What has California’s marijuana legalization meant for those growing the plant? Are their lives better or worse under the new laws?  

Jaunary 2019 marked the one-year anniversary of the legalization of recreational cannabis use in California, and the launch of the Cannabis Research Center at UC Berkeley. Sarah Edwards (MPP ‘20) sat down with Michael Polson, researcher and anthropologist, to discuss the impact of legalization on the growers and on the rural communities whose economies often center on cannabis cultivation. Tune in to unpack the equity concerns of the new process, the role of stigma in media narratives, and the personal implications of these changes.  

Interested in learning more? Check out:  

• UC Berkeley's Cannabis Research Center  
• Michael Polson’s publications—“From Outlaw to Citizen: Police Power, Property, and the Territorial Politics of Medical Marijuana in California’s Exurbs“ is a very accessible starting point   
• California’s cannabis laws and regulations 

Transcript: 

Michael Polson [00:00:00] I mean these are people that have really been shut out by criminal sanction of that public process for decades. And so to be able to have the kinds of social capital and access to the discourses and social relationships that you need to leverage in order to navigate this transition process, that's leaving a lot of people behind.

Sarah Edwards [00:00:17] On January 1st, California entered its second year of legalized recreational cannabis. There's a lot that we could talk about, but today let's focus on the growers. The process of marijuana legalization in this state has not been short or easy, but there certainly has been many opportunities along the way for some interesting lessons. We'll be focusing on the perspective of the cannabis grower and the communities that they're growing in. Cannabis. Marijuana. Pot. Let's talk weed policy.

What is legalization meant for the grower? What is it doing it to the communities where growing weed is a central part of their economy? How do we go about learning these things when this work has historically been done in the shadows? I'm Sarah Edwards and this is Talk Policy to Me.

It's an interesting time to be thinking about the policy around cannabis legalization. UC Berkeley recently opened a new center to study the intersection of policy changes, personal impacts and environmental implications around the legalization of cannabis. I spoke with Michael Polson from the Cannabis Research Center. I wanted to actually start by I was on Twitter and was looking at some of the tweet responses so I wanted to read a few of those so we could talk about them together.

Michael [00:02:04] I think one got tweet of the week. Is that right?

Sarah [00:02:07] I think I think so. There's one that says Barkley has been doing cannabis research since the 60's. Man, all they need to do is walk around town. Wouldn't it be just as easy to ask anyone on the street? So help us understand—well, obviously that's not what the Cannabis Research Center is doing—sort of what's happening?

Michael [00:02:31] Well it is interesting, you know, there is a lack of expert knowledge around this. And so I know that comment was tongue-in-cheek about "ask anyone on the street," but really that is where a lot of the knowledge actually lies at this point. It hasn't been formalized in any systematic way, and this Cannabis Research Center came about as a collaboration among natural scientists and social scientists to really begin to grapple with a realm of cannabis that really been off limits because of federal prohibition. And a lot of the policies surrounding that derivative lead down to the state and local levels where you have the emergence of for instance like the Center for Medical Cannabis Research out of San Diego by a California proposition in 1999. You have a couple other centers arising mostly centered around the issue of access and consumption, but little research has been systematically done around issues of production. And so, what a number of us were interested in was not only matters of cultivation but their effects on the environment and sensitive ecologies particularly of Northern California, in a lot of the areas where cannabis has historically been grown, but also the livelihoods that people derive from cannabis as well as cannabis producing communities that depend on that kind of income collectively.

Sarah [00:03:46] Definitely you know we're here at the policy school. And I think there's a lot of folks that are interested in rural poverty and how the rural poor are addressing their own needs and I think cannabis is a really essential component of that. So, with that, you mentioned a few different research areas within the center. What is your specific focus?

Michael [00:04:10] I've focused on rural and exurban Northern California and it's kind of a two-fold interest I have. One is, how is cannabis cultivation and the communities that have been formed around that...how are they having to transform and understand themselves and navigate? How are they navigating this transition? So, if you have the transformation of cultivators and cultivation on one side you also have the transformation of the political economies of which they're apart, as cultivation becomes a public, political and formerly economic entity that's able to actually advocate for itself in on its own terms in a way that, really, the prohibition paradigm didn't allow for.

Sarah [00:04:50] I'm from the rural Sierra Nevadas, growing up there I have a certain type of picture of what a grower looks like. And I imagine, in a lot of ways, that's not true for everyone. How did you get at understanding who these growers were, particularly when you were entering into this space where it wasn't legal and not everyone might be open about what they're doing?

