The Sacramento branch of the California tax collection agency reeks of marijuana.
That’s because it’s cash day at the collection center – when marijuana dispensary owners are allowed to bring in paper money to pay their quarterly sales tax bill – and the smell of their inventory clings to everything.
California, like all states with any form of legalized marijuana, faces a growing problem over the federal government’s position that cannabis remains a Schedule 1 illegal drug, classified the same way as meth or cocaine, with no legal uses – and therefore no legal access to traditional banks.
That means medical marijuana dispensaries, along with growers, distributors and other marijuana-related businesses that are operating legally under state laws, have no choice but to be cash-only businesses. They can’t write checks, deposit money in financial institutions or make credit card transactions.
“We’ve been a cash industry for ever and it has been quite a problem,” said Kimberly, the director of a non-profit dispensary in Sacramento who asked that her last name not be used for safety reasons. “We don’t want to drive around town paying our bills in cash. We want to be able to just go to the bank.”
Kimberly was at the tax office making a payment of more than $30,000, but officials with the agency, the board of equalization, say that is a relatively small amount. Recently at the San Francisco office, a $400,000 payment came in, carried in “a big bag”, said George Runner, a BOE board member. The day before in Sacramento, $150,000 came in as a single payment.
That kind of cash being brought to a non-secure facility raises safety issues, as well as practical ones – issues that the BOE and other agencies are scrambling to address as new medical marijuana laws in the state increase the amount of taxes being paid.
The BOE estimates that last year, it took in about $200m in cash payments from marijuana businesses, though it’s “hard to tell” what the actual amount is, since, Runner said, “we don’t always know who is a cannabis-related business”.
In the meantime, the office staff is forced to come out of their safe rooms to receive payments.He does know it is leading to some strange problems. The teller windows in the office, for example, do not have slots big enough for the cash-stuffed envelopes to slide through. They will have to be retrofitted to be bigger.
Inside the cash room at the Sacramento office, money is stored in a shiny black safe that looks straight out of the old west, with a large silver spin dial on the front and a gold Betty Boop statue on top. Though about 4ft tall, the safe still sometimes gets stuffed to capacity.
BOE staff said that sometimes the cash drawers at the windows get so full and the office so busy that money ends up being stacked on desks, out in the open.
And sometimes, instead of the aroma of cannabis, the room smells strongly of fabric softener because some depositors “wash” the money in a dryer before coming in.
“It’s been interesting,” Runner said.
Legalizing recreational marijuana is on California’s ballot this year. If it passes, the state expects up to an additional $1bn in annual tax payments from retail sales – all in cash. California already brings in the most marijuana revenue of any state through medical cannabis alone, with an estimated $2.7bn in sales last year.
Runner and his BOE colleagues say that because it is unlikely federal regulations will change anytime soon, they have been working on their own long-term solutions to deal with an increase.
Some ideas tossed around have included self-service teller kiosks placed around town like tax ATMs, and contracting with banks to allow the BOE to use a secure “back room” to receive payments. They have even looked into Bitcoin, Runner said – but “I don’t think anyone really understands Bitcoin”.
So far, no solutions have turned out to be viable.
For taxpayers, cash can be dangerous. Kimberly said she was constantly afraid of being robbed, and tried to avoid walking around with more than $20,000, the amount she feels her non-profit could lose without going out of business. She also said that she’s had someone attempt to blackmail her, thinking she had ready access to cash.
One of the three men who escaped from a California jail last month had been charged with kidnapping a marijuana dispensary owner that they suspected had hidden large amounts of cash in the desert. The man and his accomplices are accused of driving the dispensary owner out to the desert, torturing him and cutting off his penis.
For Kristin Nevedal, Super Silver Haze is not always the same Super Silver Haze. Like the concept of “terroir” in foods, she and many growers believe the characteristics of cannabis plants vary depending on their local environment.
“There are obvious differences between, say, a Super Silver Haze that is cultivated at a 700-foot elevation and a Super Silver Haze that is cultivated at a 2,200 elevation in Humboldt County,” said Nevedal, a marijuana activist and former grower.
There are champagne labels for wine and roquefort labels for cheese, so could there be a Humboldt Haze label for marijuana?
Cannabis appellation – one of the provisions in new California regulations that went into effect this year – could ensure that certain strains – for instance, Mendo Purps, which was first cultivated in Mendocino, California – are only grown in certain regions, not simply plants of that origin cultivated elsewhere.
