Sonoma County farmers want to cultivate hemp—now legal under federal law—but that won’t happen any time soon, says county agriculture commissioner Tony Linegar, a fierce advocate for farming and farmers, including those who are growing cannabis now or have yet to receive the necessary permits.

Hemp looks and smells like cannabis. For some local detractors, it’s just as objectionable as cannabis and ought to be stopped before it takes root here.

“Solving the challenge of how hemp can fit into the agricultural landscape will be a balancing act with many opposing interests,” Linegar says. “It’s a worthy cause if it creates opportunity for local farmers. Hopefully we can come out of the process with the opportunity intact.”

For the time being, Linegar is pushing the Sonoma County Supervisors to follow the lead of 13 counties around the state that have passed temporary moratoriums on commercial hemp cultivation. Mendocino blocked hemp cultivation in February; Marin adopted its own moratorium in March. He’s suggesting to the Sonoma supervisors that they do the same at the April 2 meeting.

The passage of the 2018 Farm Bill opened new opportunities to grow a crop in the U.S. that humans have been growing for thousands of years. The history of hemp in America is already well-known: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew it. Thomas Paine, who helped jump start the American Revolution, saw hemp growing wild and concluded that it would ensure that Americans would always be free and never under a foreign domination.

As agriculture commissioner, Linegar’s job is to protect, preserve and expand farming and ranching in Sonoma County—where and when that’s possible. Biodiversity has been one of his mantras over eight years on the job. “Hemp is an amazing plant botanically speaking,” Linegar say, as he extols its many virtues and uses, which includes “the possibility to create new kinds of plastics that would be biodegradable, as well as new building materials like hempcrete.”

Hemp was outlawed by the federal government in 1937—the same year that cannabis was prohibited. Ever since then, the sturdy hemp plant has been found guilty by association. The plant belongs to the cannabis family, but it’s not rich in THC and doesn’t produce intoxicating effects.

“I’ve taken a deep dive into the hemp world,” Linegar says. “I know the only way you can distinguish a field of hemp grown for CBD from a field of cannabis with THC, is to take samples of the female plants from both, bring them to a laboratory and have them tested.” Commercial hemp under the Farm Bill can’t have more than .3 percent THC content.

For that reason, and despite his overall enthusiasm for the plant, Linegar wants the county to approve an emergency ordinance to enact a moratorium on growing hemp. He’d like to see hemp eventually join the list of crops that are grown and harvested here, in part because the plant would bring diversity to fields and farms. For agriculture to survive in Sonoma, it has to produce products that bring a solid financial return per acre planted. On that score, hemp blows grapes out of the water. “In Colorado an acre of hemp produced for CBD brings in about $60,000 per acre,” Linegar says. “An acre here of the most highly sought-after grapes might bring in 5 to 6 tons an acre and sell for $5,000 a ton at the high end. You do the math.”

Some financially strapped Sonoma County farmers are chomping at the bit to start growing hemp: “We have already had numerous inquiries at the Department of Agriculture from conventional farmers who want to grow hemp,” Linegar says.

Nobody’s getting the green light, at least not yet. Hemp presents a major conundrum for the county. “There are pros and cons on all sides,” he says.

Linegar identifies three reasons to put the moratorium on hemp: Sacramento has yet to issue final regulations about hemp cultivation (that’s expected to happen this year). There’s also a loophole in state law allowing for the cultivation of hemp for research purposes without registering with a county agricultural commissioner (or be tested for THC).

“That loophole could be exploited,” Linegar says. “It has been the impetus for most of the county moratoriums in effect in California.”

And third, male hemp plants have the potential to pollinate female cannabis plants. That pollination would produce seeds with diluted THC content, which could make smokable cannabis a less valuable cash crop. Hemp pollen can move as far as 30 miles, says Linegar. “In Oregon, the proximity of hemp to cannabis is already a problem. If we have both crops here, hemp farmers growing male plants would have to be at a safe distance from female cannabis plants. We don’t want incompatible land use.”

But the biggest issue of all is squaring up the bulky legalization regime so pot growers in Sonoma can participate in the new recreational cannabis economy. “First and foremost we owe considerations to people who have been diligently pursuing legal status by complying with the rigorous local and state regulations for licensing,” he says. “Having passed an ordinance that allows for cannabis cultivation in late 2016, I believe the county has an obligation to protect [the growers’] interests.”

Linegar would like Sonoma County to wait until Sacramento creates statewide rules and regulations for hemp. He’d like to see the county avoid some of the cannabis controversies that have divided communities following Proposition 64’s passage.