Michael [00:05:11] You know, I did have some experience having lived in Sonoma County and having friends who were in the industry and understanding some of the mechanics of how it worked and what kinds of questions you can ask and what kinds of questions you don't know. But in some of these areas, really, it's a matter of scratching the surface. Everybody knows somebody which I think speaks to a huge impact that these kinds of policy transformations can have on rural communities. Everyone knows somebody who is involved in it and some kind of way whether it's trimming or having their own garden or maybe taking a couple pounds across country every now and then, some kind of way having livelihoods wrapped up in it.

Sarah [00:05:53] I grew up in the Sierra Nevadas, right where Pastor County and Nevada County meet and I was always told that that area was the third highest producer of marijuana in the state. As a kid I didn't really get it. But as I got older, the ways in which the industry touched the lives of a lot of people that I knew, gradually became clear. Now, we're a bunch of kids out in the middle of nowhere and, somehow, we never seemed to have trouble getting weed if anyone wanted it and I didn't really think twice about it. But as I got older, I realized this easy access was actually because someone intimately connected to the people that I went to school with. Maybe one of their siblings or a parent was intimately involved in the system. Maybe they were growing. Maybe they were distributing. Maybe involved in some other way. So how do you start to tease out where these connections are when it's so deeply entwined in a community?

Michael [00:06:59] So the initial way I made entry was to follow the policy processes. I sat at a lot of board of supervisors’ meetings and a lot of planning commission meetings and went to some advocacy meetings of different cultivators and medical marijuana advocates. And really, once you start talking to people then doors begin to open. Now, getting the door open versus really beginning to build the kinds of trust and intimacy are necessary not only gains access but also gains the full story, so that people to stop perceiving me as a "journalist" and understand that I'm not after... I wasn't after a story, per say, I was after how people make sense of their world around them. And so, once people began to accustom themselves to the difference in those two things those two ambitions, they began to see that hopefully I think I did my job right was to begin to open up and more trusting ways. But then it took a lot of time, I was doing fieldwork for almost a little over a year and a half. The first round and I did it a month the year prior and a couple months the year after and have come back almost annually every year since and have since maintained some connections with people back at Berkeley.

Sarah [00:08:12] That sounds like a lot to be embedded in that in that way. Who are the growers? Who were they when you first started your research? Who are they now?

Michael [00:08:22] Well, I mean there's a long history right. And really, you have the rise of a domestic cultivation sector in the late 60s and early 1970s. And so a lot of that was mythicly and I think actually wrapped up in the Back to the Land movement where a lot of countercultural  "dropouts" moved up into pretty rural areas with utopian ideas and had to figure out a way to live outside of the "system". You know, beyond the reach of the man, as it were. Marijuana provided one way to do that.

Sarah [00:08:57] Is that still the case now or is it different?

Michael [00:09:01] There was a large entry of people, I'd say, in the late 2000s when prices really began to destabilize and where everyone's going for broke because people are anticipating that. Especially after the election of Obama, some kind of policy changes from the Department of Justice went down, and also just the economic crisis is throwing a lot of people into an interest in how to make money. You've had a real growth of who was producing at that point and that was in all kinds of directions. People were coming from all corners of the country I think, particularly from people who were struggling economically. I met some out-of-work folks from Florida, from Kentucky, from Wyoming, from South Dakota, from Texas. I mean from all over, you really name it from Bulgaria from Hawaii, from all corners of the world really. So that was happening and I think as people anticipated legalization and now you have a new layer on top of all that, which is the entry of finance capital from Canada after they've legalized and the national level they're making some real splashes in some counties by investing multiple millions of dollars in new facilities. And you also just generally have institutional capital I think beginning to gain some security or gain some lasting stability I think in this economy. So that is, I think, the newest player this kind of institutional face quasi-institutional anyhow.

Sarah [00:10:28] Can we dive a little bit deeper into that? So obviously, during part of this time, these individuals were operating outside of the legal system. Is there something about them that makes this  different, that they're not in the legal system? Are "criminals" or are they just like everyone else trying to make a living in a way that's accessible to them?

Michael [00:10:56] If you look historically at who's been involved you know there's very easy characterizations you can make about criminals, but it gets a lot more complex when you begin to ask what people's motivations are, how they ended up in a place where they're involved in criminal activity, and I met a lot of people that came from poverty that had been systematically shut out of formal economies whether because of many failed jobs or perhaps a felony conviction where they don't have the same access to employment as other people or perhaps they live on a tribal reservation and have intersecting issues that kind of come up with that. So there's a lot of ways that people are differently vulnerable at this moment.

