whats going on in this crazy world.

Medical marijuana, what is it and why are the police so afraid of it? Is it really a gateway drug or is it that the large pharmaceutical drug companies don't want you to use it. Face it, they lose money every time someone inhales it. The reason is because every time some one inhales medical marijuana, they are not taking a man made toxic pharmaceutical. And, guess what, the drug companies lose a patient. This is to say the profits of the large drug companies are going down the drain.

The reason you don't see more enforcement at this point is because the government, mostly local government, is broke and they do not have the money to go after marijuana cases.

So, they want to bust more people but at this point, they can not do it because of the budget cuts.

What would you do

Last week, the Obama administration sent out a letter to U.S. attorneys reminding them the cultivation and distribution of marijuana is illegal under federal law (http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/federal-officials-could-target-states-marijuana-industry-11260). The letter also stated the U.S. Department of Justice can prosecute “those who knowingly facilitate such activities,” strongly implying the government would be cracking down on states, such as California, that up until now have been skirting the law.

In a joint investigation with KQED, and in association with “FRONTLINE,” (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/2011/07/feds-remind-states-marijuana-is-illegal.html) the Center for Investigative Reporting is launching a series of reports looking at how the United States, and especially California, has gotten to this point. Today, more than a third of all states have some form of legislation allowing for medical marijuana use – in California, the city of Oakland went further than any other city by proposing to license four large pot-growing facilities.

So what is the solution? KQED and the Center for Investigative Reporting want to hear from you about what measures the federal government and the states could take to deal with this billion-dollar industry. If you were in charge, how would you change the legislation? We’ve crafted a Public Insight Network query that you can fill out either online (http://www.publicinsightnetwork.org/form/cir-and-kqed/59504e7aa117/how-would-you-change-marijuana-laws) or via text and voice messages. To respond by phone, just text the word CAPOT to 30644. We look forward to reading – and hearing – your suggestions.

Marijuana Cooperatives illegal in MI

Attorney general issues opinion saying medical marijuana cooperatives
are illegal in Michigan
Posted: Tue, Jun 28, 2011 : 4:38 p.m.

By Ryan J. Stanton
Political Reporter

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette issued a formal opinion today,
declaring there are only two legal ways patients can get access to
medical marijuana in the state.

They can either grow it for themselves — 12 plants at a time — or they
can get it from a registered caregiver who can grow 12 plants for each
of as many as five patients.

But not allowed under the state's medical marijuana law, Schuette
said, are cooperatives where patients and caregivers jointly
cultivate, store and share medical marijuana.

Schuette's opinion also noticeably leaves out patient-to-patient
transfers of marijuana, which is the business model many dispensaries
follow, as an acceptable practice. Schuette has said publicly he
believes the law approved by voters in 2008 did not authorize
dispensaries.

Ann Arbor officials are looking into what the opinion might mean for
marijuana dispensaries and cultivation facilities that exist locally,
but City Attorney Stephen Postema noted the attorney general's stance
ultimately could be trumped by pending court decisions.

"I knew something like this was coming out, so we'll be looking at
this," Postema said via phone today, adding the city still expects a
major decision to come down from the Michigan Court of Appeals ruling
on the legality of patient-to-patient transfers.

The Ann Arbor City Council adopted local medical marijuana regulations
last week that allow up to 72 plants to be grown in a single location,
but there is language in the ordinance saying it must be done in
compliance with the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act.

Schuette clarified in his opinion today there are strict rules around
how caregivers and patients can grow and access medical marijuana. He
said the law contemplated that permitted activities, including the
cultivation of marijuana plants, would occur on an individual basis.

Patients who wish to be self-sufficient, Schuette said, can grow up to
12 plants for their own personal medical use in an "enclosed, locked
facility" that only they can access.

If patients specify a caregiver, Schuette said, they relinquish any
right to possess and cultivate marijuana plants on their own — they
must rely on the caregiver.

And caregivers must keep each patient's plants segregated and in a
separate enclosed, locked facility that only they can access, Schuette
said. That's defined as "a closet, room, or other enclosed area
equipped with locks or other security devices that permit access only
by a registered primary caregiver or registered qualifying patient."

Schuette said questions concerning commercial enterprises that sell
medical marijuana — and whether government officials can conduct
warrantless administrative searches of registered patients or
caregivers and their properties — are under review by his office.

He noted in his opinion that marijuana remains a Schedule 1 controlled
substance, meaning it has a high potential for abuse and has no
accepted medical use in treatment in the United States. He also said
the manufacture and delivery of marijuana by anyone remains a felony
and the voter-approved medical marijuana law merely "sets forth
particular circumstances under which they will not be arrested or
otherwise prosecuted for their lawbreaking."

Ryan J. Stanton covers government and politics for AnnArbor.com. Reach
him at ryanstanton@annarbor.com or 734-623-2529. You also can follow
him on Twitter or subscribe to AnnArbor.com's e-mail newsletters.

--

Oaksterdam University

Oaksterdam University: Oakland’s “cannabis college”


By Steven Short on June 14, 2011 - 4:31pm

http://kalwnews.org/audio/2011/06/14/oaksterdam-university-oakland%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Ccannabis-college%E2%80%9D_1038114.html


Listen to story audio (8:30) - http://kalwnews.org/audio/popup/1038114


If you’re a proponent of legalizing marijuana, recent events may have left a bad taste in your mouth.

Back in October then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger “semi-decriminalized” the possession of small amounts of cannabis. But then in November, voters rejected Proposition 19, which would have softened certain pot-related charges. And last week, the State Assembly vetoed a bill that would have let county district attorneys decide whether growers should face misdemeanor or felony charges.

Still, the medical marijuana industry is thriving, with a couple dozen medical marijuana facilities in San Francisco and the East Bay, and many more statewide. They all require staff. And the best-known place to learn the trade is Oaksterdam University, in Oakland. We sent KALW’s Steven Short for a weekend session to see what he’d find in the halls of higher education.

CHAD GILMORE: I recommend a half a pound in a five-gallon area. Because the agitation will allow for – the surface space is, open. One pound only gives you so much surface space, but a half a pound, opened up, allows the water to go through, and get to all the crystals.

STEVEN SHORT: Come in late to Chad Gilmore’s Extraction Class, and you might mistake it for any trade school science lecture. But once focused on the instructor, you realize this is very specialized information.

GILMORE: It’s like taking, when you’re smoking, one big bud and sticking it into your pipe and trying to smoke it over and over again. It gets black; it gets charred.

Welcome to Oaksterdam University, perhaps the best-known training school for anyone interested in working in California’s medical marijuana trade.

The growing field of medical marijuana is working at correcting a lot of negative popular perception, including a long line of comedy, ranging from stoner duos like Cheech & Chong to Harold & Kumar. But more recent comics, such as Katt Williams, go the other direction, making it sound as wholesome as the Seven Dwarves.

Reality, of course, lies somewhere in between. But Williams’ comment about proper dosage – whether aspirin, marijuana, or anything else, for that matter – is part of the training here. That’s covered in Patient Relations 101 – formerly Budtending – as well as in the Methods of Ingestion classes.

DIEDRA BAGDASARIAN: Raise your hands if you currently participate in the medical marijuana marketplace, as something other than a patient, meaning that you’re, like, exchanging goods and services. Very few of you.

Oakland resident Diedra Bagdasarian has led one of those “Methods of Ingestion” classes at Oaksterdam for about a year now.

And while this class is titled Cooking with Cannabis, you won’t find any ovens or mixing bowls here. And you certainly won’t find any raw ingredients. It’s strictly a lecture class, because possession and consumption of medical cannabis, like all prescriptions, is limited to those with doctor recommendations. Oh, and it’s worth noting that it’s totally prohibited by federal law. Right now Bagdasarian is offering some history.

BAGDASARIAN: Our first – like our first knowledge of mankind using cannabis was ten thousand years ago, okay. Okay? That is longer than most of this country thinks the Earth is old. (laughter) And that’s not just me. That’s the BBC. I’m not making this stuff up. I got that from the BBC.

Bagdasarian rattles off a few more historic highlights from that ten thousand year period: Egyptian pharaohs were buried with it. Queen Victoria used it, and she was monarch of the British Empire for most of the 1800s.

BAGDASARIAN: She used cannabis, she used it for medical reasons, to treat her “lady problems.” The Queen of England! That should be like the most conservative woman on the planet, right? (laughter) Like, c’mon!

In Bagdasarian’s Cooking with Cannabis class, at least one of the students, Tim Yarbrough of Chico, already has some pretty good culinary skills.

TIM YARBROUGH: I was a Chef Instructor the last nine years, and thought maybe I should find out about using cannabis in cooking – because I see it evolving and getting bigger, you know, each year.

RICHARD LEE: There’s a lot of people being gainfully employed in the industry. I’d say, in general, the pay range is about $50,000 to $100,000.

Richard Lee is president of Oaksterdam University. He moved to Oakland in 1998 to work with the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, following the passage of Proposition 215, the first California medical marijuana initiative. But it was a trip to the Cannabis College in Amsterdam, Holland, which inspired his next move.

LEE: I thought about taking that one step farther, and making a trade school. And so we ran an ad in the back of East Bay Express to see if anyone was interested, and we had over 200 phone calls in the first couple days. And were sold out months in advance, for the first year.

SHORT: That was 2007?

LEE: Right, November, 2007 was the first class.

Many industries have taken root in California before growing throughout the country. And every new industry has start-up hassles: look at solar power. But few of those hassles include felony charges for growing or possessing your raw material.

LEE: Well, it’s true, that there’s give and take, attacks and counter-attacks. But in general, things are going our way.

That’s an audacious statement, especially in Oakland, where earlier this year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office cracked down on the Oakland City Council’s plans to operate industrial-sized cannabis greenhouses. But Lee doesn’t see it as a setback.

