Chasing Ghosts While the Industry Burns

By Steve DeAngelo

For years, a false rumor has circulated that I was responsible for removing a one-acre cap on cannabis cultivation in California. Until now, I have stayed mostly silent—not because the rumor was true, but because I didn’t want to give oxygen to a story that had no basis in fact. But over time, this false narrative has been repeated by advocates and journalists who didn’t bother to fact check the story, and now threatens to become a part of the historical record. My friend and leading cannabis attorney Bob Hoban recently addressed and debunked the rumor in a recent Forbes article. 

Living with this false narrative has been by far the most painful experience of my activist career, but it hasn’t just affected me. Other activists, including some of the most effective advocates in the Emerald Triangle have been painted with the same brush– and as a result been ostracized and in some cases terrorized in the very communities they spent their lives defending.

By substituting scapegoating for honest analysis, the one-acre myth has fractured our community at the very moment we most need unity. Rather than confronting the true forces that shaped the California industry’s collapse, we’ve turned on each other. We’ve wasted precious time, energy, and trust telling stories about events that never happened, while the people and policies that actually caused the harm go unchallenged.

The spread of this rumor has damaged relationships among longtime allies—between growers and advocates, between those who grew plants in the hills and those who distributed that cannabis in the cities, between different parts of a community that had long been united by our shared love of the Plant. These alliances were never perfect, but they were forged in the fires of prohibition, and they carried us through the decades when nobody believed we could win.

We cannot afford to keep fighting ghosts. The truth matters—not just because it clears my name and other activists’ names– but because it gives us a common ground to stand on. If we want to change what happens next, we need to stop arguing about what never happened, and start working together to fix what really did happen.