On a sunny fall morning in 2007, Emma Worldpeace sat in a classroom at the University of California at Berkeley and racked her brain. She was at the start of her senior year at the university and was trying to come up with a subject to write about for a research proposal that was due at the end of the semester.
In her sophomore year, Emma had chosen a major that fit well with her interests, and her last name: peace and conflict studies. In her courses, she learned about wars and genocides, peace movements, and what peace really meant for people—not just the absence of war, but also the existence of harmony and safety, and people having their needs met. Emma’s major had an international focus, and for her research proposal she toyed with writing about microfinance in India. But she was also compelled to write about something closer to home. Emma had started to realize that there were many injustices taking place right outside her door.
Maybe I’ll write about racial tension in Oakland, she thought. But that didn’t feel right, either, and still she couldn’t settle on a subject.
On that Berkeley morning, her instructor, a middle-aged woman with cropped brown hair and an elegant air, offered some helpful words.
“It’s important to start a research project with a question you have always wanted to know the answer to,” she told the class. “If there was something that always seemed a little bit weird, or a little bit wrong, or a little bit off, that nobody has ever given you the answer to, that’s probably what you should do your research on.”
When Emma heard this, she knew exactly what her question was.
It had been almost four years since she stood before her classmates at South Fork High School at graduation as one of ten co-valedictorians. She loved UC Berkeley and the feeling that there was always something happening on campus, and her fellow students seemed to care about the world and weren’t afraid to speak their minds. In her free time, Emma was the captain of the women’s cycling team, her relationship with her boyfriend was going steady, and she loved the excitement and stimulation of city life. She enjoyed the cheap Indian restaurants near campus, and the ritual of eating Cheese Board pizza on the grassy median along Shattuck Avenue. One thing she didn’t love was how every time she heard a traffic helicopter thump overhead, her blood would run cold for a few scary seconds and she would be reminded of the threat that sound once held in her life.
During her years at Berkeley, Emma didn’t hear from her parents very frequently, but every so often, when one of them did ring, she would worry it was because someone else back home had died. If she missed a couple of calls from her mother, she’d wonder, Shit, did my brother die? Did someone close pass away? And sometimes, that would be the case, and Sage would say something like “Oh, did you hear about Maddie and Emily? So tragic.”
Madeline “Maddie” Coker and Emily Moody were in Emma’s younger sister Lisa’s class. In June of 2006, their car went off the road on the way to Shelter Cove and both girls were killed. Lisa called Emma after she got off the phone with her mother, and was very distraught. The girls had all been close friends.
Then, in the summer before Emma’s second year of college, Nick LaRue, a friend from Emma’s high school class, died in a car accident on the Avenue of the Giants. Her class had been the first at South Fork High to make it from kindergarten to graduation without someone dying. Now, two years out, Nick was gone. Emma thought about it and easily came up with a list of ten people she knew who had died or been murdered in the past five or six years.
Whenever a young person died in Southern Humboldt, people made plastic laminates that were handed out at their memorial. Sean Akselsen’s laminate featured a portrait of him taken during high school. He was wearing a black dress shirt and stared at the camera with the handsome, confident gaze of someone whose story was just beginning to unfold. His full name, Sean Thomas Butler Akselsen, was printed along the bottom of the image, along with the dates he entered and left this world. On the other side, superimposed over a painting of Bob Marley, was the poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye that begins, “Do not stand at my grave and weep / I am not there.”
People hung these laminates on their rearview mirrors, on bedroom walls, or carried them in their wallets. Emma strung hers on a tackboard on her dorm room wall in Berkeley, alongside cell phone bills and photos from back home. One day a new friend noticed them.
“Did you know all these people who died?” she asked.
“Yeah, I grew up with all of them,” Emma replied.
“Oh my God, that seems so tragic.”
Her friend had grown up in a rough part of the Bay Area, and Emma was surprised by her reaction.
“Well, you live in a place that’s notoriously dangerous. Doesn’t this happen to you?” Emma asked.
“Well, sure, maybe every year someone from my school died,” her friend said. “But I went to a high school with five or six thousand people.”
Emma felt strange about that conversation, and it stayed with her, lingering in the back of her mind. It was her unanswered question.
She waited until after class that morning to run her idea by her instructor.
“In the community I grew up in, there have always been a lot of young people who die,” she explained. “I want to know why that happens.”
* * *
On a Thursday evening in October 2009, Margaret Lewis, the host of a show on KMUD called Women’s Radio Collectively, announced the theme of the evening’s program: growing up in marijuana culture.
“I think it needs some discussion and airing. Not to make any judgments or conclusions,” Lewis explained in a deep, professorial tone, “but just to look at what is going on.”
