A tip about supposedly legal hemp production led California investigators to fields of marijuana plants. About 10 million of them.

The Kern County Sheriff’s Office — with the help of the FBI and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife — executed search warrants on 11 fields in the Arvin area, about 100 miles north of Los Angeles.

From the 459 acres of land, authorities destroyed about 10 million marijuana plants — a value of approximately $1 billion on the black market, the sheriff’s office said.

“These illicit marijuana gardens were grown under the guise of legitimate hemp production,” the sheriff’s office said. The Food and Agricultural Code and Health and Safety Code define industrial hemp as containing less than 0.3% THC content.
Tests showed THC levels in those fields were much higher than the legal limit, the sheriff’s office said. THC is the psychoactive substance within cannabis.

An investigation is ongoing, authorities said.

Ok, that sounds too good to be true… but wait it’s not actually!

American Marijuana is one of the most trusted medical marijuana resources online and we’re looking for someone to review a wide variety of cannabis products and give their unbiased reviews and opinions of the product.

The best part? You can work from the comfort of your own home.

Interested? Then keep on reading!

We’re Looking For…

This job is 100% for real and it’s an important job that includes more than just getting paid to smoke weed. If you think that’s the entire scope of the job, then this might not be for you.

We’re looking for someone to review a wide variety of cannabis products to give our readers an honest and reliable insights on various cannabis products. And they have to live in a state in America or Canada where medical marijuana is legal.

The applicant will have to write about their honest reviews and opinions of the product in the form of a blog. Moreover, they must also be comfortable in front of the camera since the job includes unboxing videos and explainer videos of how each cannabis product performs and differs from other, more notable products in the category.

If you think you got the guts to smoke weed every day (plays Snoop Dogg song) and get paid doing it, you might just be the guy we need. But DO NOT expect us to hire you just because you can smoke because we’re looking for a guy who also has extensive knowledge of marijuana to educate our readers.

Lastly, the applicant needs to be physically fit and healthy in general to carry out cannabis product reviews regularly.

So, How Does it Work?

Every month, the lucky applicant will be shipped a box containing different brands and varieties of cannabis products every month. These products range from weed strains, vapes, edibles to CBD oils.

The applicant will then test the products in person and write about their experience with the product from unboxing to everything they’ll be doing with the product. It has to also be noted that the applicant will be required to record their experience in film.

This includes an in-depth explanation of their experience with the product during and after their use to educate readers and viewers on the effectiveness of the product.

What Will You Get in Return?

By doing something you love, you will…

• Be paid up to $3,000 a month / $36,000 a year in salary (explained in detail in the Terms and Conditions section)
• Receive FREE cannabis products (sent on a monthly basis to your address for testing)

This may not be for everybody but I bet you’re interested in this type of work. I mean, come on, who doesn’t want to get paid by doing what you love?

If you think you’re the person we need, read on to learn how to apply for this opportunity!

How to Apply?

The applicant MUST BE 18+ years old and is required to send the following:

• Bio/resume
• Headshot OR a preferably link to a 60-second intro video talking about your passion for the position we’re posting.
• Attached links to existing social media accounts
• …and at least 6 street names, slang terms, or nicknames of marijuana (so we know you’re taking this seriously!).

EVANSTON, IL — Evanston will use the first $10 million in revenue from a new tax on the sale of recreational marijuana to fund a recently established reparation fund aimed at addressing the wealth gap and population decline among the city’s black residents.

Aldermen have yet to determine how the money will be spent, but this weeks’ City Council vote appears to have made Evanston the first municipal government in the nation to create and fund its own reparations program. Its backers hope it can become a model for other communities, with many attendees at last week’s National League of Cities summit expressing interest and support, according to aldermen who attended the meeting.

The historic vote came along with the adoption of the city’s budget for 2019 — the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves to the future United States. Following the adoption of recommendations from its Equity and Empowerment Commission at the City Council’s Sept. 9 meeting, the Reparations Fund was created Oct. 15, in addition to a Reparations Subcommittee comprised of three aldermen and city administrative and legal staff.

Monday, aldermen approved the use of revenue from its cannabis retailers tax with a 8-1 vote. All revenue collected next year from the city’s 3 percent sales tax on cannabis will be transferred to the new fund. City staff estimated Evanston will collect at least $500,000 a year from the tax, which can start being applied in July 2020, according to interim City Manager Erika Storlie.

Ald. Robin Rue Simmons, whose historically black 5th Ward includes the city’s least wealthy Census tracts, said it was time to move past apologies and move toward direct efforts to close gaps in wealth and opportunity for black residents.

