Hemp Growing

The number of certified operations and cropland acreage in California doubled between 2002 and 2016. State organic crop sales increased almost tenfold at the farm level, in real terms, during the same time period . This essay uses field-level pesticide application records and a fixed-effects model to analyze changes in the environmental impacts of pesticide use for both organic and conventional fields over 21 years. The database covers all registered agricultural pesticide applications in California, and contains over 48 million pesticide application records for over 64,000 growers and 781,000 fields from 1995 to 2015. In total, data from more than 55,000 organic fields and 11,000 growers who operated organic fields are analyzed in this essay. The Pesticide Use Risk Evaluation model is used to assess the environmental impacts of pesticide use . The results show that the environmental impact of pesticide use per acre is lower in organic fields across all of the environmental dimensions for which PURE indexes are defined: surface water, groundwater, soil, air, and pollinators. The difference in the impact on air is the smallest because natural pesticides are not systematically different from synthetic pesticides in terms of volatile organic compound emissions. The estimated impacts on all five environmental dimensions are positively correlated with farm acreage. The measure of farmer experience is positively correlated with estimated impacts per acre on surface water and groundwater, hydroponic drain table and negatively correlated with estimated impacts on soil, air, and pollinators but the difference associated with variation experience are smaller than the estimated effect of whether the field is organic or not by orders of magnitude. Environmental impacts and the difference between organic and conventional production vary by crop.

Four major California crops, lettuce, strawberries, processing tomatoes, and wine grapes, are examined in detail.The benefit from organic agriculture is partially paid by consumers through a price premium for organic products . Whether organic production is the most cost effective way to reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture is not the focus of this essay. However, readers can gain some insight into the performance of organic agriculture by comparing the cost of alternative tools and their effects on environmental quality. The contribution of this essay is threefold. First, it links the environmental impacts of organic crop production directly to pesticide applications. To the best of my knowledge, no other studies have examined this relationship. Previous literature provided abundant evidence on the environmental impact of organic agriculture as a system but failed to quantify the impact of specific farming practices . Here, AIs and their contributions to environmental impacts are identified individually, which enhances the understanding of the differences in pesticide use between organic and conventional agriculture and how they vary across crops. Second, this essay uses the PURE model to assess the environmental impacts of pesticide use . Compared to the risk quotient approach, which is another common method in the literature , the PURE model provides a more salient measure of environmental impacts by incorporating additional environmental information, such as the distance from the pesticide application to the nearest surface water. The PURE model calculates risk indices for five environmental dimensions: surface water, groundwater, soil, air, and pollinators. Third, by using the Pesticide Use Report database, this essay’s findings are based on the population of pesticide application data.

Prior works include meta-analyses that cover numerous field experiments and commercial operations examined for a crop or a small geographic area over a limited period of time. California’s agriculture is characterized by many crops and diverse climate and soil conditions. The comprehensive coverage of the PUR database eliminates any sample selection issue. The rest of the essay is organized as follows: section 2 introduces the PUR database and PURE model and presents summary statistics of historical pesticide use, section 3 provides the identification strategy to tackle grower heterogeneity, section 4 presents industry level and crop-specific estimation results, and section 5 concludes. To obtain the USDA organic certification, growers must meet requirements on several aspects of production: pesticide use, fertilizer use, and seed treatment. The requirement on pesticide use is burdensome because pesticides approved in organic agriculture are expensive and have less efficacy. Pesticide and fertilizer AIs used in organic agriculture undergo a sunset review by the National Organic Standards Board every five years and the main criterion is whether the ingredient is synthetic or not. In general, it is not reasonable for growers to use those pesticides exclusively but not apply for the organic certification, given higher price and lower efficacy of those pesticides. Therefore, growers who comply with the NOP’s requirement on pesticide use can be viewed as equivalent to certified organic growers for the data sorting purpose. In Wei et al. , authors located individual organic fields using this approach. Namely, any field without a prohibited pesticide applied for the past three years is considered organic. Their paper compared organic crop acreage from PUR to other data sources and showed that pesticide use records alone can be used to identify organic crop production. Environmental conditions for each field and toxicity values for each chemical are used to calculate the value of the PURE index developed by Zhan and Zhang .

The PURE index has been used in previous studies to represent environmental impacts of pesticide use . The PURE index indexes environmental impacts of pesticide use in five dimensions: surface water, groundwater, soil, air, and pollinators. For each dimension, the PURE index is calculated on a per acre basis and it varies from 0 to 100, where 0 indicates trivial impact and 100 rep- resents the maximum impact. Excluding air, the PURE index is the ratio of the predicted environmental concentration to toxicity to the end organisms. The PEC estimates the effect of the pesticide application on the concentration level for chemicals in the environmental sample. The toxicity values cover both acute measures, such as LD50, and long-term measures, such as No Observed Effect Concentration and acceptable daily intake for humans. End organisms are fish, algae, and water fleas for surface water, humans for groundwater, earthworms for soil, and honeybees for pollinators. The PURE index for air is calculated based on potential VOC emissions, which is a common measure of airborne pollutants emitted from agriculture production . The emission of VOCs is defined as the percentage of mass loss of the pesticide sample when heated. Unlike toxicity, VOC emissions do not have a strong link to whether the AIs are synthetic or natural. For example, the herbicide Roundup®, which contains glyphosate, has zero VOC emissions because there is no evaporation or sublimation. Meanwhile, sulfur products, which are widely used in organic agriculture, also have zero VOC emissions. Inert ingredients, which are not covered in this essay, are also found to have negative impacts on the environment and on pollinators in particular . Conventional and organic growers adopt different pest management practices. As specified by the NOP, organic growers shall use pesticides only when biological, cultural, and mechanical/physical practices are insufficient. Chemical options remain essential for organic pest management programs. Currently over 7,500 pesticide products are allowed for use in organic crop and livestock production, processing, and handling. In Figure 1.1, the acreage treated with different types of pesticides is shown on the left y-axis for both conventional and organic fields. Treated acreage is divided evenly among types for AIs that belong to multiple pesticide types, such as sulfur, which is both a fungicide and an insecticide. The average number of pesticide applications per acre, which is defined as the total treated acreage divided by the total planted acreage, is plotted against the right y-axis in both panels. This is a common measure of pesticide uses that controls for differences in application rate among pesticide products . If multiple AIs are used in a single application, rolling benches hydroponics the treated acreage is counted separately for each AI. Planted acreage remained stable for conventional agriculture over the study period, so changes in the average number of applications per acre were due to changes in treated acreage. Organic planted acreage grew dramatically, but treated acreage increased even more. The number of applications per organic acre rose from 2 to 7. Figure 1.1 provides a highly aggregated view of pesticide use as different pesticide products with different AIs and application rates are used in conventional and organic fields. Examining the Figure 1.1 , insecticide is the most used pesticide type, accounting for 36% and 44% of total treated acreage in conventional and organic agriculture respectively in 2015. Herbicide is the second most used type of pesticide in conventional fields. In contrast, organic growers’ use of herbicides is limited. Fungicide is another major pesticide type, and sulfur is the most used fungicide AI in both conventional and organic fields.

Sulfur is an important plant nutrient, fungicide, and acaricide in agriculture. The pesticide group “others” primarily includes plant growth regulators and pheromones. Disaggregating insecticide use provides more detailed insight into the nature of the difference between conventional and organic production. Figure 1.2 plots the insecticide treated acreage by physiological functions affected . Only three groups of insecticides are available to organic growers, while six are available to conventional growers. In conventional agriculture, 67% of treated acreage in 2015 was treated with insecticides that targeted nerves or muscles, which include organophosphates, pyrethroids, and neonicotinoids. For organic growers, two AIs, spinosad and pyrethrins, are available to target those physiological functions. The “unknown” category, which is mostly sulfur, accounted for a significant portion of treated acreage in organic agriculture. Insecticides that target the midgut, which includes Bacillus thuringiensis and several granulosis viruses, are widely applied in organic fields. Conventional growers rarely use them due to the high cost. In 2015, acreage treated with midgut targeted insecticides was 1% of total treated acreage in conventional agriculture and 24% in organic agriculture. A detailed discussion of insecticide and fungicide use by mode of action in conventional and organic production is in the appendix. Insecticides and fungicides in the two pest management programs have different modes of action and pose different levels of environmental impact. Simply comparing treated acreage or the amount of pesticide products used does not identify the differences in environmental impacts. In this context, the PURE index serves as a consistent measure across farming systems.Figure 1.3 plots PURE indices for conventional and organic fields by year. Index values for air and soil are significantly higher than those for the other environmental dimensions in both farming systems, which means that pesticide use in general has greater impacts on air and soil quality than groundwater, pollinators, and surface water. Risk indices of conventional fields are relatively stable from 1995 to 2015, with no obvious overall changes for air or soil, despite the many changes that have occurred during this 20-year period in regulations and grower portfolios. While PURE indices decreased 16% for surface water, 26% for pollinators, and 7% for groundwater over the same time period, these three were much less impacted by pesticides in 1995, the beginning of the study period. Despite the numerous regulatory actions designed to reduce environmental impacts over this 20-year period, such as the methyl bromide phase-out, large-scale substitution of pyrethroids for organophosphates, and regulations to reduce VOC emissions from non-fumigant products, the overall environmental impacts of conventional pesticide use show only limited reductions when aggregated across all crops. PURE indices for organic fields are similar to conventional fields in that the air and soil have significantly higher index vales than the others. However, the aggregate risk indices in all five dimensions are much lower in organic fields. Compared to conventional agriculture, organic agriculture has dramatically lower PURE indices for surface water , groundwater , air , soil , and pollinators . The reduction for air varies greatly across major California crops. Large reductions in the PURE index for air are observed for table grapes , wine grapes , and processing tomatoes , while others had relatively small ones such as leaf lettuce and almonds . The reduction in the PURE index for soil varies across crops as well, ranging from leaf lettuce to carrots . For surface water, groundwater, and pollinators, the differences between the PURE index in organic and conventional fields are similar across crops.

The present study found no effect of adolescent cannabinoid exposure in the escalation model, suggesting that adolescent WIN exposure may not facilitate the acquisition, maintenance, or escalation of cocaine use in adulthood. An alternative hypothesis is that the effect of cannabinoid use may not be observed on cocaine intake per se; instead, cannabinoid exposure may produce an increase in the motivation for cocaine, leading to an increase in compulsive cocaine seeking. Indeed, prior exposure to another potential gateway drug, alcohol, was found to have no effect on subsequent cocaine self-administration per se but produced greater motivation and compulsive-like cocaine seeking under a PR schedule of reinforcement. However, we observed no differences between the WIN-exposed and control groups in adulthood when we used a PR schedule of reinforcement to examine whether rats with prior exposure to WIN express alterations of the motivation to self-administer cocaine.One limitation of long-term behavioral studies in adolescent rats, including the present study, is that puberty in rats is relatively short . Compared with adults, rats that are allowed to self-administer cocaine during adolescence have been shown to be more vulnerable to cocaine addiction. Unfortunately, in the model of cannabinoid exposure during adolescence , cocaine self-administration can only be studied starting in late adolescence and continuing into adulthood because rats exit puberty by PND60. Because of this limitation, one possibility is that cannabinoid exposure during adolescence may affect cocaine intake in adolescence. The present results demonstrate that chronic exposure to cannabinoids does not facilitate the acquisition of cocaine self-administration or compulsive-like cocaine intake in adulthood, hydroponic table measured by the escalation of cocaine self-administration and PR responding in a relevant model of cocaine use disorder.

These results suggest that cannabinoid exposure per se is unlikely to be causally responsible for the association between prior cannabis use and future cocaine use in adulthood as purported by the gateway hypothesis. However, we found that cannabinoid exposure produced long-lasting increases in irritability-like behavior, which may indirectly facilitate the emergence of social conflicts and other mental disorders that may contribute to the abuse of drugs other than cocaine. Additionally, the cross-sensitization between WIN and cocaine in adolescence—which was not observed in adulthood—may highlight a short-term increase in the vulnerability to cocaine-induced behaviors. In summary, the present results showed that cannabinoid exposure during adolescence in rats produced cross-sensitization to cocaine in adolescence and a long-lasting increase in irritability-like behavior in adulthood. However, it did not facilitate the acquisition or escalation of cocaine self-administration or compulsive-like responding for cocaine in adulthood.Marijuana is the most widely used controlled substance in the world . In 2016, 192.2 million people used marijuana . Regular marijuana use, particularly initiated in adolescence, is associated with a range of adverse consequences, including poor cognitive and educational outcomes, low self-reported life satisfaction , downward socioeconomic mobility , psychiatric illness , marijuana-involved injury , and substance use disorders . Perceived risk and perceived availability of marijuana have historically been important drivers of adolescent marijuana use, and often targets of interventions to prevent or reduce adolescents’ use . However, these relationships may be changing. Most extant research on the changing associations between adolescent perceived risk, availability, and use of marijuana has been conducted in the United States , where 28 states and the District of Columbia have legalized medical marijuana since 2000, and 10 states and DC have legalized recreational marijuana since 2012 .

