Dying for your high: The untold exploitation and misery in America’s weed industry.webp)
.webp)
A cannabis worker consoles his girlfriend as San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies summon a hazardous materials team to deal with lethal pesticides on the unlicensed farm. The worker’s girlfriend told deputies she was pregnant. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times
Sareth Sin, 67, died upright, seated in a plastic chair, on Christmas Day. He was asphyxiated by fumes from the generator he ran to chase the desert chill out of a cannabis greenhouse on the eastern edge of Los Angeles County.
Leuane Chounlabout, 79, was found lifeless, lying on his back surrounded by a tangle of electrical cords connecting heat lamps to a greenhouse generator outside Palmdale. He had arrived two days earlier to help harvest.
Miguel and Rufino Garcia Rivera, 28 and 36, collapsed on the floor of a desert greenhouse not far away that reeked of diesel and pesticide fumes. The brothers, recent arrivals from Mexico, died of carbon monoxide poisoning near the small cannabis plants they had been hired to cultivate.
For millions of consumers, the legalization of cannabis has brought a multibillion dollar industry out of the shadows and into brightly lit neighborhood dispensaries.
But California, birthplace of both the farm labor movement and counterculture pot, has largely ignored the immigrant workers who grow, harvest and trim America’s weed. Their exploitation and misery is one of the most defining, yet overlooked narratives of the era of legal cannabis.
From the forests of Oregon to the deserts of California, a Los Angeles Times investigation found, cannabis workers are subjected to abuse, wage theft, threats of violence and squalid and hazardous conditions. They are disregarded even in death.
At least 35 workers died on cannabis farms in a five-year span through 2021. Twenty died in carbon monoxide poisonings, according to coroner records. Their deaths were tied to substandard living conditions and a shift to growing in greenhouses to increase profits. Only one led to a workplace safety investigation.
Workers described living outdoors, without sanitation or sufficient food, and told of employers who directed them to charity food banks or ran them off at gunpoint without pay. While accompanying police on raids, Times journalists saw hazardous pesticides frequently in use, including at a San Bernardino County farm where a young couple slept in a shed next to a greenhouse that reeked of metamidofos, a deadly nerve agent no longer sold in the United States but still available in Mexico. The young woman said she was . Few crops are as labor-intensive as cannabis.
From the nursing of young clones to the trimming of dried flower buds for market, every step requires human hands. On most farms, it is hard labor. Workers physically lug heavy bags of soil and fertilizer, and in some places, must carry buckets of water to plants on steep slopes.
California’s historical cannabis farms relied on local networks of friends and family for labor. Legalization brought a rush of market speculators and dramatically changed labor conditions.
The new growers built massive greenhouses, increasing demand for mobile trimming crews who travel with their own tents, sometimes under the control of middlemen who take a cut of their earnings.
The farms recruit from Chinese communities in Los Angeles and New York, from Hmong enclaves in Wisconsin and among Mexican laborers working in San Jose and the farmlands of the Central Valley. They also pull workers directly out of economically depressed countries, such as Argentina and Chile, attracting some who are teachers, biologists and physical therapists.