The Californian Pot business
Set to explode -- from
USA Today:
Will Mendocino County become the Napa Valley of marijuana?
Swap the Dungeness crab cakes and peasant skirts for lobster rolls and L.L. Bean khakis, and this snug seaside hamlet a few hours north of San Francisco could be a dead ringer for a New England village. (It was a stand-in for Cabot Cove, Maine, in the long-running TV series Murder She Wrote.)
But if California voters approve a controversial ballot proposition in November to tax and legalize marijuana for recreational use � and it's ahead in several polls � some local growers say Mendocino, pop. 900, might become better known as the tourist capital of a "Napa Valley of cannabis."
The notion of opening marijuana-tasting rooms, meet-the-grower tours and ganja-friendly "bud and breakfasts" in Northern California's pot-farming "Emerald Triangle" is like "tearing down the Berlin Wall. It's not going to happen overnight," says Matthew Cohen of MendoGrown. His 12-member association promotes a "sustainably grown medical cannabis industry" in the county, where legal and illicit pot � sanctioned for medical use by California residents since 1996 � fuels an estimated half to two-thirds of an economy once anchored by fishing and timber.
Got to love that: "
bud and breakfasts"
Makes a lot of sense -- there is a lot of money there and if they are not going to be able to keep it illegal (and therefore higher profit margin), they will do the tourism thing and make their money that way.
Posted by DaveH at October 9, 2010 7:36 PM