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.

NORML news of the week

This Week from NORML

Marijuana Inhalation Associated With Spontaneous Tumor Regression, Study Says

New York City: Prosecuting Near-Record Pot Arrests Costs City $75 Million Annually

New Jersey: Health Regulators Approve Marijuana Dispensary Applicants


Recent Action Alerts


Maryland Lawmakers Amend Medical Marijuana Measure To An Affirmative Defense -- Substitute Language Passes Senate @ http://www.capwiz.com/norml2/issues/alert/?alertid=37663501

Kansas Lawmakers Fail to Act on Medical Marijuana Legislation @ http://www.capwiz.com/norml2/issues/alert/?alertid=37578516

Washington Senate Passes Legislation To Expand States Medical Cannabis Law @ http://www.capwiz.com/norml2/issues/alert/?alertid=22061501

---

Marijuana Inhalation Associated With Spontaneous Tumor Regression, Study Says

NORML Weekly Press Release Vancouver, British Columbia: Cannabis inhalation is associated with spontaneous brain tumor regression in two subjects, according to a pair of case reports to be published in Child's Nervous System, the official journal of the International Society for Pediatric Neurosurgery.

Investigators at the British Columbia Children's Hospital in Vancouver documented the mitigation of residual tumors in two adolescent subjects who regularly inhaled cannabis. Authors determined that both subjects experienced a "clear regression" of their residual brain tumors over a three-year-period.

"Neither patient received any conventional adjuvant treatment" during this time period, investigators wrote. "The tumors regressed over the same period of time that cannabis was consumed via inhalation, raising the possibility that cannabis played a role in tumor regression."

Researchers concluded, "Further research may be appropriate to elucidate the increasingly recognized effect of cannabis/cannabinoids on gliomas (brain cancers)."

A 2006 pilot study published in the British Journal of Cancer previously reported that the intratumoral administration of the cannabinoid THC was associated with reduced tumor cell proliferation in two of nine human subjects with brain cancer.

Separate preclinical studies assessing the anti-cancer activity of cannabinoids and endocannabinoids indicate that the substances can inhibit the proliferation of various types of cancerous cells, including breast carcinoma, prostate carcinoma, and lung cancer.

For more information, please contact Paul Armentano, NORML Deputy Director, at: paul@norml.org. Full text of the study, "Spontaneous regression of septum pellucidium/forniceal pilocytic astrocytomas – possible role of cannabis inhalation," will appear in the journal Child's Nervous System.

---

New York City: Prosecuting Near-Record Pot Arrests Costs City $75 Million Annually

New York, NY: Criminal justice expenses pertaining to the arrest and prosecution of minor marijuana offenders in New York City cost taxpayers some $75 million a year, according to a report published last week by the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), a national drug policy think tank.

The report, authored by Queens College sociologist Harry Levine and Loren Siegel, an attorney formerly with the American Civil Liberties Union, estimates that the criminal justice costs in New York city associated with a single arrest for marijuana possession, including all police and court expenses, is between $1,000 and $2,000.

In 2010, New York city police made 50,383 lowest level marijuana possession arrests [NY State Penal Law 221.10] involving cases where marijuana was either used or possessed in public. The total is the second highest in the city's history and is an increase of over 5,000 percent from 1990, when police reported fewer than 1,000 low-level pot arrests.

The DPA report states that during Michael Bloomberg's tenure as mayor, from 2002 through 2010, the NYPD made nearly 350,000 arrests for marijuana possession – costing taxpayers $350 million to $700 million.

Although simple marijuana possession is a violation and not a crime in New York State, if the marijuana is "open to public view" it can be charged as a misdemeanor.

"More people have been arrested for marijuana possession under Mayor Bloomberg than under Mayors Koch, Dinkins, and Guiliani combined," said the report's co-author, Harry Levine. "These arrests are wildly expensive, do not improve public safety, and create permanent criminal records which seriously damage the life chances of the young people targeted and jailed."

Added Gabriel Sayegh, New York State Director for the Drug Policy Alliance: "It is beyond hypocritical for the Mayor, who once said he smoked marijuana and enjoyed it, to make arresting young people of color for marijuana possession his top law enforcement priority," said. "While cutting services for seniors, youth, housing, transportation, teachers, education, and more, the Mayor spent 75 million dollars last year to arrest over 50,000 people for marijuana possession – which isn't even a crime under New York State law. It's just outrageous."