In this context, more adolescents now perceive no/low risk of marijuana use, but the prevalence of marijuana use has not increased simultaneously . Research on changes in the individual-level association between no/low perceived risk and use has been mixed. Some have found that the association weakened in recent years , while others have reported that it strengthened or remained stable . Additionally, perceived easy availability of marijuana has largely declined among US adolescents . Evidence suggests that the association between perceived availability and use of marijuana has remained strong and stable over time . Understanding these relationships is particularly important in light of recent liberalization of marijuana access, as perceived risk and availability are two key mechanisms through which legalization could impact use. In this study, we focus on the Southern Cone context for two reasons. First the Southern Cone has recently experienced changes in marijuana regulation, which could impact perceived risk and availability. Second, trends in adolescent marijuana use and perceived availability are different from those in the US, which could suggest distinct relationships between perceived risk and availability and use of marijuana. In 2013, Uruguay enacted a law providing the government full regulation over the large scale production and sale of recreational marijuana. Adults in Uruguay can purchase marijuana at pharmacies, grow marijuana at home, or acquire it through a cannabis club . In Argentina, possession of marijuana for personal use continues to be illegal ; however, a 2009 court judgment marked the beginning of a paradigm shift in the criminalization of marijuana since it raised a contradiction between Law 23,737 and Article 19 of the Constitution, which protects individuals’ freedom from state regulation . In 2017, Argentina approved access to medical marijuana under specific circumstances . In Chile, marijuana is decriminalized, a limited set of cannabis-based pharmaceutical products are available for medical use, and a new bill allowing other sources of access and formulations is under debate .

Since the early 2000’s, past-month adolescent marijuana use has increased in Uruguay , Chile , and Argentina . These trends are distinct from the US where marijuana use has remained stable , and from other South American countries where past-year use is less than 5% . Although perceived risk of marijuana use has decreased in both the Southern Cone and the US, perceived availability has increased in the Southern Cone, but decreased in the US . We know of no study that has assessed the individual-level relationships between adolescent perceived risk, availability, and use of marijuana in the context of the Southern Cone. Such research may inform the priority and scope of context-specific public health interventions to prevent adolescent marijuana use and help identify the drivers of use during these historical shifts. As more regions debate or enact policies to decriminalize or legalize marijuana use, the impetus for cross-country comparisons increases. Individual-level data from adolescents enrolled in secondary education in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina were obtained from the National Surveys on Drug Use Among Secondary School Students . These cross sectional surveys, carried out every 2–3 years, collect information on substance use and related risk factors. The sampling design and survey instruments are similar to the Monitoring the Future Surveys and were implemented comparably across countries. Surveys were self-report and administered confidentially in students’ classrooms. The sample included 8th, 10th, and 12th graders in schools classified as public, private, and other in mostly urban areas. Net secondary school enrollment was 80–90% in Chile and Argentina over the last decade and increased from 67.6–82.8% from 2007 to 2016 in Uruguay . The sample was selected via clustered, multistage random sampling from areas with 10,000+ and 30,000+ inhabitants in Uruguay and Chile, respectively, greenhouse tables and schools with at least 20 students in the grades under study in Argentina. In Uruguay and Argentina, strata were types of school within urban areas of geographical regions in each country; primary sampling units were schools followed by classrooms. In Chile, strata were school type by grade within mostly urban areas and primary sampling units were classrooms. Individual-level survey weights were used. Recent school cooperation rates ranged from 76–86%. This study was determined not human subjects research by the University of California, Davis Institutional Review Board.Consistent with prior studies from South America and the US, our results indicate that the less risk an individual attributes to marijuana use, the more likely he/she is to use marijuana . However, in the Southern Cone countries, the overall magnitude of this association weakened, although it strengthened again most recently in Argentina. This suggests that risk perceptions became a weaker correlate of adolescent marijuana use over time. There are several implications of these results. First, given the overall increase in the proportion of adolescents who perceive marijuana use to pose no/low risk of harm, marijuana use would have likely increased to a greater degree in the Southern Cone had the risk/use relationship not weakened. Second, factors other than risk perceptions, such as marijuana availability, may have played a greater role in the increase in adolescent marijuana use observed during our study period. This highlights the need to consider changes in multiple individual and environmental determinants of marijuana use. Third, there may be a cross-national weakening of the risk/use relationship. We found this trend in all Southern Cone countries, and some have identified the weakening of this relationship in the US as well . This would suggest that risk perceptions may be, at least in part, shaped by broader societal norms that extend beyond local or national context. Increases in global information sharing via internet use, social media, and international news coverage may contribute to this trend .Consistent with extant research in Europe and the US , we found that adolescents who perceive marijuana to be easily available are more likely to use marijuana. However, the stability of this association varied over time and between countries.

In Chile, the availability/use association weakened, and became increasingly similar to the risk/use association, both in magnitude and trajectory, when risk and availability were modeled together. In contrast, the relationship between availability and use strengthened in Argentina and Uruguay, becoming stronger at times than the relationship between perceived risk and use in both countries. However, because we were not able to model both variables together in Argentina and Uruguay due to finite sample limitations, it is unclear how the associations relate to one another. Variation in the relationship between perceived availability and use of marijuana over time and between countries may be explained by several factors. First, different trends in availability by country may explain differences in the contribution that perceived availability makes to marijuana use. In Chile, perceived availability generally declined from 2001 to the late 2000’s and then increased until 2016, though at lower rates than use. For example, marijuana availability may depend on where individuals buy, grow, or use marijuana, neighborhood police presence and enforcement of laws, or norms about diversion of marijuana to youth . Second, alternative contributing causes of marijuana use may have arisen in Chile to a greater extent than in Uruguay and Argentina, displacing the contribution that perceived availability make to marijuana use. Such factors may include changes in peer or family substance use , changes in the illegal drug market , or social and cultural changes toward marijuana, influenced by strong lobbying for drug policy reform–particularly for cannabis– in a context of massive social movements among students . While examination of such exposures was outside the scope of the current study, future research should examine whether the contribution of perceived availability and risk to marijuana use is moderated by other potential contributing causes in the local environment. In Uruguay, the increase in perceived availability is not surprising, as the 2013 law created a concrete path to marijuana access for adults. Therefore, greater perceived availability in Uruguay likely corresponds to greater actual availability. For example, it is possible that a surplus of self-cultivated marijuana has tipped over into the streets. Second, even though minors cannot buy it, marijuana may seem more accessible because it sold to adults in pharmacies. Third, there may be increased exposure to marijuana use and contact with peers or family members who use marijuana, which could predictably result in a growing sense of availability. Our findings provide several insights about the availability/use association. First, in this region, where marijuana regulation is becoming progressively liberal and where adolescent marijuana use is increasing, perceived availability may be an increasingly important driver of marijuana use trends . Second, given the strengthening of the availability/use relationship in Argentina and Uruguay, and the high prevalence of perceived easy availability in all three countries, public health professionals in the Southern Cone may consider devoting additional resources towards regulating and intervening on the pathways by which adolescents gain access to marijuana. Relatedly, our findings raise questions about how perceptions of availability relate to real access to marijuana, including how adolescents most often obtain marijuana and whether modes of acquisition have changed over time.

These stigmatizing views of Hmong-American cultivators affect all cannabis growers. Anti-cannabis pressure creates a precarious state of impermanence — a season’s crop might be destroyed, infrastructure confiscated and investments of limited resources lost at any moment, disallowing longer-term investments. The impermanence makes noncompliance and deleterious environmental and health effects more likely, thereby perpetuating perceptions of cannabis cultivators as nuisances and dangers. As enforcement makes private land cultivation more risky, cultivators move “back up the hill,” namely onto ecologically sensitive public lands, thus substantiating characterizations of cannabis growers as criminal polluters. These stigmas even spread to county residents who do not grow cannabis themselves but if perceived to assist cannabis cultivation can face social sanctions. Meanwhile, well-resourced cultivators have an advantage over small-scale producers. They can protect their crops from visibility and complaints by concealing them on large plots of land or inside physical infrastructures ; and for white growers there is the anonymity of not being marked as ethnically different and therefore subject to heightened scrutiny. Greater access to capital, land and racial privileges insulates some from visibility and criminalization, resulting in uneven development and disparities in California’s expanding cannabis industry. Additionally, jurisdictions like the Siskiyou municipalities of Mt. Shasta and Weed are welcoming regulated cannabis commerce, thus capitalizing on its expulsion from the rest of Siskiyou and benefiting entrepreneurs with social capital and network access to successfully navigate complex public regulatory systems.After a century of cannabis’s criminal exclusion in California, grow table state voters have elected to integrate cannabis farmers into civil regulation.

An important facet of evolving cannabis regulations is local determination. As one interviewee pointed out, a 1-acre farm might be permitted in rural San Joaquin County but would not make sense in downtown San Diego. Yet, when cannabis cultivation is disqualified from consideration as agriculture by localities, as it has been in Siskiyou County, it can be substantively recriminalized and placed beyond the regulatory reach of civil institutions. Prohibitionist strategies that blur lines between civil and criminal enforcement lead to penetrating forms of visibility and vulnerability that produce inequity and disparity. The result, as this case illustrates, can be a narrow, exclusive definition of agriculture that affirms dominant notions of land use and community. The definition of cannabis cultivation as agriculture by the CDFA creates an opportunity for service providers and regulators — including agricultural institutions, public health departments and environmental agencies — to craft programs and policies that openly address the negative impacts of production. Owley advises that “if we treat cultivation of marijuana the same as we treat cultivation of other agricultural crops, we gain stricter regulation of the growing process, including limits on pesticide usage, water pollution, wetland conversion, air pollution, and local land-use laws.” Presently, however, many agencies are being enlisted in locally crafted criminalizing efforts, thus limiting their ability to work cooperatively with cultivators and address issues through customary civil abatement processes. Though unregulated cannabis cultivation can pose threats to public health, safety and welfare, police enforcement is only one of many possible ways to address it. Siskiyou’s cannabis cultivators experience familiar agricultural challenges around access to land, water and credit. These challenges are amplified without technical assistance or institutional support. If recognized statewide as farmers, these cultivators would be better positioned to access agricultural training and support services, thus addressing ecological and social concerns around cannabis production.

Additionally, new cannabis cultivators might be considered “beginning” farmers according to the CDFA, and minority farmers, including Hmong-Americans, who experience poverty at twice the national rate , would be considered “socially disadvantaged” under the California Farmer Equity Act of 2017 . Farmers with these designations would, in fact, be prioritized for technical assistance and support from farm service providers — if, that is, they were recognized as farmers. Uniformly treating cannabis cultivation as agriculture would also help enable the collection of accurate and robust data by researchers. This information base is necessary if agricultural institutions are to take an assistive and educational orientation toward cannabis farmers. Continued enforcement tactics that amplify distrust, frustration and confusion will further hinder data collection , leaving little basis to understand basic dynamics of complex, interdisciplinary systems like agriculture . In a criminalized situation, it is inevitable that information is metered and brokered by community leaders in ways that inhibit full understanding of cannabis cultivation. We suggest, for all these reasons, that a decisive break with enforcement-led, prohibitionist trajectories is needed and that agricultural institutions lead civil policy development and support farmers who cultivate cannabis. Agricultural service providers could play a leadership role in addressing the pressing needs of farmers — both those impacted by and engaging in cannabis cultivation. Yet, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources Cooperative Extension advisors, for instance, consistently report that they are currently prohibited from engaging with cannabis issues . Additionally, many county-based agricultural commissions, Siskiyou County’s included, feel that cannabis is not an agricultural enterprise and therefore do not see its cultivators as their clientele. Without leadership from agricultural institutions and agencies, the expanding cannabis cultivation industry is left to develop unevenly across the state — with wealthy private interests capitalizing in some locales while vulnerable and unregulated growers may retreat, to avoid criminalization, into ecologically sensitive areas.

