Michigan’s Caregivers Helped The State Rise From Recession

Cannativa

THE STORY OF A PIONEERING PROJECT

WORDS G. ELIZABETH MUNGUÍA/ TRANSLATION PEDRUSKI 2021 PHOTOS CANNATIVA

“Cannativa is now an organization that investigates and promotes the culture of medicinal and conscious use of plants like cannabis.”

After several years studying cannabis production in organic farms in Northern California, Pedro Nicoletti Motta and Genlizzie Garibay returned to Mexico City and found medical users in desperate need of information and guidance. They set up an informative web page and saw the demand for education growing. They decided to focus on teaching and guiding users to produce, extract, prepare and administer their own medicine in a conscious, prepared, and correctly dosed way.

As they began their activities in Mexico, they found themselves in a quasi-desert. There were very few people working on the question who were actually users, with little information and a stereotypical view of cannabis. So in 2015, they founded Cannativa in semi-clandestinity under the names of Polita Pepper and Nico Malaz Artes, aliases they now use on social media. At that time, there was no social media presence, and workshops were only by word of mouth. These started in the Tepepan Xochimilco neighborhood of Mexico City, moved around the city, and then, as word spread, all over Mexico. During the first years, the participants were mainly older women, mothers, and grandmothers needing to make the medicine their young needed, while at the same time, they began to train the first doctors and therapists who would go on to become pioneers in the clinical use of cannabis in the country.

By 2018, thanks to collective activism that challenged and changed the laws, Mexico was opening up to cannabis, and the context had changed enough to be able to register as a NonProfit Civil Association aimed at reducing the risks associated with cannabis use, as well as other plants and psychedelics.

Cannativa is now an organization that investigates and promotes the culture of medicinal and conscious use of plants like cannabis. It maintains a wide-reaching and accessible web and social networks, where a multidisciplinary group of specialists shares information in a diversity of formats aimed at a wide range of audiences. We teach know-how as a tool for cultivating well-being and for positive social and environmental transformation, running workshops and courses, giving talks, and developing teaching material in audiovisual and graphical formats. Knowledge is power, and Cannative aims to empower users, reduce social and personal risk, and encourage a critical and intersectional viewpoint, unaffected by fear and marketing.

As a direct consequence of this vision, and to share knowledge and experience, Cannative works with indigenous cannabis cultivating communities in Mexico and Colombia. In 2016 they released the documentary short “What are we going to do?”, a narrative from the viewpoint of Wilmer Conda, a member of the indigenous Nasa people of Colombia.

Peasant communities in Latin America have cultivated cannabis traditionally for centuries and have suffered many of the worst consequences of the war on drugs. How will they be taken into account as cannabis is slowly regimented and normalized? In the quest for responses to this complex question, the association collaborates with indigenous and peasant families in Michoacán, Oaxaca, and Guerrero in Mexico, where they also investigate the endemic cannabis genetics.

In 2018 Polita Pepper, one of the founders of the Latin America Network of Women in Cannabis (Red Latinoamericana de Mujeres Cannábicas), published the first article on cannabis and feminism in Vice (“Salió Macho” - “It came out male”), which provoked intense online debate and opened up the debate on sexism in the cannabis scene in Latin America. In 2020 they released a video critical of transphobia called “Jardín de Hembras” (“Garden of Females”), where they visibilize through interspecies dialogue the necessity of including trans and non-binary people in the world of cannabis.

Cannative’s pioneering and successful model has influenced other emerging organizations and become a reference for the field, often featuring in Mexican and international media like AlJazeera and Vice, and with thousands of followers in social media. It has trained over 5000 people online and physically, including doctors, health professionals, patients, engineers, farmers, and users from México, Colombia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Perú, Ecuador, and Uruguay.

Since 2016 they have been regularly invited as judges and speakers at cannabis events like ExpoMedWeed, ExpoCannabis Bogotá, Copa Cannabica México, Pot In Rio in Brazil, or the Farallones Cannabis Cup in Cali, Colombia, and have extended their influence from Mexico to all of Latin America. Indeed they are currently organizing the first Latin American Cannabis Cup in Costa Rica, slated to take place at the end of 2021. Stay tuned!