LEE: In general, I wouldn’t say the federal government is cracking down. As far as the Oakland commercial permits – that got a lot of media, but things are moving ahead. And if you look at California, with our medical marijuana system, some people would say that it’s already legal here. It’s fairly easy to go to a doctor, get a recommendation, and then there’s thousands of places open, selling cannabis. You can get it delivered to you, like pizza.

A growing number of states – 14 at present – now authorize some form of legal cannabis. And students from every state, with the exception of North Dakota, have come to Oakland to take classes at Oaksterdam University.

And medical cannabis, Lee points out, is only one of many uses for the plant.

LEE: Hemp is any of the industrial uses, the non-psychoactive uses. So it’s not just the fibers off the stalk, but the seed is the other big use – for the oils, food products, as well as beauty or skin products.

Students in Deidra Bagdasarian’s cooking class aren’t focused on hemp, of course. Their thoughts are elsewhere.

BAGDASARIAN: Do not make a recipe that you’ve never made before, with cannabis. Test your recipes without cannabis first. Okay? You do not want to, you know, make a $200 mistake. That’s not a good time.

Actually, student Josh Salans of San Jose, says he doesn’t know anyone interested in growing industrial hemp. And, he notes, hemp plants and cannabis plants should not be grown together.

JOSH SALANS: Where I have land in Mendocino County, I was told that if I tried to grow hemp, I’d be killed. Because hemp will pollinate the pot, right? Because they’re male. So you don’t want that. So you don’t want hemp anywhere near your pot-growing.

SHORT: Well, you learn something every day.

SALANS: Yeah! (chuckles) Under threat of duress!

It will be years before growers and government officials straighten out who can grow what, where. In the meantime, Oaksterdam University will continue to provide training in legal issues, history, ingestion, and economics.

And with hundreds of thousands of cardholders using medical cannabis for everything from AIDS to anorexia, glaucoma to chronic pain the prospects of these Oaksterdam grads finding jobs should be … high.

In Oakland, I’m Steven Short, for Crosscurrents.

It was 15 years ago that the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Co-op began, in 1996, paved the way for businesses such as Oaksterdam University.

Dispensary Ban in Glendale

CITY HALL - The City Council today will consider permanently banning
marijuana dispensaries in Glendale after spending nearly two years
vetting their legal standing to do so.

Medical marijuana dispensaries are prohibited under the city's zoning
codes, but the City Council in 2009 adopted a moratorium to
completely close Glendale's borders to the shops so city attorneys
could review the legal issues associated with an all-out ban.

But that moratorium is set to expire in September and officials can
no longer extend it, prompting city attorneys and police to recommend
enacting a citywide ban similar to those in dozens of cities across
the state.

There are no dispensaries within Glendale city limits, but city
officials have said interest has increased in recent years. Glendale
is also a virtual island in the Greater Los Angeles area. In 2007,
187 pot dispensaries registered to continue operating when the Los
Angeles City Council approved a moratorium.

Glendale officials had been hoping that a decision by a state
appellate court regarding Anaheim's ban on marijuana dispensaries
would provide firm legal precedent. Instead, the 4th District Court
of Appeal in Santa Ana sent a legal challenge of the city's ban back
to a lower court for further review.

Still, city attorneys say they are confident a ban in Glendale would
be on solid legal footing.

"We know that the legal landscape is continuing to evolve; however,
review of the cases to date help support the recommendation that we
are making," said Carmen Merino, general counsel for the Police
Department.

In cities where dispensaries have been established, law enforcement
agencies have reported increased burglaries, vandalism, illegal drug
sales and other criminal behaviors, according to a report to the
California Chiefs of Police Assn.

"It is a collective opinion that this is not good for our community,"
said city spokesman Tom Lorenz. "It is a quality-of-life issue."

Advocates of medical marijuana, meanwhile, continue to challenge
outright bans as being counter to state law.

"It's illegal under state law to ban outright this kind of activity,"
said Kris Hermes, a spokesman for the medical marijuana advocacy
group Americans for Safe Access. "Local governments should feel an
obligation to address the needs of patients in their community and be
able to regulate activity that is shown to be lawful under state law."

Hermes also disputed assertions that pot dispensaries contribute to
crime, citing interviews with public safety officials in cities where
the shops are regulated that show the opposite.

"These are public officials that are talking to us on the record.
They've found that crime actually decreases around these facilities,"
he said.

Erase those text messages!

The contents of your cell phone can reveal a lot more about you than the naked eye can: who your friends are, what you've been saying and when, which websites you've visited, and more. There has long been debate over user privacy when it comes to various data found on a cell phone, but according to the California Supreme Court, police don't need a warrant to start digging through your phone's contents.

The ruling comes as a result of the conviction of one Gregory Diaz, who was arrested for trying to sell ecstasy to a police informant in 2007 and had his phone confiscated when he arrived at the police station. The police eventually went through Diaz's text message folder and found one that read "6 4 80." Such a message means nothing to most of us, but it was apparently enough to be used as evidence against Diaz (for those curious, it means six pills will cost $80).

Diaz had argued that the warrantless search of his phone violated his Fourth Amendment rights, but the trial court said that anything found on his person at the time of arrest was "really fair game in terms of being evidence of a crime."

In its review of the case, the Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment didn't apply to the text messages on Diaz's cell phone at the time of arrest. The court cited a number of previous cases wherein defendants were arrested with all manner of incriminating objects—heroin tablets hidden in a cigarette case, paint chips hidden in clothing, marijuana in the trunk of a car — which did not require a warrant to obtain. The court said that the phone was "immediately associated" with Diaz's person, and therefore the warrantless search was valid.

The decision was not unanimous, though. "The potential intrusion on informational privacy involved in a police search of a person‟s mobile phone, smartphone or handheld computer is unique among searches of an arrestee's person and effects," Justices Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos Moreno wrote in dissent.

They went on to argue that the court majority's opinion would allow police "carte blanche, with no showing of exigency, to rummage at leisure through the wealth of personal and business information that can be carried on a mobile phone or handheld computer merely because the device was taken from an arrestee's person. The majority thus sanctions a highly intrusive and unjustified type of search, one meeting neither the warrant requirement nor the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution."

The courts have gone back and forth in the past on how much privacy protection should be given to data that can be found on a citizen's cell phone. A Pennsylvania District Court ruled in 2008 that law enforcement must get a warrant before acquiring historical records of a cell phone user's physical movements. The same year, the 9th Circuit Court said that the text messages of a police officer had to meet the standards of a reasonable search before law enforcement could access them. In 2010, however, the US Supreme Court said that government employers have the right to read transcripts of employees' e-mails, IMs, texts, and other communications, and that the Fourth Amendment wouldn't protect them from a government search.

South Texas College of Law professor Adam Gershowitz argued in a 2008 paper that the proliferation of iPhone-like devices means that officers fishing through your pockets for weapons can suddenly access a plethora of sensitive documents, not to mention possible passwords. "[S]ince the Supreme Court has ruled that police have broad authority to arrest people for even trivial infractions, such as failure to wear a seat belt, the current rule gives law enforcement officers broad discretion to transform a routine traffic stop into a highly intrusive excavation of your digital life," Ars observed at the time.

Gershowtiz suggested a number of possibilities for how courts could distinguish between an appropriate cell phone search and an inappropriate one, but no such rules exist yet. In the meantime, California citizens may want to be extra careful about what gets stored on their devices, lest the police find a reason to dig up your sexy texts or communications with your private "dispensary."

Canada moves closer to legalization?

“Communities will be safer a result, simple as that,” said association president Len Garis. “I congratulate Minister [Leona] Aglukkaq for bringing this forward and for allowing a consultation process to take place in the meantime, with community stakeholders, to help us work to solve our immediate concerns.”

Minister Aglukkaq announced Friday that the federal government will be changing laws for medical marijuana growers

The government is beginning the process immediately by launching public consultations into a list of proposed changes the department has prepared.

Aglukkaq said government is hoping the changes will “reduce the risk of abuse . . . while significantly improving the way program participants access marijuana for medical purposes.”

Among other changes, the move would eliminate individual and private growers. Under the current system, eligible people apply to Health Canada, which then issues the licence.

People in the dispensing community who have been hearing about the impending change say it’s unconstitutional, and removes the rights of medical cannabis patients to produce their own cannabis.

Health Canada’s proposal is based on recent complaints from mayors and councillors across the country who say the current system poses dangers when growers don’t follow local electrical, health and safety bylaws.

At the Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference earlier this month, delegates approved a resolution to ask that Health Canada issue licences only to growers who have already received a licence from their respective municipality.

In March, the mayors of two towns in southern British Columbia wrote to Aglukkaq, saying too many licences were floating around, making it impossible for municipalities to know who is licensed and whether those growers are operating safely. The mayors of Langley, B.C., and the Township of Langley, B.C., also wrote that they knew “based on actual cases, that there is significant misuse of many licences and the volume of product produced often exceeds an individual’s personal requirement.”

Late last month, RCMP drug investigators in B.C. arrested three men and seized a helicopter after raiding a Maple Ridge property growing almost seven times more pot than its two medical marijuana licences permitted. The Federal Drug Enforcement Branch found 1,490 plants instead of the 220 permitted by two licences provided by Health Canada to grow medical pot.

— with a file from The Province

Brazil Calls for legalized marijuana

SAO PAULO — Brazilian demonstrators held marches on the weekend calling for marijuana to be legalized after the country's top court ruled the gatherings could go ahead in the name of freedom of speech.

The demonstrations were held in 40 towns and cities late Saturday, according to Brazilian media.

Most were small affairs, with around 2,000 marching in the country's megapolis of Sao Paulo. Some people were seen smoking marijuana, but there were no immediate reports of arrests.

Possession and use of marijuana remains illegal in Brazil, and some commentators and social groups said they saw the marches as violating a law on justifying crimes.

But Brazil's Supreme Court last Wednesday ruled that the right to freedom of expression was more important and the marches could be held -- but that illicit drugs should not be consumed.

