Responses by managers was a common theme discussed by workers as managers have the direct ability to ban customers based on inappropriate behavior and were often the first point-of-contact for workers to report an experience of harassment.The risk of continued harassment is exasperated by apathetic management teams who were described as prioritizing customer satisfaction over workers’ safety.Workers also illustrated the unique history of cannabis as a heavily sexualized industry whose legacy continues to permeate the industry today and negatively impact worker’s experience with sexual harassment.According to interviews, workers believed that customers either could not or refused to distinguish legally operating dispensaries from trap shops where women were explicitly used as props to sell product.The lack of distinction encourages the entitlement customers feel towards exploiting cannabis workers without repercussions.Interview results presented a paradox within the cannabis industry in which legalization introduced new protections to workers while simultaneously ushering in the corporate model of the “customer is always right,” which previous studies highlight as a detriment to the ability of workers to protect themselves from threatening customers.Furthermore, regarding research question five, data indicated workers were most interested in sexual harassment-based training for all workers, managers and supervisors as well establishing and publicizing clear policies on harassment.As previously mentioned, insufficient handling of sexual harassment cases by mangers was a common theme among all interviewees, highlighting the need for their additional training.Through interviews,drying cannabis workers were able to explain, in more detail, what they would like to see covered in a sexual harassment training.Likewise, interviews provided the opportunity for workers to explain exactly what policies or guidelines they would like established and publicized in their workplace.
Examples of policies included being able to ask a security guard to walk you home, an anonymous hotline number and permission to ask security guards for assistance in closing a store for the night.Given the unique study population of this project, there are several limitations to consider when interpreting the results.As previously mentioned, the sample of survey respondents was a convenience sample of cannabis employees represented by UFCW Local 770; respondents were not randomly sampled from all cannabis retail employees in Los Angeles County.Likewise, interview participants were also recruited through snowball sampling and were not randomly selected.All workers in the study sample are represented by a labor union and therefore the generalizability of the findings to all workers in the cannabis industry is limited as rank-and-file cannabis members of UFCW represent only a small subset of the cannabis industry.And as labor unions continue to grow their membership among cannabis workers, additional studies should compare the experiences with sexual harassment among unionized and non-unionized workers.The small sample size reduced the power of the study and created challenges for isolating effect sizes between the outcomes of interest and the independent variables, particularly in the multivariate models.With the understanding that sexual harassment is an under reported phenomenon, the analyses were likely impacted by respondents who reported never experiencing sexual harassment as it is possible workers simply did not feel comfortable disclosing such information.A larger sample size of workers across the state or ideally the nation as more states legalize the consumption and commerce of cannabis may also reveal regional differences in the effects of laws and policies that protect workers’ safety.There were also several issues regarding the survey tool.Although the survey was able to gauge frequency of harassment experienced by respondents using a Likert scale, it was not conducive to creating a discrete variable of harassment and consequently incidence rate could not be calculated.For example, the response option “once a month or less” could imply harassment was experienced anywhere from two to 12 times in the last 12 months as it was the second option after reporting experiencing harassment “once” in the past 12 months.
Providing more definitive response options may aid in developing more epidemiologically accurate variables.Questions from the SEQ-DoD were also originally developed to measure sexual harassment as it is experienced by women and studies show it is not as effective for capturing the experiences of men.In order to capture more precisely the phenomena of sexual harassment by all participants, future studies should utilize a more comprehensive survey for sexual harassment.Recall bias was also present in data collection as respondents were asked to remember specific examples of sexual harassment and the frequency at which those experiences occurred in the last 12 months.Finally, without a direct comparison to another workplace or industry applying the same methodology, it is difficult to make definitive statements about prevalence of sexual harassment in cannabis relative to other industries.In 2016, when voters approved Proposition 64, they set the stage for radical change across California’s cannabis landscape.Licensed, regulated cannabis stores would soon throw open their doors.The state’s vast cannabis industry would begin to emerge from illegality, though unlicensed operations would surely persist.UC researchers immediately understood that cannabis legalization would present California with pressing new questions, along numerous dimensions, that could only be answered through rigorous, broad ranging research.How would legalized cannabis cultivation affect the state’s water, wildlife and forests? How might impaired driving, or interconnections between cannabis and tobacco, influence public health? How would tax and regulatory policy affect the rate at which cannabis cultivators abandoned the illegal market? These questions and many more are now the subject of research around the UC system, and multiple campuses are establishing centers dedicated to cannabis research.This article surveys UC’s emerging architecture for cannabis research in the legalization era — and presents a sampling of notable research projects, both completed and ongoing.