Sarah [00:11:36] So it kind of sounds like growers have tended to be historically marginalized people, for one way or another. Is that accurate? Not accurate?

Michael [00:11:43] There are all kinds of vulnerabilities and then there's all kinds of choices people make too. You know we are under a kind of legal system where it oftentimes can make those aspects disappear about people's social context and really just looks at the choices that they make and reduces people to those choices. So whether or not you traffic in, grow, cultivate or have a conspiracy to distribute, these are the actions that are associated with cannabis rather than "why do why are people in those kinds of situations?" And I think that's more of a social and collective issue that isn't really given space in our legal system.

Sarah [00:12:22] Yes. I would talk about the flaws, the flattening and the depersonalization of our legal system all day long. But zooming in a little bit, onto the legal aspects of cannabis...2019: legal to grow, legal to distribute, legal to consume. In a hypothetical world where policy changes always go as planned, legalization would make the growers, especially those more vulnerable groups that we touched on, it would make them more secure. In a non-hypothetical real world that we live in, is that actually how it's played out? Is legalization actually making it better for growers or is it making it worse?

Michael [00:13:15] The answer to a question I really think lies in who you're asking. At a very basic level, I think everyone's probably happy to not be criminalized, to not face criminal sanctions for  growing cannabis. I think for a lot of people it really worked to have a kind of licit system where it wasn't regulated, it wasn't fully legal. So you're still benefiting from prohibition in some ways, but didn't quite have to deal with. You got the price kind of subsidies that prohibition brought but you didn't get all the kinds of regulations that that legalization would bring. So that kind of transitional phase that we've been in for the last twenty five years from 1996 until the present day, I think, really worked for a lot of folks riding that line. I think you know I think this is a really rough transition period. And the question I'm interested in is how do concerns about equity and parity, in terms of who has historically bore the load of being criminalized by prohibition policies? What kinds of advantages and disadvantages has that put them at? What is their ability to navigate in kind of formal policy circles and to advocate, for instance, for their policies that they would like to see happen, to even have access to policymakers or decision makers? I mean, these are people that have really been shut out by criminal sanction of that public process for decades. And so to be able to have the kinds of social capital and access to the discourses and social relationships that you need to leverage in order to navigate this transition process, that's leaving a lot of people behind.

Sarah [00:14:51] That's really disappointing, but also not outside the norm, right? The people who have been making something work aren't inherently the same people who have the systems, knowledge or resources to be able to navigate a formal process when it's created. Unusually, legal systems like this feel like they've historically been built for the people who do have that knowledge though. Even when that's not necessarily the people who's pushed the industry forward. It's that the case here?

Michael [00:15:29] The thing is, those people have also been involved in building the knowledge, the human knowledge, the social relationships and the legitimacy that cannabis currently has. Their historical labor, in a sense, whether it's in overt activism or in covert growing activities, is now being capitalized on by people who are able to enter the industry just by virtue of being able to navigate policy regulatory processes and having access to capital, to land, into the right social relationships.

Sarah [00:16:01] Right. I imagine there's something about who has access to even just the knowledge about how to go about the legalization process.

Michael [00:16:07] Precisely, and that's some of what we're beginning to study with Cannabis Research Center. In fact, just this year we're looking at barriers to compliance for environmental regulation in something like you're mentioning. Access to information is very basic, right? And right now, a lot of the traditional agricultural service providers that give assistance to farmers across the state don't have the same kinds of flexibility, capacity, capability, and permission, really, to be able to talk to cannabis farmers about good production techniques, for instance, or what the regulation actually says.

Sarah [00:16:46] Which is crazy. There is this deep set of resources for farmers to be able to get advice, to learn how to navigate processes, to talk to an expert and maybe see what it would take to be permitted organic and whether or not that's worth the time and the money and... asking all of those questions doesn't hurt farmer, right? So thinking about how different that process is for growers, and, when we're thinking about, in this case maybe let's think about a grower that maybe does have the capital and has the resources and enough of the knowledge to try to work towards permitting. I'm imagining it must be so stressful to try to be doing your best, to do everything right and not even know what right looks like. To think that your potential livelihood hinges on getting that approval, and thats an approval that's not totally clear what that takes. How are growers handling that?