UC ANR and CDFA have an opportunity to fulfill their missions and facilitate, for a burgeoning farming population, greater parity in farmer rights, capacities and resource access. Identifying the factors limiting imperiled wildlife populations requires an understanding of all influences affecting population growth and persistence. The geographic range of the fisher, , a medium-sized mesocarnivore that inhabits northern North America, has contracted significantly over the past century. Several factors potentially explain this contraction, including trapping and habitat alteration associated with fire management and logging throughout the early 1900s . Recent conservation efforts, such as reintroductions and forest restoration to improve habitat, have helped to increase the fisher’s range from a range-wide low of 43% back to 68% of its historical range. However, recent expansions were concentrated primarily in the central and eastern portions of the fisher’s range. Fisher populations in the Pacific states currently occupy only 21% of their historic distribution in this region and have not expanded, even in some regions with ample available suitable habitat and limited forest fragmentation. Fishers were extirpated from the state of Washington and northern and central Oregon prior to reintroductions to these regions from northern and eastern populations. Isolation and failure of population expansion in this portion of their range has prompted the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to deem these populations in these Pacific states a West Coast Distinct Population Segment and propose them for listing under the US Endangered Species Act as a threatened species. In 2015, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife listed the southern Sierra Nevada population of fishers, vertical rack but not the northern California population, threatened under the California Endangered Species Act. California contains two genetically and geographically distinct native populations of fishers within this DPS. The northern California population inhabits the coastal and southern Cascade mountain ranges and is the larger of two California populations. The southern Sierra Nevada population is considerably smaller, thought to contain approximately 300 individuals with fewer than 120 breeding females. The USFWS considers five potential limiting factors as merits for listing: 1) destruction or modification of the habitat or species’ range; 2) overutilization for commercial, recreational, scientific or educational purposes; 3) disease or predation; 4) the inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms; or 5) other natural or manmade factors affecting its continued existence. Investigation into the frequencies of different causes of mortality can lend information to several of these concerns, most specifically factors 2, 3, and 5. Though several studies on western fisher populations have included descriptions of isolated cases of mortality for fisher, a systematic, large-scale investigation into cause-specific mortality as determined through full necropsies has not been conducted, specifically within the West Coast DPS . Since 2004, several long-term studies of the California fisher populations have been initiated investigating demographics, habitat utilization, and mortality, and we took the opportunity to investigate fisher mortality across projects for a more comprehensive examination throughout California.

Fishers were collected through three long-term projects in California , including one on the northern California population and two in the southern Sierra Nevada: the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management Project , and the USFS Kings River Fisher Project . The HVRFP project area was located in northwestern California on the Hoopa Reservation and adjacent private lands and federal United States Forest Service public lands. The HVRFP personnel monitored fishers from the ground using telemetry approximately 1–2 times per week . Both southern Sierra Nevada fisher projects were conducted on the Sierra National Forest in the northern and central portions of this population’s range. Fishers from the SNAMP project were located 3–6 times per week via aerial telemetry , while the KRFP personnel located each fisher via ground telemetry 2–3 times per week . In all projects, fishers were captured in box traps modified with plywood cubby boxes to minimize environmental stressors. Each fisher was fitted with a VHF radio-collar and monitored via radio-telemetry. Radio-collars were equipped with activity or mortality sensor. Inactivity on two consecutive location attempts separated by more than 24 hours or a single mortality signal from telemetry collars prompted attempts to recover carcasses as soon as was practical. When a fisher carcass was recovered, project biologists identified and recorded a suspected cause of mortality. Field based mortality determinations were constructed from evidence found at the immediate mortality site and the condition of the carcass . Recovered fisher carcasses were stored in a -20°C freezer until further analysis. Fishers were subject to a complete necropsy performed by a board-certified veterinary pathologist specializing in wildlife at the University of California, Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital or the California Animal Health and Food Safety Laboratory System on the UCD campus. Additionally, any uncollared fishers that were collected opportunistically from the field within or near project areas were necropsied. For each fisher carcass, age was determined by pulp-cavity closure or enumeration of cementum annuli of an upper premolar. Fishers were classified as kits if they were altricial and dependent on mothers-milk for nourishment , juveniles if weaned and <12 months of age, sub-adults when between 12–24 months of age, and adults when  24 months of age. Ancillary diagnostic testing was performed based on gross and histologic findings and consisted of molecular diagnostic tests to confirm a viral etiology, toxicological screening of selected Thissues, forensic genetic tests of swabbed ante-mortem bite wounds to identify species of predators, and serology to determine exposure to three carnivore pathogens: canine distemper virus , canine parvovirus-2 , and Toxoplasma gondii. Serological assessment and titer cutoffs were performed via indirect fluorescent-antibody assays on uncoagulated blood collected by sterile cardiac puncture. For both CDV and T. gondii, detection of both antibody isotype IgG, which persists for extended periods, and the short-duration antibody isotype IgM was used, while only detection of isotype IgG was used for CPV . Isotype IgM was utilized for selected pathogen assays since recent or acute infections from these pathogens may predispose individuals to certain causes of mortality. Predation was considered the cause of mortality if ante-mortem hemorrhage was observed and associated with bite, claw or talon wounds. In addition, we followed up visible field signs of predation for which ante-mortem hemorrhaging could not be determined with forensic DNA testing of Thissue around putative bite wounds or tooth marks. Mortalities were classified as “natural disease” if they exhibited clinically significant infectious or non-infectious factors that were considered by the pathologist to represent the primary cause of death. Mortalities were classified as “poisoning” if an individual had acute clinically significant signs of toxicosis associated with toxicant exposure . Fishers that died directly from anthropogenic factors were classified as “human-caused.” Vehicular strike was considered to be the cause of death when carcasses were recovered on or near roads combined with evidence of blunt trauma. If a fisher carcass had insufficient Thissues for a necropsy, severe autolysis or a lack of forensic evidence, its cause of death was classified as unknown.StaThistical analyses were performed using R studio version 0.98.507 and the “mlogit” packag. A kappa staThistic for test agreement was calculated to assess the strength of test agreement between field biologist-suspected cause of death and necropsy-confirmed cause of death .

Remarkably, Irvine has 9.7% of the Hispanic population, and Santa Ana—77.3%. In Outsiders, Howard Becker defines three types of social control of cannabis use: limiting supply and access to the drug; keeping nonusers from discovering that one is a user; defining the act as immoral. Since Becker published his book, cannabis has been depenalized, decriminalized, and finally legalized in California. Although the situation has significantly improved in terms of supply and access to cannabis, the stigmatization of cannabis use is still a pressing issue in the legal cannabis market. The war on drugs generated various misconceptions about cannabis, which detrimentally affected public perceptions. First, despite scientific research showing that cannabis is no more harmful than nicotine or alcohol, some people still believe that cannabis is a gateway drug to heavier substances that induces criminal activity and violence. Second, although most people recognize the medicinal benefits of cannabis , they continue to disfavor the recreational use of cannabis, perceiving it as a non-conforming and risky behavior and its users as weak and non-productive members of society. Finally, people who tolerate the recreational use of cannabis in private spaces do not always accept its public display and consumption. Agreeing with legalization as a concept, Californians are not ready to embrace it entirely and allow dispensaries in their own neighborhoods—this occasionally leads to their obtaining court rulings against cannabis-growing operations. The drug problem cannot be adequately understood without examining the underpinning issues of poverty and disadvantage . There is nothing inherently criminogenic about drugs, nor drugs necessarily relate to poverty. Stigmatization of drug use is a product of a culture in which the consumption of pleasurable intoxicants is deemed intolerable and punishable. Drug use is a heavily moralized territory, indoor grow shelves and the lower social strata suffer worse outcomes than more affluent people for the same drug-related behavior .

The literature on the history of drugs portrays drug regulation as a moral tale, in which the “blurry lines between us and them, privileged and repressed, strong and weak, keep getting rewritten as the boundaries between good and evil” . Existing at all social levels, drug use is recognized as a problem in specific social contexts—namely, it is clustered in the communities suffering already from multiple socio-economic difficulties . Even if the number of cannabis arrests is declining every year, Hispanics and African Americans continue to be disproportionately arrested. In California, in 2019, Hispanics accounted for 41.7% of cannabis felony arrests, African Americans for 22.3%, and whites for 21.3%. Despite the fact that cannabis consumption rates are higher among whites, they are less likely to be arrested for cannabis-related offenses . The idea behind socio-spatial control is that deviance should be contained within designated territories, i.e., if objects, practices, and behaviors do not fit the existing social order, they are to be spatially excluded. In this chapter, I tested the reverse hypothesis, i.e., if things are geographically put out of place, it means that they are viewed as socially undesirable and inappropriate. The statistical analysis shows that city governments act as moral entrepreneurs when deciding whether they want to forbid or allow legal cannabis businesses. The prohibition era stereotypes continue to influence the development of the legal cannabis market: most jurisdictions decide to keep aloof from spoiled identities and tainted places associated with cannabis use, even at the cost of not reaping financial rewards. On the contrary, economically disadvantaged communities with a larger Hispanic population are more likely to permit cannabis dispensaries because: they have higher financial incentives, and they have lower reputational risks. Since these communities are already marginalized and associated with crime, disadvantage, and social exclusion, having legal cannabis dispensaries will not exacerbate their stigmatization.As of May 2022, 38 states permit medical cannabis and 19 states permit recreational cannabis.

These policies have numerous potential implications for public health, including changes in the epidemiology of cannabis consumption and associated health outcomes. States regulate cannabis in varied ways, but many cede substantial powers to local governments. Within the bounds of state law, local authorities may determine the number and type of commercial cannabis businesses allowed, if any. They can also regulate locations of retail cannabis outlets, hours and days of sale, types of products sold, packaging, advertising, tax rates, and clean air requirements. Guidelines for state and local cannabis control policies regulating cannabis are based on alcohol and tobacco research. Recommended policies may protect public health by limiting cannabis availability and potency and by encouraging safer modes of use. In states with legal cannabis and local control, city and county governments can advance health equity by adopting health-promoting cannabis control policies and ensuring that they are fairly applied across the population. Little is known about local variation in cannabis control policies or to whom these policies apply. Previous studies surveyed local cannabis control policies following recreational cannabis legalization in Colorado, Washington, and California. All found wide variation, primarily between jurisdictions that banned commercial cannabis businesses and those that allowed all or most commercial activities. However, none of these studies characterized the populations affected by distinct policy approaches. Variation in local laws is important, because if policies that protect public health are adopted in socially advantaged communities but not in disadvantaged communities, health disparities may be exacerbated. For example, uneven application of smoke-free tobacco laws across localities was linked to racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in tobacco related disease. Anticipating such disparities can inform appropriate public health responses.

Previous studies show that cannabis outlets, particularly illegal ones, are disproportionately located in less advantaged communities. Studies from alcohol control show that local governments can play a role in both creating and mitigating undue burden of alcohol outlets in vulnerable communities through local planning, zoning, and public health regulations. Similar provisions could be needed to protect communities from uneven distributions of legal or illegal cannabis outlets. In this study, we characterized the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of communities subject to different types of local cannabis control policies. We considered 3 levels of policy measures: overall bans on cannabis businesses, restrictions on cannabis availability, and individual cannabis control policies. We hypothesized that policies designed to protect public health would be less common in socially disadvantaged communities. We focused on 12 counties in California, where adult use of recreational cannabis was legalized on November 9, 2016, and retail sales were implemented on January 1, 2018.We assessed local cannabis control polices for 12 of California’s 58 counties and all the incorporated cities within them. These counties were selected to capture a range of sizes, sociodemographic compositions, political orientations, and cannabis policy approaches. City policies apply within incorporated city borders, indoor garden table and county policies apply to areas outside of incorporated cities . We defined “jurisdictions” as the set of incorporated cities and unincorporated county areas because these are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive geographic areas to which distinct policies apply. The 12 counties included 230 distinct cities and 11 unincorporated county areas , covering 59% of the California population . Using a legal epidemiological approach, we systematically coded characteristics of cannabis policies in all 241 jurisdictions and then linked these policies to data on demographic and socioeconomic factors to characterize the affected populations. For each jurisdiction, we identified the corresponding local government’s online searchable database of currently applicable laws. All code and ordinances are publicly available under the California Public Records Act. We downloaded all legal text pertaining to cannabis by using the search term “cannabis OR marijuana OR marihuana.” Across jurisdictions, relevant legal text ranged in length from 1 paragraph to thousands of pages. Five authors reviewed the text using a structured data collection instrument to capture the presence or absence and content of prespecified provisions in each jurisdiction’s cannabis law. Policy data were collected and managed using REDCap electronic data capture tools hosted at the University of California San Francisco. The data collection instrument was iteratively piloted and refined as new policy approaches were uncovered. To ensure accuracy, all jurisdictions were double coded by 2 analysts until achieving greater than 95% agreement. Policy data collection and coding were conducted from November 2020 to January 2021. The complete protocol and data collection instrument are provided in Appendices B and C .California state law specifies a minimum set of policies that apply to medical and recreational cannabis statewide. However, localities retain considerable discretion. We collected cannabis policy measures, guided by an established taxonomy of all possible cannabis policies developed by affiliates of the Alcohol Policy Information System. From this comprehensive taxonomy, we measured all policies that could be applied at the local level in California given state law, varied across jurisdictions within California, were more restrictive than state law, and were plausibly related to public health according to previous evidence, recommended public health best practices, and expert opinion. We captured the greatest detail on restrictions related to cannabis availability and retail sales, because these are major levers for modifying population-level consumption, and existing evidence suggests that policies regulating retail sales are the key component of state laws linking legalization to consumption and problems. Appendix A, Table A describes these local policies, relative to state law.To characterize the populations exposed to different policy approaches, we included a range of demographic and socioeconomic characteristics from sources including the US Census Bureau and Geolytics.