For more information, please visit: http://www.drugpolicy.org.

---

New Jersey: Health Regulators Approve Marijuana Dispensary Applicants

Trenton, NJ: State health regulators on Monday selected six applicants to grow and dispense cannabis in accordance with the state's nascent medical law. Twenty-one separate applicants had applied for the state's six available licenses.

Signed into law in January 2010 by former Gov. Jon Corzine, the New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act authorizes patients with a physician's recommendation to possess and obtain medical cannabis from state-authorized "alternative treatment centers."

However, draft rules proposed by the state Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) in 2010 to govern the yet-to-be established program have been criticized by several state lawmakers as unduly restrictive.

Lawmakers have held hearings but have yet to vote on whether or not to repeal the regulations.

Commenting on the applicants' approval, Ken Wolski the executive director of The Coalition for Medical Marijuana – New Jersey (CMMNJ) said, "We certainly wish the successful applicants luck because patients need legal marijuana as soon as possible. However, we have serious doubts that these non-profit organizations will be able to develop a working program with the overly restrictive regulations proposed by DHSS. CMMNJ still supports the legislative Resolution to invalidate significant parts of the DHSS regulations."

For more information, please visit: http://www.cmmnj.org/ or e-mail: media@cmmnj.org.

IRS and club Audits

As The American Independent has reported, perhaps the most effective of these tactics is a push within the IRS to audit the books of medical marijuana dispensaries and declare all business deductions ineligible (http://www.americanindependent.com/174351/irs-goes-after-medical-marijuana-in-california). If the move continues and isn’t overruled in court, it could mean that all but the largest dispensaries in the country could shut down within months.

Allen St. Pierre, Executive Director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), tells The American Independent that he believes this is phase three in a federal push to stymie medical marijuana that began in 1996, when medical marijuana first became legal in California. St. Pierre says that federal investigators first went after doctors, threatening to convict any who discussed medical uses of marijuana with patients as accomplices in the procurement and possession of marijuana. That tactic was declared unconstitutional in the case Conant v. McCaffrey.

The next tactic was to prosecute landlords. “If you’re renting property to someone breaking federal law, the property can be taken,” says St. Pierre. “Unsurprisingly, a lot of landlords stopped renting to dispensaries.” Eventually, enough landlords found liability loopholes or simply decided it was worth the risk to rent to dispensaries that the government gave up, as the thousands of dispensaries that today populate California alone attest.

Now, the federal government is using a time-honored method that could just cripple the medical marijuana industry once and for all, St. Pierre says.

“Rather than the SWAT approach, they’re going the Al Capone approach. He didn’t go to jail for cutting off people’s testicles and shoving them down their throats as a calling card,” St. Pierre colorfully offers. “He went to jail for tax evasion. If past is prologue, that route is much more effective.”

There may be an answer as to whether that route will be effective this time around very soon. As TAI previously reported, at least one California dispensary has already received a final determination from the IRS demanding nearly $800,000 in back taxes from 2009 alone (http://www.americanindependent.com/174367/california-medical-marijuana-dispensary-plans-to-take-irs-to-court). The Marin Alliance for Medical Marijuana (MAMM) intends to take the IRS to court to dispute the claims within the next month, and the outcome of that trial will likely determine the course that medical marijuana throughout the country will take in the months and years to come.

St. Pierre believes that, though a 2007 case set a precedent for dispensaries being allowed standard business deductions, the IRS may be successful in making a collection this time around — and that’s why it’s pursuing these audits so vigorously all of a sudden. St. Pierre thinks that the IRS could easily point to the fact that marijuana isn’t treated like any other drug and, importantly, isn’t taxed at the production stage, all in order to make the claim that medical marijuana dispensaries shouldn’t get the same tax write-offs as other businesses.

Says St. Pierre, “Activists in the field will make the clarion call that medicine is not taxed,” and neither, they contend, should marijuana. “However, the corporations that make the medicine are taxed. Not surprisingly, the pharmaceutical industry is getting a little sick after ten years of people growing something in the closet, putting it in a mason jar, walking it across the street and selling it for 50 to 100 times the production value without even going through the medicine review process at the FDA.”