Michael [00:17:49] You know I saw one guy who was waiting for another inspection from a state agency and just was a wreck because he didn't know what to expect. He was trying to take apart all the rules and regulations with his lawyers, he hired a geologist, he hired a hydrologist in order to understand what his property was to anticipate anything that was coming but. But that's because I think at outset he's being viewed as criminal-like, maybe not an actual criminal but untrustworthy and someone who needed to be made sure they're following the permit the rules down to the T. Whereas, I think the agricultural approach, you know, we're here to work with you cooperatively to help you understand what the rules are to help you understand how to cultivate in ways that are sustainable, and are best for the sustainability for even just your plot of land. You know, that kind of information is really tough for folks to come by.

Sarah [00:18:41] So it's pretty clear that access, access to information, access to official processes, access to capital is so central to an individual's success. Is there a way the policy can make these systems better? Or is policy only going to reinforce pre-existing inequities?

Ad [00:19:11] Looking for a good read? Choose Children of the Dream by Goldman professor Rucker Johnson. In the book, Rucker shows that school integration in the 1970s and 80s was really successful and not just for people of color, but for all kids. It's a timely read arguing that integrated well-funded schools are our best tool for social mobility. You can find Children of the Dream now at your local bookstore or online.

Sarah [00:19:47] Welcome back. We're speaking with Michael Polson from the Cannabis Research Center about his research in cannabis cultivation communities. So, we're about to look to the role of policy in improving equity or, if the case may be, in failing to do so for the growers. For context, California has legalized recreational weed use, but the individual counties currently make their own systems for permitting—which plays a huge role when we're thinking about what makes something accessible to a grower or what makes it challenging to them? So before the break, we just spoke about how the individuals involved in the historic labor that has paved the way for today's cannabis industry think about the people who might have developed new strains or developed best practices around how to grow and get these plants to produce to their fullest capacities. Those individuals, in a lot of ways, are not the same people who have access to capital and the knowledge to navigate these legal systems and processes. That makes me really uncomfortable. Couldn't we say that the people who are coming in and able to access the legal system are exploiting the previous work of these other individual?

Michael [00:21:13] Whether it's exploitative...I mean we could have a long conversation about that, I think. But yeah, I think the short-and-long of it is that, you know, this industrial consolidation process is going to go the same way that most agriculture...or, It seems to be going the way that most agricultural systems have gone, which is towards industrial consolidation and the elimination of smallholder agriculturalists from from the system.

Sarah [00:21:38] But does it have to go this way? In a certain sense, cannabis legalization is this really interesting moment for a do-over; a do-over of agricultural consolidation a do over of the whitewashing of the farming industry and maybe a chance to consider the historic efforts of those vulnerable communities that we touched on earlier, and consider how to make sure that they're actually brought into the fold. So talk me through how the regulation process works.

Michael [00:22:13] There was an effort, I think in some counties... I mean, it's worthwhile to remember, and don't quote me on these exact numbers, only 13 of California's 50  counties have actually made an allowance for cultivation to occur—I think specifically for outdoor, but that might be for the cultivation period—and are issuing permits and allowing that process to go through. So it's very uneven across the state.

Sarah [00:22:38] So at the time in the initial interview in February, I believe that Michael was accurate with this number. But as of April 12th there are 17 counties that allow for the permitting of commercial cultivation, specifically for recreational use, and 15 of these allow for outdoor commercial cultivation. And there are some counties allow for cultivation for medical use only, some allow for distribution but not for cultivation...Michael's right, it's very uneven and somewhat unclear across the state.

Michael [00:23:11] But of the counties that have allowed it, you know, some of those allowed a grandfather process where people who had been growing for such a long period time and could prove it through satellite imagery or other kinds of ways then could get grandfathered in and can be allowed to continue on their properties like  how they have been doing.

Sarah [00:23:33] Okay. So, that sounds like a really great way to support people who want to enter the process and have been involved in this for a long time. Problem solved?

Michael [00:23:43] Lot of people didn't enter into that process for one reason or another. I know Mendocino may have just closed that grandfathering clause and I think a fair amount of people entered in when they saw that regulation was really there to stay, and there are some benefits to coming into regulation. Whereas, Humboldt closed it pretty quickly and not a lot of people got into that grandfather clause process. So Humboldt now has taken some initiative to promote some degree of equity,  or at least a chance for people to navigate this process who can't grow now.

Sarah [00:24:16] Why can't they grow? What's the challenge in being able to do so.? Is it just the permitting? Could they like grow on the same land and just go through the permit process and everything would be fine or is there something else?

