Love and Revolución

in economic activity during those two years. The state’s GDP increased by 11% from 2009 to 2012 and bettered the national average in 2010 and 2011. Michigan had risen from the lowest of the low to the 5th fastest improving state in 2011.

Domestic cannabis production was good for the economy. “By the end of 2009, cash flow began moving around,” said Roger Maufort, formerly of Jackson County Compassion Club, now with Seed Cellar. “Once that cash was spent, the tax dollars went back into the state and the economy. It helped pull the state out of the recession.”

Cannabis consumers weren’t buying more cannabis than they had budgeted for. They just changed who they gave the money to. When all the money stays local, all the benefit stays local, too. “I recall vividly in 2010 trying to get into restaurants, and they were all full,” said Ryan Basore of Redemption Cannabis. “People paying cash.”

In 2010 Basore was running Capital City Caregivers, a Michigan Avenue unregulated cannabis retailer in the state capital of Lansing. Derelict buildings grew like weeds along the Avenue, a sign of the harsh decade-long recession. Joblessness and crime lingered like an untreatable illness. “People started growing out of necessity, trying to survive,” Basore said, with emotion in his voice. “It wasn’t play time, it wasn’t fun. If their gardens failed, they lost their house.” He paused.

“People grew cannabis to pay down their bills, pay their mortgage, keep the lights on. It saved a lot of people I know.”

Caregivers grew more cannabis than their patients needed, and the unregulated cannabis retail industry was there to redistribute the overages. In Ypsilanti, which borders on liberal Ann Arbor, the 3rd Coast dispensary was founded in 2009 by Darrell Stavros, Jamie Lowell, and Anthony Freed. “People brought in cannabis for others to use; it created a really functional system,” Lowell, now the social equity director for The Botanical Company, recalled. “They were able to get really good medicine to patients who did not have caregivers. The operators were caregivers, and the budtenders were caregivers. It was very functional and productive.”

Unregulated medical cannabis retailers were popular. “From 2010-11, in Lansing specifically, we jumped up to 35-40 dispensaries,” Basore remembered. The stretch of Michigan Avenue running from the expressway, past Basore’s shop, and arriving at the Capitol Building became known as the Green Mile. Those weedy derelict buildings became painted and restored weed buildings. “I had the first dispensary on the Green Mile and watched 12 others pop up over the next two years,” Basore chuckled.

The economic benefit of this domestic cannabis surge is difficult to chart in large part because it affects nearly every aspect of commerce. “The sign companies had their best year,” observed Basore, “not to mention the electricians, the HVAC, everyone was making money. So many people in Lansing were benefitting from the caregiver grows.”

“We have a Coney Island restaurant a half-block away from 3rd Coast,” Lowell recalled. “We were popular, and sometimes we had parking issues. They allowed our overflow into their parking lot; they enjoyed the extra business we brought to the restaurant, the great people coming in from all different places.” The restaurant owners were featured in a television news story about the 3rd Coast. “It was bringing more attention to their store and others. The news used the restaurant, the gas station, the other retailers in the area. All happy to have us there.”

In January of 2011, the cannabis-hating former Appellate Judge became the state’s Attorney General. Drug warriors across the state followed the lead of that unhappy sheriff by initiating a crackdown on caregivers, patients, and retail stores serving the medical market.

“Once Schuette was elected, I started getting raided,” Basore said. Just days after Schuette took office, a raid was initiated on Big Daddy’s in Oak Park, one of the early industry leaders, which drew national attention. “He orchestrated the attacks through local county prosecutors and sheriffs, wherever he could find support.”

Although most caregivers were undaunted, others closed up their home gardens and returned to making purchases from those old import-market connections. So did those patients who used the shuttered dispensaries The Schuette effect did not bring about a reduction in cannabis consumption. It revitalized the import market at the expense of the caregiver’s domestic cannabis market in Michigan. That spiking GDP growth from 2011 took a turn for the worse in 2012, dropping from 5th to 18th fastest GDP growth in the nation.