Aside from being useful to the discerning consumer who might “want the specialty stuff they can bring out for special occasions or just want to treat themselves”, appellations could protect small farmers against “big marijuana”, said Dale Sky Jones, chancellor of cannabis-centric Oaksterdam University in Oakland, California.
It could ensure that growers in a specific area who built the state’s prestige by producing high-quality strains retain exclusive rights over that location in marketing, so that Santa Cruz sensimilla or Bodega-grown Blue Dream is reliably from those locations.
“This is how small business competes with big marijuana”, Jones said. “And this is why this is so unbelievably important … Appellation is going to wind up being the first line of defense”.
Already with medical marijuana’s legalization, the state is seeing a boom in investors and entrepreneurs inundating the industry, and more are expected amid current efforts to put recreational marijuana before state voters next fall.
The appellation system is “a means to protect California’s unique heritage and leadership within this industry”, said Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, a statewide education and lobbying group.
Allen said that there “are isolated communities of cannabis cultivators in every corner of the state and each of these has a unique culture”. But the reclusiveness that protected their illegal operations is now an impediment to competition.
Allen added that he sees the appellation system extending beyond just region to incorporate issues such as sustainability practices, use of pesticides and other “value” issues that “articulate what the community standards are”, he said.
While location is a key differentiator for northern California growers, some in the industry say southern California is likely to focus more on branding than appellation, since it lacks as many notable growing areas.
“It’s more about personalities down there,” Jones said. She points to celebrity-backed strains of weed that are catching attention and venture capital-backing not just in California, but in other states where marijuana is legal. Influential musicians and stars such as Willie Nelson, Wiz Khalifa and the family of Bob Marley have all announced ventures into the cannabis industry.
While California’s new marijuana laws went into effect 1 January, the state is a long way from setting up the appellation system or fulfilling the complex medical marijuana regulation package that could become the model for recreational legalization in the state. Some advocates don’t expect to see implementation of the law until 2018.
With the passage of a new law this summer mandating vaccines for schoolkids in California, home school advocates and organizations say they are seeing surging interest in off-campus education options that would exempt them from the requirement.
“The word on the streets is that, yes, people are coming to home schooling,” said Sarah Ford, membership director for Sonoma County Homeschoolers Nonprofit in northern California.
The controversial mandate, co-authored by state Senator Richard Pan, a pediatrician backed by the California Medical Association, requires any student in public or private school to have 10 vaccinations as an attendance requirement, with some exceptions for medical conditions.
En route to passage, the proposal sparked scathing controversy on both sides of the issue, with opponents (wearing red to symbolize children who have been harmed by vaccines and often with their own kids in tow) regularly flooding hearings at the state capitol to protest.
Lyn Elliott, a mother of a 20-month-old girl, says she is taking a serious look at home schooling because of the law. While her daughter Rebel is “mostly vaccinated”, there are certain shots she feels are unnecessary “and that I feel have risks”.
Next summer she will have to face the choice of giving vaccinations she does not want, or lose access to daycare – where some of the vaccine requirements will also apply. A single parent after her husband died in a motorcycle accident, she says home schooling could mean a critical drop in her income, but it’s a move she feels compelled to make.
“For myself and my personal situation, school was something I was somewhat looking forward to,” she says. “I think it would actually be more beneficial for [Rebel] to be in public school but I am not willing to take that risk or let them make that decision for me just to make my life easier.”
Nicole Arango, a 34-year-old mother of two, said she faced a similar choice and decided to move forward with home schooling now.
She recently moved from Oxnard, California, to Simi Valley with her son, Ryan, 13, and daughter, Juliet, 6. Because Ryan had an adverse vaccine reaction when he was young, Arango has chosen not to vaccinate further. Rather than put them in school in their new town for a year and have to pull them out when the law goes into effect, she is beginning home schooling this fall.
“I was already kind of on the fence about home schooling anyway but the vaccine law really pushed me over because that’s not something I’m going to have shoved down my throat,” she said. “I feel like I have no other alternative.”
Elliott and Arango are likely just the beginning of a wave of parents looking for options as the deadline moves closer. The law, one of the strictest in the country, eliminated both personal belief and religious exemptions to vaccinations, closing opt-out possibilities for the majority of vaccine-averse parents aside from home school.
Teresa Fitzpatrick, president of Anaheim-based California Homeschool Network, said her organization has also seen a mild increase in calls and questions about vaccinations, but since the requirements for shots do not go into effect until next fall, “we are probably going to see a bigger increase then”.
“Home schooling is definitely seeing a bump, absolutely,” seconded Corin Goodwin, CEO and executive director of Gifted Homeschoolers Forum (GHF), a resource site for homeschooling parents.