Last month, when protesters tried to hold a pro-marijuana rally in Sao Paulo without judicial support, the march degenerated into clashes with police who fired tear gas to disperse them.

Feds on New Medical Marijuana Offensive

Rally in Sacramento Monday for Dr. Mollie Fry and Dale Schafer. Threatening letters from US attorneys have been sent to officials in Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Rhode Island, and Washington. The first was in February in California; the latest came this week in Arizona.

What is worse is that the interventions by the US attorneys appear deliberately timed to intimidate elected officials as they consider regulating medical marijuana dispensaries -- and it seems to be working. Last week, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire vetoed a bill that would have created a regulated dispensary system after requesting and receiving a threatening letter from her state's two US attorneys. This week, Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee "placed a hold" on dispensaries about to open there after receiving an unsolicited threatening letter from the US attorney.

Earlier, as Montana legislators debated whether to regulate and allow dispensaries there, the feds hit them with a one-two punch of DEA raids and a US attorney letter. While Gov. Brian Schweitzer vetoed a bill that would have repealed the state's medical marijuana law, all indications are that he will not veto a bill that will effectively kill dispensaries in Big Sky Country. And in Hawaii, legislators backed away from a dispensary bill after receiving similar threats.

The medical marijuana community has responded with protests -- there were actions in cities across the country on Monday -- but appears uncertain about what to do next. There are calls to reschedule marijuana, including one by Washington Gov. Gregoire, there are calls for the Obama administration or Congress to do something, and there are calls on state elected and appointed officials to stand firm in the face of federal bullying.

A group of Washington state legislators has also responded by sending a letter asking the state's Attorney General for his legal opinion on the law. The 15 legislators, all Democrats, led by Rep. Roger Goodman (Kirkland), asked Attorney General Rob McKenna if state employees had anything to fear from federal law enforcement if the vetoed state licensing provisions of the bill were revived, according to the Kitsap Sun.

A cannabis rescheduling petition to change marijuana's status under the Controlled Substances Act has been pending since 2002. Perhaps if Gregoire can rally other governors behind her, they can light a fire under the feds.



Rally in Washington, DC Monday to demand an end to federal interfence. (Image courtesy ASA) In the meantime, the raids continue. The DEA hit a San Diego dispensary Tuesday.

"This turn of events with the US attorneys is troublesome and reactionary," said Dale Gieringer, the long-time head of California NORML, who had just returned from a Sacramento rally in support of Dr. Mollie Fry and her companion, Dale Schafer, who had that day begun serving five-year federal prison sentences for medical marijuana cultivation. "It makes your head spin about that Obama policy of low enforcement, but Obama never said he supports states having access, and the US attorneys have taken matters into their own hands. This is certainly disappointing."

"It's very disconcerting and alarming that the federal government is deciding to deal with the medical marijuana issue this way," said Kris Hermes, a spokesman for Americans for Safe Access (ASA), the nation's largest medical marijuana defense organization. "We had been seeing progress, with states passing distribution laws, others amending their laws to include distribution, and others passing new laws to incorporate distribution into the laws they passed. It's very unsettling that the federal government is choosing to interfere in the implementation of those laws and restrict the access that patients could benefit from or are benefiting from."

ASA recently gave the Obama administration a failing grade on its approach to medical marijuana. That report card cited continuing law enforcement actions against medical marijuana providers. It is unclear whether the recent US attorney letters represent a policy shift at the Justice Department or whether individual prosecutors are taking the initiative. The Justice Department did not respond to a Chronicle call for clarification. Still, it is clear that the federal prosecutors are on a mission.

"When the Rhode Island US attorney made the threat he did, without being asked, that signified that this is more than just a defensive policy, it is an aggressive policy on the part of the US attorneys to keep medical marijuana illegal," said Gieringer.

"We'd like to know what's going on," said Hermes. "The federal government is showing its cards now. This is drawing attention to the fact that it didn't necessarily mean what it said when it said it wouldn't use Department of Justice resources to circumvent state laws. It certainly seems like there is a concerted effort in the background, but no one has come out from Justice and said that. Justice has refused to meet with patient advocates since this increased interference in the past few months, and they need to address this community and this issue. They can't say one thing in a policy statement and do the exact opposite. The spotlight is on the president at this point."

"The federal government has totally ignored us on all fronts," said Geiringer, "but we're just going to have to keep insisting that we be heard. I would like to see somebody in Congress question this on the record. It never gets mentioned in congressional hearings when DEA officials are up there; it's just totally ignored."

"The timing of these memos really smacks of intimidation and interference," said Morgan Fox, communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP). "Our advice for lawmakers is to stand their ground and do what's best for their states, particularly when it comes to the feds prosecuting state employees involved in registries. There has never been a prosecution; it doesn’t rise to the level of aiding and abetting."

"They've never moved against any public official for this stuff anywhere, so I think this is an empty threat," agreed Gieringer, "but public officials being what they are, they are easily cowed."

Elected and appointed officials at the state level need to stand firm against the federal threats, said Fox. "The US attorney memos are frightening and starting to get more severe in tone, but all we need to do is have the states considering dispensary regulation to continue moving ahead with that. I don't think the feds are going to push this too much. They don't have the resources, and it would be a policy disaster for the administration."

If the threats to go after state officials are over-hyped, the dangers to dispensary operators are not. One was convicted in Spokane as legislators deliberated, and more than a dozen were raided in Montana as the legislature took up medical marijuana bills. They are all looking at lengthy federal prison sentences if prosecuted and convicted.



Patients rally across the country for medical marijuana. (Image courtesy ASA)"It's not lawmakers who will be looking at five-year federal prison sentences, but dispensary operators. They have to make personal decisions about whether they want to take that risk. Opening dispensaries is not just a way to provide safe access for patients, but also an act of civil disobedience, and you could face consequences," warned MPP's Fox.

ASA is holding training sessions for dispensary operators, said Hermes. But operators also need to continue to organize and pressure their elected representatives, he said.

But if the feds are standing firm, so is the medical marijuana movement. ASA, MPP, and California NORML all pledged to continue the fight.

"This is the federal government's last shot to try to prevent something that is working well in the US and will continue to work as long as the federal government stays out of the business of implementing state laws," said Hermes. "More than that, the federal government should be working with states to design a comprehensive federal policy that includes disengagement from enforcement and investment in research and rescheduling marijuana so that patients are protected wherever they live."

"We will continue to try to shine a light on this absurd and obscene misuse of law enforcement," said Gieringer, again pointing to the case of Dr. Fry and Dale Schafer. "Dale is on anti-hemophilia drugs with one treatment costing $10,000. He's also on morphine. And they're sending him to prison for five years? That's just crazy, but the machine just keeps going."

"We are just on the cusp of being legitimate and are now being beat back," said Fox. "We have to hold our ground."

City attorney sues medical marijuana dispensaries

The city plans to ask a judge for injunctions to bar the pot shops from storing, selling, distributing or giving away marijuana. It could also seek fines of up to $2,500 a day, as well as a $25,000 fine for violating state narcotics laws. The lawsuits, which name the store and building owners, also aim to force the landlords to oust their tenants.

“The city of Los Angeles is sending a clear message that we will no longer allow property owners to turn a blind eye to illegal activity,” City Atty. Carmen Trutanich said in a statement.

Trutanich’s office is battling numerous lawsuits filed by dispensaries seeking to remain open. Some dispensaries are now trying to overturn the city’s revamped medical marijuana ordinance, which would cap the number of stores at 100 and allow only those that were in business on Sept. 14, 2007, when the city passed a moratorium to make it illegal to open new stores.

The dispensaries targeted by the city are: Cancare Collective, 11120 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood; Golden Triangle Collective, 2626 S. Figueroa Blvd., University Park; Green Oasis, 11924 Jefferson Blvd., Playa Vista; Natural Ways Always, 10006½ National Blvd., Palms; Rainforest Collective, 12515 Venice Blvd., Mar Vista; The Spot, 3200 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood Hills; and Helping Hint, 13614-16 Victory Blvd., Valley Glen.

-- John Hoeffel

Venice pot doctors shut down after raid by state medical board and police

Investigators carted boxes and at least two large plastic bags that appeared to contain marijuana out of the deep-blue building next to Muscle Beach that houses a doctor’s office, a smoke shop and a popular dispensary called the Medical Kush Beach Club.

Jennifer Simoes, spokeswoman for the Medical Board of California, said the warrant was sealed. She declined to discuss the reason for the board’s investigation, but said the warrant was served at 1313, 1811 and 2017 Ocean Front Walk.

Attorneys for Medical Kush Doctor raced to the beach, but said they were not allowed on the premises. Graham Berry, one of the lawyers, said the warrant authorized a search of the offices, vehicles and “anything else that your imagination could run to.� He said it also allowed officials to seize records related to the unlicensed practice of medicine. “Since all these doctors appear to be duly licensed, I don’t know what they are referring to,� he said.

Berry said that the raid started about 10:15 a.m. and that by the time he arrived at 11, he found a line of patrol cars, a crowd gathered outside, news cameras and a news helicopter fluttering overhead. “Once I arrived, they pulled the sliding gate door down,� he said.

The Medical Kush Beach Club was also shut down, but Berry said, “It appeared to me that the target was the doctors and the practice of writing recommendations and the collective was a collateral casualty.� The Medical Kush Beach Club is operated by Sean Cardillo, who is also the registered agent for Kush Dr., the limited liability corporation that runs the doctor’s offices.

Cardillo could not be reached for comment.

Stewart Richlin, another attorney who represents Cardillo, said that agents seized 5 pounds of marijuana from the dispensary but that he expected it to be returned. “They involved the Medical Kush Beach Club unfairly,� he said. He added that he did not know whether any cash or equipment was seized but said no one was arrested in the raids.

Richlin said Kush Dr. rents space and provides promotional services for medical marijuana doctors. He said he believed the doctors followed state law in issuing recommendations for marijana use.

