The Green Rush Is Over
The Green Rush is officially over and the era of legalization is upon us. There is hardly a corner of the country that doesn’t have some form of regulation for cannabis production and sales. The catch, of course, is that all the small in-state businesses that built this industry are now being whittled into cartels owned by the very same investors that profited from the last 80 years of prohibition. It doesn’t have to be this way.
While the primary goal of advocates has been to undo the original sin of prohibition based on lies, racism and greed, the “business” always coexisted with the movement to legalize. In the beginning, the business funded advocacy. In the end the advocacy laid the tracks for the cartels.
The term cartel is not hyperbolic, it is literal. While the boogeymen of capitalism have always been the monopolists, we hardly notice that the whole business world itself is designed as a cartel oligopoly, or just a small handful of big players dominating all markets and colluding to shut others out. Cartel capitalism masquerades as freedom while it fuels modern-day feudalistic oligarchies that control the entire world.
When the controlling structure is all you know or can imagine, as it was for your parents, their parents and thousands of years of generations before them, it is acceptable. We accept dangerous procedures and pharmaceuticals over traditional herbalism and wisdom because it’s familiar. We accept that some people deserve to be obscenely rich on the backs of the masses because it’s familiar.
Legally barred from this economy for 80 years, cannabis thrived below the rule of law on a truly free market comprised of a larger quantity of smaller farms that provided a lifeblood for dying rural communities across the West Coast. The free market fueled innovation and diversity.
Cartel cannabis feels that much more egregious coming from the perspective of the wonderful diversity of plants, people and economies the free market once supported. At its core, the movement to re-legalize cannabis was never about the plant itself as much as it was about allowing truth to destroy the profitable fallacy of “free market capitalism” that forces consolidation, and therefore power, into the hands of a few greedy thieves.
“Cannabis legalization” is not the end, it’s the beginning to the breakdown of a society trained to see a naked emperor and imagine he is wearing the finest clothes. The lie that limited, tightly regulated markets prevent criminal behavior is so pervasive because we collectively accept that laws are just and markets are fair. Cannabis is forcing us to see that the emperor wears no clothes — and he’s an ugly nude.
The Green Rush was, like the Gold Rush, one big clusterfuck. As a nation of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”, suddenly everyone saw their fortunes in those buds. While we thought we were fighting together for freedom, it turns out that some of our new Green Rush era allies were the same cartel capitalist forces that destroy economic and environmental sustainability worldwide.
Through advocacy organizations like Marijuana Policy Project, the red carpet to Big Canna domination was rolled out for the same investors who fuel the Koch Donor network with Big War, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Drugs, Big Alcohol and Big Ag.
Here we are now today in the late stages of the cannabis cartel formation on the eve of a national and international end to prohibition. Licenses have been awarded, one corrupt state at a time, and limited demand of the artificially contained in-state markets is forcing consolidation. The man with the most money to burn before the policy shift wins.
We have accepted this outcome in exchange for a sliver of our human rights back. There are those who accept fate and go quietly into the night — but the cannabis culture was not born of such cowardice. The movement to legalize “marijuana” has always been a broader movement to end to all war, even if it is good for business.
Eighty years of prohibition have shown how resilient the plant and the people who continued to use it, grow it and smuggle it are. At the edge of the Green Rush and the dawn of the legalization era we have a choice to make; either we use the cannabis culture to change capitalism, or we allow capitalism to crush the cannabis culture.
This article was originally published in the 2022 Cannabis Annual by Jay Kitchen of Uptown Growlab and will also appear in an upcoming book compiled from investigative work that covers all corners of the cannabis industry. Support is needed to get this book to print, please consider making a donation to the Cannabis Museum- Investigative Fund. The Cannabis Museum is a 501(c)3 non-profit and donations are tax-deductible.
