“High Times in the Plague Year: Booze & Cannabis Retailers Shine - WOLF STREET” plus 1 more

High Times in the Plague Year: Booze & Cannabis Retailers Shine - WOLF STREET

Posted: 31 Oct 2020 05:28 PM PDT

Landlords already know this: People are getting more toasted than Wonder Bread.

By John E. McNellis, Principal at McNellis Partners, for WOLF STREET:

Happy Hour starts at 3 o'clock. Tenants selling reality-relief are killing it. I called a number of retailers to double-check my desultory anecdotal evidence. One, the owner of a first-rate supermarket chain, said his alcohol sales are up 25 percent since March. That came as no surprise, but the identity of his best-selling beer — Corona — did.

Along with half of America, I assumed that Corona was destined to become the Adolph of beer labels. Wrong. Drinkers love it — some think calling a hangover a "corona virus" is funny. This merchant said the only limitation on his Corona sales was lack of inventory. Neither he nor any other seller of liquor is asking for any rent breaks.

I called a major beer distributor in the Central Valley. Same story. Up 25 percent across the board. Any brand outselling the pack? "Honey, anything selling in a can or a bottle, our customers are buying it."

Alcohol is easy to vet, sales are reported — no one's cooking moonshine in their backyards. Marijuana? Let's just say the numbers are a little cloudy. Without getting lost in the weeds, the big picture looks like this: Recreational marijuana ("rec") consumption is up considerably this year, but precise numbers are hard to come by. Point of sale numbers for California's legal rec were up 29 percent for the month of August.

These reported sales exclude of course the everyday low-cost alternatives of illegal and homegrown dope. How big is the illegal business? No one really knows, but a couple weeks ago California's Attorney General Xavier Becerra touted the eradication of more than a million plants at 455 grow sites by the Department of Justice's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) program. Unless CAMP is considerably more effective than most governmental programs, his numbers mean there's enough illegal pot growing in the Golden State's hills to blanket a lesser state. Or two.

As for the do-it-yourself crowd, you can grow a single plant on your kitchen window sill and, according to the net, harvest a couple hundred joints, enough to light up your neighborhood like a diesel generator. Grow the six plants you're permitted under California law and you can buy yourself a tractor. No one has a clue how many pot transactions are free or bartered; maybe Netflix could make an educated guess by counting the number of times "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle" has been downloaded.

On the other hand, medical marijuana — the pain-killing lotions and potions — does lend itself to accurate accounting. It's highly regulated, legal in 33 states and no one is selling it off the back of a truck. I asked the president of a leading medical marijuana company how the virus affected his business. Surprisingly, he said his sales were off 50 percent in early spring, during the depths of the shut-down, but slowly rebounded over the summer and are now surpassing their pre-Covid levels. He needed rent breaks in the spring.

I had assumed just the opposite: that with everyone in all kinds of pain, his sales would have soared. He replied, "Tinctures and topicals are expensive. When the shutdown hit and people were suddenly unemployed, there was a flight from med to rec, to quantity over quality."

I think he meant that you can deal with back pain a couple different ways: rub an expensive lotion on your lumbar region or roll up a fattie. In addition to being cheaper, the latter approach has the benefit of making television comedy actually seem funny.

Reflecting on the Cannabiz in general, he said the price of "top flower" (on the street, buds) has risen from $1200 a pound wholesale in January to $1500 today, a result of its increased demand. He said the industry benefited by being earmarked essential from the get-go. (Guns and ammunition were also classified essential from day one; let's hope the overlap between the two consumer groups is small.)

More than its essential classification, he believed the business was aided by the $600 federal stimulus payments to the unemployed. That figures. And, reflecting trends in the larger economy, he thought one clear Cannabiz winner is its home delivery sub-industry; it's been growing exponentially at the expense of the bricks-and-mortar dispensaries.

As with alcohol, the real estate industry need not worry about its marijuana tenants. Let's face it, selling highly addictive products has a distinct upside (just ask Starbucks).

The great toilet paper run may have made all the headlines, but it had nothing on pot. When the dopers belatedly realized their dispensaries were about to shut down in mid-March ("Whoa, dude, for sure? No? Whoa. That's heavy"), they stormed the Bastille, their lines wrapping around the pot shops for blocks, buying everything green except the AstroTurf. A reasonable response to this the worst year anyone can recall. By John E. McNellis, Principal at McNellis Partners, for WOLF STREET

New York City, San Francisco Bay Area are the big losers. The great 2020 exodus raises the question: Will the techies ever return? Read… The Flight of the Techies

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Medieval Europeans didn’t understand how the plague spread. Their response wasn’t so different from ours now. - The Washington Post

Posted: 15 Oct 2020 12:00 AM PDT

One writer of the time compared the mass graves to "lasagna."

Seven centuries later, the plague in Europe stands as an example of a pandemic at its worst — what happens when so many people die so quickly that some foresee the end of the human race. Few places were hit harder than Florence, whose population in 1348 was cut by at least a third and possibly far more.

We had figured a trip to Florence might provide some comforting perspective on modern times — a chance to dwell on a period that was patently deadlier and more fear-inducing than the coronavirus pandemic. But instead, as we spoke with historians and searched for the plague's lasting marks, what stood out most were the similarities, 672 years apart.

Theirs was a mysterious bacteria spreading at a time when people didn't yet understand disease transmission; ours, a novel virus infiltrating a world that prides itself on its medical knowledge. But in both cases, the first instinct was to close borders to try to keep the disease at bay. When that didn't work, officials called for strict rules — but only some people paid attention. All the while, there was a proliferation of conspiracy theories. Many tried to blame the disease on outsiders or minorities — in medieval Europe, often Jews.