“As far as I know, it’s by the book. I’m surprised that this is happening,� he said. “I have a feeling by the time the fat lady sings on this it will be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.�

Simoes said the operation was conducted with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, the Los Angeles Police Department, the county Sheriff’s Department and the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which provided search dogs.

-- John Hoeffel


http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/04/venice-pot-doctors-shut-down-after-raid-by-state-medical-board-and-police.html

U.S. attorney: Justice Department considers medical marijuana to be illegal

By CHARLES S. JOHNSON
Gazette State Bureau

Posted: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 7:59 pm



Read the letter from US Attorney for Montana Michael Cotter to lawmakers @ http://billingsgazette.com/pdf_edadcde6-02c9-576f-b39a-f99e99ee483f.html


HELENA — The U.S. Justice Department will prosecute individuals and organizations involved in the business of any illegal drug, including marijuana used for medical purposes permitted under state law, Michael W. Cotter, U.S. attorney for Montana, said in a letter to top legislative leaders Wednesday.

In another development on marijuana Wednesday, Gov. Brian Schweitzer said he is likely to make some amendatory vetoes suggesting changes to the medical marijuana bill moving through the Legislature.

Senate Bill 423, by Sen. Jeff Essmann, R-Billings, is the last surviving bill to repeal Montana's medical marijuana law and enact a new one that would impose far stricter regulations and make it much tougher for people to obtain cards to use medical marijuana.

Earlier this week, Senate President Jim Peterson, R-Buffalo, and House Speaker Mike Milburn, R-Cascade, wrote Cotter to ask for his guidance as the Montana Legislature completes work on SB423.

In 2004, Montanans voted, 62 percent to 38 percent, to legalize the use of marijuana for medical purposes. Since the fall of 2009, the number of medical marijuana cardholders has skyrocketed to nearly 30,000 last month.

Cotter said the Justice Department has not reviewed the specific legislative bill. But he said the U.S. Justice Department "has stated on many occasions that Congress placed marijuana in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and as such, growing, distributing and possessing marijuana in any capacity, other than as part of a federally authorized research program, is a violation of federal law, regardless of state laws that purport to permit such activities."

Cotter went on to say, "The prosecution of individuals and organizations involved in the trade of any illegal drugs and the disruption of drug trafficking organizations is a core priority of the department."

This core priority, he said, "includes prosecution of business enterprises that unlawfully market and sell marijuana."

"While the department generally does not focus its limited resources on seriously ill individuals who use marijuana as part of a medically recommended treatment regimen consistent with applicable state law, as stated in the October 2009 Ogden Memorandum, we maintain the authority to enforce the CSA against individuals and organizations that participate in unlawful manufacturing and distribution activity involving marijuana, even if such activities are permitted under state law," Cotter said.

Cotter added, "The department's investigative and prosecutorial resources will continue to be directed toward these objectives."

In mid-March, federal law enforcement authorities raided 26 medical marijuana growing and dispensary operations in 13 Montana cities. They said they had probable cause that these businesses were engaged in large-scale trafficking.

Cotter said then that the search warrants executed were the culmination of an "18-month, multi-agency investigation into the drug trafficking activities of criminal enterprises." He said civil seizure warrants also were executed for financial institutions in Bozeman, Helena and Kalispell that sought up to $4 million.

Regarding the bill before the Legislature, Schweitzer said he probably would have some amendments when SB423 reaches him after passing both legislative houses next week.

"They're moving to a 'grow-your-own' (marijuana system)," Schweitzer said. "It does concern me. I don't know if it will end up being 2,000 patients or 30,000 patients growing their own."

He said that would make it harder to regulate than having a smaller number of producers growing for more people.

"We have some ideas that we think will make it better," Schweitzer said.

Westlake Village bans medical pot dispensaries

Although California passed Proposition 215 in 1996 decriminalizing the use of medical marijuana, many local cities passed ordinances outlawing cannabis clubs in support of the federal government’s anti-drug stance.

Westlake Village received inquiries from business people seeking to establish marijuana clinics in the city. In 2009, the city shut down a medical marijuana business that had opened at a La Baya Drive commercial center without permission.

Officials passed a subsequent moratoriums to evaluate the impacts of dispensary bans in other jurisdictions. They also wanted to wait for the results of a 2010 state initiative that would have legalized the use of marijuana before implementing their own prohibition.

Since the initiative failed at the polls last November, a city land use committee recommended that Westlake Village enact its own ordinance to prohibit marijuana distribution facilities throughout the city. Agoura Hills has a similar ordinance banning pot dispensaries. The Westlake Village law includes the sale of synthetic marijuana products.

Before voting, Mayor Ned Davis expressed some concerns about the proposed ban because, he said, it would forbid distribution of cannabis in pharmacies and medical offices even if the state allowed those operations in the future.

Medical marijuana should be available only to patients who truly need it, Davis said, adding, “The way California allows marijuana distribution is blatantly wrong. It just doesn’t work.”

Councilmember Mark Rutherford urged Sacramento legislators to solve the problems associated with Prop. 219. “All the city is doing is trying to work with the uncertainty in the law,” he said.

Most California voters say possessing small amount of illegal drugs should be misdemeanor, not felony

April 11, 2011 | 8:20 am

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/04/voters-marijuana-use-felony-to-misdemeanor.html




A strong majority of California voters believe the penalty for possession of a small amount of an illegal drug for personal use should be reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor, according to a poll released Monday by organizations seeking to relax drug laws.

The survey conducted by a professional polling firm found that almost 75% of California voters likely to cast ballots in 2012 believe the crime should be downgraded to a misdemeanor. And 40% went even further, saying they think it should be dropped to an infraction, which is the equivalent of a speeding ticket and carries no prison time.

The poll did not define what is considered a small amount of a drug. Possession of controlled substances, such as cocaine and heroin, is a felony, although charges are sometimes reduced. Marijuana is treated separately, and possession of an ounce or less is an infraction.

A majority of voters also said California sends too many people to prison. And almost 75% agreed that in the midst of a budget crisis, the state should instead use the millions of dollars spent to imprison drug users on schools, healthcare and law enforcement.

"The point here is that this is an overwhelming majority of California voters," said Margaret Dooley-Sammuli, the deputy state director for Southern California for the Drug Policy Alliance, a national organization that supports efforts to reduce drug sentences. "Californians don't want to waste money on incarcerating people for drug possession. They'd rather see that money go for something else."

The poll was released by the Drug Policy Alliance along with the ACLU of Northern California in San Francisco and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland. It was designed and administered by Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling firm.

Support for reducing drug possession penalties crosses party lines, drawing favor from substantial majorities of Democratic, Republican and nonpartisan voters. Most voters in every region of the state also back the change. Voters also indicated they are more inclined to reelect state lawmakers who vote to reduce the penalties for drug possession.

Nearly a quarter of the voters surveyed said Californians caught with a small amount of an illegal drug for personal use should not spend any time behind bars, while 27% said they should be locked up for less than three months. Just 8% suggested incarceration for a year or more.

The statewide poll surveyed 800 voters who intend to vote in the 2012 general election. They were questioned between March 21 and 24. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The results and analysis can be viewed at www.lakeresearch.com.

-- John Hoeffel


http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/04/voters-marijuana-use-felony-to-misdemeanor.html

*Five Medical Marijuana Activists Arrested Today at San Diego City Council Protest

Americans for Safe Access
For Immediate Release:*April 12, 2011

*/Patients, supporters resist passage of flawed ordinance & forced
closure of all city collectives/

in the San Diego City Council chambers protesting the final vote on a
local distribution ordinance, which advocates say imposes a citywide de
facto ban on collectives. During the hearing, members of the "Stop the
Ban Campaign" -- a coalition of over 20 local, state, and national
groups spearheaded by Canvass for a Cause and the San Diego Chapter of
Americans for Safe Access (ASA) -- repeatedly chanted "We demand safe
access," disrupting the session, forcing council to clear the chambers,
and postponing a critical vote on the ordinance.

The Stop the Ban Campaign has demanded that the City Council amend its
ordinance to include a compliance period that will avoid the immediate
closure of more than 100 facilities currently serving thousands of area
patients, and to open up available space in the city so that collectives
can actually relocate. Unfortunately, despite years of study, thoughtful
recommendations from a city-appointed task force, countless letters
received from constituents, hundreds of supporters at the last public
hearing, the City Council has so far refused to acknowledge the
recommendations of experts and the will of the people.

"The patient community in San Diego will not be deterred despite the
efforts of the City Council," said ASA San Diego Chair Eugene
Davidovich, one of the protest organizers and people arrested today.
"One way or another San Diego patients will gain safe access to their
medication, but it would be much more effective for the city to work
with us instead of fighting us at every step of the way."

Prior to the bill's first reading on March 28th, the Stop the Ban
campaign organized the largest letter-writing campaign in the city's
history, during which San Diego residents wrote in opposition to the
ordinance, requesting the passage of specific amendments. The ordinance
was also opposed by the Chair and Vice-Chair of the City's Medical
Marijuana Task Force. Left with little option, activists chose
nonviolent civil disobedience to protest the council's decision to
ignore years of citizen and expert input into the development of
regulations.

Advocates are now targeting San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, urging him to
reject the bill and tell the City Council to come back with a version
that reflects the community's input. While litigation is likely to
result from the passage of the ordinance in its current form, there is
another move afoot. The San Diego chapter of ASA in collaboration with
the Stop the Ban Campaign submitted a ballot proposal to the city clerk
on Monday in an attempt to put the issue before the voters. A
little-used process involving the city's Rules Committee, could prompt a
public hearing on the proposed measure and if approved by the committee
would be sent to the council for placement on the next election's ballot.

*Further information:*
San Diego medical marijuana ordinance:
http://AmericansForSafeAccess.org/downloads/City_of_San_Diego_Ordinance.pdf
Manifesto from arrested activists:
http://AmericansForSafeAccess.org/downloads/San_Diego_Manifesto.pdf
San Diego ASA chapter website: http://SafeAccessSD.org

AZ: Rules about medical marijuana in Arizona released

The state health department on Monday released its final version of medical-marijuana rules, which detail how dispensaries will be chosen and distributed throughout the state.