That could be the linchpin of the IRS’s argument — that dispensaries want special treatment with regard to marijuana’s medical status but expect to be treated like normal businesses when it comes time to file their taxes. “In some ways, it’s all part of the immaturity of the industry,” says St. Pierre. “Not many people show up in the newspapers screaming that they make millions of dollars and don’t want to pay taxes.” Only time will tell if the IRS indeed takes up this line of reasoning and, more importantly, if it works.

The larger aim of dispensary owners like MAMM’s Lynette Shaw in taking the IRS to court — namely, getting a judicial review of the legal status of marijuana as a Schedule I drug — St. Pierre dismisses out of hand. “Judges won’t rule against the federal government,” he says. “We’re really talking about the big enchilada here, which is Congress. They created this mess” by criminalizing marijuana through a series of 20th century laws, “and they’re the only ones who can fix it.”

“The most expedient route would be for Congress to pass a law taking an eraser to parts of the Controlled Substances Act. Is that going to happen? No,” says St. Pierre.

NORML and other advocacy groups hope instead to at least start a conversation about changing federal marijuana laws. To that end, they’re working with legislators to introduce five new marijuana reform bills in coming weeks: the “Truth in Trials” act, which would allow medical use of marijuana to be considered in federal drug trials (at present, any evidence relating to medical use is inadmissible in federal court); a bill that would reduce the classification of marijuana to Schedule II; a federal decriminalization bill that would impact very few actual court cases, as 98 to 99 percent of marijuana-related arrests are at the state and local levels; an outright legalization bill; and one that may take shape as a rider on a banking bill.

Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) has already pledged his support to the banking bill and is due to introduce it in the House soon. It would reform those regulations that Drug War Chronicle reported on, absolving banks of liability or a responsibility to keep tabs on dispensaries.

St. Pierre gives all five bills a “snowball’s chance in hell” of passing. But he’s counting on them to push the conversation on decriminalizing marijuana that much further forward.

“Congress is the best chance we’ve got,” he says.

Next Step Conference

It was a fantastic day, a special thanks to Susan Soares for the work she put in to make the event come off so seamless, enjoyable and informative for the attendees. One of the comments I heard most while sitting at the Cal NORML table most of the day was how people were not expecting so much valuable information and to me it was interesting to note that out in the smoking area people were hurrying up to medicate, get high and eat at the gourmet food trucks on site to go back inside and listen to the next speaker as the day was filled with panels, speakers, questions and answers from the audience without any breaks of more than a few minutes each. And almost everyone stayed to the end. It was truly a remarkable event.

I also want to say thank you to the many members of this group who I met in person for the first time at the event and the kind words that you said truly mean a lot to me. Special thanks to the folks involved with OC NORML, your chapter and the members just rock, no other way to describe you. Thank you.

Crawling back into the bed and listen to the rain pound on the roof today. Back with news later today or over night. Stay dry and stay high.

Peace

brett

20 peopledetained in downtown LA pot bust

Over 20 people were detained in connection with the bust, but arrests
are still being processed.

KTLA News

7:36 PM PDT, March 13, 2011

LOS ANGELES (KTLA) -- Officers serving a search warrant Saturday
uncovered a dangerous and extensive marijuana lab with "thousands upon
thousands" of plants in a warehouse south of Downtown Los Angeles,
reports said.

LAPD Media Relations Officer Norma Eisenman said officers were serving
a search warrant for a narcotics suspect at an industrial warehouse on
the 1000 block of Santa Fe Avenue around 3 p.m. Saturday when they
found the illegal lab.

The brick building appeared to have been illegally converted into
housing.

When officers entered, they found over 3,000 living marijuana plants.

"As a result of that investigation, [officers] found thousands upon
thousands of marijuana plants inside including growers, lights and
fans," Commanding Officer Matt Blake told KTLA.

Over 20 people were detained in connection with the bust, but arrests
are still being processed.

Officers also found evidence of chemicals consistent for making
methamphetamine and cocaine, but Blake said that lab did not appear to
be active. Blake also said that evidence at the location showed that
it was operating as an unregistered medical clinic.

The westbound I-10 freeway was closed for six hours as city fire
hazardous materials teams and the Department of Water and Power
investigated the area.

