 My name is Michael Poulsen. I'm a postdoctoral researcher here at UC Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science Policy and Management, also a member of the Cannabis Research Center. Today I'm going to be giving a talk on social science and cannabis policy, highlighting a bit of the highlights from my research over the past decade. I was trained as an anthropologist, and for those of you who are less familiar with that field, it involves spending time with people in the environments that they live in to understand how they perceive, experience, and act in the world. So the subtitle of my talk today is a view from the bottom up, which references my efforts to document and understand this period of epic policy change as it's experienced in everyday terms. So to give you an overview of today's talk, I'm going to first talk about my research, give you a sense of what my basic research question was, how I sought to answer it, where I studied, and when. Then I'm going to go through the implications for public policy and for public debate. I'll be focusing first on some of the major lessons from the prohibition period, focusing particularly on rural development issues. Second, I'll be looking at lessons from the period of regulatory formation, which I bracket from the period of 2010 to 2016. Here I'll talk more about issues about the environment, but also land use, zoning, and a couple other issues. And then finally, based on a number of interviews I've been conducting over the past six months with cannabis cultivators, I'll ask, what are we learning from the experience of cultivators after legalization? And here I'll focus on issues of local control, on bans, and on issues of regulatory inconsistencies. And then finally, I'll be drawing some key implications and future research directions. The basic question I entered the field with in 2010 there about was simple. It was how a society's relationship to cannabis transforming. I had a pretty simple approach in asking this question. First, I was interested in relationships. Who do people interact with? So you can think about the cannabis supply chain. In prohibition period, it was a pretty simple supply chain going from the cultivator to a broker to dealers and distributors. But with the advent of medical and now legal cannabis, you have the entrance of a whole number of new actors. From quality and safety lab technicians to attorneys, accountants, security contractors, processors, landlords, not to mention all the policymakers, state inspectors, biologists, and tribal officials that affect the supply chain. These are all new actors and they all indicate new relationships that influence what cannabis actually is in the world. Second, I look at issues of language and discourse. How do we talk about, comprehend, and categorize issues around cannabis? Generally speaking, we can think, do we talk about it as a medicine? And if it's a medicine, is it an herbal medicine like echinacea? Or is it more like a pharmaceutical like Zoloft? Is it a vice? And if so, which one? Is it tobacco or is it more like alcohol? Are dispensaries like tattoo parlors, sex work businesses, or liquor stores? Finally, we can think about, is it an agricultural product or maybe it's a crime? Clearly, every one of these framings has a big influence on how we talk about cannabis and then how we conceive and act around cannabis itself. Finally, we come to the issue of practices. What are the everyday habits that people have with and around cannabis? We can think about communication practices. In the prohibition period, communication was often shrouded in secrecy. You had a tight-knit group of people that you communicated with and you certainly didn't document most of what you were doing. In a post-legalization period, that is very different. There's a mandate to communicate not only with neighbors, but to communicate with government officials and to document everything you do. What do people navigate this massive shift in communication practices? Who is able to navigate them? I conducted fieldwork from 2009, my first field trip to Northern California, to the present. I had a few methods that I employed in conducting the research. First was interviews and oral histories, where I talked with people ranging from cultivators who, on the illegal and legal side of the law, with deputies in law enforcement, with policy makers and tribal members, patients, lawyers, neighborhood activists, environmentalists, scientists, realtors, and so on. I also did what we call participant observation, which involves spending time with many of these actors, building relationships and trust, and attempting to really understand how it is that they see the world. I lived on cannabis farms, I attended policy meetings, I went to tribal events and activist meetings, conferences, trade shows. I did ride-alongs with deputies. And as you can see from the map on this slide, I conducted research all over California, primarily in the green highlighted areas, but I also conducted research in the red areas as well. I began research in 2010 in earnest. And if some of you remember, that was the time when California was debating its first proposition around legalization in recent history, Proposition 19, which posed the idea of full legalization. Of course, at that point, medical cannabis had been passed for 14 years since 1996, and that had done a significant job in terms of liberalizing issues of consumption and distribution. But matters of production of cultivation really remained in the gray market, if not the underground market altogether. For the first time in 2010, the proposition of liberalizing production was posed to California voters and public. Producers were thrust into and also entered into the public sphere, and production became a new focus of public debate. This really changed the dynamics of cannabis policy going forward. For this reason, I focused on Northern California, which is, by many accounts, the epicenter of U.S. cannabis production. So for the rest of the talk, I want to speak about what I found over the past 10 years that I see as important to the formation of policy and public debate. Looking at the period of prohibition, I've looked primarily into issues of rural development. Removing our judgment about whether prohibition was good or bad, we can say that during