The state’s economic growth was slowed but not stopped- at least, the cannabis portion of it. Cannabis consumer outrage, and a rise in the number of quasi-legal cannabis retailers selling domestic-market cannabis, brought the industry out of the Schuette slowdown. The Attorney General received vicious pushback over his efforts to squash the unregulated retail stores and to curtail the cultivation rights of the sick and injured. Schuette abandoned his public campaign against cannabis after the first two years of his eight-year tenure.

“It’s cliche, but we didn’t have the resources or the allies in government that the AG had, but we had the truth on our side,” Jamie Lowell proclaimed. “That was always obvious and minimized a lot of what Schuette was doing.”

“He bet his whole political career on ending marijuana,” Basore explained, “but these are your neighbors, the people you work with or go to church with. You know them as good people. To see them raided and have guns put to their head forever changed a lot of Michigan folks.”

Videos of elderly people being led off in handcuffs by cops enraged the citizenry. Basore’s home and cultivation setup was raided by police and National Guard helicopters in a military-style assault which eventually landed him in federal prison for two years. Each episode of overreach stained not just Schuette but also those responsible for carrying out his cannabis crackdown. The memories are still very real to those who were involved, including Basore and his family. “Michigan law enforcement has a lot of damage to make up for because of those multi-jurisdictional SWAT teams.”

Lawmakers will point to changes in tax law or incentive programs as the catalyst for the beginning of the boom. The cannabis industry’s growth didn’t rely on incentives, tax

breaks, or even permission. Indoor growing supply stores popped up everywhere, as did quasi-legal cannabis retailers supplying caregiver-grown medicine to registered patients. Those cannabis retailers were just mom-and-pop operations, rented storefronts employing local people, which kept any profit dollars circulating in the local economy. There were 500 pirate retail operations in Michigan in 2015-2016, their primary supply coming from 45,000 registered caregivers. Each caregiver is able to cultivate a maximum of 60 plants on behalf of five patients- and have their own personal grow of 12 plants, too, if the caregiver is also a patient.

More than 150,000 of Michigan’s current registered patients have not designated a caregiver; those patients may or may not be cultivating for themselves. It is most difficult to chart the impact their cultivation of cannabis has on the economy. Growing cannabis is expensive, but the savings is greater than the expense. These monetary savings are reflected in larger personal or family budgets. Some patients who grow their own medicine buy better groceries or purchase better health insurance with the money they save. Others may vacation. It’s obvious the state economy benefits from the personal cultivation of cannabis, even if we cannot specify the exact ways in which home cultivation is helping.

Every gram of cannabis produced by caregivers in Michigan is a gram of cannabis not imported from Mexico or Colorado. Even though the same amount of money was being spent on transactions by consumers, the 2009-2016 shift from being a primarily import-driven cannabis industry to a primarily selfsufficient cannabis supply chain had a positive economic effect on communities and Michigan itself. It’s almost impossible to measure that success- caregivers were not required to report their transactions, and neither were patients- but we do have some information with which to make educated guesses.

Michigan’s 2020 market for cannabis was $3.2 billion, a number contained within a public relations release by the Anderson Economic Group. They estimate that 30%, or $930 million dollars, is generated by home cultivation of cannabis by caregivers and patients registered with the state. State-legal caregivers in Michigan had permission to grow more than 1 million cannabis plants in 2019, according to TheSocialRevolution.org. If 75% of the sale price of cannabis previously went to out-of-state cannabis cultivation and transfer sources, and those dollars are now staying home, the positive effect of caregiver-grown cannabis on the state’s economy is undeniable.

Over the evolution of the state’s medical-marijuana program the caregiver economy improved Michigan in predictable ways: more money in pockets means more food and retail sales, fewer people looking for jobs, fewer people in the traditional workforce. The Michigan Senate Fiscal Agency published economic indicators in June 2016, which showed a shrinking labor force in the state, despite an expanded labor force nationally. The unemployment numbers were down, too, and personal consumption spending was up 2.8% in a single month. Retail and foodservice sales were up nearly 3% over the previous year, despite private domestic investment indicators dropping at a rate of 1.7% per month.