Far from being a few fringe families, home schooling in the US now has a myriad of both nonprofit and for-profit support networks and curriculum possibilities that service about 1.77 million students – a number that has been steadily increasing for years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Nationally, about 3% of kids between ages five and 17 were home schooled in the 2011-2012 school year.
California has one of the largest populations of home-schooled children, with about 177,000 in some form of homeschooling, according to estimates by home-schooling expert Anne Zeise, who runs the website a2zhomeschooling.com.
But few reliable statistics are available for the number of students in California who attend home school because the term applies to different options.
Home school can mean a parent who files the proper paperwork is personally handling a child’s education, or it can mean that the child has a private tutor. It can also apply to kids utilizing private or public charter school programs that offer a home-study option – but those students are often officially counted as part of the traditional school system.
Diane Flynn Keith, who runs home-school information seminars in the San Francisco bay area, said her three-hour sessions have been filling to capacity since the law passed. Her most recent seminar earlier in August drew a sold-out crowd of 40, when normally she would expect about 25.
“At least 10 of the people there asked me specifically about vaccinations,” she said. That demand has led her to add more events in the coming months.
Goodwin added that her organization has also fielded more inquiries from programs and vendors that are interested in doing business or expanding in the state.
“We are hearing a lot more from the charter programs,” she said.
Keith cautions parents that home schooling “is not easy” and those seeking a way out of vaccinations represent a “whole new group that are sort of being forced into it”.
“You may have people that are sort of doing it more out of fear than anything else, they have no choice,” said Fitzpatrick. “If it’s not done because they believe in the philosophy of home schooling and they want the experience of home schooling, then it’s going to be harder for them. And I think it could be more of a struggle for the children too.”
Maile Hampton, the African American activist who was arrested for “lynching” after trying to pull a fellow protester away from police during a January rally against law enforcement brutality in Sacramento, has a large black butterfly tattooed across her neck.
Below it, scrawling script reads: “Have faith in me.”
It means: “Have faith that I am here to change the world,” said the 20-year-old with a youthful mix of passion and innocence. She got it about a year ago, around the same time she began to be politically active, she said.
Video of the rally shows police tussling with a protester in the street while activists on the sidewalk yell: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”
A woman who appears to be Hampton enters the street, carrying a bullhorn. She grabs the handle of a sign held by the protester being detained by police and attempts to pull it away from an officer who is also holding it. She is then pushed away by other officers.
Hampton’s arrest – and sensational-sounding charge – made headlines. California’s lynching law was put on the books in 1933, to prevent mobs from forcibly taking people from police custody for vigilante justice.
But the statute has long been used against protesters as well, by police if not prosecutors. In 1999, anti-fur protesters in San Francisco who blocked access to a Neiman Marcus store in Union Square were charged under the lynching law. Prosecutors declined to take the case to court.
In 2011, police in Oakland used it against members of the Occupy movement, arresting at least two activists, Tiffany Tran and Alex Brown, on the count during a sweep of a public plaza. The charges were dropped.
In 2012, police in Los Angeles also used the lynching law against Occupy, when an activist named Sergio Ballesteros was accused of intervening in an arrest during an Art Walk – according to published reports, the charge was later dropped.
Last year, in the conservative Southern California enclave of Murrieta, it was used on at least one activist, Janet Mathieson, who was arrested while protesting in support of migrant detainees. She is scheduled for sentencing on 10 April, in a plea bargain that involves dropping the felony charge and pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of obstructing or resisting, according to Riverside County district attorney spokesman John Hall.
Shortly after Hampton’s arrest, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson asked state legislators to take the term out of the penal code, saying via Twitter on 25 February that the “word ‘lynching’ has a long and painful history in our nation. It’s time to remove its use in CA Law”.
Perhaps that is why the use of the lynching law against a black woman struck many as notable. But some activists say the felony count itself is indicative of a change in attitude of police in the California state capital.
“I have no doubt whatsoever that the Sacramento police department’s response has changed as the police brutality protests began late last year,” said Cres Vellucci of the Sacramento chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), an organization whose members attend rallies as independent observers, to monitor police response.
“It’s very apparent, at least to NLG observers like me, that officers want the protests to stop, and if people have to be abused, or arrested or otherwise mistreated, that will happen.”
‘Targeted by police’
Hampton, sitting in her lawyer’s office in mid-March with her half-brother, Jamier Sale, for an exclusive interview with the Guardian, said she believed she and Sale were being targeted by police because they were “very active in the Black Lives Matter movement”.