We considered sociodemographic characteristics related to health disparities, including age, race/ethnicity, gender, educational attainment, poverty, unemployment, median income, household composition, urbanicity , home ownership, and population change. We also assessed the density of social organizations as a measure of social capital and density of general retail businesses as a measure of economic development. Appendix A, Table B provides additional detail on each covariate. In addition to considering each sociodemographic characteristic individually, to help synthesize the overall pattern of results, we created a binary measure of social advantage by entering all of the jurisdiction-level sociodemographic measures into a principal components analysis and dichotomizing the resulting first component at the median. In sensitivity analyses, we considered measures of social advantage dichotomized at the 75th and 90th percentiles.We found substantial local variation in cannabis control policies. Of 241 jurisdictions, 83 permitted at least 1 form of commercial medical or recreational cannabis business . The largest distinction in regulatory approaches across jurisdictions was between those that banned all forms of medical and recreational cannabis businesses and those that permitted them all . Between these extremes, 5 jurisdictions permitted all types of medical businesses but not recreational businesses; 14 permitted cultivation, distribution, manufacture, and testing but not retail; and 5 permitted retail only. Jurisdictions with nonzero residential populations permitting at least one form of medical or recreational retail cannabis enacted a range of cannabis control policies . Most jurisdictions required local permits for retail sales , limited hours of sale , taxed retail purchases , restricted the density of outlets permitted per land area or population , and adopted operating standards for upkeep and safety . Bans on on-site consumption, which protect workers and visitors from health hazards such as secondhand smoke exposure, were present in 74% of jurisdictions. Less common were public health tools such as restrictions on marketing or advertising , server training requirements , limits on product types or potency , or social host liability .For the 238 jurisdictions with nonzero residential populations, Table 1 compares the population characteristics of jurisdictions banning all cannabis businesses versus those that permitted 1 or more. All-out bans on all cannabis businesses were more common in areas with higher socioeconomic status. Populations in jurisdictions permitting commercial cannabis, by contrast, were on average less educated, with lower median income, more poverty, higher unemployment, and more crowded housing. Cities and unincorporated areas allowing cannabis businesses were also slightly older and had greater proportions of Black and Latinx residents, and fewer Asian and White residents. Population density, population growth, renters, non-family households, and densities of general retail and social organizations were also greater in jurisdictions permitting cannabis businesses.For the 68 jurisdictions with nonzero residential populations that permitted at least 1 form of cannabis retail, Table 2 shows the characteristics of populations residing in jurisdictions with varying numbers of public health restrictions on retail sales and cannabis availability.

As I discussed above, cannabis prohibition and cannabis legalization are not separate processes; these are two dialectically united phenomena that interact, contradict, negate, and reaffirm each other. Socio-legal scholars, who are interested in cannabis as a criminal justice issue, often overlook the fact that control does not exist without resistance and that criminalization and legalization are two sides of the same coin. It is impossible to understand lawmaking processes without considering the work of mobilized groups of citizens challenging the unfair laws and shifting agendas of resourceful players. As I show below, defining the “drug problem” is not a prerogative of mighty actors or institutions. Some less powerful actors can create and promote alternative narratives about drugs and drug users and ultimately succeed in changing the governing norms and public opinion. The ongoing cannabis legalization in California offers a clear illustration of how social movements can become a local source of power and foster ideational change. It was the first state to prohibit recreational use of cannabis in 1913 and the first to allow its medical use in 1996. Pro-cannabis social movements emerged in response to the Controlled Substance Act that classified cannabis as a Schedule I drug . According to Andreas Glaeser , change becomes possible when the state fails to positively validate people’s understandings of the social world. Understandings contribute significantly to the stabilization of political institutions, but for this to happen, they need to be continuously validated.

There are three modes of understanding based on: interpretations, emotions, and senses. In the case of cannabis, drying rack cannabis the de-fetishization of the prohibitionist policies started in the 1960s, when new scientific evidence, dissaThisfaction with authorities, and people’s own experience challenged the domain of unquestioned background assumptions about cannabis and its users. The first objection to the prohibitionist assumptions came from the scientific community, which provided a new interpretation of cannabis. Although Nixon disowned the Shafer Commission’s report , which called for the decriminalization of cannabis possession, its results were spreading in society, along with the La Guardia Report of 1944. From the 1970s, scientific evidence proving the medical benefits of cannabis and demystifying its deleterious effects was multiplying, but the government continued to ignore it. The scientific community was calling for thorough research of the chemical properties, pharmacological qualities, and therapeutic applications of cannabis . More and more studies had shown the possible benefits of cannabis use. However, the scientific evidence was constantly downplayed by the federal authorities and the National Institute of Drug Abuse, who continued to fixate on presumed adverse effects of cannabis . For instance, the Reagan administration ignored the National Academy of Science’s report published in 1982, which questioned the effectiveness of full prohibition and recommended removal of criminal sanctions. Under the democratic Clinton presidency, a study co-authored by Harvard Medical School and Yale University showed the efficacy of cannabis for a wide range of ailments.41 Yet, once again, scientific findings did not change the anti-cannabis course of the political establishment; on the contrary, the drug-war budget doubled, and the record number of Americans were arrested on cannabis charges in those years .

The second challenge to the prohibitionist status quo was a growing dissaThisfaction with the US drug policy and the defiance of state authority. Cannabis use became a form of protest, a central symbol of the counterculture, and a ritual that demonstrated the willingness of young Americans to run risks with their peers . Many college students began smoking cannabis to protest the war in Vietnam. The government responded with harsher enforcement of drug laws: cannabis-related arrests rose from 18,000 in 1965 to 220,000 in 1970. That inevitably amplified protest movements. According to Patrick Anderson, the legalization movement began on August 16, 1964, when a young man walked into a police station in San Francisco, lit a cannabis joint and asked to be arrested . Later that year, his lawyer launched the Legalize Marijuana organization , which sponsored the first pro-cannabis demonstration in America. In sum, the legalization movement was developing in response to political threats, confronting the mythology of “reefer madness” and persuading Americans that the time had come to change political priorities and put an end to the incarceration of young people for using a mild intoxicant . The third challenge to the prohibitionist discourse arose at the level of individual senses. An increasing number of people who used cannabis realized that it was no more dangerous than alcohol. The fact that cannabis was classified as the most dangerous drug, causing more damage than cocaine, opium, or methadone, sounded preposterous to those who had experienced cannabis effects. Thus, less and less people believed in the myths propagated during the anti-cannabis campaign. In 1975, psychiatrist and social activist Tod Hiro Mikuriya wrote: “Marijuana use in America is reminiscent of the era of Prohibition, in that almost 30 million people have smoked pot and the police of the 180 million other Americans are trying to prevent them from doing so. Despite vigorous efforts of society to regulate by deterrent legal sanctions, they have obviously failed. The use continues to escalate. In fact, marijuana has become a permanent part of American society. Since those who try and continue to use pot find it enjoyable, and many more people are trying it all the time, marijuana use is clearly here to stay.

The time has passed when prohibition against personal use and possession should have been repealed” . All three factors—scientific evidence, dissaThisfaction with authorities, and personal experience—made Americans more susceptible to the proclaimed dangers of cannabis. And this, in turn, raised political dissidence. In the 1970s, many social activists felt that the decriminalization and legalization of cannabis were just “around the corner.” Not only scienThists and activists but also some state actors favored the depenalization of cannabis. The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws became the main voice of the pro-cannabis movement. Founded in 1970 by Georgetown law graduate Keith Stroup, the organization brought together a group of young lawyers, scienThists, civic leaders, and even politicians to fight for cannabis reform . From the very beginning, NORML was a public-interest lobby that represented the interests of cannabis users, commercial greenhouse supplies focusing on individual rights and the social harm caused by incarceration for minor drug offenses. Although its ultimate goal was the complete legalization of cannabis, in the 1970s, NORML focused mainly on the depenalization of cannabis and its removal from the list of Schedule I controlled substances. A catalyst of the national pro-cannabis movement, NORML scored its first victory in 1973 when Oregon has ended criminal penalties for smoking cannabis. Over the decade, several more states—including California—have followed suit. In 1976, California approved the Moscone Act, which made possession of small amounts of cannabis a civil instead of a criminal offense. That was the beginning of cannabis decriminalization in California: felony arrests for cannabis decreased fourfold—from 99,587 in 1974 to 19,284 in 1976 . In subsequent years, both the number of organizations working on pro-cannabis issues and the pressure imposed on the federal government increased. In 1977, President Carter asked Congress to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of cannabis at the federal level . But his plan never came to life due to the scandal discrediting his drug advisor Peter Bourne and the emergence of the grassroots parents’ organizations, which were building strong opposition to cannabis decriminalization. In 1986, the Drug Enforcement Administration finally agreed to review a petition filed by NORML and the American Public Health Association that asked to recognize the medical value of cannabis and remove it from Schedule I classification . After careful investigation, the DEA’s chief administrative law judge Francis L. Young stated that cannabis “has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people […] and it would be unreasonable […] for DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance.” The judge permitted the transfer of cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule II so that cannabis could be legally available for patients. However, the DEA director ignored such recommendations . Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the federal government and the media launched the largest anti-drug and anti-cannabis campaign. In this cultural context, the pro-cannabis movements did not have any political or discursive opportunities to bring about legal change. To a great degree, the success of social movements depends on their ability to “offer frames that tap into a hegemonic discourse” . Cannabis activists had nothing to offer; their claims did not resonate with ideas widely accepted in the broader society. The situation has changed with the AIDS epidemic, which provided discursive opportunities for politically effective framing. The narrative that cannabis could be medicine is not new; it has existed for centuries, despite the efforts of the federal drug enforcement to suppress it. But in the 1980s and 1990s, the medical conception of cannabis had reemerged and developed into a powerful moral agenda .

Robert Randall, a young college professor from Washington, D.C., was the Rosa Parks of the medical cannabis movement . In 1976, he sued the federal government for the right to use cannabis to treat his glaucoma. His doctor testified that the use of cannabis significantly decreased eye pressure, one of the primary symptoms of glaucoma, which kept Randall from going blind . In 1978, D.C. Superior Court established an important legal precedent: Randall won his case and became the first legal cannabis smoker since cannabis prohibition in 1937. However, Randall’s victory did not solve the problem of obtaining cannabis legally. He was not allowed to grow cannabis for himself and filed a petition demanding that the government provides him enough cannabis from the federal experimental farm at the University of Mississippi . His victory forced the Food and Drug Administration to establish the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program, which provided government-grown cannabis for seriously ill patients. However, the program was limited to a small number of patients since many people who had received medical approval were rejected by the program . By 1991, only 15 patients were enrolled in the program. Randall’s legal precedent was a landmark victory, and social movements continued to exploit the medical discourse in the following years. Pro-cannabis activists crafted the image of cannabis as a compassionate palliative for seriously ill people and the image of cannabis users as patients, not criminals . However, such a medical frame was not very successful until the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, which made medical cannabis an urgent issue and provided first discursive and later political opportunities for the movement. Many AIDS patients experienced wasting syndrome, and cannabis helped them stimulate appetite, retain weight, and prolong lives. As Cyrus Dioun argues, “the death and devastation of the AIDS epidemic made it necessary to discuss previously unmentionable topics” . From 1980 to 1995, over 500,000AIDS cases and over 300,000 AIDS deaths have been reported in the US. San Francisco was at the forefront of both the AIDS crisis and the medical cannabis movement. By 1993, 4% of the city’s population were living with AIDS . The outbreak of the AIDS crisis challenged the illegal status of cannabis: now, law-abiding AIDS patients had to take illegal actions that were previously unthinkable, i.e., to purchase an illicit drug on the black market to ease pain and restore appetite . The cause seemed greater than harm, and it raised sympathy and support for AIDS patients among the population. AIDS patients first tried the path that Robert Randall has opened for them: they applied to the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program to obtain government-supplied cannabis, but the number of applications was so large that the government stopped accepting new applicants in the early 1990s . Unable to get cannabis through legal channels, AIDS patients were pushed to the illegal market where medical cannabis activists developed informal institutions that delivered illegal products to legitimate consumers . In 1991, Dennis Peron, an illegal cannabis dealer and gay rights activist, drafted and organized the passage of the San Francisco medical cannabis initiative , which recommended the State of California and the California Medical Association to include cannabis in the list of available medicines and not penalize doctors for prescribing it.