The inspiration for the show, she explained, was sparked by a piece that had been performed by a local youth theater company about a family in the growing business with children in high school. In the skit, the children were forced to lie to a career counselor at school about how their parents earned a living. When the daughter in the family wanted to bring a new friend home, the family resisted because there was pot around the house. The family eventually cleaned up their place, and the new friend visited. But while she was there, the Feds conducted a raid and busted the family. The performance left Lewis with the realization that there were unique challenges to growing up in marijuana culture that needed to be addressed.
“I realize that the growing lifestyle is not all negative,” she said, giving examples of how neighbors help one another deal with the hazards of the profession such as mold, pests, and law enforcement convoys. But there were unintentional consequences that Lewis wanted to talk about.
“What I would like to discuss here is how we and our children are affected by the duplicity of not being able to openly discuss with new acquaintances, and in some cases family members, our profession, the furtiveness, and the anxiety of possible arrests, and how this lifestyle impacts our families and our lives,” she said.
Joining Lewis on the show that evening was a guest and cohost who had become something of an expert on the subject: Emma Worldpeace.
“Thank you for having me, Margaret,” Emma told her in a chipper voice.
Emma had brought along three high school students who were also raised in families who grew marijuana. Given that the local industry was still covered in a mantle of secrecy, the young guests, two boys and a girl, remained anonymous, as did the callers to the show, in order to “free up the conversation,” as Lewis put it.
Emma had moved back to Humboldt after graduating from Berkeley. She had never intended to return home so quickly, but toward the end of her time in the Bay Area, she realized she missed the peaceful calm that comes with living closer to nature. She had applied for jobs in other states and moved home while she was waiting for something to come through. That something ended up being an AmeriCorps position at the family services center in Redway. In the end, returning to her community was also a way for Emma to share the discoveries she had made during her final semester of school.
“I did my thesis research on death among youth in southern Humboldt County, an issue I think we are all aware of,” Emma told listeners that evening. “We have a very high youth death rate, and it’s something I had to deal with as a young person, growing up and losing friends, and it’s something that we are dealing with now. One of the five emergent themes from my research was basically this, growing up in the marijuana culture.”
Emma called this particular theme the “secrecy oxymoron.”
During her senior year of college, she attempted to answer that gnawing question about why so many youths in her community died. She sifted data from the county health department and conducted interviews with local teens and adults. In March of that year, Emma presented her thesis to the local school board and a packed public audience at the Garberville Civic Club. Her findings stunned the community: the youth death rate in Southern Humboldt was nearly twice the county average.
From 1994 to 2004, thirty-six youths died in the community in violent or untimely deaths, including car accidents, suicide, and murder. Local youth also had an incredibly high rate of engaging in risky behaviors. Sure, teenagers everywhere take chances, experiment with drugs, and think they are invincible, but Emma found that in Southern Humboldt, the percent of eleventh-graders who had recently engaged in binge drinking was twice the state average, and the number who had recently smoked pot was even higher. These high rates of alcohol and drug use, coupled with frequent reckless driving, lax parental boundaries, and a grim numbness around loss, were themes that emerged during Emma’s research.
But on that October evening on KMUD, the focus was on one of the most dominant themes, the one that children in the community had been taught not to talk about. Emma had found it interesting that the marijuana industry was mentioned so often during her interviews about youth deaths.
“Not to say that kids are killed because they are smoking pot, or directly because of it,” she explained that night, “but not being able to talk openly about what’s going on in your home, or that sense of having a deep fear of law enforcement, can either lead to situations that are very dangerous or prevent you from reaching out for help in an appropriate way when a situation is dangerous.”
Lewis, the show’s host, had spoken with a friend earlier that day about the topic, and they agreed that not being able to talk about something, be it marijuana or abuse or anything else going on in your house, made it impossible to move past it.
“If you can’t talk about it or seek help, there’s a stigma about it, and it feels like there is something wrong,” Lewis said. “Guests, how do you feel about that?”
The three high school students all agreed and shared stories. The girl admitted that it wasn’t fun to hide things from one’s friends.
A boy with a husky voice concurred, but said he’d never had that problem.
“You can always tell the kid of a smoker family,” he said. “After a while you know who you can invite over and talk to about these things.”
The other boy recalled how during junior high school there was an unspoken agreement among his friends that nobody asked if they could come over during the busy months of harvest season, when pot was dried and cut, and stored at their houses.
“When did you become aware of growing pot and the illegality and what all that meant?” Lewis asked her young guests. “Did you always just know about it or was there a eureka moment?”
When the teenage girl was about eight, her father started bringing her up to the remote piece of land where he grew. She’d smell pot there and occasionally catch glimpses of it, and her father would tell her, “We don’t talk about this.”
“I never put a second thought to it,” she said. “It seemed totally fine.”