Michael [00:24:30] Land zoned for timber use you're not allowed to grow on in Humboldt County, which is historically where a lot of people have grown because those are the hills and they're more secluded spots that are more protected from detection. So a lot of those people didn't pass through the grandfathering process and now are being faced with either just stopping altogether, facing fines of sometimes ten thousand dollars a day where that can come up to be... I know some people are now facing bills of nine hundred thousand dollar leans on their property.

Sarah [00:25:05] I want to take a minute here to say that number again, nine-hundred thousand dollars. We're talking about someone who might have been operating exactly the same as their neighbor, maybe both of them are working outside the law previously but this one person didn't make it into the narrow window they had in order to be legally grandfathered in. What does that mean for this person? Would they lose their land? Would they lose their livelihood?

Michael [00:25:32] I'm not sure if that enters into foreclosure processes at that point in time or a civil seizure process, but I think I guess we'll see what happens. But Humboldt has made some efforts through this program, I think, called the Retire Remediate and Relocate program which essentially means get rid of your grow, remediate all the properties, all the effects that that had on land, and then you will be given a permit to grow on another parcel of land somewhere. The problem is, is where?  And so, a lot of the cultivation is now zoned for prime agricultural land which is somewhat  few and far between and a lot of it's really dedicated right now towards ranching and other kinds of land uses that I think people who are looking to cultivate in those lands are gonna come up. I'm interested to see what the social and political process will look like when you have ranching communities, pretty conservative communities, in Humboldt come up against people who want to open up multi-acre cultivation sites in this land that's now zoned for it. Maybe you'll have a conversion of ranchers to see the benefits of cannabis cultivation or maybe you'll have essentially new forms of bands eliminating the prospect of growing in those areas.

Sarah [00:26:51] That sounds challenging-nubians would just push those growers into other spaces or force them to change their way of making a living, wouldn't it? It also feels to me like that age-old battle between farmers and ranchers, but just rolling out in a different way. I have to hope though, that there's some way policy can provide support for these challenges.

Michael [00:27:16] Yeah. I think these communities, producers and various jurisdictions, that deal with policy are going to have to figure out what direction they want to go. And right now, there's some pretty predictable directions in the ways that this could go, the ways that we understand historically, regarding the development of industrial agriculture in the US. But, we're really at a unique crossroads in terms of...well, rarely is it that you have a lucrative, very lucrative, commodity, if not the largest cash crop in the country and certainly in California, entering entirely at once into full regulation. And so we have a chance right now, historically, to get it right. Things that have gone wrong historically, that we know very clearly, about the deep peopling of agriculture, you know the industrialization of it, its environmental effects, what that's meant for rural development and rural communities across the country? Not only is this just a crop but it's one of the world's most valuable crops. That's coming online right now that we have the chance to leverage in ways that could do wonders for local communities, for farmers, for the environment even, potentially.

And I think that, in particular, that last note is really important to think about because agriculture has been immune in a lot of ways from environmental regulation or a given exception to really account for the environmental effects that they have. And I think California's legislation in particular is very unique in the sense that it really centers environmental care and stewardship as a main goal of what it's trying to achieve. So can we actually do that? I think this is the question before us, and what does it take to do that? And I think we have to think more deeply than just making sure everyone's following environmental regulations down to a T and gets the proper permits. We really have to keep focused on what the outcomes are we want, which is a healthy environment and healthy communities. And if we keep focused on that, then it's not only regulations but it's things like education. It's things like agricultural assistance, helping people know the best, most environmentally sound techniques.

It's ensuring that there are incentives to keep an industrial structure that is democratic and widespread in the ways that the cannabis industry has been for the last half a century because ironically of prohibition and maintaining that kind of structure where smallholders are still able to have some kind of maneuverability in this emerging market. This doesn't mean that there isn't a place for potentially bigger cannabis operators or more capitalized ones, but that oftentimes we just know the direction that it heads. Which is not only industrial consolidation's derivative effects on farmers and environment but is the leveraging information of political power that then begins to water down regulations, begins to look for exceptions to environmental rules, begins to look at ways to exempt their workers from labor protections. All these kinds of issues then come into play when you start to think about the formalization of an industrial corporate agriculture around cannabis. And those are things I think we really need to be looking towards, right, if for instance we want positive environmental outcomes. That that the questions of industrial structure are intimately connected with all the other kinds of social questions that we're approaching at this moment.

