Since early July, Jason Hauer has spent approximately seven
hours commuting to and from San Francisco five days a week. The 40-year-old cannabis
grower claims he was forced to find a job 124 miles away
from his home in California’s rural Calaveras County after local politicians
voted in January to ban commercial marijuana cultivation just two years after
attempting to regulate it.
"I am doing the same thing I would be doing in
Calaveras, working with a cultivator in San Francisco and providing assistance
with their state and local applications," Hauer told Vice. "I am
enriching somebody else when I could have been easily doing this in my
hometown: providing jobs, economic activity, and a little profit for my family.
But I stopped investing in my farm long before the deadline.”
The decision by the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors early this year to ban grow operations in the area—20 months after granting temporary licenses to medical marijuana grows—has upset local pot cultivators who feel like the rug was pulled out from under them.
