Alicia Ashley works in what is essentially a weed factory. Her job is to roll joints by hand, run a label printer, and attach those labels to jars of cannabis flower, all while making sure the products look and smell appealing. Ashley works for Flow Kana, a cannabis processing and distribution company in Mendocino, California, that serves as a sort of clearinghouse for the crops from numerous small pot farms in the area. By modern standards, it’s a pretty good job: She has regular work hours, health benefits, paid time off, and the peace of mind that comes with working in the legal side of the industry.
Ashley’s gig is one of many created by the legal cannabis industry. While it’s yielded winners and losers, legal weed has made it possible for people like Ashley to switch from being employed by quasi-legal or criminal enterprises to legit businesses. In the process, working in cannabis has become less like an outlaw adventure and more like a career.
It wasn’t always that way. Ashley came up through the black and gray markets, growing and processing weed “on the hill,” as many in Northern California’s Emerald Triangle refer to the hundreds of small farms that dot the higher elevations of that region. Back then, she would spend days at a time during harvest season trimming flower—that is, cutting the stems and extraneous leaves of each bud by hand to turn raw weed by into a product that people want to buy. It’s long and tedious work, and comes with some risks.
During non-harvest times, she would water and feed plants and help out around the farm. Ashley surmises that some of what she helped grow went to California’s medical dispensaries, and some to the underground recreational market. “I didn’t inquire too much about all that,” she said. Oftentimes, there was little to no communication between farm owners and workers on the hill. Even drivers, who brought pounds of weed from farms to town, would not interact with workers much—when operating in an illegal industry, it’s often best not to know what goes on along other points in the supply chain.