Michigan’s Caregivers

HELPED THE STATE RISE FROM RECESSION

WORDS RICK THOMPSON PHOTOS RICK THOMPSON/MICHAEL MCSHANE

The story is as old as smuggling itself. Cannabis is grown and processed somewhere else; it is brought to Michigan, where a guy receives it in bulk and breaks it into smaller batches; he hands some of those to another guy, who may break it down into smaller packages before selling it to consumers. The first Michigan guy takes a cut, the second Michigan guy takes a cut, but the bulk of the money being transferred flows out of the state, back to where the cannabis was grown.

That was Michigan’s cannabis industry before medical marijuana. Everything changed in 2009. In 2008 the voters in Michigan passed the Medical Marihuana Act, and it authorized legal home cultivation of cannabis by sick people or a person they designate to grow on their behalf. When the program came online the following year, people quickly registered as patients or caregivers and began their own gardens. These new gardeners spent their savings at the local hydro store, and with the utility company, and at the grocery store.

To be sure, cannabis was being grown in Michigan prior to 2008. Those growers were already contributing their illegally-gained dollars into the local economies of the places where they cultivated by paying their bills and living their lives. In past years, according to government claims, the amount of Michigan-produced cannabis was small in volume compared to the amount being imported to the state from California, Canada, and elsewhere. The medical cannabis law immediately empowered an entirely new group of growers, people who were black market cannabis purchasers who then transitioned into home cultivation.

According to the Anderson Economic Group, caregivers and home cultivation of cannabis accounted for 30% of Michigan’s $3.2 billion cannabis market in 2020. That’s $930,000,000 every year that stays in-state and supports the domestic economy. The roots of Michigan’s cannabis home cultivation economic boom can be traced to April of 2009.

Arguably the Rust Belt state hardest hit by recession and manufacturing drain, Michigan has been in decline for some time. The auto industry, once the creator of the Middle Class, is just a shell of its former self in the state. The chemical giants have moved operations to other places, family-based agriculture is on the decline, and the tech surge was more of a Western states thing than it was a Midwestern states thing.

Michigan experienced a “prolonged state downturn that began in 2001 and continued through the 2008-09 recession,” wrote the Citizen’s Research Council of Michigan in 2013. The national economic crisis hit Michigan harder than others “as the state economy did not fully recover from the earlier and less severe 2001 recession,” the Council noted.

The state’s downfall can be framed by looking at the two national recessions, one in 2001 and another lasting from December 2007-June 2009. Although the US ended the first in 2001, Michigan’s situation never bettered, and the Great Lakes State entered a not-so-great single-state recession in 2002. Job losses plagued the state until the employment market stabilized in early 2007, according to the Council, just in time for the December 2007 start of the second national recession.

How bad was it? It is referred to as Michigan’s Lost Decade, per Crain’s Detroit Business. Between 2000 and 2009, Michigan was dead last in the nation in employment, population growth, and per capita gross domestic product. The state lost 800,000 jobs. “February 2010 marked the end of a 47-month streak in which Michigan had the highest unemployment rate in the country,” the Council detailed.

The damage was real; people went hungry; per capita, personal income fell from 19th to 41st in the nation. Most recessions hit the already-poor the hardest, but this prolonged period of financial pain brought down the wealthy, too.

The weary and beleaguered citizens of Michigan looked to the medical marijuana ballot proposal with hope and anticipation. In November of 2008, they approved the ballot proposal by a 63% margin, a landslide by any measure. This overpowering win was particularly stinging to those who had called for the proposal’s defeat, including the sheriff of influential Oakland County and an Appellate Court judge named Bill Schuette.

The language required the state to begin offering medical marijuana program applications by April of 2009. When the patient form was released to the public, it was like a starter’s pistol had fired. Thousands rushed to physicians and then to the mailbox. Patient and caregiver applications came in faster than the state’s ability to issue medical marijuana registry identification cards, but nobody cared. The ballot proposal language gave the state thirty days in which to either decline the form or issue an approval. Submitting their patient paperwork was the act that started the timer.

When the national recession ended in June 2009, the Michigan medical marijuana program was just two months old, and thousands of patients and caregivers were growing cannabis or planning their gardens in Michigan. Although the economic benefit brought on by home cultivation of cannabis is difficult to trace, it began in mid-2009, grew furiously for the next two years, then met an unexpected speed bump on the highway of success, a speed bump named Schuette.

During those two years, cannabis sales made by registered cannabis patients transitioned from the pre-medical program model of purchasing from importers to buying from in-state medical marijuana cultivation sources. Michigan saw a spike