The release wraps up the state health department's four-month rule-making process. Arizona's medical-marijuana program officially begins April 14, when the Arizona Department of Health Services will begin accepting patient applications. The program should be fully functioning by the end of the year.

In November, voters passed Proposition 203, which will allow qualifying patients with certain debilitating medical conditions to receive up to 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks from dispensaries or cultivate up to 12 marijuana plants if they live 25 miles or farther from a dispensary. There will be between 120 and 126 dispensaries throughout the state, proportionate to the number of pharmacies.

Since early February, the state health department received more than 1,450 electronic comments on the second draft of its rules. The agency held four public forums - in Flagstaff, Tempe and Tucson - where about 150 people gave input on the rules.

"Ultimately, whether it becomes recreational over time is directly related to whether physicians across the state take this seriously and really make full assessments of patients, and only write certifications for people who really do have debilitating medical conditions," said Will Humble, ADHS director.

Humble said one of the main problems he expects in the first couple of weeks of the program is patients submitting doctor certifications that are incomplete or not in the department's accepted electronic format. Several doctors have been writing medical-pot certifications before the department finalized its rules.

"(The patients have) been walking away with sheets of paper that they believe are certifications that we'll accept. The fact is, we will only accept certifications that are on the department-provided form," Humble said.

The main changes made to the final version relate to selecting and distributing dispensaries:

- Dispensary selection

The final version builds on the previous draft's proposed two-step process of approving applications. Dispensary agents will be required to first apply for a registration certificate, which would include a background check and basic information such as location. The agent then will apply for an operating license, which requires more detailed plans, such as a site plan and a certificate of occupancy.

ADHS has added more requirements to the first application step. For example, applicants must include a business plan that shows projected expenditures before and after the dispensary is operational, and the projected revenue.

The final rules make it easier for dispensary owners to change locations within their designated health area.

- Dispensary distribution

There will be one dispensary in each Community Health Analysis Area, a geographical breakdown of the state that the DHS previously used to track public-health statistics. There are 126 of these health areas in the state, close to the number of dispensaries allowed.

If there is one qualified applicant for one health area, the department will approve the dispensary. But if there is more than one qualified application for the same health area, prospective dispensaries will be evaluated on a set of standards: whether the dispensary has access to $150,000 in start-up capital; whether the applicant has been bankrupt; whether anyone with a 20 percent or more interest in the dispensary is a board member or a principal member; whether the applicant is a resident of Arizona for three years; and whether the applicant has outstanding fees, such as federal, state and local taxes and child support.

If the applicants all rank the same, the department will choose dispensaries randomly.

One of the reasons this provision was included in the final rules was to encourage applicants to set up shop in rural areas of the state, Humble said. If applicants do not meet the standards, they will have a better chance applying for a less competitive health area. After three years, dispensary owners can apply to move to a different health area, perhaps inside the Valley.

Whittier city officials consider cap of one on medical marijuana dispensaries

By Mike Sprague, Staff Writer

Posted: 04/07/2011 05:39:51 PM PDT

http://www.whittierdailynews.com/news/ci_17796928


WHITTIER - The city's only legal medical marijuana dispensary may become a monopoly of one.

Concerned about a potential influx of such facilities, city officials have proposed a cap of one on the number allowed in Whittier.

The amendment to the zoning ordinance - recommended Monday on a 5-0 vote by the Planning Commission - is expected to go to the City Council at its May 10 meeting.

Assistant City Manager Jeff Collier said the cap of one was based on the small number of Whittier residents holding state-authorized medical marijuana cards. It's only 22.

"We're providing the number of businesses necessary to serve that particular constituent base," Collier said.

"We don't need an influx of these throughout our city," he said. "We're accommodating the use but we're not going beyond what's is necessary to serve (Whittier) residents."

The proposed new law would allow for a second medical marijuana dispensary if the owner could demonstrate through documented evidence there is "compelling need and demand for a second facility to serve residents of the city of Whittier only."

Robert Ortiz, director of the Whittier Hope Collective, the dispensary that opened in July of 2010, said he was surprised to hear about the proposed law.

"It's obvious (city officials) feel that's what the city needs," Ortiz said. "I can't say that I'm really more excited or not excited."

Ortiz, whose group has about 2,500 patients, said he doesn't believe the law creates a monopoly.

"There are other options for patients, the most important of which is home cultivation," he said.

In addition, there are other dispensaries in nearby Santa Fe Springs, he said.

Bill Britt, executive director for the Association of Patient Advocates, criticized the potential action.

"I can't think of anything as un-American as that," Britt said.

"No other business is restricted like that. Patients will suffer," he said. "How many pharmacies are there in the city? How many liquor stores are there?"

Britt also said to base a law on the number of patient cards is misleading.

"Everybody's afraid to the get the cards," he said. "Plus it costs $75, just if you're on Medi-Cal. And that's on top of getting the doctor's letter."

Britt said he believes that 10 percent of any city most likely uses marijuana for medical reasons.

mike.sprague@sgvn.com

562-698-0955, ext. 3022

Trutanich Talks Pot Shops, Crime and Moving Billboards

The Los Angeles city attorney is also already looking for a local storefront for an office to run his district attorney campaign.


By Mike Szymanski | 4-7-11 | 4:30pm

http://studiocity.patch.com/articles/trutanich-talks-pot-shops-crime-and-moving-billboards


City Attorney Carmen Trutanich spoke to members of the Studio City Chamber of Commerce Thursday afternoon about what his offices does in fighting crime, how medical marijuana shops will soon be closed, and what is being done about moving billboards.

“I try to explain it this way: we are the guards at the bank gates of the city’s money,” Trutanich told the chamber members at a luncheon held at the Out Take Bistro. “There’s a lot of work to be done.”

The San Pedro resident, who brought up four children, and once had an office on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, said 70 percent of every crime that goes through the Los Angeles Police Department comes through his office. His staff of 300 attorneys handle about 110,000 police reports, and they take 75,000 cases a year. He credits some of his vigorous prosecutions with the lowered crime rates in the city.

On the civil site, about 2,800 cases have been filed against the city and remain open, that’s not including 7,800 worker’s comp cases. Budget cuts have hit his office, like all city offices, and he said no one has been hired, not even an office worker, and he has a $300,000 surplus so far.

Trutanich said about $60 million to $90 million of debt that people and companies owe to the city is still outstanding and needs to be collected.

In order to deal with some of the heavy workload, the former U.S. Coast Guard man patterned a program as if it were part of a military reserve detail. He has volunteer attorneys just out of law school come in to train for 30 days and then spend four-and-a-half months working in a courtroom with an attorney as an apprentice, and then they are active deputy city attorneys.

“It is like a reserve cop, you can't tell the difference,” Trutanich explained. “And by the end of it, they have more face time with judges and courtroom experience than some of the partners in the firms that they’ll eventually work for.”

The reserve program has since been adopted by San Diego and Sacramento and received national media attention as a model for cash-strapped city attorneys.

“Truly the termites are holding the house together,” Trutanich quipped about the budget crisis.

During his term, 85 civil cases have been tried, and five resulted in negative results, he said.

As far as the medical marijuana shops, he said 200 of them exist in the city borders, and 43 received letters to close down. About 50 to 60 lawsuits are still pending about the lottery system and other reasons to stay open, but Trutanich said most of the rulings in court have been on the city’s side, and the shops must close down.

About the mobile signs law that was also a pet project for City Councilman Paul Krekorian, Trutanich said, “I know there are some people who think they can get around it by saying the signs are not mobile if they are behind a bicycle or something like that.”

He is referring to signs that are driven through the streets, or left in parking spaces all day.

“I told my staff this morning in a meeting that I don’t care if the sign is behind a bicycle, a horse or a camel, if it’s movable like that then it is illegal, and we will prosecute.”

Trutanich is already making plans to run for Los Angeles County District Attorney position in 2012 and is looking for an office to run his campaign on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. He said things are not strained between him and present district attorney Steve Cooley.

“Steve and I shared a cigar last night, we’re working well together,” Trutanich said. “And we’ll probably have another cigar soon again."

San Diego to Restrict Dispensaryies

City considers restrictions on medical marijuana stores


By Christopher Cadelago

Originally published March 27, 2011 at 3:45 p.m., updated March 27, 2011 at 4:38 p.m.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/mar/27/city-considers-restrictions-on-medical-marijuana/


Fifteen years after state voters approved marijuana for medical purposes, the city of San Diego stands poised to consider proposals that would dramatically pare down the number of dispensaries and force those that qualify to tighten their operations.

The City Council on Monday will look to forge the path toward legitimacy for some of the roughly 180 medical marijuana dispensaries operating in an unrestricted environment, closing a chapter in a long-running debate over how to provide access for patients while ensuring safety for neighborhood residents.

The proposed rules would limit dispensaries to some commercial and industrial zones. Cooperatives would have to be 1,000 feet from each other, schools, playgrounds, libraries, child care and youth facilities, parks and churches.

They also would have limited business hours and mandatory security guards.

Councilman Todd Gloria, who is advancing the zoning proposal, said maintaining the status quo was not acceptable to cannabis patients, collective owners or neighborhood residents pining for rules of the road.

“In my council district, which has been very favorable to cannabis as legitimate medicine, I have neighborhoods coming to me pleading for relief” from the impacts of dispensaries, Gloria said. “If the ordinance is enacted the collectives are going to have to show over time that they can be good neighbors.”

Passage of the measure is no guarantee: Opponents on one side say it will choke patient access to medical marijuana while critics on the other contend it amounts to tacit approval of a drug with no redeeming qualities.

“It’s at such opposite ends right now that nobody is reaching across the aisle to get done what needs to be done,” said Frederick Aidan Remick, former director for the Association of Clinical Dispensaries.