Her arrest took place during a counter-protest that was marching towards to a pro-law enforcement rally.
“It’s clear [law enforcement] are trying to target two of the most powerful Answer activists,” she said, referring to the Act Now To Stop War and Racism Coalition, a group that has grown in prominence nationally as an organizing body for the Black Lives Matter movement and other issues.
“Based on how law enforcement has interacted with us and tried to get information, we know that they know that we are very intersectional in our activism and we are two young educated people of color,” said Hampton, who also has joined rallies for pro-Palestine causes, raising the minimum wage (she works a low-wage job as a car detailer), organizing fast food workers and a recent event for Cesar Chavez day, among others.
“And they see that as a threat,” added Sale, who has a habit of finishing his sister’s thoughts.
Sale recently concluded his own run-in with the law, after being cited for jaywalking at a Black Lives Matter protest in November. That case made it to court in March, resulting in a $240 fine and a friend starting the hashtag #leavethisfamilyalone in support of Hampton and Sale.
Sacramento police spokesperson Traci Trapani said she “didn’t think” lynching was a common charge in a city where rallies happen on an almost weekly basis, but she was unable to provide numbers. She added that most protests were a “peaceful process” in which officers were “accommodating” of protesters.
While video of the 18 January protest that led to Hampton’s arrest makes it clear that she did have an individual interaction with law enforcement officers, there are questions about how the resulting arrest and charges are moving through the courts.
“Certainly there did not appear to be any conduct that rose to a felony level,” said Hampton’s pro bono lawyer, Linda Parisi, who has advised her client not to speak about the events surrounding the arrest itself. “It makes you say: ‘Really, you’ve charged this young woman with a felony charge of lynching? Is that right? Is that the message we want to send?’”
Other arrests but different outcomes
Parisi said two other protesters were arrested for lynching that day, with a different outcome from Hampton’s.
Video shows multiple officers arresting Walls in the street while protesters, including Hampton, shout from the sidewalk, where police had ordered them to stay. Other video later shows Hampton in the street with officers.
Walls said he was in jail for three days – a claim confirmed by his lawyer – and was eventually released, along with Cinder, on his own recognizance. The Sacramento district attorney has not filed charges against either, although it has the ability to do so until April 2016, according to spokeswoman Shelly Orio.
Orio declined to comment specifically on any of the three activists, saying the DA did not comment on ongoing cases. She was also unable to give any statistics on the number of people prosecuted for lynching in Sacramento.
Walls said he had “no idea” why he and Cinder were released while Hampton’s charges remained.
The police did not detain Hampton and she said no officer recorded her personal information. She did not know a warrant had been issued for over a month, until officers came to her mother’s house to arrest her.
“The cops said to me you’re not charged with anything, the judge just wants to talk you,” she said. But she was booked into jail on multiple charges, including the felony count of lynching.
Maile Hampton with her half-brother, Jamier Sale. Photograph: Anita Chabria
“It seemed very hypocritical and outrageous that … four uniformed white men came into my home, an African American woman, took me out of my home, put me in jail for standing up for black people – on lynching,” said Hampton, who has developed a public presence not just at rallies, but also through speaking at city council meetings and other venues.
“Under the circumstances of that day, it was apparent to me it was an intimidation tactic.”
An activist is born
Hampton attended her first protest in the summer of 2014 – a pro-Palestine event where she quickly found herself on the bullhorn, which is now a common practice for her at rallies, where she often leads chants. But it wasn’t until her brother went to Ferguson, Missouri that fall, after the Michael Brown verdict and as part of an Answer coalition, that she began to be active in the Black Lives Matter movement.
“A lot of the passion I have is also fear for my loved ones and for my own life and for people around me,” she said. “When [Sale] was in Ferguson, one of the members of Answer sent out like an alert, like: ‘Our comrades in Ferguson are being attacked by the police right now.’ So seeing that, not only is he a comrade but he’s my brother.
“You know, it’s like he could have been Mike Brown. So that fear really motivated me to really get the most involved that I could be.”
Parisi said she was “optimistic that we will arrive at a resolution” to Hampton’s case that involves removing the felony charge, though no negotiations with the district attorney had yet taken place, she added.
Hampton remains committed to her activism. When she was released from jail, she came out to find more than two dozen supporters waiting to greet her.
“That feeling was – it was really unexplainable,” she said. “It really just brought me to tears. Seeing that really made being an activist and being an organizer ... it all makes sense of why I am out here doing what I do.”