On September 14, 2016, the Michigan legislature passed the Medical Marihuana Facilities Licensing Act (MMFLA) and created a new, regulated cannabis distribution program. The governor signed it into law one week later. That signaled the beginning of the end for those quasi-legal retail entities serving patients. Communities that recognized the need for patients to have access to medicine began shedding the unlicensed stores in favor of the soon-to-be-released MMFLA state-legal shops, even though those shops would not receive licensure for a year or more later. Just as the 2008 Medical Marihuana Act was a starter’s pistol for medical cannabis registrations, the MMFLA was a clear signal to law enforcement and always-skeptical municipal leaders to begin purging their cities of unlicensed cannabis businesses.

The closure of easy access, caregiver-supplied shops meant medical marijuana patients were forced to return to the easy access, import-based cannabis sources they were already familiar with. The caregiver supply chain had dominated the cannabis space in Michigan for six years, but that boost faded as a regulated market replaced the unregulated one. Although Michigan residency was a requirement for medical cannabis business approval from the state, too many of the dollars spent by medical marijuana patients in licensed retailers went out of state to pay for business loans, as profit to corporate ownership, and to satisfy shareholders in other states. The new licensees may have been Michigan residents, but they didn’t dump all their money back into the community the way caregivers had.

The new license types authorized industrial cannabis production, but it was several years before the regulated market was sufficient to satisfy the consumer’s thirst for cannabis. Initially, the state agency overseeing the medical business program allowed caregivers to sell their excess cannabis to the regulated shops. Caregivers contributed to the success of the marketplace, which replaced them as the retailer of choice. The caregiver-driven economic boom slowly bled into the regulated-market economy. A few of the unlicensed shops stayed open, and some of them were able to transition into the new, regulated market.

Today there are still nearly 30,000 registered caregivers in Michigan servicing 72,000 patients, per the City Pulse, but they are prevented from selling their cannabis at retail. Their work established the cannabis retail space in Michigan; they laid the foundations for the success of the regulated market, and they established a standard for retailer’s compassionate treatment of sick people. Although their role has changed, caregivers are still a vibrant and essential part of Michigan’s medical marijuana program- and the state’s economic recovery.

WORDS RICK THOMPSON PHOTOS PUBLIC DOMAIN

Intro:

Love and Revolución is a 3 part tale of the romance of the legendary Pancho Villa “Centaur of the North” (the Mexican Revolutions Fire and Eagle’s Heart) and his obsession with the famous field Marshall “Warrior Soldier” Marijuana, the commander of the battalion of sharpshooter women “Las Adelitas” and the curandera/ healer of General Villa himself.

The story is loosely based on actual historical events. The characters have been modified, and marijuana is a composite of some of the women soldiers ( Adelitas and Valentinas ) in the Mexican Revolution.

Her spirit lives today ( 110 years after the Mexican Revolution ) in the Social Justice movement against the federal prohibition (Drug War) of marijuana and her medicinal properties. She brings hope and light to a world in crisis and uncertainty, desperately in need of healing and love. Enter a world in upheaval, a timeless tale of Love and Revolution. Aah YaYaYa-Aho!

Prologue:

For Centuries Mexico has been key in the world’s spread of marijuana use and cannabis culture. Through Mexico, the plant found its way to the United States Jazz players, Beatnicks, and Hippies.

The legacy of the 500-year Moorish occupation of Spain was critical in Mexico’s rise as a global cannabis center. The Moors brought hashish and the tradition of Kif smoking to Spain. Marijuana has entered the New World on Spanish galleons.

It was acculturated into Indigenous tribes and the upper class in Mexico over the centuries. The iconic anthem of the Mexican Revolution, “La Cucaracha,” is about Pancho Villa’s rebel army getting high just before a battle.

Numerous accounts say that “marijuana” came into use in the early 20th century because anti-cannabis forces wanted to underscore the drugs “Mexican-ness.” It was meant to play off of anti-immigrant sentiments.

Marijuana was nationally outlawed in the U.S. by the 1930’s, and demonizing Mexican immigrants became a decisive tactic