“Evanston has been preparing to lead the nation in this way for years. We have celebrated diversity, although it’s drive-by diversity. We honor our diversity and efforts for inclusion, ceremonially in resolution, in our traditions, there’s evidence of it throughout town in public art. We have created a chief equity officer position, we have appointed an Equity and Empowerment Commission, we have an equity lens that we use in our staffing, and we’re not alone. Many of the institutions and nonprofits in town express the same commitment,” Rue Simmons said.

Rue Simmons has been advocating for the city to create a reparations fund throughout the year, starting with a recommendation in February and continuing with her leadership of a “Solutions Only” subcommittee of the Equity and Empowerment Commission, collecting feedback and refining ideas from more than 100 residents. She noted the City Council had passed a couple dozen resolutions in the name of equity, inclusion and black history since she joined the council, but it was time to make the leap toward the kind of concrete repair first discussed 150 years ago with the “40 acres and a mule” land redistribution proposal. Rue Simmons said it was important to establish Evanston’s program before this year’s budget process was complete.

“The timeline has been quick because this is the 400th year of African-American slavery and it is 400 years of black resilience,” she said. “I expressed early along in the process with the [Equity and Empowerment] Commission that we complete some substantial part of this work in 2019, in honor of the many black residents among us that continue to be hopeful and resilient and innovative, even though we live with barriers and systemic racism and structural racism.”

Since then, segregation, racist home ownership policies and racially biased law enforcement practices in the name of the “War on Drugs” have all contributed to the stark differences in opportunity between black and white residents in Evanston. Rue Simmons cited the $45,000 wealth gap between the average black and white Evanston family and a 13-year gap in average life expectancy. Since 2000, Evanston’s black population has declined by nearly 4,000, falling as a proportion of the city from 22.5 percent of the population to under 17 percent in 2017, according to U.S. Census data.

A study by the Metropolitan Planning Council found segregation costs the Chicago region an estimated $4.4 billion. If levels of segregation in the area were reduced to the national median, black residents would see their annual incomes rise by an average of nearly $3,000. Likewise, a drop in homicide rates — currently 17 percent higher for black Chicagoans than for whites in the city — and an increase in college graduates would add billions of dollars to real estate values and future potential earnings.

“It was clear that we needed to move forward with no apologies and understand that there is demonstrable damages specific to black Evanston residents — through redlining and the impact of Jim Crow — that we needed to move forward and correct this damage,” Rue Simmons said. All the damage, she added, was rooted in the American slave economy. “It is a cumulative damage whose foundation is in the kidnapping, enslavement and torture of my foremothers and fathers. Slavery informs this whole nation.”

Ald. Peter Braithwaite said it was no surprise to see Evanston taking the lead on the reparations issue.

“This is a really special moment in the city of Evanston, and also in the country,” the 2nd Ward alderman said ahead of the Nov. 25 vote.

Ald. Don Wilson, 4th Ward, said reparations are needed to address ongoing inequities in addition to injustices of the past.

“It’s not just a historical story problem, it’s about present, existing impediments to opportunities,” he said. “The list is very long. We have existing problems now — educational opportunities, predatory lending, deceptive actions, I’ve seen a number of situations with reverse mortgages — it’s a lot of subversive things that continue to go on in the community, so things happened a long time ago, but things are still happening.”

Ald. Ann Rainey sits on the Reparations Subcommittee established in September with Rue Simmons, 9th Ward Ald. Cicely Fleming, Deputy City Manager Kimberly Richardson and Corporation Counsel Michelle Masoncup. She attended a National League of Cities summit last week in San Antonio, where Rue Simmons awed attendees with a presentation about the city’s reparations efforts, the 8th Ward alderman said.

“People were just really surprised, and I did not hear not one city saying they were doing anything along these lines,” she said. “A lot of talk about diversity, lot of talk about equity, lot of talk about that kind of thing, but nobody was talking about reparation — except for us.” National leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union contacted city officials to offer legal support with the effort, according to Rainey.

Rue Simmons, a member of the National League of Cities’ Community and Economic Development Committee, noted a bill to establish a commission to study and develop reparations proposals — House Bill 40 — was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in January. But any action by the federal government, even just to authorize study of the issue, is unlikely in the foreseeable future.

“One thing that I’ve learned as an active member of National League of Cities is that all government is local and that we have the closest connection to the residents. We live among the people. I live on the block that is within Census tract 8092, so I can respond as a local elected from my lived experience, having overcome low income and the challenges of being a teen mom and what the war on drugs and mass incarceration has done to my family personally,” Rue Simmons said. “I can lead on City Council with that lived experience, and I woke up and I saw no other way but reparation.”

