one and there’s not a clear answer on this one, unfortunately. But what I can say is that criminalization has caused a lot of distrust and so you’re not going door-to-door getting great demographic data. However, with that said, it’s clear that certain groups are getting caught up in the criminal justice system more than others and in an analysis of county records by the Asian Law Caucus and the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union). Well, the census shows Asian Americans are around 2.5% of the county’s population, they were involved in almost 30% of traffic stops, almost 80% of cannabis cultivation citations and nearly 82% of property liens. And that’s just between 2019 and 2021. And I just want to add that while Hmong Americans are predominant in the area, there’s also other racial groups. There are Chinese Americans, Laotians, and Mien. It’s a pretty diverse area.
Miller: But those numbers are super striking in terms of the percentage of property liens and cannabis infractions, 80% or 82%. Is it possible to know if that is out of proportion to the percentage of illegal cannabis operations that are run by Hmong Americans?
Whitcomb: Yeah, it’s unfortunately really hard to tell. Scientists and researchers tell me this all the time. It’s hard to get good numbers on this stuff. But if you listen to Hmong residents themselves, they’ll tell you the neighborhoods that they live and work in whether or not they’re growing or or or just living there are just really heavily policed. The county has really made an effort to try to crack down on that area in particular.
Miller: So Hmong and other Southeast Asian American residents say they are being unfairly targeted. I’m curious about the larger argument put forward by the sheriff that illegal cannabis grows are draining water and polluting the environment because we have heard identical things from a lot of people from elected officials and law enforcement officers and others in Oregon, especially in southern Oregon over the last two years or so. What did you hear from actual experts from hydrologists or environmental watchdogs in northern California about this?
Whitcomb: Yeah, you’re kind of gonna start noticing a theme here, Dave. Hydrologists will be the first to tell you how incredibly difficult it is to get good data on water use and to specifically address the water use issue. It’s really important for folks who are studying this to be able to go and interact with farmers and get a sense of their growing practices. The same goes for environmental impact and stuff. So with that said though, what we do know is hydrologists who studied this, say that early estimations of cannabis water that kind of informed a lot of the rhetoric around how much they’re being used, they have been coming to realize that they were a bit inflated. So cannabis use is about the same amount of water as a tomato plant, you kind of start hearing that more but the bigger issue is that when you have a completely unregulated industry grow really rapidly, it’s going to cause impacts to things like steam and water tables, that’s for sure.
So and then there’s obviously the other impacts and at its worst the largest industrially-grown cannabis farms are just like any other agribusiness. They use fertilizers, pesticides inputs, controlling pests, farmers use rodenticides. You hear a good amount. In Siskiyou you hear about things like mites that are a problem. So farmers use chemicals to try to deal with that.
Miller: So two things are happening at once. Here to go back to the question of the stepped up enforcement by Sheriff LaRue. One is that a number of members of the community, especially Hmong American residents, are saying that he is unfairly cracking down on them. But you report that he is saying that he’s not satisfied with the law enforcement tools at his disposal. What else is he pushing for?
Whitcomb: I think one thing is that the environmental impact is getting pretty noticeable and so I think he’s in a position to kind of be at the forefront of dealing with this issue. And the tools he has like fines and things, he kind of sets and calls them a pay to play, like people can just pay the fines and get on and do what they were doing. But I think that he sees one of the most powerful tools law enforcement has as kind of a solution and that is the threatening stick of a felony or or even worst case incarceration. I think since he sees himself as overwhelmed, he’s kind of reaching for that to accomplish a range of goals that the county has around land use and water issues. So, yes, I think it’s just that the most powerful tool he has and is potentially becoming more and more attractive as a solution for dealing with what’s kind of a ballooning issue for the county.
Miller: Theo Whitcomb, thanks very much.
Whitcomb: Thank you.
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