Linegar believes that any rush to regulate locally could find the county scrambling “down the same rabbit hole that it went down with cannabis. Some of the same people in Sonoma County and elsewhere, who have opposed cannabis, would also oppose hemp. For one thing, it would smell. For another, if mistaken for cannabis it could present similar concerns around public safety.”

He adds, “”I understand that cannabis is prohibited in areas zoned Rural Residential and Agriculture Residential. I can accept that, but [other] places that are zoned [for agriculture], have to be maintained and defended for farming and ranching. I draw the line there. The primary use for that land is agricultural, not residential.”

He says cannabis and hemp farmers ought to be able to grow on land that’s zoned by the county as Land Intensive Agriculture, Land Extensive Agriculture and Diverse Agriculture. “We have had a huge influx of people from urban areas who don’t understand agriculture and don’t appreciate or respect that they are moving into areas zoned for agriculture. We can’t kowtow to them.”

Linegar returns to the subject of CBD, even as he wonders which products the Food and Drug Administration will ultimately approve. But the CBD horse has left the stable. “There are all kinds of CBD products out there already that consumers purchase and use. Enforcing restraints has been non existent.” Hemp can be cultivated to be high in CBD.

A robust embrace of the potential for hemp, he hopes, may well persuade anti-cannabis agonists to reconsider their opposition.

“Unfortunately, there’s guilt by association,” Linegar says. “The way cannabis has been over-regulated has the ability to color the way hemp is regulated. That would not be in the best interests of our farmers.”

Marin State Assemblyman Marc Levine’s got a pretty good idea going this week. He introduced AB 1648 on Tuesday in an effort to streamline the state-mandated environmental review for affordable housing that’s built on local school district surplus properties.

The idea, of course, is to bring teachers and parents closer to the schools they work at or send their kids to. The bill would give authority to school districts to provide housing preference for teachers, who often cannot afford to live where they work in pricey Marin. Levine’s bill takes aim at the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by requiring approvals of affordable housing projects on school district-owned properties within seven months of the filing of a certified record of the CEQA proceedings with a court. That’s a long way of saying that his bill would limit or eliminate costly lawsuits from neighbors who may disapprove of the affordable housing plan.

In a statement, Levine notes that the same CEQA rule applies to the building of sports stadiums and called on lawmakers to expedite the process for affordable housing, too. Marin Superintendent of Schools Mary Jane Burke’s in favor of the local pols’ latest legislative push as she notes that having affordable-housing options for teachers and staff “will enable our schools to attract and retain a quality workforce,” she says. “Our students deserve the very best educational opportunities and retaining qualified staff is paramount to making this happen.”

Napa State Senator Bill Dodd’s got a pretty good idea, too, that’s now making its way through Sacramento’s committee process. SB 290 would, for the first time, allow the State of California to take out an insurance policy on itself in the (pretty likely) event of future wildfires or other disasters. “Why doesn’t the state have disaster insurance to reduce its financial exposure,” he asks, non-rhetorically.

Dodd’s bill is co-sponsored by Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara and state Treasurer Fiona Ma. The bill authorizes their agencies, and the governor’s office, to “enter into an insurance policy that pays out when California has unexpected disaster costs.” It would basically work like a home insurance policy.

Dodd notes in a statement that this is how they do it in Oregon, not to mention at the World Bank. They’ve both used insurance policies to protect taxpayers from financial exposure after a disaster, though it’s unclear when Oregon has faced a big disaster of any kind, besides those freakish neo-Nazis of Portland. OK, that time Mt. St. Helena blew up, that was pretty bad.

Closer to home, In the last
12 years, California has experienced 11 of the 20 most destructive fires in its history, the senator observes, including last year’s Paradise Fire, which was the most destructive fire in state history and has a $8 billion price tag for Californians to chew on. Dodd’s bill is parked in the Senate Committee on Appropriations, awaiting its next vote.

Can unions organize cannabis industry workers, some stoned, some sober, others undocumented and still others with college degrees?

It’s tricky.

The upsides: a unionized cannabis industry could help improve wages and working conditions for men and women who labor in North Bay cannabis fields, warehouses and dispensaries. Unions could also assist the industry as a whole by rendering it more transparent, and by insisting on standards that contribute to the health and safety of employers, employees and consumers.

The downsides: a wobbly workforce that’s still laboring underground in many cases and that doesn’t really need the union dues on top of the onerous tax burden that comes with compliance. Not to mention that there’s not one or two, but three unions angling to ramp up their rolls with the North Bay cannabis labor pool.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters is one of the unions pushing to organize weed workers. Its drivers already transport legal weed throughout the state; now the union is pushing out into the fields and warehouses. At 1.3 million members strong, the IBT is one of the strongest unions in the country and now they’re in the thick of a campaign to organize a California cannabis industry that is moving haltingly from illegality to legality.