The image of cannabis as a dangerous drug was promoted in the public discourse, which resulted in its classification as a Schedule I narcotic by the 1970’s Controlled Substances Act .11 In the 1980s, with the launch of the war on drugs, the prosecution of cannabis cultivators, distributors, and consumers is escalated, which significantly contributed to the mass incarceration of minority groups. Meanwhile, cannabis supporters crafted an alternative image of cannabis as a safe and pleasurable alternative to alcohol. Social movements and their efforts to portray cannabis as an innocuous substance led to the decriminalization of cannabis in several states in the 1970s . However, neither the prohibitionists nor the proponents of cannabis viewed it as a medicine, but primarily as an intoxicant used for hedonistic pleasure . The medical conceptualization of cannabis came back with the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Cannabis use helped patients to increase appetite, retain weight, and hence prolonged their lives. Pro-legalization activists created a new concept of cannabis as a compassionate palliative for dying people. Thence began the process of cannabis legalization in the US.12 This brief historical overview suggests that cannabis is more than a plant in modern America. As Alan Bock argues, “It is something of a cultural signifier, a totem laden with assumptions and attitudes about what constitutes a good life” . Nowadays, cannabis has three equally powerful meanings. In different situations, cannabis is described as a dangerous drug, a medical treatment, or soft tonic. This polysemy creates a significant challenge for developing consistent legal and cultural infrastructure related to cannabis vertical farming consumption and distribution. Although both medical and recreational cannabis were legalized in California, the idea of “legal cannabis” is still vague.

The very distinction between medical and recreational meanings exacerbates this ambiguity, leaving cannabis is in a limbo: it is a pain-relief medicine that is not available in the pharmacy, and a recreational intoxicant , that cannot be bought at the supermarket. Cannabis was removed from the criminal justice context but was refused a place in the context of existing medical or market institutions. At present, cannabis is going through a moment of transition and institutional change. In order to become a “thing,” legal cannabis should settle in a new institutional environment. When we say that something is institutionalized, we mean that it is cognitively, behaviorally, and organizationally established.13 First, institutionalization rests on meaning making. There should be a consensus about what cannabis is and what it is not, a cognitive convention upon which individuals can jointly rely when they make decisions. An idea is institutionalized when it is built into the language, logic, values, social relations, or—as Mary Douglas put it—when it finds “its rightness in reason and in nature” . Second, institutionalization manifests itself through practices, actions, preformed roles, and shaped identities. To understand the real meaning of cannabis, we need to look at what people do in their everyday lives—that is, how cannabis companies apply for licenses, how licensing agencies decide who gets a license, how landlords decide who gets a space, how consumers choose where to buy cannabis, how the police oversee the activity of illegal businesses, and so forth. Finally, the institutionalized phenomenon is represented through material reality, such as cannabis dispensaries, testing laboratories, greenhouses, licensing agencies, legal documents, licenses, permits, etc. Social phenomena can be institutionalized to a different degree . Complete institutionalization means that individuals experience an institution as an objective reality and take it for granted . In California, cannabis is not understood as a dangerous drug anymore.

It is something else, but what exactly? Why distinguish between medical and recreational cannabis, given that it is the same herb, grown in the same conditions, and distributed by the same people? Does the persistence of the black market affect the institutionalization of legal cannabis? To understand the real status of cannabis nowadays, one should answer such and other questions. The idea of cannabis is not crystallized yet, and its vocabulary is still in a formative stage. For example, recently, activists and state officials began using the term “adult-use cannabis” instead of “recreational cannabis.” Such wording supposedly sounds more neutral and legitimate, deemphasizes the pleasure component, and denies the possibility of adolescent use. My research contributes to an understanding of institutional change. The legalization of cannabis is unfolding before our eyes at this very moment. It is a great opportunity to observe the process of institutional change in action, rather than post factum. Instead of examining what caused an institutional change in the past, I focus on what enables it right now, namely, what kind of background understandings, practices, and organizations make the legalization of cannabis possible . According to Rao et al. , institutional change is characterized by the transformations in institutional logics and governance structures . In the case of cannabis legalization, social movements were the most important motors of institutional and ideational change; their actions eventually led to the dissolution of old beliefs systems and governance structures and the necessity to create new ones. Since 2015, California has passed seven statutes and propositions regulating different aspects of cannabis-related activities and elaborating on the idea of cannabis. To be naturalized and reproduced in the future, these new understandings of cannabis come to be positively validated in the environment .14 The real meaning of cannabis has to be defined by continuous interaction between regulators, local authorities, market actors, and societyin general. When I say that cannabis legalization is the project under construction, I mean that institutional elements are not yet equilibria : power relations, roles, identities, potential benefits are still being validated and clarified.

My research lies at the intersection of cultural criminology and lawmaking perspective. The primary focus of cultural criminology is the meaning, representation, and power in the contested construction of crime . Cultural criminology incorporates, on the one hand, traditional sociological perspectives and, on the other hand, postmodern theories . The concept of crime embodies a dynamic notion: it is defined as a project under construction, which is shaped by interaction, encoded with collective meaning, and attached to a particular social context. This view is essential for understanding several problems in my research, such as the criminalization of cannabis and stigmatization of its users through the 20th century, the role the mass media and power structures in the social control of illicit substances, the reasons and implications of the war of drugs, etc. Similarly, this approach helps to investigate the nature of the legalization process—the reverse mode of criminalization—and understand the construction of “legal cannabis”, i.e., how it is being depenalized, decriminalized, destigmatized, and deracialized. As for the lawmaking perspective, the following ideas are informative for the current study: Gusfield’s distinction between the instrumental and symbolic functions of law; and the ‘gap studies’ exploring the discrepancy between claims held out for law and its actual effects . According to Gusfield , lawmaking is not only a means of social control but also a symbol of cultural ideals and norms. Symbolic aspects of law are concerned with public morality and defining the line between right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, drying cannabis normal andpathological. In analyzing a legislative act as symbolic, we are oriented towards the meaning people attach to it rather than its instrumental functions. Legal rules are not automatically created and enforced; they result from a moral enterprise undertaken by individuals engaged in defense of their status position and the enforcement of their ethical standards . The temperance movement, for instance, was the response of the old middle class to a changing status system and a perceived loss of moral authority . The government acted as a prestige-granting agency glorifying the values of one group and demeaning those of another. Similar to other culture wars, cannabis regulation in the 20th century reflects a general clash over cultural values between the progressive and conservative camps . In this project, I analyze cannabis legalization through the lens of symbolic politics, cultural dominance, and moral authority. The gap studies allow us to move beyond national-level explanations and empirically investigate the local factors—social, cultural, political, or economic—that affect policy implementation. As Mona Lynch has argued, law as practiced is significantly shaped by local norms and culture . Although the adoption of federal and state regulations predicts homogeneous outcomes across the jurisdiction, there are significant variations at the county and city levels. The notion that legal change happens through ground-up—rather than top-down—processes has gained popularity in socio-legal scholarship recently . The case of cannabis legalization offers another illustration of how social and political culture affects local decision making.

This study focuses on the law-before and the law-in-between processes exploring the adoption and enforcement of morality policies at the city level. Specifically, it explains the gap between public input on cannabis legalization and actual political decisions. This project covers several gaps in the existing literature. First, most studies focus on the legalization of cannabis for medical use. The legalization of cannabis for recreational purposes has a very different rationale behind it, but since it is a relatively new phenomenon, it has not been fully explored yet. Second, cannabis legalization is a subject that attracts the attention of economists, policy analysts, psychologists, biologists, but rarely socio-legal scholars. Criminologists are exclusively interested in how the legalization of cannabis affects crime rates—increases, decreases, or does not change them . Sociologists focus on public attitudes to cannabis, deviance and stigma, identities, or the market formation . However, there is no comprehensive socio-legal analysis of how cannabis shifts from an illicit drug to a legal intoxicant, how the idea of legal cannabis is constructed and institutionalized, or, in short, how cultural, social, and legal change happens. Third, the traditional gap studies focus on the discrepancy between the law-in-the-books and the law-in-action. In other words, scholars are interested in how the initial idea of legislators is implemented in practice. However, there is no single “gap” but multiple types of gaps at different levels of the decision-making process . This perspective is especially important when we analyze morality policies, such as the legalization of abortions, same-sex marriages, gambling, prostitution, or recreational drugs. Fourth, a large body of literature focuses on the symbolic qualities of law: the symbolic role of drug legislation ; the symbolic meaning of “crime control” in political campaigns ; the symbolic character of capital punishment ; the symbolic goals of anti-abortion campaign , and so forth. However, all these studies center on prohibitionist legislation while the permissive morality policies, like cannabis legalization, were not on the radar of the symbolic politics studies. The present study covers this gap in the literature.There is no single definition of the “drug problem.” The term may simultaneously refer to the mere use of illegal drugs, drug use by teenagers, the abuse of drugs, drug-induced behavior that harms others, or domestic and international drug trafficking . The polysemy of the “drug problem” is itself a problem for researchers. The two main traditions in the literature on drugs are the constructionist and the objectivist. The latter examines drugs as objective phenomena that can be measured, counted, and classified . This approach is popular among medical scholars, medical practitioners, psychologists, policy advocates, and legislators. The objectivists typically speak about “drug problems” in the plural and employ it as an umbrella term for drug use, drug abuse, drug addiction, drug trafficking, drug selling, etc. The constructionist approach is common among sociologists, socio-legal scholars, political scienThists, journalists, and policymakers who see the drug problem as a product of political campaigns and social concerns. The basic premise of the constructionist literature is that drugs have an identity beyond pharmacology. To a large extent, these two traditions ignore each other, and their mutual neglect limits our understanding of drugs as a problem: the idea of drugs refers at once to a social construct, a chemical substance, and a legal fiction . Although the current socio-legal literature mostly relies on the constructivist approach, I suggest that we also should not rule out individual experiences that shape the understanding of drugs. In this study, I define the drug problem as: various ways in which societies deal with drugs, i.e., define its meaning, produce competing discourses, establish forms of control and treatment, etc.; and various ways in which individuals experience and respond to drug control, i.e., resist social and institutional pressure, challenge the existing modes of control, mobilize for change, deal with stigma, shape alternative understandings of drugs, etc.

The advertising and marketing restrictions in AUMA prohibit the use of cartoon characters, giveaways, and adverThising on billboards located on an “Interstate Highway or State Highway which crosses the border of any other state.” The signage requirements for marijuana licensees prohibit adverThisements within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds. Event sponsorship, payments to promote marijuana in movies, and branded merchandise will be permitted as long as these promotions are not “specifically designed to appeal to certain demographics.” There are no requirements that discounted offers and coupons be prohibited. Advertising on broadcast, cable, radio, print and digital communications will be permitted as long as 71.6% of the audience is “reasonably expected to be 21 years or older” based on audience composition data. Any individualized or direct digital adverThising or marketing through email, the internet, and mobile devices will be required to use a method of age verification, which is modeled on voluntary codes for digital direct marketing established by the alcohol industry that have failed to reduce underage minors’ exposure to alcohol advertising and marketing. Advertising and marketing restrictions will not apply to noncommercial speech. Prohibiting advertising and marketing is one of the most effective tobacco and alcohol control interventions to protect the public from industry strategies having the effect of or known to target youth and young adults. A public health framework for retail marijuana would prohibit the use of cartoon characters, event sponsorship, vertical grow system product placement in popular media, and branded merchandise. It would also prohibit giveaways, free samples, coupon redemption, distributing coupons in public areas, and distributing ads or coupons to underage people.