the decline of extractive industries, such as mining and forestry, prohibition functioned as an alternative source of development in government revenue. Many actors benefited from what I call a shadow economic development of cannabis. I focused particularly on Humboldt and Calaveras, where I showed how prohibition supported property owners through things like inflated property prices and law enforcement and government through government seizures as well as funding allocations. And despite the harms that it caused, and there are many, prohibition also benefited farmers, workers and communities that would otherwise be suffering from unemployment. It circulated money in ways that it wouldn't otherwise have circulated in rural areas that were experiencing formal economic decline. So the implications of this are that legalization is a new regime of rural development and government that replaces prohibition and its unexpected rural development effects. If that's the case that legalization is a new development regime, then we need to equitably and proactively redress, transition and replace the system that prohibition had created. I see this as a matter of equity. To date, equity debates necessarily have focused on the need to account for the negative impacts of the drug war. Absolutely true. It's also important to account for ways that prohibition benefited people in rural and in urban areas, benefits that are now being taken away. There's many tools to make this transition happen equitably, from appellation designations to producer collectives, equity programs and regulatory actions to limit farm size and implement price controls. In the transitional period of regulatory formation and experimentation, which I bracket from 2010 to 2016, I asked what new institutional and social dynamics altered the way that we understand and approach cannabis? Largely because of the new focus on production that legalization debates brought about, cannabis became an object of environmental concern during the formation of regulations. As you can see at the chart at the bottom, which tracks the amount of stories, news stories that have developed around cannabis in the environment, from the 1970s there was virtually no mention of this kind of connection, but by 2017 you have upwards of 2,000 stories a year coming out about cannabis in the environment. One way to understand this increase in public attention to environmental issues is the shifting strategy of the federal government to one of environmental protection. Notably, after the passage of Proposition 215, there was a slipping legitimacy of prohibition after medicalization. The environment became an important way of newly underscoring federal approaches, especially in California, where we care about our land and our public parks. This culminated in a series of ever widening multi-agency efforts between 2008 and 2012, starting with one county and ending in a six-county, multi-week, public land-focused effort and eventually expanding to the entire U.S. West. These efforts had a rhetorical strategy to them. Cultivation was portrayed as a source of danger, of violence, associated with drugs like meth and heroin, associated with environmental pollution, and also cartels. Because these rhetorical strategies are still commonly expressed, there is an urgent need for a systematic review of issues of cartel involvement, violence, and pollution, and unpermitted growth, especially those on public lands. But to my mind, there's not any systematic figures and reports yet on this. Yet these associations still circulate, which draws our attention then to what these associations themselves do. In the absence of these reports, the rhetorical and institutional strategies function to continue the stigmatization of cannabis cultivation as polluters who lack moral character, often with racial and xenophobic undertones. And these frames still resound in regulatory debates. So one way this plays out is the blanket assumption that cannabis cultivators come from a place lacking in environmental ethics. But my work shows this is not so simple. First, there's a legacy of back-to-the-land and environmentalist care for nature that has a palpable legacy in many of the cultivator communities that I studied. Second, the first call for environmental regulation, not simply environmental criminalization, of which I'm aware, came from cultivators themselves in 2008 and Southern Humboldt. And third, the results of the survey that Dr. Hekyobodwitch talks about in a corresponding video shows that there's widespread adoption of environmental agricultural practices and attitudes. On a different but related point, there's a reticence and resistance to regulation that often comes not despite environmental concern, but rooted in environmental concern. Remember that many of the cultivators I interviewed had watched salmon depletion, deforestation, poisonous mining, water chugging, and environmentally impactful agriculture. They had watched all these sectors blossom with the sanction of government. So the suggestion now that government cares for the environment is understandably greeted with skepticism by many cultivators. All of this is to say that there may be an interest in environmental protection among growers, but first there's a need for destigmatization of cultivation itself and the building of trust and consensus. These efforts, both my own research as well as a literature shows, may address challenges to compliance. My work is also involved looking at several other areas in that period of emerging regulations and how they've altered cannabis. I look at zoning and land use issues, which are the primary capacities of local governments to regulate cannabis. I explore competing claims about what kinds of land uses are deemed legitimate and valuable. Second, I look at issues of economic development and planning. How do people invest cannabis with visions and agendas for the future? Third, I look at issues of medical collectives. The ways that these horizontal, socially organized, and not-for-profit collectives were increasingly disciplined into a business-like form. So I encourage you to consult a list of references at the end of this presentation to read more on these matters. In the post-legalization era, I arrived at a question. How do people encounter the legal and regulatory system