The Teamsters have already been engaged in the cannabis culture in this state for decades. Along with the California Growers Association, plus law enforcement and elected officials all across the state, the Teamsters supported and lobbied for Proposition 215, which ushered in the state’s landmark medical marijuana regime in 1996.

The Teamsters also lobbied in favor of Proposition 64, which legalized adult use in 2016 and launched the system of regulation and taxation that’s now in place. Once the legal cannabis industry had employees who delivered and distributed marijuana, it made perfect sense, from the Teamsters perspective, to organize them.

“Helping new industries evolve” is the current Teamster slogan. They’d like to see the cannabis industry evolve by embracing unionization—an effort already underway that’s helped one California pot business organize its workers.

The Teamsters recently helped organize workers at Continuum, a California marijuana distributor that has offices and warehouses in Oakland, Sacramento and Orange County. “We worked closely with the Teamsters,” says Tim Morland, the compliance and policy director at Continuum. “Now all our employees—drivers and warehouse workers—are in the union and make $25 an hour.”

The Teamsters have also stood by their pot-transport workers when they’ve been arrested and detained by law enforcement. The Los Angeles police recently nabbed and held a cannabis delivery man named Richard Rodriguez, a member of Local 853, for 15 hours. The Teamsters found a lawyer who secured the trucker’s release; no charges were filed. “No one has ever offered me that kind of protection,” he told the Teamsters blog. “We need the Teamsters because they have those relationships.”

Closer to home, it’s a challenge to obtain accurate information about where and what the Teamsters are actually doing on the ground in the North Bay on the cannabis front—in part because there’s competition between rival local labor organizations that nobody in the union-advocacy movement wants to talk about, at least on the record.

It’s understandable that the union doesn’t want to tip its hand about its organizing plans and invite sabotage at the hands of “right to work” agitators. And it’s a touchy prospect going in: Some cannabis companies are still very much underground, or straddle a gray border that divides the legal and the illegal. They don’t want or need the publicity of a union shop.

A local Teamsters organizer who insisted on anonymity says of efforts to unionize the industry, “This is just the beginning. A lot of people haven’t followed rules and still don’t follow rules. They’re not the easiest people to work with.”

The United Farm Workers (UFW) and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), also aim to organize cannabis workers. If you’re a cannabis worker, we want to talk with you,” says UFW national vice president Armando Elenes.

For its part, the UFCW asks that the Teamsters kindly step back. “The UFCW has a Cannabis Workers Rising Campaign,” UFCW spokesman Jeff Ferro says. “We would hope they [the Teamsters] respect our jurisdiction.”

The competing unions reflect the diversity and scope of a cannabis industry that stretches from fields and warehouses to trucks, kitchens and dispensaries.

Another Teamster spokesperson who requested anonymity says the union is aware of competition from the UFW and UFCW. One difference, she says, is that Teamsters don’t want to be organized-labor militants. “We aim to be an advocate for the industry, not a thorn in its side.”

Organizers note that there’s still some lingering bitterness in California’s Central Valley between the United Farm Workers and the Teamsters, who tried to elbow out Cesar Chavez’s organization in the 1970s. But it was a different Teamsters in the ’70s—in bed with organized crime and with a corrupt ex-convict Jimmy Hoffa as its leader. The union has taken great pains to reform its image and organization since its mid-’70s lowpoint, when Hoffa disappeared and was presumed to be killed by the Mafia. He still hasn’t been found.

It’s a different union today, even if it is headed by James Hoffa Jr.

Kristin Heidelbach heads the Teamsters Cannabis Division. A graduate of Sacramento State University, she commands an office in the state capitol, travels widely, speaks publicly and provides a recognizable name and face to an industry that has historically been reluctant to go public.

Heidelbach worked closely for more than a decade with her mentor, Barry Broad, a Teamsters lawyer from 1985 until his retirement last year. For much of his career, Broad focused exclusively on cannabis issues.

“We joined with members of the cannabis industry to reach consensus on issues and to create the regulatory system that’s now in place,” he says. “We knew it would be a rough transition for the legacy players, but the industry will settle down and become efficient, capitalized and automated like the rest of California agriculture.

“Government officials,” he adds, “had been uncomfortable dealing with people in the underground economy. Once the Teamsters unionized workers, it helped legitimize the industry.”