Marijuana advertising would be prohibited on television, radio , billboards, public transit, and restricted in print and digital communications with 15% as the maximum underage audience composition for permitted adverThising . The way to protect youth most effectively and prevent advertising that encourages excessive or abusive use , would be to allow retail marijuana advertising only inside licensed, adult-only retail outlets that sell retail marijuana and marijuana products . In addition, tax deductions for adverThising and marketing would not be allowed in order to increase costs of marijuana company promotional activity. An additional tool to protect underage people and vulnerable populations from marijuana industry targeted marketing tactics would be to have in place a comprehensive set of sunshine disclosure policies. Through sunshine disclosure laws, marijuana companies would be required to report to the California Department of Public Health all paid advertising expenditures, price discounting and incentives, promotional allowances, payments to retailers and wholesalers, and contributions to elected officials. The CDPH would create reports of the data collected from marijuana companies and these reports would be required by law to be publicly available. These laws are important to promote government transparency and to discourage industry payments to professionals . Additionally, these laws are an important strategy to address and reduce health disparities by removing access, as evidenced by tobacco and alcohol company marketing practices, to key marketing tools that would target underage persons, low income groups, and communities of color. The AUMA initiative is strong in that it prohibits marijuana companies from advertising or marketing their products using false or misleading health-related statements or claims.

These claims may include that the product has therapeutic benefits; all adverThising will be required to be “truthful” and “appropriately substantiated” . The AUMA initiative fails to include other important restrictions that would prevent marijuana companies from using marketing claims to increase the appeal and safety of their products. Marijuana companies will be permitted to market their products as “natural” or “less harmful” than other marijuana, tobacco, or alcohol products. Marijuana and marijuana products with a “certified organic designation” will not be required to include an additional warning statement that informs the consumer that the product is not safe or safer than other marijuana products because it is organic. Tobacco companies use similar marketing claims on tobacco products , which are often rated by young people and smokers as more appealing and less harmful than products without these descriptors. One way to prevent the likelihood that marijuana companies would take advantage of the weak language for restrictions on health-related messaging, would be to require that all advertising and marketing statements and claims be evidence-based and approved by the Department of Public Health, including claims about the product improving sex, energy, sleep, weight reduction, vitamin supplements, among other health-related claims that would increase product appeal. Under the AUMA initiative, product standards will be based on voluntary codes established by industry organizations rather than independent public health agencies, whose primary mission is protecting public health. AUMA prohibits the sale of marijuana and marijuana products that exceed the minimum level of contaminants set forth by the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia, an herbal product industry organization that creates herbal product industry standards, reviews traditional and scientific data, and publishes this information in monographs and other materials for public and commercial distribution. These contaminants include residual solvents, butane, propane, and poisons, toxins, or carcinogens, such as methanol, isopropyl alcohol, methylene chloride, acetone, benzene, toluene, and trichloroethylene.

The toxic chemical, nicotine, is not included. AUMA prohibits the sale of marijuana and marijuana products that exceed the level of residual volatile organic compounds of the voluntary standards established by the United States Pharmacopeia, a nonprofit organization that includes members of the pharmaceutical, food, and dietary supplement industries that, in collaboration with stakeholders including industry representatives, sets national standards for the strength and quality of drugs, food, and dietary supplements. Licensed testing facilities would be required to follow standard methods set forth by the International Organization for Standardization for testing and calibration activities including marijuana and marijuana product sampling, rather than the Department of Public Health. As is the case with tobacco companies influencing tobacco product standards that are antithetical to public health, it is likely that industry representation in these organizations will result in standards that prioritize commercial interests over public health. The standards established by the ISO for tobacco and tobacco products have failed to protect consumers’ health and safety, largely due to the tobacco companies’ role in influencing ISO standard methods to measure tar and nicotine levels. The tobacco companies, cannabis grow supplies through the industry-dominated Cooperation Center for Scientific Research Relative to Tobacco , pushed industry friendly tests and scientific evidence to establish ISO standard methods that yielded lower tar and nicotine levels than those actually present in cigarettes. The flawed measurement permitted the cigarette companies to market their products using specific health claims , suggesting these products were safe or had a reduced risk of harm. Tobacco companies have also claimed their products were “less toxic”, “natural”, or “additive-free”, among other misleading claims that would lead consumers to perceive their products were safe. A public health framework would provide the CDPH with the power to enact strong potency limits and product quality testing for marijuana products, with a clear mission to protect public health. The CDPH would set a maximum THC per serving size level using evidence based recommendations for new users, with packaging indicating individual single servings and a maximum amount per package. The CDPH would be permitted to change these amounts based on the available and emerging evidence. The independent advisory committee would advise the Legislature on how to create tax incentives for producers to create less potent products. Additives that would increase potency, toxicity, or addictive potential, or that would create unsafe combinations with other psychoactive substances would be prohibited. In addition to additives prohibited by the CDPH, marijuana and marijuana products would not include nicotine, alcohol, caffeine or other chemicals that increase the carcinogenicity, cardiac effects, or other toxicity when consumed as intended, as well as flavors that appeal to underage persons. Products that contain dangerous contaminants such as residual butane and other solvents, and other chemicals not safe for consumption or inhalation would not be approved. Marijuana companies would be required to submit applications to the CDPH prior to marketing or selling new marijuana products. Under the AUMA initiative, the marijuana product safety requirements are inadequate to minimize public health harms. The AUMA initiative’s serving size THC level is twice the maximum limit recommended by the Oregon Retail Marijuana Scientific Advisory Committee to the Oregon Health Authority, which is that marijuana and marijuana products contain 5 mg of THC per serving and each package be limited to a maximum of 10 servings . The maximum THC per serving size level of 10 mg of tetrahydrocannabinol per serving is written into the initiative and, so, cannot be easily changed as new information on the effects and toxicity of marijuana and marijuana products accumulates.

The Legislature will be able to adjust THC per serving amounts; however, as noted above the Legislature has failed to close important loopholes in the state smoke free law. It has also failed to increase the cigarette tax in 23 years , despite evidence-based research that supports tobacco tax increases to deter youth initiation and minimize consumption. While the AUMA initiative mandates that products will be required to be contained in childproof containers, there is the potential that marijuana companies would take advantage of the weak language for product regulations. The requirement for marijuana and marijuana products states that products may not be “designed to be appealing to children or be easily confused with commercially sold candy or foods that do not contain marijuana.” Because the intent of design is hard to determine and prove, an enforceable public health standard would replace “designed to” with “have the effect of” or “is known to be” appealing to children or easily confused with non-marijuana candy or food products. As discussed above, the CDPH will be required to develop product and testing standards consistent with voluntary codes set by industry organizations, which are unlikely to be strong enough to protect public health. Marijuana companies will be permitted to increase marijuana’s potency and addictiveness through other addictive substances or other additives that would make marijuana more toxic when inhaled, or palatable through flavors. From experience in tobacco and alcohol control, flavoring agents that enhance palatability create products that largely appeal to youth and young adults.New age products, such as e-cigarettes, also use flavoring agents in liquid nicotine that are attracting youth and young adults to these products. The initiative also fails to prohibit the use of other additives or ingredients that would mislead consumers into perceiving marijuana products as less harmful or beneficial or address fire safety.While the AUMA initiative requires the warning label be included on all marijuana and marijuana products, and packaging, including inserts, it fails to require warning labels be prominently displayed on all adverThisements and marketing materials. Large graphic warnings and plain packaging are proven strategies to reduce tobacco use, discourage nonsmokers from initiating, and encourage smokers to quit, and have become the global standard adopted widely outside the United States. While federal law preempts the authority of states and localities to implement these policies for tobacco , there are no statutory restrictions on California implementing such policies for marijuana. A public health framework for retail marijuana would ensure that health warning labels follow state of the art packaging requirements for tobacco products used in other countries around the world, including Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Uruguay. A public health framework for marijuana regulations would require warning labels on marijuana and marijuana products be large, prominently featured, and contain imagery in addition to text. Warning labels would provide clear, direct, and accurate information to the user of health risks associated with marijuana use and with exposure to secondhand marijuana smoke. Public health messages would include increased risk for addiction, cancer, reproductive toxicity, cardiovascular disease, respiratory, and neurological problems and would warn against driving a vehicle or operating equipment. The labels would be large on front and back, and not limited to just the sides. The language in the labels would be simple, at a reading level appropriate for the audience, including low literacy adults who are at greatest risk. Warning labels would include graphic images that provide factual information on the health risks associated with using marijuana as an intervention to prevent initiation and promote quitting. There would be several rotating warning labels that would be updated regularly, as new scientific evidence becomes available, to prevent “burn out” of stale warning labels.

One caveat for the locomotor studies is that the arena was not as large compared with the size of a lobster as the similar ratio for typical open field studies conducted in rodents. Similarly, the water depth was limited to that necessary to cover the lobster to facilitate the video tracking for this initial investigation. Nevertheless, the animals were able to express movement, turn around, change direction, etc., and traveled about 20 m after the vehicle exposure condition. It would be of interest in future studies to assess locomotor behavior in a larger arena or to assess behavior in a deeper aquatic environment. In the nociception experiment, lobsters were observed to respond to warm water immersion of claw, tail or antenna in a temperature-dependent manner . This provides evidence of thermal nociception in the lobster for the first time , and is consistent with prior work which has shown thermal nociception in crayfish, using a warm metal stimulus on the claw and antenna . No response to immersion in maintenance temperature salt water was observed in this study, using the 15 s cutoff. . At temperatures from 40 to 48 °C, however, the lobsters made distinct motor responses upon immersion of the tail, the claws or the antenna. Tail immersion resulted in a clear response of legs and claws and/or a strong flick of the tail which was in many cases repetitious . These latter behaviors can be considered within escape responses of lobsters and crayfish, dry racks for weed with evidence from the latter more plentiful. In the crayfish, sudden onset stimuli evoke tail movements associated with lateral and/or medial giant neuronal activity whereas more gradual stimuli evoke tail movements which do not involve the lateral or medial giant .

This study observed a range of apparent behavioral responses including gradual movements, strong flips and repeated flipping of the tail suggesting a diversity of sensory experiences from the sudden to the gradual. Additional experimentation would be required to further dissociate the thermoceptive responses under various conditions but the critical factor for this study was the detection of the hot water stimulus. Immersion of the claws or antenna also resulted in a distinct movement to remove the appendage from the water, consistent with thermoception. Temperature dependent differences in response latency were observed for the warm water challenges, with 40 °C less noxious than 44 or 48 °C. This graded response is what is observed with a similar nociceptive assay in rats and further enhances confidence in the specificity of the response to the noxious stimulus. The pronounced difference in sensitivity between the crusher and cutter claws provides another important validation of the model. Prior reports have focused on claw morphology and muscle fiber type and this extends this by demonstrating a clear behavioral insensitivity of the crusher compared with the cutter claw. Finally, the effect of THC vapor exposure on thermal nociception was minimal under the tested conditions. Surprisingly, despite the locomotor effect of 30 min of THC vapor exposure, there was no impact relative to vehicle vapor exposure on the latency of the response to warm water immersion . It required 60 min of exposure to THC to produce any significant effect , which was very small in magnitude. Although THC has limited anti-nociceptive impact in rodents relative to opioids and has a limited dose-effect range due to this low ceiling, it is typically more robust in rodents than what was observed here.

The present results and the work on lobster neuromuscular junctions suggest that THC has specific neuropharmacological effect, however, there does not appear to be a vertebrate endocannabinoid receptor expressed in the lobster or crayfish ; this is similar to behavioral effects in Drosophila melanogaster which likewise lack CB1/2 analogs. This turns attention to the possibility that THC acts in the lobster via temperature activating transient receptor potential channels. THC appears to function as a ligand at TRPV2, TRPV3, TRPV4, TRPA1, and TRPV8, as reviewed , and the Caribbean spiny lobster expresses 17 TRP channels including TRPA and TRPV homologs . A further clue is provided by the fact that another cannabis constituent which does not have substantial activity at endocannabinoid receptors , cannabidiol , also had inhibitory effects in Turkanis and Karler , and CBD modulates several THC sensitive TRPs . One apparent concern for this interpretation is that mammal TRPA1 is activated by noxious low, but not high, temperature. Nevertheless, thermosensitive TRPs may be a particularly good candidates for any anti-nociceptive effects in decapod crustaceans given that TRPA1 from invertebrates are indeed activated by high temperature. In some work, TRPV1 activates at about 48 °C , in other work over 43 °C as reviewed . There may be species differences in the activation temperature and as a comprehensive review observes that while TRPA1 activation temperatures vary across species/ortholog, activation is always above the preferred temperature of the species . Overall, the likely activation temperature for TRP homologs in the lobster are likely to accord with the temperature range established here for thermal nociception, i.e., observed at 40 °C and above, but not at 22 °C . A prior finding, however, that capsaicin did not influence the apparent thermal nociceptors in crayfish may suggest that whatever small effect was produced on nociception here was not mediated by a capsaicin sensitive TRP channel, such as TRPA1 or TRPV1. Alternately, the fact that TRPV1 can desensitize to capsaicin may have resulted in an apparent divergent result for noxious heat and capsaicin stimuli, presumably as a consequence of the specific methods used and potentially the species/ortholog in question. Finally, it is possible that there may be an as yet undiscovered ortholog of mammalian cannabinoid receptors in the lobster.

