The Genesis of the Emerald Triangle
Photo courtesy of The Emerald Cup
“In California the ‘back to the land’ movement began in the 1960’s and blossomed in the 70’s seeding the hills of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties with young pot-smoking gardeners who formed the genesis of the ‘Emerald Triangle’.”
INTRODUCTION
by Caroline Phillips, Founder, National Cannabis Festival
In winter 2018, I had the opportunity to attend The Emerald Cup, California’s largest and longest-running festival celebrating all things regenerative farming and cannabis. I was incredibly excited to attend and had no idea what to expect. When you hear about The Emerald Cup you think of the the legends and mysteries of the “Emerald Triangle,” a region of the United States known for some of the best sun grown cannabis in the world.
My experience at the Cup was exciting and eye-opening. I saw cannabis industry and culture on a scale I hadn’t experienced before, and I could feel the history of the region around me.
By far, the most vivid memory of the trip was meeting the founder of the Cup, Tim Blake. Tim is synonymous with cannabis culture in the region and his commitment to his community extends far beyond the dates of his annual event. When I met him, I was overwhelmed by his kindness, his commitment to his work, and the amazing team of people that he brought together to make the Cup one of the most beloved cannabis events in the world.
A few weeks ago, I was corresponding with Tim and asked him if he would consider sharing some of his writing for the National Cannabis Festival blog. He agreed, and what follows is an incredible peek into cannabis from 1960 to the present day in Mendocino County, Humboldt and Trinity Counties.
Enjoy the read and to learn more about the Emerald Cup, click here.
THE GENESIS OF THE EMERALD TRIANGLE
Tim Blake, Founder, The Emerald Cup
by Tim Blake, Founder, The Emerald Cup
In California the “back to the land” movement began in the 1960’s and blossomed in the 70’s seeding the hills of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties with young pot-smoking gardeners who formed the genesis of the “Emerald Triangle”. While many people attribute the explosion of cannabis production here to Proposition 215 passing in 1996, the truth of the matter is slightly different. Yes, Prop 215 did add greatly to the mix but cannabis was blowing up from all directions long before that.
My family moved in the summer of 1972 from Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley, to Capitola in the Santa Cruz area; which was right up there with San Francisco as the heart of alternative living and thinking. I attended Soquel High School as a Sophomore and I spent the summer before learning the ropes of my new hometown. There were art galleries and small craft stores littered throughout the downtown area. Long hair on men was standard and everyone was smoking bud and doing psychedelics. My parents started inviting these folks into our house which was a three story building with living quarters on the top two floors and what was at one time a somewhat infamous bar on the street level. The smell of Colombian and Acapulco Gold lingered in the air daily.
I was allowed to live in the old bar. I put black lights in the keg room, filled the walls with tapestries, and the party was on. Talk about a kid being in heaven! The pool tables were still there. Needless to say, I became popular pretty quick. My dad was a big time lawyer but he was still a down to earth guy who treated all the hippies as equals and my mom was the same way and everyone was happy. It made it real easy for to me get cannabis from friends. I soon realized that I could pay for my smoke by picking up a compressed brick from one of them and re-selling it myself.
A brick (or kilo) weighed 2.2 pounds. I’d cut it into 33 ounces, and keep the rest for myself. I’d go to school on a Friday, sell thirty-three lids (they were called lids back then) and head home to toke out my friends with the 2 plus ounces left over. The bricks were costing me anywhere from 350 to 450 dollars. I’d sell them for ten to fifteen bucks an ounce. That left me with some spending money and 2 ounces of stash. I did that throughout my high school years, which allowed me to live a life of luxury; at least for a teenager back then. There were no cops hunting people back then. They hadn’t even made up the laws to bust you with yet. By the time I got out of high school, I was dealing those pounds to other young dudes. The young hippies I was buying from turned into adults in their mid to late twenties. Everyone was getting high and the business exploded.