Broad says cannabis workers have suffered in the black market because they haven’t been paying into or accessing Social Security, unemployment insurance or workers’ compensation.

“There has been a dark side to the cannabis industry,” Broad says. “There’s been use of child labor, which is against the law, and there has been a lot of pot on the market with fungus that’s not fit for human consumption. We’ve helped to clean up the whole industry in more ways than one.”

Heidelbach carries on Broad’s legacy. Over the past three years, she has staked out the Emerald Triangle for organizing pot workers. The Emerald Triangle has for decades been the heart of the California cannabis industry—though it’s losing ground to Salinas, Monterey and Santa Barbara, where municipalities are eager for tax revenue from the emerging economy.

Broad notes that Humboldt growers, far removed from the regional motherlode of cannabis consumers in San Francisco and San Jose. It’s a long way to drive with a load of legal weed, he says, even for a veteran Teamsters driver.

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Last fall, Heidelbach chaired a panel at the Emerald Cup (the annual cannabis county fair, job market and stoner festival) in Santa Rosa that was titled “Tips for Making Money in the Newly Regulated Market.”

“It’s all about survival,” Heidelbach told the audience. That summed up the sentiments of the participants on the panel. None were gleeful about the future of legal weed.

Heidelbach is presently focused on working conditions in the Emerald Triangle and beyond, and not just because Murder Mountain is up on Netflix, highlighting the outlaw culture to the north. Yes, the pot workers are often pleasantly stoned, but many are also unhappy with the long hours, the repetitive work and the demand to turn out product quickly.

“A lot of trimmers and dispensary workers are treated unfairly,” Heidelbach says. “They need representation because they’re often afraid to speak up, lest they lose their jobs. At one place, I was told, ‘We’re good to our workers, but you can’t talk to them. They’re idiots.'”

Along with the condescending tone directed at workers, Heidelbach’s also gotten an indifferent, if not cold, shoulder from big commercial operators in the North Bay. One Sonoma County-based cannabis-industry spokesman who insisted on anonymity says the weed industry is now so squeezed by taxes and regulations it can’t survive further squeezing by the Teamsters.

The new taxes that are part of the Proposition 64 legalization regime have made it nearly impossible for individuals without big financial backing to enter the market.

Earlier this year, Clayton Taylor, a fledgling organizer for the Teamsters—he has an office in Santa Rosa—spoke to a roomful of largely union-indifferent members of the Sonoma Valley Cannabis Enthusiasts (SVCE), an industry group that wants Sonoma Valley weed to be as well-known as Sonoma Valley wine.

Ken Brown, a former Sonoma mayor and a longtime local activist, helped bring Taylor to the SVCE meeting.

“The Teamsters have a right to organize,” Brown says. “[But] if people don’t want a union, that’s their business.”

For years, Brown’s wife, Jewel Mathieson, has been the heart and soul of the Sonoma Patient Group, the longest-running dispensary in Sonoma County. The Sonoma Patient Group is not represented by any union.

At the SVCE meeting, Taylor distributed a Teamsters flyer that boasted, “We sign what’s called a Labor Peace Agreement which sets the bedrock for the positive relation between employer and the Teamsters.”

That day, no SVCE growers signed up.

“We’re strapped,” one member says. “The union could make life more difficult for us.”

Immigrant trimmers in the cannabis industry are also pretty wary of the uptick in union agitation. Rosa (not her real name) is 25 and from Central America; Santiago (not his real name) is 29 and from South America. She has a passport and a visa; he has no legit papers.

What they make in four months here lasts a year back home. Three years ago, they earned $25 an hour as trimmers. By 2018, the wage had dropped to $15.

Working conditions are onerous—they put in shifts of up to 14 hours, and are under near constant surveillance—but Rosa and Santiago haven’t sought union representation and say they won’t strike or rock the boat. When they don’t like one workplace, they move to another farm or warehouse where the weed bosses are kinder.

Santiago worries about Rosa and rightly so.

“She has trimmed on remote farms where growers hit on her,” he says. “There’s little, if any, protection.”

At CannaCraft, a major cannabis-manufacturing facility in Santa Rosa, CEO Bill Silver expresses pride in the CannaCraft workforce and the company itself. “I was initially drawn to the company because it treats all our employees well.”

Silver, a former professor at Sonoma State University, is a bit more guarded when it comes to the question of a unionized Cannacraft. The company employs around 180 people.

“That’s a sensitive issue,” says Silver. “I don’t want to comment on anything that’s in progress.”

Jonah Raskin is the author of ‘Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War.’