Tapping a new cannabis tax to pay for a reparations plan allowed the City Council to provide funding for a future reparations program without reassigning any money previously allocated elsewhere. It also allowed revenue from recreational marijuana to be invested in a community that has disproportionately suffered from its ban.

Backers of the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act, which will legalize the possession and sale of cannabis for all adults 21 and over starting in January, identified social equity among the goals of legalization. Gov. JB Pritzker described it as the “most equity-centric” cannabis legalization bill in the nation.

The legalization bill, the first to be approved through legislative action rather than through a popular referendum, included equity frameworks aimed at providing opportunities for cannabis business licenses, funding and employment to those in communities disproportionately impacted by prohibition.

Evanston’s lone medical cannabis dispensary, located in a city-owned parking garage in the 1800 block of Maple Avenue, has been authorized to begin selling recreational marijuana starting Jan. 1, 2020. The dispensary changed hands in the collapse of a recent merger and plans to operate under the MedMen brand. Additional dispensaries will require special use permits from the city.

Studies have shown people consume cannabis at roughly the same rates regardless of their racial background — some have found black youth use less marijuana than their white counterparts — but Evanston arrest and citation data from the last 36 months show black people make up 71 percent of those arrested for cannabis possession. Whites make up nearly 67 percent of the population, according to Census data, but they comprised only 15 percent of those arrested by Evanston police.

“Consequences from marijuana convictions limit and often exclude residents from housing, employment and student financial aid,” Rue Simmons said. “It is appropriate that revenue from recreational marijuana be invested in the community in which it unfairly policed and damaged.”

Ald. Tom Suffredin, 6th Ward, was the lone vote against the measure. In a note to constituents, Suffredin said he supports the city taking responsibility for the role it has played in disadvantaging its black residents but did not support dedicating cannabis revenue for the reparations fund.

“[I]n a town full of financial needs and obligations,” Suffredin said. “I believe it is bad policy to dedicate tax revenue from a particular source, in unknown annual amounts, to a purpose that has yet to be determined.”

In addition to receiving revenue from the new adult-use cannabis tax, the Reparations Fund is accepting tax-deductible donations from private businesses, individuals and other organizations.

Ahead of the creation of the subcommittee in September, Rainey said the city would not be able to accomplish an ambitious reparations program by itself. She emphasized the importance of getting banks and financial institutions to participate “because that’s where the money is,” referencing the apocryphal bank robber’s adage.

“One of the biggest problems in the United States of America — regardless of black, brown, white or otherwise — is redlining by banks and others based on wealth and lack of wealth. And today there’s even a worse problem: people who have very good incomes are having a lot of difficulty getting mortgages,” Rainey said.

“I think we have to reach out and find sources of funds. I don’t know how many other communities, localities, municipalities are taking on the burden of reparations all by themselves. I can’t believe that it’s happening every place. I think we need help, and let’s go get it. Because if reparation is so well-embraced by our community, then everybody has to help.”

Among the issues the Reparations Subcommittee must consider is how to determine who qualifies for the program. Rue Simmons said the general consensus of those involved in the development of the program has been to include all black Evanston residents, regardless of their levels of wealth or which ward they live in.

However, Rue Simmons said she would support some of the funding to be devoted to infrastructure in areas, such as parts of her ward, that have historically suffered from a lack of investment due to racially discriminatory policies. She said she favored direct assistance to help build wealth through home ownership and business development.

Among the recommendations presented from the Equity and Empowerment Commission were property tax relief, help with down payments, assistance with housing repairs and rehabilitation, low-interest loans for black entrepreneurs in Evanston and more.

“The Commission understands that implementation of these recommendations will just begin to address an as-yet unquantifiable loss of assets, wealth, and opportunity for Evanston’s African American community over decades,” according to a memo from the commission. “The process of repair and reparation must be part of a larger, community-wide racial reconciliation process, that the Commission intends to begin and for which the Commission seeks the Council’s support and participation.”

In addition to the reparations fund, the city has started work on a “Truth and Reconciliation” process to publicly examine Evanston’s legacy of racial discrimination, which includes efforts by real estate brokers and city officials to displace black residents to a highly segregated area of west Evanston.

A community meeting with the National African-American Reparation Commission is tentatively planned for Dec. 11 to discuss the next steps in the development of the Evanston reparations program.