There are more medical marijuana collectives in the city than there are pharmacies, the Rev. John Bombaro said.

“What is the vision for San Diego?” said Bombaro, who says he’s seen an uptick in loitering, drug use and fights since four dispensaries opened in the same building next to Grace Lutheran Church. “I don’t think we want to become the Amsterdam of Southern California.”

Eugene Davidovich, local chapter coordinator of Americans for Safe Access, said the organization has studied the proposed restrictions and found just one to three parcels that could allow dispensaries. Proponents of a citywide ban estimate between 25 and 30 locations where collectives could legally open.

“This isn’t regulating access it’s simply eradicating it,” Davidovich said. “It will have a significant negative impact on the most vulnerable folks in our community.”

None of the collectives would be grandfathered in regardless of the final policy, leading supporters to contend it would amount to a de facto ban when combined with the county’s ordinance.

Only a handful of people have applied to open medical pot shops in unincorporated areas of the county since the Board of Supervisors in June approved a set of regulations establishing how and where marijuana dispensaries could operate.

Every collective currently operating in the city would have to close and apply for a permit, further limiting availability of the medication, said Rachel Scoma, a senior organizer with Stop the Ban.

“In reality, they are all going to shut down and it will take a year before any of them can open,” Scoma said.

Stop the Ban is calling for revisions that allow for all commercial and industrial areas to be included; relax distance restrictions to comply with the state law of 600 feet from schools and provide medical marijuana facilities the same requirements imposed on traditional pharmacies.

More than 3,700 residents have written letters to the council voicing their opposition to the ordinances, Davidovich said. Among them was Terrie Best, a board member of Stepping Stone of San Diego, an inpatient drug and alcohol treatment facility.

Best said she’s seen people with chronic pain begin to take pharmaceutical pills only to have their lives turned upside down by dependence. Many chose cannabis as a pain killer without the devastating consequences, she said.

“If they have a look at what we’re trying to do they would understand that we’re not wild-eyed, crazy dope heads,” said Kenneth Cole, owner of the downtown dispensary One on One. “We have the support of our landlord. That’s not what this business is about.”

Twelve of California’s 58 counties ban medical marijuana dispensaries outright, an increase of 10 in the last two years. Eleven have established regulations and eight have temporary moratoriums, according to the Coalition for a Drug Free California. Among cities, 42 have regulations, 90 have temporary moratoriums and 214 have bans, according to the coalition.

A separate survey by the safe access group found 12 counties with bans, 15 with temporary moratoriums and nine with regulations. In addition, 42 cities had regulations, 103 had moratoriums and 143 had bans. Both lists were updated last month.

Since May, the City Attorney’s Office has sent more than 40 letters to dispensary operators and property owners in cases referred by the Neighborhood Code Compliance Division. There also have been raids, arrests and ample frustration.

Councilwoman Lorie Zapf said the proposed regulations have serious flaws. She and others have called for a 1,000-foot buffer around universities and colleges amid worries that her district would become the “pot district.”

There’s no doubt that marijuana shops are commercial enterprises as evidenced by the copious amount of advertising, discount coupons and special prices, said Scott Chipman, chairman of San Diegans for Safe Neighborhoods. He believes the proliferation of storefronts is increasing recreational drug use and youth access to marijuana.

“What’s the enforcement mechanism?” he said. “Because code compliance has been borderline useless.”

Safe Neighborhoods member Marcie Beckett is among those pushing for an all-out ban on pot shops.

“It’s the only thing to end this backdoor legalization — something voters turned down in November,” said Beckett, the mother of 14- and 16-year-old boys. “And it’s the only real way to keep it out of the hands of young, healthy people.”

The meeting is 2 p.m. Monday on the 12th floor of San Diego City Hall, 202 C St.

=====
Medical marijuana rules

Among the proposals for regulating dispensaries in the city of San Diego:

• Allowed only in some commercial or industrial zones.

• Hours of operation would be limited from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week.

• A licensed security guard would have to be on the premises during business hours.

• Dispensaries would have to show proof that they are nonprofit entities.

• All permitting costs would be recovered by the city.
=====

christopher.cadelago@uniontrib.com • (619) 293-1334


http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2011/mar/27/city-considers-restrictions-on-medical-marijuana/

Humboldt- Travel NYTimes

March 25, 2011, 1:30 pm

By WELLS TOWER

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/the-high-life/?scp=1&sq=humboldt&st=cse



Humboldt’s atmospheric caprices echo the character of a county that proudly resists any consensus about what constitutes a sane or normal way of life. A five-hour drive north from San Francisco, Humboldt is a mostly rural coastal region a little less than twice the size of Delaware, inhabited by 129,000 or so artists, back-to-the-landers, outdoorsfolk, slow-food entrepreneurs and urban refugees who found the Upper Haight too staid.

The county is also home to a large community of people whose knack for growing high-quality marijuana has made “Humboldt” a sacred word to dope smokers worldwide. Cannabis cultivation is more or less rampant throughout the county, though the outdoor industrial-scale plantations lie mostly in southern Humboldt (“SoHum,” to locals), where rough-hewn settlements give off an aura of people being up to something. A fair proportion of homes visible to highway traffic have additions built of plastic sheeting. Much of SoHum’s population lives up rutted, hillside tracks where tourists, locals caution, would be most unwise to venture on their own.

An hour up Route 101 sit Eureka and Arcata, Humboldt’s largest towns (population 26,000 and 17,500, respectively), which feel more genially disposed toward outside guests. Eureka, the county seat, has yet to recover fully from its hard landing at the end of the county’s fish and timber age. Shuttered storefronts, bail-bonds operations and check-cashing establishments sit between its attractively refurbished Old Town harbor front and an arresting stock of Victorian homes.

Arcata is a town with greater appeal, helped along by the countywide disdain for outside influence. A local ordinance limits the number of franchise restaurants to nine, and no chains, save an incongruous Bank of America, mar the handsomeness of Arcata’s central plaza. I checked into the Hotel Arcata, a 96-year-old establishment in the heart of downtown. My unfussy room had a claw-foot tub and a piping hot space heater, and seemed a great bargain for $99. I went back to the desk and asked if I might stay on through the rest of the week, which, incidentally, would overlap with New Year’s Eve. The desk clerk — ground down, I imagined, by her daily dealings with local free spirits and individualists — looked at me like I’d asked to crash for free on her couch.

“O.K.,” she finally said. “But you can’t bring a bunch of crazy, noisy people back to your room.”

“I don’t know any crazy, noisy people here,” I told her.

“You’re going to meet some, believe me,” she said.

“Well, even if I do, I don’t think I’ll want to bring them home with me.”

“They can be very persuasive,” she said.

On an alpine stretch of Route 299, heading into Trinity National Forest, plumes of fog rose from the hillsides, which resembled a sodden green carpet slung over a scalding radiator. Dark, confidential groves of Douglas fir and redwood crowded the little highway, emanating a kind of Narnian ominousness. A skeptical East Coast type by nature, I started having some newfound, Californian feelings about “the energy” of the forest. So I was in an unusually open frame of mind when I stopped at the village of Willow Creek, whose China Flat Museum and Bigfoot Collection is known to sasquatch enthusiasts worldwide.

The museum was closed for the winter, but one of its volunteers, a kindly retiree named Peggy McWilliams, was good enough to give me a tour of the place. “Do I believe they’re out there? You betcha,” she offered without prompting. “We get reports all the time. For example, a little while ago, search-and-rescue came down from Oregon looking for a missing 4-year-old boy. When they finally found him, all he would talk about was the big hairy man that had picked him up and sat him alongside the road. I doubt it was a hippie. A hippie probably would have carried him off.”

The collection, housed in a windowless rear chamber, was amply stocked with physical evidence collected over the years by Bigfoot observers local and far-flung. Arrayed in glass cases were reconstructed skulls, yellowed news clippings, dioramas, footprint casts and a plastic bag containing a few strands of wiry fur alongside the query “Can you identify this hair?” The footprint casts — taken nearby at Bluff Creek, the site of Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin’s famous 1967 film, whose footage of a shaggy creature is proof to believers in Bigfoot lore — were not enormously convincing. They looked like hoagie loaves with toes.

McWilliams wanted to be clear that she herself had never seen Bigfoot, and that only one thing about the creature was absolutely certain: if you see one, you should not tell a soul. “The writers and researchers would be all over you,” she said. “They’re absolute pests, and nobody needs that kind of disruption. It’s best to keep quiet.”

I thanked McWilliams for the tip and told her I was off to the redwoods of southern Humboldt. “Keep your eyes open,” she advised. “You might see a Bigfoot.”

No offense to Peggy McWilliams or the good people at the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, but pulling into Humboldt Redwoods State Park, I wondered: who needs a mythic ape when you’ve got redwood trees around?

Perennially fattened on a diet of Pacific Ocean fogs, many of the trees in the state park (and its counterpart in northern Humboldt, Redwood National Park) casually top 300 feet, and the oldest specimens have been growing for two millenniums. In my touristic career, I’ve grown numb to the presence of hammerhead sharks, giant tortoises, grizzly bears, blue-footed boobies and pilot whales, but in the awe department, coast redwoods seemed to have no point of diminishing returns. Each tree revealed some astounding new characteristic of girth, bark tone, branch anatomy or moss couture. The forest’s crisp, misty air made breathing a thrilling novelty. It seemed to inhale itself. I tried not to think about a distressing spate of recent studies wondering how these trees will survive what looks to be a worsening, climate-change-related shortage of coastal fogs. Instead, I tried to marvel gratefully that there were still thousands of these trees standing, not just one on a museum lot enclosed by a velvet rope.

The trouble with redwood forests, though, is that they are hard on the human ego. You can’t spend much time among all of that primordial rectilinearity without starting to feel disheveled, crooked and mortal. I’d had every intention of going for a hike, but you cannot maintain a pace staggering around with your neck craned, guffawing like Jed Clampett seeing his first skyscraper. Back at the car, the dashboard clock said it had taken me two hours to walk a mile.