since regulation? One way I've answered that is with colleagues through a survey in the interviews that I've been conducting in 2019 and currently. In deciding whether to comply or not, people have three major realms of concern. They're concerned with the effects of compliance on their ability to earn a livelihood. Will it help them or will it hurt them? They're concerned with their relationship to government. Do they have a hopeful orientation towards government or are they suspicious of government relationships? And third, issues of the environment. Will regulation actually help the environment or will this be another depleting regulatory system? With all three of these areas, people need to have trust that regulation is fair and that it will at least give them, their communities and the environment, a chance to thrive. To the degree people think that this isn't the case, non-compliance is likely to increase. After a century of prohibition and a few decades of tumultuous legal and policy battles over medical cannabis, people have perceptions and fears of government that impedes compliance. And without building trust and consensus, that is, without the active transition of cultivators out of one economy and into another, regulations will systematically favor new market entrants over old. New actors, of course, have less historical baggage and aversion to regulation. So I won't spend much time explaining the results of the survey here, but instead refer you over to my colleague, Dr. Hekia Bodwich. In the post-legalization period, I've been asking the question about the experience of different kinds of farmers, what their experience is with regulation, and answered this through ongoing interviews with cultivators. I want to convey a few of these interviews to illustrate some of the emerging themes that I see across interviewees. First, small farmers are struggling to comply. One farmer in a northern county, for instance, he's a long-time medical cannabis advocate who moved recently to the area. After spending a year cleaning his property and pursuing, actively, a cultivation license, only to receive confusing and contradictory information from the county, he was raided by law enforcement, had his plants chopped down, and fell deeply into debt with ever more demanding lenders. He estimates he's now spent $900,000 in total on purchasing the property and coming into compliance. He wishes that regulatory information had been clearer and supports environmental regulation, but at this point he's considering moving out of the state altogether. Those staying in the regulated system are increasingly indebted and insecure. For instance, another medium-sized cultivator in a coastal county was forced into compliance in 2015 after notices from the water board. Despite having been in the compliance process for five years, he's still waiting for a license. He will only be granted that license after doing another $65,000 of work on culverts. At the moment, he's operating at a major loss, leading him to seek out new investors, increase the scale of the farm as well as its environmental footprint, and keep, quote, pouring money in and hoping for the best. Small farmers who make it through regulation are also barely making it. One cultivator in an eastern California county was one of about 30 in the county to receive a license. Now, just a while before, 930 cultivators in the county had expressed interest in complying, but only 30 have made it through. He identifies local regulations as a, quote, moving target that have made it difficult to grow enough to make a living. Though he hopes to break even in two years, a hope made more intense when he was laid off from his other job. He still wonders, quote, if it's all worth it. Even smaller farmers that have a fair amount of resources are struggling to make it. One farmer who entered cannabis industry from the financial world has a farm that is capped at 10,000 square feet per county rules. And he can't make enough money to turn profit at that cap. The permit, therefore, is somewhat worthless in terms of raising the property values, which he was hoping to sell. And so he stuck with his property and operating it a loss. So this isn't just about farmers, but also about farm workers. One worker who's been in the cannabis industry for 15 years and lives in a coastal county can't get access to land to cultivate. Something that he used to do through leasing scenarios prior to legalization. As labor prices drop, he's become a casual laborer on other people's farms. Though he knows he could make a lot of money on unlicensed grows, either working for himself or for others, he's now trying to figure out how to economically survive in the legal world. A real challenge, given that his entire adult life has centered on honing his cannabis cultivation skills. Now, larger growers are also struggling with compliance. One Central Coast cultivator applied for 65 licenses in a transition from an organic tomato farm to a cannabis farm. The local regulatory process for him has been slow, and it's changed several times, making it hard to understand. He's had to keep his land fallow for the years he's been applying, and he's laid out $300,000 that have depleted his savings. Even successful, larger growers have it rough and wish it was more fair for others. One Central Coast cultivator, who's successfully become licensed, has spent about a million dollars in transition from a flower farm. He sees over-regulation as a problem. Though he laments the unfair competition from growers who operate in the underground space, he sees a need to increase the ability to enter the market, not a need for enforcement to crack down further. So across the board, local regulations are a major impediment to becoming compliant is what I'm finding. Second, becoming compliant takes large financial and social resources. And third, inconsistent, unclear, and often slow regulations are a major problem. Another way that I've investigated my questions in the post-legalization period is to look at matters of local control and bans on cannabis-related activities. I conducted one study with a colleague of mine, Marguiana Peterson-Rockney, in Siskiyou County, where I've been looking into what I've come to think of as de facto prohibition. The sheriff in that county has largely been in charge of the civil