My teen years were carefree until my dad started to struggle and committed suicide. Needless to say I didn’t deal with it well and needed to get away from the pain. My girlfriend (and future wife) had family up north in Mendocino county and we moved to a ranch way out on Sherwood road, outside of Willits over ten miles of bumpy dirt road. There was no electricity or phone It was a real culture shock! While there, we hooked up with a man who would become as good as friend as I’ve ever had and for two summers I grew cannabis on the ranch. I traveled back and forth to Santa Cruz dealing pot, and after two years I moved to Mendocino to really jump into the business. Those years cemented my ties to Mendocino county and the Emerald Triangle. I bought property on the ranch then and I still own property in Mendocino County now.
In a few short years - from 1975 to 1980 - an international business evolved from all of the cannabis flooding into our country. The flowers were more carefully packaged to deliver a better product and different organizations also emerged. Italian business owners covered the shipping while the Jewish organized the emerging industry. Even the hippies had their own piece of the pie. I was a rare bird who worked with everyone. At 20 years old I hustled more than any kid my age.
By the time I was in my mid-twenties it was the 1980’s. Now instead of most of the cannabis coming from South America it was Thai sticks and hash coming from Asia. They tied up their flowers on sticks and sent it around the world. Very quickly people realized that the packaging didn’t make sense and all the flowers were gently compacted into bricks, weighing between 900 and 1300 grams. The term “stick-less Thai” emerged. It was stunning. Golden and light brown were the norm, but in every large delivery (1000- 5000 pounds), you got a few blocks of red cannabis, which was far and above the best. The bricks would be shipped in loads of 500,000pounds or more and shipped across the ocean. They would follow the coast from Washington state down to Southern California, dropping 100,000 pounds offshore each city - Seattle, Portland, Eugene, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and then LA before heading down to Mexico. Crews would meet the boats and haul the loads ashore. From there you’d see four guys get 25,000 pounds, which then would be broken into 5,000 pound allotments. After that the bricks were cut down into 1,000 pound allotments. A lot of this product was transported to the east coast with drops in the midwest on the way.
The “Emerald Triangle” Region
I was the guy on the bottom of the totem pole, getting my one thousand pounds and hitting the streets. There was little to no violence and things were run like a well oiled machine. I’d always move my share quickly and come back for more before others could get their shares sold. At one point I was picking up 5,000 pounds, just to wholesale them so I could get some of those few beautiful red bricks. I would give my team the red bricks so they had the finest on the streets. We’d be charged around $1100 to $1300 a pound wholesale and everyone would make two or three (hundred) bucks a pound. Talk about a sweet business! At this point, there was no such thing as indoor cultivation.
The thing about the Thai weed was that it got you ripped, but it was a heavy sedative high. I preferred getting high on the flowers coming out of Northern California. The business up north wasn’t huge yet, with no urgent need with millions of pounds hitting the streets and already in place. I’d drive up once a week and buy a few pounds. I’d throw a cooler in the back of the car, drink beers and smoke all the way back home. California Highway Patrol wasn’t hunting people back then; they were looking out for people and serving them. The “back to the landers” were jumping in more every year and growing weed more openly. Highway 101 became the ganja freeway. It was the infancy of what would later become the “Emerald Triangle”.
The powers that be had watched all of this take place. They saw everyone getting high and being harmless for a good while, but then they realized that a huge industry had come out of nowhere, making hippies and alternative people rich and helping finance everything they despised. It drove them crazy that so much funding was going towards Greenpeace, liberal politicians, anti-war movements, etc. They decided that something had to be done!
Soon, two things would happen to change the course of cannabis history.
One day, a friend of mine called him Biker Boy stopped by my house. He earned the nickname because he would drive around Santa Cruz for hours every night. He pulled out the prettiest, frostiest bud I had ever laid my eyes on. It was sugar coated and was the strongest cannabis I had ever tasted, maybe even better than the finest OG. This cultivar later became known as the “Grease”, “Chronic”, and “Magic”.
That night, Biker Boy told me a tale, or what I thought was one. He said that he’d heard that over the next couple of years all the loads of Thai flowers coming in would be busted. People would have to grow cannabis indoors under the lights you see in Safeway and the big factories.