Of the nearly two million acres of old-growth coastal redwoods that once covered central California to southern Oregon, less than 5 percent survived the past 150 years of logging, and about 80 percent of the remaining trees stand on protected lands. This is good news for the trees and their admirers but bad news for the timber industry, whose boom years petered out in the 1980s. The depletion of the timber stock, coupled with the exhaustion of northwestern salmon fisheries, has created something of an employment crisis for Humboldt County, or legal employment, anyway. Sound statistics on the issue don’t exist, but anyone you’ll meet in Humboldt will tell you that the county’s economic backbone is unquestionably cannabis. Law enforcement officials estimate that as many as two in five Arcata homes contain a growing operation. A calculation by a Humboldt State University economist appraised the county’s marijuana industry at about a half-billion dollars a year.

These days, what worries the county’s farmers, trimmers, shippers and dealers isn’t that they make their living on the far side of the law but that legalization and a consequent price dive are probably close at hand. Tellingly, Proposition 19, a 2010 ballot measure to legalize marijuana in California, didn’t pass in Humboldt County. Already, provisions in California’s medical marijuana law that permit card-carrying patients to keep small gardens have contributed to a 25 percent price drop in the past five years and continue to erode the competitive advantage of growers in the north. “It’s a sad thing to see,” the local cannabis blogger Kym Kemp told me. “The big grower pulling in $5 million on an acre might be able to survive, but the single mom keeping a half dozen plants to make ends meet, she probably won’t make it.”

You hardly need D.E.A. training to catch on to Humboldt’s open secret. Driving along county byways with the windows down, you may suddenly pass through banks of skunk-gland miasma. Many small towns consist of little more than a grocery and a horticultural supply store, selling such products as Buddha Bloom bat guano fertilizer and Humboldt Nutrients Ginormous Bloom Enhancer. Roadside billboards advertise sales on “turkey oven bags,” preferred by contraband expediters for their odor-suppressing properties.

If Humboldt’s large-scale cannabis industry has a factory town, it’s Garberville, an unprepossessing community not far from the Mendocino County border. Garberville has zero stoplights, two gun stores, a hemp-ware boutique and several real estate agencies whose acreage listings prominently advertise “privacy” and “good water flow.” Most of the stores on Garberville’s main street are patronized by people paying in cash and about whom hang an identifiable smell. Stopping for coffee at an Internet cafe, I paused to watch a young couple with Carhartt jackets and grubby hands browsing beachfront rentals in Hawaii.

The upside of the great pools of black-market cash is a countywide surfeit of good restaurants, galleries and craft boutiques, not all of which specialize in redwood burls or drums. “We’ve got more restaurants per capita than San Francisco,” I was told by Hank Sims, the former editor of Humboldt’s biggest weekly paper, The North Coast Journal. “There are a lot of places that wouldn’t be in business if not for pot money.”

One evening, I dined at Cecil’s, the fanciest restaurant in Garberville, whose unusual market will apparently bear a steak topped with crab meat, shrimp and handpicked chanterelles for $72. I didn’t get the steak. I got fried oysters remoulade and some smoked pork spring rolls I’d have eaten my weight in. While I was making my way through a superb fried chicken salad, a group of college-age kids took a table near mine. They wore camouflage hats and long-underwear shirts and looked like they’d been working hard all day. They got the steak.

Eager to know a little more about Humboldt’s cannabis culture but somewhat spooked by Garberville’s aura of the underworld, I headed back to Arcata to pay a visit to Mariellen Jurkovich. Jurkovich, a 58-year-old grandmother with dark hair and striking blue eyes, was a school board member and former real estate agent with Coldwell Banker, though now she is the director of the Humboldt Patient Resource Center, Arcata’s oldest medical marijuana collective.

The dispensary occupies a former auto body shop two blocks from Arcata’s central plaza and resembles a community center more than a controlled-substance dealership. Beyond selling marijuana, the H.P.R.C. offers classes in yoga, massage, dance and tai chi, and invites patients to help in its garden and learn the delicate art of cannabis cultivation. Contrary to her colleagues in the south, Jurkovich looks forward to a day when marijuana is legal, hoping it might draw more visitors to the remote county. Before Proposition 19’s defeat, the H.P.R.C. and others in the cannabis sector had been looking forward to the introduction of a pot-related tourism industry. “People could visit the collective, do some trimming, take some cooking classes and then go walk around in the redwood trees,” Jurkovich said.

“It was said we were going to be the new Napa Valley of cannabis,” said Tony Smithers, executive director of the Humboldt County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We took it very seriously, and it was an intriguing marketing challenge: how to do cannabis tourism while preserving our core branding as the most beautiful place in the world with the world’s tallest trees. In the end, it was kind of a relief when [Proposition 19] didn’t pass.”

All of the H.P.R.C.’s cannabis is grown on-site. Kevin Jodrey, the H.P.R.C.’s cultivation director, was good enough to give me a tour of the garden, which lay in a klieg-lit room just past the reception desk. Brushing past a pungent canopy of lush, serrated leaves, Jodrey went on amiably and with eye-crossing knowledgeability about plant genetics, the analgesic properties of different “medicines” and their observed effects on such maladies as cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s and depression. As the conversation wore on, the room began to feel less like a pot farm than a research lab at Merck. “What’s this?” I asked Jodrey, pausing at a plant with sugary foxtails that smelled pleasantly of grapefruit. “Oh,” he said. “That’s Green Crack.”

That night, I gorged enjoyably at Tomo, a first-rate sushi restaurant on the ground floor of the Hotel Arcata. Because it was the last evening of the year, it seemed important to have a night on the town. Up the street, at the Arcata Theatre, a gypsy jazz band was getting under way. The band was very good, but the crowd was going in for styles of West Coast whimsy irksome to a peevish East Coaster like myself. People in the throes of air-palming jam-band dances kept revolving in my personal space. Someone dressed in a dark shroud with a spray of foam swimming-pool noodles jutting from the top exhibited his or her liberty from hangups by painfully whacking the noodles into my and everybody’s face. Soon, it was necessary to go.

Out on the crowded plaza, the ball had dropped, and the first drum circles of 2011 had formed. Youngsters in dreadlocks had scaled a statue of President McKinley, whose bronze pelvis was being ground from three sides. Describing the scene in my notebook prompted two separate people to come over and ask me if I was a cop, and that, like, according to the Constitution or something, I had to tell them if I was.

The night and I were getting old. I went to the hotel and was stopped at the door by the hotel employee who had days ago balked at extending my stay. Before she stepped aside, she examined my key, asked my name and quizzed me about which room I was staying in. It seemed to disappoint her that she couldn’t catch me out as an impostor or a noisy lunatic, but in the end, she let me back inside.March 25, 2011, 1:30 pm

By WELLS TOWER

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/the-high-life/?scp=1&sq=humboldt&st=cse


The sights of Humboldt County, Calif., can be hard for the rational mind to reconcile. Its hysterical shifts in landscape and weather conspire to make you feel, in the most pleasurable way possible, that you are going out of your head. A day’s drive in Humboldt carried me past what appeared to be: a Hawaiian beach, an Icelandic coastal flat, a swath of rustic Switzerland, an elk-thronged Montana prairie, a street in San Francisco, the Ewok moon of Endor, a prop village from a musical about the Gold Rush, and Allentown, Pa. The dawn brought blue skies, which turned to brilliant sunlit rain, then hail, then sleet, then driving snow, then back to full sun refracting into a huge rainbow that seemed like the meteorological equivalent of a crazy person’s laugh.

Humboldt’s atmospheric caprices echo the character of a county that proudly resists any consensus about what constitutes a sane or normal way of life. A five-hour drive north from San Francisco, Humboldt is a mostly rural coastal region a little less than twice the size of Delaware, inhabited by 129,000 or so artists, back-to-the-landers, outdoorsfolk, slow-food entrepreneurs and urban refugees who found the Upper Haight too staid.

The county is also home to a large community of people whose knack for growing high-quality marijuana has made “Humboldt” a sacred word to dope smokers worldwide. Cannabis cultivation is more or less rampant throughout the county, though the outdoor industrial-scale plantations lie mostly in southern Humboldt (“SoHum,” to locals), where rough-hewn settlements give off an aura of people being up to something. A fair proportion of homes visible to highway traffic have additions built of plastic sheeting. Much of SoHum’s population lives up rutted, hillside tracks where tourists, locals caution, would be most unwise to venture on their own.

An hour up Route 101 sit Eureka and Arcata, Humboldt’s largest towns (population 26,000 and 17,500, respectively), which feel more genially disposed toward outside guests. Eureka, the county seat, has yet to recover fully from its hard landing at the end of the county’s fish and timber age. Shuttered storefronts, bail-bonds operations and check-cashing establishments sit between its attractively refurbished Old Town harbor front and an arresting stock of Victorian homes.

Arcata is a town with greater appeal, helped along by the countywide disdain for outside influence. A local ordinance limits the number of franchise restaurants to nine, and no chains, save an incongruous Bank of America, mar the handsomeness of Arcata’s central plaza. I checked into the Hotel Arcata, a 96-year-old establishment in the heart of downtown. My unfussy room had a claw-foot tub and a piping hot space heater, and seemed a great bargain for $99. I went back to the desk and asked if I might stay on through the rest of the week, which, incidentally, would overlap with New Year’s Eve. The desk clerk — ground down, I imagined, by her daily dealings with local free spirits and individualists — looked at me like I’d asked to crash for free on her couch.

“O.K.,” she finally said. “But you can’t bring a bunch of crazy, noisy people back to your room.”

“I don’t know any crazy, noisy people here,” I told her.

“You’re going to meet some, believe me,” she said.

“Well, even if I do, I don’t think I’ll want to bring them home with me.”

“They can be very persuasive,” she said.