and criminal responses to cannabis since 2016. This has led to, the sheriff's initiative, has led to the enlistment of civil agencies, not just criminal agencies at the local, state, and federal level, from animal control to fish and wildlife to toxic substances to code enforcement, all of which are geared towards civilly and criminally targeting cannabis producers. What this effectively creates is a new iteration of prohibition that treats cannabis not as an unregulated crop, but as a criminal substance. The exclusion of cannabis as agriculture by agricultural officials at the county level means that it's been offloaded onto other agencies that bring other approaches like the sheriff. This means the denial of agricultural support and services to cultivators, including programs for disadvantaged farmers, extension and support services, as well as the kind of support they would experience from their local agricultural agency. The disqualification of cannabis as agriculture goes to a deeper anxiety about local agriculture and culture, with the effect of excluding those who don't align with what tend to be rather narrow definitions, often along racial, cultural, and class lines of who counts as a farmer. The effect is that the exclusion of cannabis as agriculture serves to prevent economic development that could promote certain pathways to prosperity for relatively poor counties and for historically disadvantaged and marginalized groups. All of this, of course, occurs despite the CDFA's designation of cannabis as agriculture. All of this has disparate impacts. Medical patients can't provide for themselves. For instance, in Siskiyou, there's an intensive code requirement that makes it virtually impossible to grow your own. Second, in Siskiyou, the rollout of restrictions, moratoria and bans, has fallen heaviest on among American farmers who have moved in large numbers to the area since 2015. And they have faced intensive scrutiny and enforcement efforts in this predominantly white county. Finally, low-income cultivators, many of whom are among American and or medically needy, cannot move to other places that allow cultivation. They face either significant consequences for cultivating, or they have the option of giving up entirely on cannabis as a livelihood altogether. Meanwhile, those with capital and political access, and wherewithal, are moving to other municipalities within Siskiyou and other places in the state that allow cultivation and opening cannabis operations, leading to stratification within the cannabis industry itself. So, in terms of implications and takeaways, first is the area of rural development where prohibition was a shadow system of rural development, and legalization now requires a transition for affected communities and actors. Second, in the area of compliance regulations in the environment, the issue of stigma comes up. This stigma impacts policymaking and the implementation process, often by intensifying negative outlooks on cultivators and people formerly regarded as criminals. This, in turn, impacts people's perceptions of and willingness to comply. People have been excluded and fearful of regulation, requiring destigmatization and also trust building. In terms of trust, my research points to a need to understand current agricultural environmental practices and to incorporate this information into policy design and educational practices and approaches. On that note, education and outreach is needed. This is happening already, but it could go further, such as with active solicitation and involvement in policy formation process of cultivators or maybe peer-to-peer outreach support. My work shows that enforcement-based approaches have led to numerous unintended consequences in the past. Is it possible now to take a new approach, not only to compliant cannabis cultivators, but also to non-compliant cultivators? Is it possible to welcome, reach out and educate folks instead of just enforce? Finally, in the issue of consistency and clarity. Any person who farms knows that consistency and clarity is paramount for planning future farm activities. The survey we've conducted and my studies show that people are negatively impacted when regulations are unpredictable, unclear and unfair, even if only in perception. In the issue of support and services, there's a need for consistent treatment of cannabis as agriculture across jurisdictions, particularly in the importionment of rights and assistance from county and state agricultural programs like small and disadvantaged farmer programs, which leads, of course, to the topic of equity. There's many ways to speak about equity. I'll highlight two here. One is in the issue of local control. Each county is its own political environment as an empowered under Proposition 64 to set their own rules on cannabis cultivation and other market activities. This is a matter of equity we can think of. Oftentimes, local control leads to uneven and disparate effects on populations, especially to the degree that they're racially, culturally or economically marked as different. Another issue of equity might be around self-provisioning, growing one's own. This is a matter of equity for patients and poor people who can't afford stores. The state granted the capacity for home growing, but localities are taking it away in substance through local laws. Finally, in the area of agriculture and environment, could there be lessons to learn from cannabis? More generally. There's a chance here to avoid the pitfalls of industrial agriculture with legalization, to create rural agricultural systems that support small and disadvantaged farmers and support whole farming communities in both rural and urban areas. Finally, cannabis has some of the highest environmental standards. What if cannabis was looked at not as an environmentally deficient, but as a new standard of environmental care for agriculture more broadly? This is much needed in addressing the challenges of climate change and carbon emissions in traditional agriculture, not to mention the impacts on wildlife and natural resources more generally. What if cannabis could lead the way? Here I'm going to leave you with a few of the resources of what I've written over the past decade as well as a reference to my website, and I hope you found today's talk informative. Thank you for taking the time.