The Cannabis Research Center at UC Berkeley is an interdisciplinary program that, bringing together social, physical and natural scientists, evaluates the environmental impacts of cannabis cultivation; investigates the policy-related and regulatory dimensions of cultivation; and directly engages cannabis farmers and cannabis-growing communities.The center, according to Ted Grantham — one of three CRC co-directors and a UC Cooperative Extension assistant specialist affiliated with UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management — is “focused on cannabis as an agricultural crop, grown in particular places by particular communities with unique characteristics.” For Grantham and the center’s co-founders, establishing the program was “a chance to develop policy-relevant research at the time of legalization and a time of rapidly shifting cultivation practices.” The center’s co-directors, in addition to Grantham, are Van Butsic — a UCCE assistant specialist affiliated with UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management — and Eric Biber, a UC Berkeley professor of law.Other CRC researchers are associated with entities such as the UC Berkeley Department of Integrative Biology, the UC Berkeley Geography Department, the UC Merced Environmental Engineering program and The Nature Conservancy.The center itself is affiliated with the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix.The CRC formally launched with a public event in January.The center’s ongoing research includes a multifaceted project to assess specific aspects of Northern California’s cannabis farms, including the number and size of non-compliant cultivation sites; the environmental effects of non-compliant sites ; and the challenges to regulatory compliance that cannabis cultivators encounter.According to a grant proposal associated with the research, the project is motivated by an urgent need to understand the environmental threats posed by non-compliant farms and the reasons that some farms successfully navigate state regulations while others fail.The researchers are combining high-resolution satellite images with local and state permitting data to identify permitted and non-permitted cultivation sites.In parallel, the researchers are combining permit specifications with water use models to estimate the effects on stream flows of non-permitted versus permitted cultivation.Additionally, they are determining which factors associated with cannabis cultivation are most closely linked to compliance — whether parcels are large or small, old or new — and, through written grower surveys and in-person interviews, they are seeking to understand what stands in the way of cultivator compliance.Ultimately, the work will yield a policy report outlining ways in which state and local governments can decrease the harm of non-compliant cannabis cultivation while increasing rates of compliance.The research is supported by a grant from the Campbell Foundation, provided through the Resource Legacy Fund.In another example of CRC research focused on cannabis and the environment, last year Butsic, Jennifer Carah and additional co-authors published the results of their work on “agricultural frontiers”.These are places where,ebb flow due to increased profit potential for agricultural activity, land is newly cultivated — frequently resulting in environmental impacts such as forest fragmentation and threats to sensitive species.Such transformations, the authors write, occur when economic circumstances are altered by some new mechanism — such as, in the case of cannabis, a new legal status.The researchers, documenting the emergence of such a frontier, studied cannabis cultivation sites in Humboldt and Mendocino counties from 2012 to 2016.
Using satellite imagery to develop a database of cultivation sites, the researchers correlated site characteristics such as remoteness and erosion potential with the spread of agricultural frontiers.They report that, over the study period, cannabis cultivation sites in the study area nearly doubled in number, with total acreage under cultivation likewise nearly doubling, and that a significant portion of the new cultivation occurred in areas such as sensitive watersheds.They found, for example, that nearly 90% of the areas newly developed for cannabis cultivation had been covered in natural vegetation as late as 2006.The researchers argue that agricultural frontiers can develop “almost anywhere institutions fail to prevent” them — and note that, for 18 years after medicinal cannabis use became legal in California with the 1996 Compassionate Use Act, the state devoted no funds to regulating cannabis cultivation and production.In this issue of California Agriculture, Grantham and four co-authors from the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board present the results of their research into cannabis cultivators’ patterns of water use in several Northern California counties.For the research that resulted in “Watering the Emerald Triangle: Irrigation sources used by cannabis cultivators in Northern California” , Grantham and his colleagues analyzed reports submitted to the board by cannabis cultivators.The researchers determined how many cultivators sourced their water from wells, surface water diversions, spring diversions and other sources; how water sourcing behavior changed over the course of a year; and how water use patterns varied according to whether growers operated within the state’s legal cannabis market.The researchers determined that cannabis growers rely on well water to a greater degree than is generally supposed — and that their reliance on well water may increase as more growers join the legal market because of well water’s less restrictive permitting requirements.In separate research, Michael Polson — a postdoctoral researcher in UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management — has investigated the environmental dimensions of cannabis from an anthropological perspective.In a paper published earlier this year, Polson shows how cannabis has been identified as an environmental problem that requires public intervention.On the basis of participant observation and more than 70 interviews with subjects across the cannabis spectrum — from park rangers to environmentalists to “criminalized people” — Polson demonstrates how cannabis production has been defined as pollution — “dovetail[ing] with [cannabis] prohibition’s history of marking people and substances as socially polluting.” Polson argues, as he highlights the legacy of cannabis prohibition in environmental debates, that policy making is at its most innovative when it includes a broad range of cultivators and when stigmas are explicitly addressed.Research into the environmental aspects of cannabis is also underway at UC Davis, where Mourad Gabriel is a research associate member in UCD’s School of Veterinary Medicine.In 2018, Gabriel and co-authors, including Robert Poppenga — a professor of molecular bio-sciences at the California Animal Health and Food Safety Lab at UC Davis — published the results of their research on the effects of rodenticides on owls in northwestern California forests.The researchers, working on privately owned timberland in Humboldt and Del Norte counties, investigated the prevalence of anticoagulant rodenticides in areas characterized by illegal cannabis cultivation.Anticoagulant rodenticides, used by some cannabis cultivators to control pests, are known to affect non-target species in urban areas and recently have been shown to affect carnivores in California’s remote forest areas as well.Gabriel and his coauthors undertook to determine whether the northern spotted owl, a threatened species, is exposed to anticoagulant rodenticides in the study area — and also to determine if barred owls, a common species, can be used as a surrogate to determine exposure levels in northern spotted owls.