For example, the invertebrate C. elegans expresses a cannabinoid-like receptor that appears to mediate effects of the endogenous cannabinoid agonists 2-arachidonoylglycerol and anandamide . There are a few limitations to this study that may be useful to address in any future work. In the lobster behavior experiments, housing for the range of 4–21 days prior to a given assessment was never explicitly tested for potential effects. No major changes were noticed, but it is not impossible this would contribute. Likewise, we selected a fixed housing temperature, within the range described for this species in their natural habitat, so any effect of housing at one or the other end of their temperature range was not determined. As mentioned above, the locomotor assessment was conducted in an arena too small to divide into zones, e.g. Center vs Periphery, that in the context of a rodent test would permit assessment of anxiety-like avoidance of the center; a larger arena might facilitate such investigations. The nociception assay provides strong evidence for detection of a warm water stimulus, hydroponic rack system however it is possible that additional analysis of the response of the tail would provide further insight. Because the main goal was to determine if any response would be made, and there is no available information on how lobsters would respond to a thermally noxious stimulus, it was decided to operationalize the first clearly detectable response as the target latency. Future studies which determine the consistency of the strong flip, repeated flipping or the slower withdrawal response, both between and within individuals, would further define this response. In conclusion, these data confirm a method for studying the effects of aerosol THC exposure in a lobster model. Duration-dependent levels of THC were observed in the species’ tissues and a reduction in locomotor behavior was produced. The animals also responded in a temperature-dependent manner to the immersion of tail, claw or antenna in a hot water bath, indicating thermal nociception. This latter conclusion was further enhanced by the observation of differential sensitivity in the cutter and crusher claws. Further experimentation will be required to fully investigate other behavioral outcomes, including anxiety-like measures. Despite emerging scientific evidence on the adverse health risks of marijuana smoke, many people think that marijuana smoke is less toxic than tobacco smoke. Marijuana smoke contains chemicals known to cause cancer and reproductive toxicity, many of which are also in tobacco smoke. Indeed, except for the psychoactive ingredient — THC versus nicotine — marijuana smoke is similar to tobacco smoke. This similarity makes it likely that marijuana use will have comparable health effects as tobacco, a prediction supported by recent findings that marijuana and tobacco secondhand smoke exposure both have adverse cardiovascular effects. For example, combustible marijuana use and secondhand marijuana smoke exposure significantly impair blood vessel function, similar to tobacco, in ways that would increase the risk of atherosclerosis , heart attack, and stroke. Marijuana smokers are also at an increased risk of respiratory problems including chronic bronchitis, as marijuana smoke is associated with inflammation of the large airways, increased airway resistance, and lung hyperinflation.

Marijuana smokers also report increased rates of respiratory infections and pneumonia compared to nonsmokers. Increased marijuana use may produce other adverse effects such as long-lasting detrimental changes in brain function in adolescents, increased risk for addiction , and elevated risks of mental health disorders . Increased marijuana use also may result in increased traffic accidents from driving while impaired by marijuana. Aerosolizers are used for both nicotine and marijuana, and do not involve combustion, so produce fewer toxic chemicals than combusted products. While not fully understood, e-cigarettes do, however, expose users and bystanders to nicotine, ultrafine particles, and other toxins. Research on the health effects of marijuana leaf aerosolizers, THC concentrate aerosolizers, and liquid THC-filled e-cigarettes is hampered by the same factors that hamper research on marijuana in general. However, there is evidence on the adverse health risks of flavorants used in both e-cigarettes and marijuana products , which contain the chemical diacetyl. Marijuana remains a Schedule I substance under the Federal Controlled Substances Act, in which the use, sale, and possession of cannabis is a criminal offense under federal law, and which has resulted in a huge deficit in knowledge on marijuana use and secondhand exposure, whereas tobacco is now one of the most comprehensively researched substances. In addition, because, at least at the present time, adults who use marijuana often also use tobacco, it is difficult to separate the effects of these two products. These factors also make it difficult to study the possible medical benefits from certain forms and chemical components of marijuana. It is important to emphasize, however, that the current situation in which there is relatively little evidence on the health effects of marijuana, is not the same as evidence of little or no adverse effect. In California tobacco is legal, but its use is increasingly denormalized, while marijuana is illegal but becoming more socially accepted. This reality is reflected by the fact that, in California, more youth are now using marijuana than tobacco. Between 2011-2013, 24% of 11th graders and 15% of 9th graders reported past 30 day marijuana use, compared to 12% of 11th graders and 7% of 9th graders for past 30 day cigarette use. If current tobacco and marijuana use trends in California continue, with tobacco use continuing to fall and marijuana use continuing to increase, and as retail marijuana becomes legal in more places and time passes, we are likely to develop a more detailed and precise understanding of the associated health risks. Arguments for marijuana policy reform generally are centered on social justice, public safety, and the economic impact of marijuana criminalization. Some marijuana policy reformists argue that legalizing retail marijuana for recreational use will eliminate the incarceration of responsible users and nonviolent dealers and shrink or eliminate existing illicit markets without significantly increasing the health harms and costs of marijuana use. Others advocate for policy change somewhere between incarceration and legalization, often advocating for decriminalizing possession and lesser penalties for production and distribution. Full legalization advocates generally envision a commercial marijuana regulatory framework modeled on state alcohol regulations. They also argue that the revenues from new marijuana taxes will cover the costs not only of overseeing and regulating legal sales but also will cover programs to prevent youth initiation and control abusive use associated with increased access to marijuana, with revenue to spare for the state government general fund. Whether these predictions materialize will depend on how the production, distribution, marketing, and sale of the newly-legalized marijuana market are structured and regulated, and what the new legal marijuana industry looks like and how it operates.

Because I used a voluntary identification card database as a proxy for all medical marijuana users in California, many approximations may be under estimated. While there was some evidence of a substitution effect between alcohol and medical marijuana from the arrest data, the true effect could be much larger. This would justify why in previous studies, there has been stronger evidence of substitution effects. It was particularly interesting that there was no evidence of a substitution effect between marijuana and narcotics. Because the proxy for narcotics use was arrest rates, it is possible that the actual substitution effect could not be observed. Many users who substitute narcotics for medical marijuana are originally prescribed a legal amount of prescription-drugs, thus having no reason for an arrest to take place. It is also possible that many medical marijuana cardholders do not use for medical purposes and the actual medical users did not identify themselves in this database. While this proxy is not definitive of all effects that marijuana has on society, it offers insight on the true impact that marijuana use can have on crime and substance use. An improvement of this study would be to use data from states that have passed recreational marijuana laws and comparing it to those who have not. However, at the moment we can use this analysis to better understand how the current marijuana laws affect California. Significant changes have taken place in the policy landscape surrounding cannabis legalization, production, pipp racking system and use around the globe and across the United States. Over the last couple of decades, 35 states and the District of Columbia have legalized cannabis for medical conditions; of these, 15 states and the District of Columbia have also legalized adult use of cannabis.

These landmark changes in policy have impacted cannabis use patterns and the perceived levels of risk. However, despite this changing landscape, evidence regarding the short- and long-term health effects of cannabis use remains inconclusive. Several research studies have examined cannabis use in many forms, however, often these research conclusions are not appropriately translated and/or communicated to policy makers, health-care providers, state health officials, and other stakeholders who have been charged with influencing and enacting policies, procedures, and laws related to cannabis use . Other relevant challenges include the availability of cannabinoid-based study medications, federal regulations, and other constraints associated with clinical trials. Oncologists frequently discuss the clinical use of cannabis with their patients although most feel they lack an adequate knowledge base to advise effectively . The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s report on the Health Effects of Cannabis and Cannabinoids found strong evidence in support of the use of cannabinoids for chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting as well as pain . Despite those findings, many oncologists prefer to recommend approved pharmaceuticals with larger bodies of supporting evidence. Increasingly patients are hearing of people healing their malignancies with highly concentrated cannabis oils . Although there is a significant body of preclinical evidence suggesting anticancer effects of cannabinoids, translation to clinical benefit has not yet occurred. Hence, oncologists and cancer researchers are likely to be particularly interested in seeing cannabis research advance. This review highlights challenges and barriers to cannabis and cannabinoid research from the perspectives of administrators from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health ; the US Food and Drug Administration ; and clinical researchers. Barriers specifically to studying cannabis, cannabinoids, and cancer are emphasized.Federal restrictions on clinical cannabis research result from its legal status as defined by the Controlled Substances Act [CSA ] and international treaties. However, federal and state laws conflict, with diverse state regulations allowing personal possession and recreational and medical use.

Laws and regulations on federal cannabinoid research have been changing recently, and more changes are expected . Cannabis remains a federal schedule I controlled substance. Schedule I substances include those determined to have high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision. Additionally, the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs makes it illegal to grow, possess, or distribute cannabis except under strict conditions. One of those restrictions is that nations may designate a single source of research marijuana. NIDA has served as the single source in the United States since 1968. However, because of a recent re-interpretation of the Single Convention requirements, the DEA recently published a new rule that will potentially allow the approval of additional growers and producers of cannabis for research . Currently, an estimated 41 applications are pending. Conflicting federal and state cannabis regulations hinder research in several ways, including the inability of researchers to access products that are legal in their state, a lack of standardization and quality control of cannabis and cannabis-derived products within and across states, and no national oversight of this standardization and quality control or the industry.The administrative challenges for cannabinoid research include the single domestic source requirement for cannabis, complex and lengthy registration processes, and schedule I classification of nonintoxicating cannabis components such as CBD. Scientific challenges include the complexity of cannabis plants ; difficulty in designing blinded, controlled studies ; and the inability to study products available from dispensaries in states where they exist. Researchers who order cannabis from NIDA for human research in the United States must obtain FDA Investigational New Drug authorization, DEA schedule I registration, and institutional review board approval.

Despite misconceptions, NIDA has no role in determining qualifications. If researchers receive FDA, DEA, and IRB approval, NIDA fulfills orders for cigarettes and bulk cannabis in various THC and CBD concentrations, plus placebos. NIDA’s research cannabis is consistent, reproducible, pesticide free, and herbicide free. Although the cannabis provided by NIDA tracks the average THC potency of the cannabis generally available, NIDA does recognize the need for greater varieties of products, including improved placebos and more formulations , a larger range of potencies, and variable terpene content .There is broad public interest in expanding the availability of cannabis-based products for both medical and non-medical use. In responding to this demand, the mission of the FDA is focused on advancing public health by overseeing the investigation, approval, and production of safe, effective, and high-quality medical products, including those that are synthesized chemically or derived from the cannabis plant. As described above, the Agricultural Improvement Act of 2018 had an important impact on the FDA’s actions in this area. Importantly, the Farm Bill stipulates that the FDA’s authorities under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act are unchanged, so that hemp-based drug products will be subject to the same authorities and requirements as any other drug product. To date, the consequences of FDA regulation of cannabis and cannabinoids, including hemp, pipp vertical racks include the approval of 4 drug products. Three of these products are synthetic THC or similar to THC and are approved to treat nausea from cancerchemotherapy. The fourth product, Epidiolex, is made from highly purified CBD from cannabis. It is approved for certain rare seizure disorders and, more recently, for tuberous sclerosis complex. The marketing approval of Epidiolex, particularly in light of the DEA’s placement of FDA-approved CBD-containing products in schedule V according to the CSA , shows that the clinical development of cannabis-derived medicines derives from the concerted evolution of biomedical knowledge and regulatory flexibility. Beyond the 4 FDA approvals mentioned above, the agency has more generally performed a scientific assessment of cannabis-derived CBD and concluded that, although CBD is psychoactive, it does not have the same abuse potential as THC . In addition to reviewing marketing applications for drugs and their indications, the FDA also regulates clinical studies with cannabis and cannabinoids. For these avenues of research, the investigator submits an Investigational New Drug application to the FDA for review. The application includes a detailed description of the study protocol and information about the investigational drug, including a summary of previous human experience with the investigational drug; animal pharmacology and toxicology; chemistry, manufacturing, and controls information on the investigational drug; and evidence that it was manufactured according to current good manufacturing practices . Given that state legalization may have facilitated the municipal sale and use of many new cannabis-derived products around the United States, it is important for investigators to be aware of FDA regulations before engaging in clinical studies with cannabis and cannabinoids. As the FDA works to regulate cannabis-derived products appropriately, there is a great deal that is unknown about CBD, and even less is known about the dozens of cannabinoids and other compounds present in cannabis extracts.