Sarah [00:30:50] So maybe there are some ways in which other external forces are complicating things further through the stories that we tell about these people in these places. I'm thinking of one in particular. If you're not deeply plugged into the Netflix algorithm you might not have heard about Murder Mountain. Here's a few ways that the show has been explained. Netflix says, "in Humboldt County, California, the big business of legal marijuana brings in visitors from around the world. Some are never seen again." From Fusion, "What happens when California Dreaming becomes a nightmare. When people head to Humboldt County California, in search of quick riches in the form of marijuana, oftentimes they are unaware of the price they might ultimately pay in tne illegal cannabis growing capital of the United States. The area produces at least 60 percent of the black market marijuana crop in the US and also it's the state in missing person cases." The series dives into the disappearance of one of those individuals following the trail of twenty nine year old Garrett Rodriguez who goes missing on Murder Mountain. His disappearance and the events surrounding the investigation into his whereabouts threaten to expose a wild, lawless place and will forever change the local community. The executive producers said this: "Murder Mountain is a riveting tale about vigilante justice and outlaw culture in a lawless community that resembles America's Wild West past." So with all of these clearly colorful explanations of this show, I was curious what Michael thought about the show itself and about the narrative around it.

Sarah [00:32:42] So I have to ask you. Murder Mountain: is that reality, is it just fiction, somewhere between?

Michael [00:32:52] Right, So I'm going to admit that I haven't watched it but every single person I've talked to on recent field trips research trips have have cited it to me and say that I absolutely need to watch it. But what I can say is this show is in a long line of shows attempting to represent cannabis growers.

And this one in particular is centered around a narrative of greedy criminals. And I think we have to be really careful about the work that this kind of...Regardless of the truth, I'm not denying it is and can be real. But what these kinds of public representations, as processes of stigmatization, can do...and having been a researcher in this field for quite a while now, is seeing the kind of ebbs and flows of different forms of representation and so around the 2008 crisis and a few years after, you really have this efflorescence of media coverage of cannabis whether...you know, from the major news networks to PBS to NPR to whatever kinds of international film crew wants to do another documentary on it. Where there is a real interest in what it means to be criminalized for just being a farmer, is often the narrative that it came across. And I think that did a lot of work in terms of mobilizing public sentiment towards seeing that maybe it's not quite as evil, you know, and maybe it's not quite as crazy as people said it was and it really went along with this movement towards legalization that was rooted in the broader challenging of the prison industrial complex and of the racialized ways in which it operates. So you have that moment which I think facilitated legalization. Now, I'm a little worried about what kind of work does representation like Murder Mountain do in this moment. Because I think what you're going to see, is at this moment, where there are regulated permitted people and there are unregulated unpermitted people, you're going to see an increasing demand to criminalize and to eliminate the kind of competition that unregulated and uncommitted people pose. And I'm not questioning whether that's a valid pursuit by folks who feel unfairly pitted against people that are undercutting their prices and the fact that they went through a governmental process to get a permit and whatnot, that they probably rightly feel they've been wronged.

However, do we address it by more criminalization in the model of how prohibition has historically done? And I'm studying right now in some counties which really are looking very similar to ways that prohibition worked back in the day just through regulatory agencies rather than through law enforcement, or maybe along with law enforcement. But they're figuring out new ways to act to essentially achieve the same effects which is to prohibit cannabis altogether. So I think at this moment  we have to be careful of what these kinds of representations do how they work in our world and I'm worried that it's going to lead to another round of, essentially, criminalization of informal actors who, in my view, are also vulnerable actors who maybe don't have access to the halls of power, to the social relationships, to everything that we've been discussing that allows them to enter into formal regulated relationships.

Sarah [00:36:03] Definitely yeah. My impression watching it was it felt like kind of another way to "other-ize" people.

Michael [00:36:11] Yeah. I think that's right, yeah. And I think we need to be careful about that right now. I think that's just another way that that people get erased from or vilified by the valorization of and the goodness of regulated people, permitted people, people who are doing things by the rulebook who get held up as the epitome of good behavior when, in fact, the story is a lot more complex than that simple dichotomy.

Sarah [00:36:39] That's one of my biggest takeaways here. That the story is always a lot more complex than we'd expect. But the story of who is a criminal and who is not is a lot more nuanced than it comes across in a story like Murder Mountain. But also, that whether or not legalization was good for a grower...that's a lot more complicated of an answer than I thought it might be.

Sarah [00:37:13] Thanks for listening. Talk Policy to Me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans. For show notes, visit us at talkpolicytome.org. Music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions. Talk Policy to Me's executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck. Michael Quiroz is our engineer. I'm Sarah Edwards, catch you next time.