Riding Dirty–An Article about Transporting Medical Marijuana

Today’s Miller-McCune, a magazine devoted to thoughtful long-form journalism published an article by David Freed about the morass of medical marijuana laws in California and in particular the difficulty of growers getting legitimately grown medicinal cannabis to market. Each county has its own regulations.  Break a rule in one county, doing something that is legal in another, and the grower/driver could spend years in jail.

The thread tying the article together is the transfer and transport of Humboldt Co. medical cannabis.  I went along to take photos. Here’s a taste of an excellent piece.

Mr. Green has arranged to hand over to Mr. X for delivery to the Harborside dispensary in Oakland one pound of “Train Wreck,” another of the marijuana strains he raises on his 2-​acre farm outside Garberville. Because marijuana dispensaries in California and those who supply them are prohibited from profiting, Mr. Green will receive $2,200 for what Mr. X carefully describes as Mr. Green’s “equitable contribution” to the collective. In turn, Mr. X will mark up the price of Mr. Green’s marijuana (he declines to say by how much) to cover the collective’s operating costs. At the dispensary in Oakland, that same pound, sold to individual patients in increments as small as a gram, may fetch $4,000 or more.

….Law enforcement may not be as aggressive as it once was in pursuing relative small-timers like them, he and Mr. Green agree, but their labors are hardly without risk. One problem, the two say, is that no one’s exactly sure where the risks lie, because medical-marijuana regulations are so contradictory and confusing from one jurisdiction to the next.

“There’s a great hunger among us to understand the rules,” Mr. X says, “so that we can follow them.”