He told me that if I wanted to be part of this new industry I had to give up a third of my crop for two years and promise to never cut and take a clone. At the time I had thousands of pounds of Thai and hash put away and I thought he was out of his mind. Instead, I bought every gram of the bud he had with him at a price of $2,500; which was twice the wholesale price of anything on the streets. He left me scratching my head at such an unimaginable story. Fields of plants being grown indoors under lights?
The second thing he told me was that the streets would be flooded with cheap cocaine. This didn’t make sense to me because cocaine was a rich man’s drug at the time, snorted by the elite and people with money.
Two years later, everything changed. I had to go back to Biker Boy and beg for that clone. As he predicted, they’d busted every load of Thai flowers, changed the laws and made minimum mandatory sentencing laws that created a whole new industry; privately owned prisons.
“The last load I never got was 7,000 pounds... My friend ended up getting 8 months in county jail. This was right before the mandatory sentencing laws. A year later that bust would get you 10 to 15 years.”
Also as he predicted, cheap cocaine flooded the inner cities with a new and more powerful version called “crack”. There was hardly any bud on the streets, but $10 grams of this nasty shit were everywhere. It devastated our country.
The last load I never got was 7,000 pounds. The package was only coming a short distance from my friend’s house in the Santa Cruz mountains. The police followed the driver up into the hills. Back then they didn’t have locators on the phones so they followed him to be sure they didn’t lose him on the dark and rainy night. My friend ended up getting eight months in county jail. This was right before the mandatory sentencing laws. A year later that bust would get you ten to fifteen years. Everyone started rolling on each other to avoid those sentences and our industry was ripped apart.
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was formed in 1973 but it didn’t really kick in until the mid-80’s when California formed the Campaign Against Marijuana Production (CAMP). CAMP quickly became the largest law enforcement agency in the state. As the CAMP team went to work in Northern California, emboldened by their DEA parents, they destroyed lives mercilessly and brought in their military friends to join the party.
In a way I have no beef with the cops. They were indoctrinated under the company line of “the devil’s weed” and that the people who grew it were Devils to them. They actually thought they were doing a good thing for our country and they were the best of the best at what they did - but I’d bet on a cannabis warrior any day to prevail.
In response, we went indoors and grew the shit out of cannabis, trying to fill the ever-growing demand for bud in cities. You had to have real conviction to carry on. They picked off many cannabis soldiers, filling their god-forsaken private prisons with mostly young, peace-loving men.
There is so much more to the story right up to the present but the point of this history lesson is that a vacuum was created when they took down that fast growing international cannabis smuggling industry, and what became known as the “Emerald Triangle” emerged as a result. Prop 215 surely empowered people to move to the mountains and I’d never discount its impact, but the “Emerald Triangle” was in full force well before 1996.
Tim Blake, Founder, The Emerald Cup
About Tim Blake: Tim Blake has utilized cannabis for forty seven years, both personally and professionally. Tim created and has continued to produce the Emerald Cup for the past sixteen years. The Emerald Cup is the longest running organic, sun grown cannabis competition and gathering of the cannabis community in the world.
Tim sponsored and helped produce the first gathering of law enforcement and cannabis farmers in the country to openly discuss how they could work together. He was the co-founder of the Mendocino Farmers Collective and also Healing Harvest Farms, both local cannabis dispensaries designed to help facilitate getting outdoor cannabis into the dispensaries across the state. He was a founding member of Coalition for Cannabis Policy Reform (CCPR), which evolved into ReformCA (Prop 64), and was also a founding member of the Mendocino Cannabis Policy Council (MCPC). Tim was on the steering committee for the Mendocino Heritage Initiative (Measure AF), which was on the county ballot in 2016. Tim was a founding member of The Mendocino Cannabis Industry Association (MCIA). Tim has created a vertically integrated set of cannabis companies as well; ranging from cultivation farms, a genetics company, nursery, manufacturing, product and distribution companies. Those companies have been merged into Emerald Cup Supply Company.