But when she learned it was illegal, the girl had a different reaction.
“I was so mad at them for it, but over the years now I’ve had conversations with my parents about it, and they’ve said they couldn’t have the same lifestyle we do if they didn’t grow, even if they both had a full-time job.”
The second boy grew up in a household where marijuana was, as he put it, very present. As soon as he started school, his parents began to stress that it was something the children couldn’t talk about, or they would be taken away.
“It was almost like a daily ritual on the way to school,” he said. “They used scare tactics.”
The boy with the husky voice had much more relaxed parents, including a mother who liked to belly dance at community events. He got the secrecy talk only after he erroneously told his elementary school teacher that his parents had gone to Las Vegas to get better pot. (They had really gone on a shopping spree.) He was curious why he wasn’t allowed to talk about it and discussed the matter with close friends who were in the same position. At that point, he said, he came to a place of acceptance with it.
“Even with it being illegal, it just seemed like the way things were,” he said. “Especially in this community, where everyone is doing it.”
“Seemingly,” Lewis interjected, with a chuckle.
Emma then brought up some of the positive aspects of growing up in pot culture. The way she saw it, the meager amount her mother grew helped supplement the welfare checks she received, put food on the table, and ensured that Emma and her siblings had new shoes. Emma had no memory of being afraid or worrying about it being illegal until her mom got busted.
“It was a complete upset for my entire family,” she said.
Sage stopped growing after the bust, and Emma had to find work in her teens, bussing tables after school at a local restaurant. She moved out of the house at sixteen, in part because there wasn’t enough money to support her. The hardest part, she remembered, was the secrecy associated with what had happened. She remembered feeling like she couldn’t talk to anyone about it and how ashamed she felt.
Returning to the community after spending four years in a vibrant city, Emma now saw everything with different eyes. She looked around at the brilliant young people she went to high school with, who had stayed behind to earn a living growing pot, and she wondered about their futures.
“Sometimes I wonder if that’s a genuine choice that they made, or if it’s just something that they’ve fallen into, or if it’s something that they’ve stayed with because they can make a lot of money off of it,” she said. “Is there a generation that has been caught up in this that we have lost?”
Lewis, like so many members of the older generation, also wondered about this.
“I’ve heard young people say I’m just going to grow and make my first million and then I’ll go on to school and do all this stuff,” she said. “Well, things happen.”
Mold happened. Rats happened. Rip-offs happened, she pointed out, and people don’t always realize their plans, and then they have to grow for another year, and pretty soon they are caught up in it.
What was more, a man who called into the show pointed out, the children who stayed behind to grow didn’t seem to share the values of their elders. Why, he asked, weren’t there more young people from the community on the boards of the Mateel, and the Redwoods Rural Health Center, and KMUD, the very radio station the show was being broadcast on? Their parents had built these nonprofit institutions, and for decades supported them with time and money.
The boy with the husky voice had also noticed this. His theory was that people his age who wanted to help the community and make it a better place were the same people who didn’t want to stick around and grow pot.
“Everyone who I’ve seen in our generation who is saying, ‘Hey I can make a lot of money by growing pot,’ are the same people who aren’t thinking about the community and how they can use that money to help others.”
Emma then pointed out the need for more job opportunities in the community so that young people who went away to school could return and put their skills to use.
“This is a beautiful area,” she said. “This is an awesome community, there is a lot going on here, but there are no legal jobs.”
In an essay in chronic freedom, an art book and history of the community that was published in 2010, a writer from the Back-to-the-Land generation makes this very point, after acknowledging that saddling children with the burden of secrecy required them to be dishonest with how they represented themselves to the outside world. “We failed our children by not creating a more broad-based economy in which they could participate if they chose to stay, or left to learn a profession and wanted to return. And in some ways they failed us, those that stayed, by not supporting the institutions we had built. Or is the fact we lost so many children the biggest indictment of all?”
At one point in the conversation, a female listener called in who had just returned from a marijuana legalization conference in San Francisco. The caller had noticed at the conference that most of the harms associated with marijuana were harms of prohibition and the fact that it was illegal, not because of marijuana itself.
“I wonder,” the caller said, “what the guests would think if their parents had the same status of a wine grower, who was legal, and they didn’t have to hide and worry about it, and what that would mean about all of their choices.”
“I would love to see it legalized,” said Emma. “I think it would make an incredible difference. I think there would be tradeoffs about people not being able to make the kinds of livings that they do off of it now. It would change our relationship with it and make it not so much of a secret we have to carry.”
A little over a year later, around the same time that her brother Mike was accused of being involved in a horrible shooting, it seemed as though Emma’s wish might come true and that legalization might finally arrive and change that relationship for good.
In the meantime, however, it would be business as usual.