"Much has changed since the 1340s," author John Kelly wrote in his book on the plague, "but not human nature."

Then like now, people were divided over how to face the threat. Some in Florence shut themselves inside their homes and lived in isolation, according to a detailed account from 14th-century writer and poet Giovanni Boccaccio. Others ventured out in public, armed with herbs and spices intended to purify the air — a medieval version of HVAC filters and masks. Still others were cavalier about the disease and went about their lives socializing, drinking heavily, "satisfying their appetites by any means available," Boccaccio wrote.

Nobody was safe, and isolation scarcely worked as a safeguard in a dense city. But the people who gathered in groups courted greater risk. Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, a wealthy Florentine, wrote of daring dinner parties in which a host would gather 10 friends, with plans to reconvene again the next night.

At the next dinner, Stefani said, sometimes "two or three were missing."

Worst of all, in an obvious parallel to the present, many faced their last moments cut off from everybody else, according to accounts from the time. During the plague, these lonely deaths were not the result of public health protocols but the product of sheer terror. People, after the onset of symptoms, were a mortal danger to those around them. So in some cases, family members abandoned sick loved ones, even children. Their deaths were noticed only when neighbors smelled the rotting corpses.

"Many departed this life," Boccaccio wrote, "without anyone at all as a witness."

Searching for traces of the plague

The plague lashed Europe again and again over centuries — devastating London in the 1660s and Marseille, France, in 1720 — but nothing was worse than what struck in the late 1340s and early 1350s, when the disease touched almost the entire continent and killed tens of millions of people. This was Europe's first wave. Florence was one of the hot spots.

To understand what it was like at the time, we enlisted Donatella Lippi, a professor of medical history at the University of Florence, as a tour guide. And on a recent morning, she took us through the city, which in the tourist-free quiet of the coronavirus pandemic looked like a pristine medieval theater set.

In 1348, she said, the city was in its own state of near-lockdown. The inns were closed. The workshops closed, too.

"I imagine Florence at night in this period," Lippi said. "The city was immersed in darkness."

People were panicked. It was unclear how the disease spread — but there was no doubt that proximity to others was a risk. Animals — oxen, dogs, pigs — were dying, as well. People wondered whether it was retribution from God. They prayed and disavowed sin. They obsessed about the air and used scents and fires to ward off perceived deadly vapors. They were mostly guessing; scientists wouldn't know what actually caused the plague — how the bacteria was spread by rats and fleas — until 500 years later.

Among Florence's hospitals at the time, at least one was accepting the sick, just a small building with a few beds. Lippi guided us around a street corner and there it was: now a facility spanning much of a city block, with a white tent outside, a screening area for potential coronavirus patients.

Lippi led us through the frescoed entranceway, down several corridors, to a quiet courtyard covered in scruffy grass. She explained that in the 18th century, excavators discovered layer upon layer of human bones — hospital dead who went unclaimed by family members. Some bones dated back to the 1300s, meaning they may have died of the plague.

"Probably," Lippi said. "We don't know for sure."

What she does know for sure is that plague pits were dug all over the city and that all the usual customs for grieving together and mourning collapsed. In the absence of family processions, gravediggers desperate for money took over the task of transporting the dead bodies, dropping them in mass graves.

Lippi said that before the coronavirus pandemic, she had studied the plague with the "distance of a historian." But she thought about the pits of plague victims in March, when hundreds were dying of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in Italy every day, when crematoriums couldn't keep up, and when military trucks were called into the city of Bergamo to haul away the dead.

"It's a very close connection," she said.

Escaping death by leaving the city

At a time when people were trying to avoid the disease with trial-and-error strategies, only one thing seemed to work: If the plague arrived in your city, drop everything, flee the crowds and take refuge in the countryside.

Boccaccio's masterpiece, "The Decameron," was written several years after the disease had swept through Florence and describes a fictional getaway: 10 young characters leaving the plague-hit city and heading into the hills.

The place where they were depicted seeking refuge was most likely Fiesole, a town about six miles northeast of Florence. So one morning — trying to better imagine such an escape — we followed the same winding roads out of town, up the terraced hills, past a smattering of luxury homes. Fiesole has basically become a high-altitude Florentine suburb.

All through the coronavirus pandemic, there have been accounts of people taking their own countryside flights to safety — New Yorkers decamping to the Hamptons, British urbanites seeking out holiday cottages. People were doing much the same thing as Boccaccio's characters. Amid the coronavirus emergency, they were even fleeing Florence for Fiesole.

We soon found ourselves at an ocher villa talking to Simone Cerrina Feroni, 62. He didn't live there. It was his ex-wife's home. But as Italy's coronavirus crisis deepened this spring, his ex-wife invited him to leave his Florence apartment. He had a heart condition. He would be safer away from the crowds.

He said yes, and he spent the next 50 days at the villa with his ex-wife and her brother, almost never leaving the property. The weather was mild, he said; the air, clean. They had noon lunches with formal table settings and dinner outside in the garden. The danger, he said, always felt far away.

Boccaccio's 14th-century characters passed their time in self-imposed exile by telling stories about kings, priests and sex. But Cerrina Feroni said his ex-wife had already heard all of his stories many times over, and he had likewise heard all of hers.

So instead, during pandemic lockdown in Fiesole, they watched Netflix.

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