On an alpine stretch of Route 299, heading into Trinity National Forest, plumes of fog rose from the hillsides, which resembled a sodden green carpet slung over a scalding radiator. Dark, confidential groves of Douglas fir and redwood crowded the little highway, emanating a kind of Narnian ominousness. A skeptical East Coast type by nature, I started having some newfound, Californian feelings about “the energy” of the forest. So I was in an unusually open frame of mind when I stopped at the village of Willow Creek, whose China Flat Museum and Bigfoot Collection is known to sasquatch enthusiasts worldwide.

The museum was closed for the winter, but one of its volunteers, a kindly retiree named Peggy McWilliams, was good enough to give me a tour of the place. “Do I believe they’re out there? You betcha,” she offered without prompting. “We get reports all the time. For example, a little while ago, search-and-rescue came down from Oregon looking for a missing 4-year-old boy. When they finally found him, all he would talk about was the big hairy man that had picked him up and sat him alongside the road. I doubt it was a hippie. A hippie probably would have carried him off.”

The collection, housed in a windowless rear chamber, was amply stocked with physical evidence collected over the years by Bigfoot observers local and far-flung. Arrayed in glass cases were reconstructed skulls, yellowed news clippings, dioramas, footprint casts and a plastic bag containing a few strands of wiry fur alongside the query “Can you identify this hair?” The footprint casts — taken nearby at Bluff Creek, the site of Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin’s famous 1967 film, whose footage of a shaggy creature is proof to believers in Bigfoot lore — were not enormously convincing. They looked like hoagie loaves with toes.

McWilliams wanted to be clear that she herself had never seen Bigfoot, and that only one thing about the creature was absolutely certain: if you see one, you should not tell a soul. “The writers and researchers would be all over you,” she said. “They’re absolute pests, and nobody needs that kind of disruption. It’s best to keep quiet.”

I thanked McWilliams for the tip and told her I was off to the redwoods of southern Humboldt. “Keep your eyes open,” she advised. “You might see a Bigfoot.”

No offense to Peggy McWilliams or the good people at the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, but pulling into Humboldt Redwoods State Park, I wondered: who needs a mythic ape when you’ve got redwood trees around?

Perennially fattened on a diet of Pacific Ocean fogs, many of the trees in the state park (and its counterpart in northern Humboldt, Redwood National Park) casually top 300 feet, and the oldest specimens have been growing for two millenniums. In my touristic career, I’ve grown numb to the presence of hammerhead sharks, giant tortoises, grizzly bears, blue-footed boobies and pilot whales, but in the awe department, coast redwoods seemed to have no point of diminishing returns. Each tree revealed some astounding new characteristic of girth, bark tone, branch anatomy or moss couture. The forest’s crisp, misty air made breathing a thrilling novelty. It seemed to inhale itself. I tried not to think about a distressing spate of recent studies wondering how these trees will survive what looks to be a worsening, climate-change-related shortage of coastal fogs. Instead, I tried to marvel gratefully that there were still thousands of these trees standing, not just one on a museum lot enclosed by a velvet rope.

The trouble with redwood forests, though, is that they are hard on the human ego. You can’t spend much time among all of that primordial rectilinearity without starting to feel disheveled, crooked and mortal. I’d had every intention of going for a hike, but you cannot maintain a pace staggering around with your neck craned, guffawing like Jed Clampett seeing his first skyscraper. Back at the car, the dashboard clock said it had taken me two hours to walk a mile.

Of the nearly two million acres of old-growth coastal redwoods that once covered central California to southern Oregon, less than 5 percent survived the past 150 years of logging, and about 80 percent of the remaining trees stand on protected lands. This is good news for the trees and their admirers but bad news for the timber industry, whose boom years petered out in the 1980s. The depletion of the timber stock, coupled with the exhaustion of northwestern salmon fisheries, has created something of an employment crisis for Humboldt County, or legal employment, anyway. Sound statistics on the issue don’t exist, but anyone you’ll meet in Humboldt will tell you that the county’s economic backbone is unquestionably cannabis. Law enforcement officials estimate that as many as two in five Arcata homes contain a growing operation. A calculation by a Humboldt State University economist appraised the county’s marijuana industry at about a half-billion dollars a year.

These days, what worries the county’s farmers, trimmers, shippers and dealers isn’t that they make their living on the far side of the law but that legalization and a consequent price dive are probably close at hand. Tellingly, Proposition 19, a 2010 ballot measure to legalize marijuana in California, didn’t pass in Humboldt County. Already, provisions in California’s medical marijuana law that permit card-carrying patients to keep small gardens have contributed to a 25 percent price drop in the past five years and continue to erode the competitive advantage of growers in the north. “It’s a sad thing to see,” the local cannabis blogger Kym Kemp told me. “The big grower pulling in $5 million on an acre might be able to survive, but the single mom keeping a half dozen plants to make ends meet, she probably won’t make it.”

You hardly need D.E.A. training to catch on to Humboldt’s open secret. Driving along county byways with the windows down, you may suddenly pass through banks of skunk-gland miasma. Many small towns consist of little more than a grocery and a horticultural supply store, selling such products as Buddha Bloom bat guano fertilizer and Humboldt Nutrients Ginormous Bloom Enhancer. Roadside billboards advertise sales on “turkey oven bags,” preferred by contraband expediters for their odor-suppressing properties.

If Humboldt’s large-scale cannabis industry has a factory town, it’s Garberville, an unprepossessing community not far from the Mendocino County border. Garberville has zero stoplights, two gun stores, a hemp-ware boutique and several real estate agencies whose acreage listings prominently advertise “privacy” and “good water flow.” Most of the stores on Garberville’s main street are patronized by people paying in cash and about whom hang an identifiable smell. Stopping for coffee at an Internet cafe, I paused to watch a young couple with Carhartt jackets and grubby hands browsing beachfront rentals in Hawaii.

The upside of the great pools of black-market cash is a countywide surfeit of good restaurants, galleries and craft boutiques, not all of which specialize in redwood burls or drums. “We’ve got more restaurants per capita than San Francisco,” I was told by Hank Sims, the former editor of Humboldt’s biggest weekly paper, The North Coast Journal. “There are a lot of places that wouldn’t be in business if not for pot money.”

One evening, I dined at Cecil’s, the fanciest restaurant in Garberville, whose unusual market will apparently bear a steak topped with crab meat, shrimp and handpicked chanterelles for $72. I didn’t get the steak. I got fried oysters remoulade and some smoked pork spring rolls I’d have eaten my weight in. While I was making my way through a superb fried chicken salad, a group of college-age kids took a table near mine. They wore camouflage hats and long-underwear shirts and looked like they’d been working hard all day. They got the steak.

Eager to know a little more about Humboldt’s cannabis culture but somewhat spooked by Garberville’s aura of the underworld, I headed back to Arcata to pay a visit to Mariellen Jurkovich. Jurkovich, a 58-year-old grandmother with dark hair and striking blue eyes, was a school board member and former real estate agent with Coldwell Banker, though now she is the director of the Humboldt Patient Resource Center, Arcata’s oldest medical marijuana collective.

The dispensary occupies a former auto body shop two blocks from Arcata’s central plaza and resembles a community center more than a controlled-substance dealership. Beyond selling marijuana, the H.P.R.C. offers classes in yoga, massage, dance and tai chi, and invites patients to help in its garden and learn the delicate art of cannabis cultivation. Contrary to her colleagues in the south, Jurkovich looks forward to a day when marijuana is legal, hoping it might draw more visitors to the remote county. Before Proposition 19’s defeat, the H.P.R.C. and others in the cannabis sector had been looking forward to the introduction of a pot-related tourism industry. “People could visit the collective, do some trimming, take some cooking classes and then go walk around in the redwood trees,” Jurkovich said.

“It was said we were going to be the new Napa Valley of cannabis,” said Tony Smithers, executive director of the Humboldt County Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We took it very seriously, and it was an intriguing marketing challenge: how to do cannabis tourism while preserving our core branding as the most beautiful place in the world with the world’s tallest trees. In the end, it was kind of a relief when [Proposition 19] didn’t pass.”

All of the H.P.R.C.’s cannabis is grown on-site. Kevin Jodrey, the H.P.R.C.’s cultivation director, was good enough to give me a tour of the garden, which lay in a klieg-lit room just past the reception desk. Brushing past a pungent canopy of lush, serrated leaves, Jodrey went on amiably and with eye-crossing knowledgeability about plant genetics, the analgesic properties of different “medicines” and their observed effects on such maladies as cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s and depression. As the conversation wore on, the room began to feel less like a pot farm than a research lab at Merck. “What’s this?” I asked Jodrey, pausing at a plant with sugary foxtails that smelled pleasantly of grapefruit. “Oh,” he said. “That’s Green Crack.”

That night, I gorged enjoyably at Tomo, a first-rate sushi restaurant on the ground floor of the Hotel Arcata. Because it was the last evening of the year, it seemed important to have a night on the town. Up the street, at the Arcata Theatre, a gypsy jazz band was getting under way. The band was very good, but the crowd was going in for styles of West Coast whimsy irksome to a peevish East Coaster like myself. People in the throes of air-palming jam-band dances kept revolving in my personal space. Someone dressed in a dark shroud with a spray of foam swimming-pool noodles jutting from the top exhibited his or her liberty from hangups by painfully whacking the noodles into my and everybody’s face. Soon, it was necessary to go.

Out on the crowded plaza, the ball had dropped, and the first drum circles of 2011 had formed. Youngsters in dreadlocks had scaled a statue of President McKinley, whose bronze pelvis was being ground from three sides. Describing the scene in my notebook prompted two separate people to come over and ask me if I was a cop, and that, like, according to the Constitution or something, I had to tell them if I was.

The night and I were getting old. I went to the hotel and was stopped at the door by the hotel employee who had days ago balked at extending my stay. Before she stepped aside, she examined my key, asked my name and quizzed me about which room I was staying in. It seemed to disappoint her that she couldn’t catch me out as an impostor or a noisy lunatic, but in the end, she let me back inside.