For example, little is known about the effects of long-term human use of CBD and the impact of CBD in susceptible populations: children, pregnant women, and the elderly. Based on data from the drug development program for Epidiolex and from the published literature, there are known toxicities of concern related to CBD use . For example, there are signals of potential liver injury, potential male reproductive toxicity, and clinically important drug-drug interactions. We do not know exactly how serious these signals are, and it is important that we continue efforts to assess them. Going forward, we also need to identify ways of answering the many remaining questions about the safety of CBD, as well as the many other compounds found in cannabis. With so much yet to be learned, the FDA is committed to supporting scientific cannabinoid research and development. To support human drug development of cannabis and cannabis-derived compounds, the FDA has created several resources to aide investigators as they develop their clinical studies and use real-world data to fill the scientific gaps of knowledge. Some examples of these resources include information about the conduct of clinical studies and how to request formal meetings , considerations for using botanicals , a frequently asked questions website , recently released draft guidance about manufacturing cannabis-derived drugs , and the newly published FDA Voices Blog . The FDA’s research agenda is aimed at supporting studies to develop the data that is needed to understand how cannabinoids can be used safely in drug products and other consumer goods, such as dietary supplements, cosmetics, and pet foods. The FDA also is exploring policy options to enable broader availability of safe, effective, and high-quality cannabinoid products. There is substantial interest in US Congress legislation, and the FDA is actively offering assistance to state and nongovernmental partners in understanding the evolving cannabinoid landscape. The FDA also continues to take enforcement actions whenever violative marketing of cannabinoid products is identified. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA had to take action in multiple instances where makers of CBD products made antiviral, curative claims despite the lack of any supporting evidence on their safety or efficacy. In summary, the FDA has a well-defined and multifaceted role in the cannabinoid space. Its role has been strengthened and clarified in some respects through recent activities on the legislative level. Most importantly, the FDA continues to support the scientific assessment of cannabis-derived compounds. Because of broad interest in expanding the availability of these products, the FDA is considering many different regulatory options for responding to this interest, always informed by our commitment to protect patients and advance our national public health interests.The clinical researcher striving to respond to public health priorities related to the surge in cannabis and cannabinoid use is met with a number of regulatory hurdles. With rapid expansion of new products, novel methods of use, and growing populations using these products for medical indications or for non-medical use, these restrictions are a major contributing factor to the limited data published addressing the most urgent issues. Apart from questions on the potential effectiveness of products on the market for certain indications, a more immediate concern relates to the safety of these products. There are increasingly popular product categories and modes of delivery that are available for purchase in state-regulated dispensaries that have yet to be tested under controlled conditions. Some of these products are hypothesized to have potentially significant negative effects, such as high-potency extracts geared toward delivering efficient intoxicating effects, as well as products such as specific minor cannabinoids and terpenes that, based on preclinical literature, may be safe but have yet to be assessed in humans. In an effort to elucidate both the safety and the potential therapeutic uses of these products for a range of indications for which they are already approved in an overwhelming majority of the United States, researchers must work tirelessly through institutional, regulatory, funding, and drug supply hurdles, all of which significantly influence the scientific impact, public health relevancy, and efficiency of investigations.

Using the USDA Quick Stats tool to find census data on Milk – Operations with Sales for California returns the years 1997, 2002, 2007, 2012 and 2017 and comes with the county name and the number of operations.All available years of the county crop reports were downloaded from the USDA NASS site as .CSV files and compiled using R Studio for processing and analysis. A total number of 442 crop types were reported. After merging the 41 years into a single data frame, I filtered the dataset to include only milk related commodities, of which there were three possible types: Milk Market Fluid, which refers to Grade A beverage milk ; Milk Manufacturing, which refers to milk that is used to make butter, cheeses or milk powder; and Milk Cow’s Unspecified, which simply means that the county did not distinguish between fluid and manufacturing milks. While they are reported differently depending on the county, these three types of milk are the same in terms of form and units . Milk is measured in hundredweights, notated as Cwt, which is equal to 100 pounds or11.63 gallons of fluid milk. For the purpose of my analysis, I summed the different production values for the three categories of milk to allow for comparison across all counties. Lastly, I pivoted the table to make the data compatible with a shape file for mapping, so there was one row per county with a column for each year of production, 1980-2020. This pivot removes any associated data such as price per unit or value, which can be addressed in a separate data frame or re-joined if desired but was not included in this analysis. At this point, any holes in the data were identified where the original county reports were missing production quantities for certain counties and years. This may be due to errors in the compiled report, or that the county only reported the total monetary value of the commodity, rolling benches without reporting the hundredweights of milk produced. Table 2 summarizes the counties and years that were missing data, and what steps I took to fill in the data. I first searched directly in the County crop reports online and filled in blank data in an excel sheet.

If the crop reports did not report milk production quantities that year, I used a simple average formula to interpolate the data from the previous and following year so as to not leave any blank cells, which would appear the same as zeros on the maps. For a few counties, the reports from 2018 onward were missing, so I extrapolated numbers from the most recent year. In the end, 41 out of 58 of California counties remained in the dataset, meaning 41 counties reported milk production at least once between 1980 and 2020. Of these 41 counties, 22 of them had milk production reported for the full time-period , while 18 counties stopped reporting milk production at some point between 1981-2014. California has 58 counties; the smallest is San Francisco County and the largest is San Bernardino. These counties are grouped into eight agricultural districts by the CA County Agriculture Commissioner’s Data Listing. The initial analysis is presented at the county level for all the Census years and decades, after which the data is aggregated into regions, as shown in Figure 3, to show the broader patterns. Based on the history of California’s dairy industry, and the current milk production rates, I distinguish Marin and Sonoma from the Central Coast counties as its own agricultural region in the context of dairy production, creating nine regions.This research involves two sets of spatial-temporal data from 58 counties spanning 41 years. When visualizing changes over space and time, a static map or time-based chart will inevitably sacrifice nuances, obscuring changes through the years or spatial relationships between counties. I developed a methodology to map changes over time using a sequence of maps designed to be viewed in succession, either flipping through full pages or as an animation in a GIF file. The result is a unique visual of the data that captures the spatial relationship while maintaining the temporal resolution. To provide further detail, the maps are supplemented with data tables summarized by decade and with basic calculations like percent share and percent change to quantify the effect that the maps give visually.

To visualize the milk production and dairy operations data I had acquired, I created bubble maps, or maps using proportional symbols, to address the problem of using county-level data in symbolizing quantities. A map with proportional symbols uses point sizes to represent the number of farms per county, or volume of milk produced. This is an alternative to maps where a color gradient fills the shape of the county, known as a choropleth map. While there are benefits and drawbacks to both types of symbology, I decided to use proportional symbols because the size of the counties in California is irregular, and the size of the counties would affect the visual weight of the color. I executed the same steps to create the maps of milk production and number of operations for all years, as follows. There are at least two methods to create the maps of proportional symbols, and I used both – the first in R for creating a series of 41 maps automatically and the second in ArcGIS Pro for more detailed cartographic design. In R Studio, I created centroids of each county based on a shape file of California County Boundaries , and then joined the processed and interpolated data to the shape file based on county name. I used the “tmap” package with the “tm_bubbles” function to create circles based on the quantity of milk production or operations within each county. I set the “size.max” as the maximum production quantity, or number of operations, for the full dataset to standardize symbology across all the years. I set the scale to 5, the style to “fixed,” and set breaks to 2,500,000 for production. I used a function to iterate over each column of the dataset to create maps of production for all 41 years automatically. In ArcGIS Pro, the visualization was almost identical but the steps to create the maps were different. I symbolized the data from each year using proportional symbols and set the maximum point size for each year to a fraction of that year’s maximum value to standardize the sizes of the symbols across all years. For the production maps, this fraction was one over one million – for example in 1980 the maximum production value was 24,711,000 Cwt, and I set the maximum symbol size for the 1980 map to 24.7 points.

The minimum symbol size for production was 1pt throughout all years because the minimum production values were always less than half a million. For the operations maps, the fraction was one fifth – so in 1997 the maximum number of operations in a county was 325, and I set the maximum symbol size to 65 points. The minimum symbol size was calculated the same way, but the minimum number was always less than 6 so the minimum point size was always one. Taking the same fraction of each year’s minimum and maximum created a uniform scale of point sizes across the multiple years. If I were to leave the minimum and maximum the same for multiple years, rolling grow table the values would be stretched or compressed within that range, but the sizes would not correspond to the same values across different years. This did mean that each of the years had to be symbolized individually, which I did for five decades for the production maps and five years for the operations maps. Since the maps in ArcGIS were created to be static maps published in this thesis submission, or a journal submission, where a GIF animation will not work, I decided to average the 41 years of production data by decade, so as to not be forced to cherry-pick 5 singular years, thus losing 37 years of data, when creating a series of five maps. While averaging the decades does reduce the temporal resolution, the averages still represent the general annual production rate of each county. I calculated the average annual production in Excel for 1980-1989, 1990-1999, 2000- 2009, and 2010-2019. I left 2020 on its own and symbolized its own map, since the data seemed dissimilar to the production rates even a few years before, and is the start of a new decade. There are a few limitations to the data involving the quality and time-period and scale of the data that must be acknowledged. The data had 45 counties in the production dataset and 55 counties in the operations dataset. This points to potential flaws and differences in both the county crop reports and the Census of Agriculture data. The annual county crop reports are compiled from independent reports, they do not claim to cover all of agriculture or report everything. In the reports, counties aggregate the revenues of many commodities and may exclude small quantities. This may result in underestimates of production. Missing data will also increase errors in the percent share calculation of other counties. As described in the data processing subsection, missing data was addressed using interpolation . The Census of Agriculture has the opposite problem where any operation with milk sales is included in the dataset regardless of size or actual commercial dairy status, possibly resulting in overestimates of the number of active dairy operations. The data is also limited to the time-period of available data and that two datasets do not cover the same length of time.

The county crop reports were available annually from 1980, while the Census of Agriculture was only available every 5 years beginning in 1997. This limits the capacity for comparison of production and number of operations by year, as the beginning dates are 17 years apart and the resolution of the data is so different. This also keeps our analysis in the contemporary period, whereas we know from our literature review that milk has been produced commercially in California since the late 1800s, about 150 years. Finally there is the problem of resolution and geolocation. The finest scale data readily available is at the county level. The county sizes vary greatly and many of them overlap with mountain ranges or deserts that are not agriculturally productive, therefor diluting the actual area. When I use proportional symbols, they are plotted in the center of the county, or the centroid. For large counties like San Bernardino and Tulare where more than half of the state is desert or mountains respectively, this can create a misleading effect in the maps. This problem persists, and possibly made worse, when I use graduated colors or dot density maps as well, as the full area is filled with color or dots, while actual milk production may occur only in a small corner of the county. This problem would be ameliorated with more information on the locations of the dairies, but without it, the maps should be interpreted with the understanding that the dots are not accurately located where milk production occurs in the county, and instead should be interpreted as a symbolic marker of the county’s production rates. The following two sections contain maps visualizing the data collected on milk production and operations at the county-level, each followed by tables of the quantities and percent shares of production and operations that the maps were based on for more detail. The California Agricultural Commissioner’s Annual Crop Reports provide data on individual county milk production rates from 1980-2020. Figures 4-8 are maps of the average milk production by decade. Table 3 shows the average annual volume of milk produced for each county by decade, and Table 4 shows each county’s percent share of the total average annual production. Table 5 shows the actual change and percent change between the 1980s and 2010s of average annual production for each county. The Census of Agriculture provides data on the number of operations with milk sales for each county for the years 1997, 2002, 2007, 2012 and 2017. Figures 9-13 are maps showing the decreasing number of operations by county through all 5 of the Census years. Table 6 shows the quantities and percent share of operations for each county for all 5 years. Table 7 shows the actual change and percent change in number of operations between 1997 and 2017.