Other surface streets were closed as well at Santa Fe and Sacramento
Street.

Next Step in LA

LA "Next Steps for Marijuana Reform" Conference March 19th


Reserve your tix now at http://www.drugpolicy.org/nextsteps or http://bit.ly/enYQJX


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 11, 2011

Contact: Dale Gieringer: (415) 563-5858 or Stephen Gutwillig (323) 542-2606


Conference on Future of Marijuana Reform in California Will Draw Broad Coalition to End Failed Prohibition Policies

Saturday, March 19th at Ricardo Montalban Theatre in Hollywood


"Next Steps for Marijuana Reform in California," a day-long gathering of marijuana reform advocates, will take place March 19th at the Ricardo Montalban Theatre in Hollywood. In the wake of Proposition 19's remarkably strong showing at the polls last year, this conference will address ongoing efforts to end failed marijuana prohibition in California, steps to reform the state's medical marijuana laws, and priorities for marijuana reform in the coming years.

The conference is presented by California NORML, Drug Policy Alliance, Marijuana Policy Project, Americans for Safe Access, and VibeNation MultiMedia. Confirmed participants include leaders of the Proposition 19 campaign and other ballot initiative proponents, Latino Voters League, California NAACP, United Food and Commercial Workers, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, and California Church Impact as well as political consultants, attorneys, medical marijuana advocates, and public officials.

The event is open to the public, and the audience will have the opportunity to comment and weigh in on competing proposals. A party and reception, featuring live music, other entertainment and refreshments, will be held at the Montalban Theatre immediately following the conference until 10 pm.

The conference follows up the sold out "Next Steps" conference in Berkeley in January (http://www.canorml.org/nextsched.html).


What: "Next Steps for Marijuana Reform in California"

When: Saturday, March 19th, 9 am to 6 pm

Where: Ricardo Montalban Theatre, 1615 Vine St., Hollywood

Conference Schedule: www.canorml.org/LAConfSched_Online.html

Tickets: www.drugpolicy.org/nextsteps or http://bit.ly/enYQJX

Admission: $20 for the conference; $20 for the reception. A $30 discounted ticket for both events is available online in advance only.

Organica fined for medical marijuana sales

Once-popular Venice-area medical marijuana dispensary is barred from reopening


March 10, 2011 | 5:56 pm





In a judgment issued Wednesday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Michael Johnson also ordered the dispensary and Jeff Joseph to pay nearly $326,000 in fees and penalties.

The dispensary, which was in a sprawling building on Washington Boulevard that straddles Los Angeles and Culver City, drew intense law enforcement scrutiny for its high-volume business and the charge that its representatives distributed fliers near Culver City High School.

“I feel like Organica was truly one of the big bad apples out there,” said Anh Truong, an assistant supervising deputy city attorney. “They were so off the hook with their activities.”

The city has used costly, slow-moving civil actions to close four of the illegal dispensaries in the city and is trying to persuade a judge to evict a fifth.

The city attorney’s office this week warned 141 dispensaries in letters sent to operators and landlords that the stores must close immediately or face legal action. “We hope that this process will be smoother and quicker,” said Asha Greenberg, an assistant city attorney.

Organica, which registered with the city in 2007 to operate under the moratorium, was raided three times. In two searches, about 290 pounds of marijuana were seized. Records indicated the dispensary had almost $5.3 million in sales over a 13-month period.

A preliminary injunction issued 11 months ago shut down the dispensary. Last summer, the property owner agreed to evict the dispensary and not rent to any marijuana collectives. In his ruling, Johnson found that Organica and Joseph were not adhering to the state’s medical marijuana laws and were violating state prohibitions against selling controlled substances.

Joseph said he would like to appeal the decision but also said he was broke. “I have nothing but loss and huge debt,” he said. “All the money went back into the weed.”

He accused the city of singling him out. “They’ve got a really big problem on their hands with these dispensaries, and they demonized me,” he said. Joseph has insisted the dispensary followed state law and denied it ever handed out fliers to high school students.

Joseph said the legal system was rigged, noting the judge issued a summary judgment rather than allowing the case to proceed to a trial. “It’s ridiculous. It’s just sad,” he said. Joseph also faces felony drug charges stemming from the raids.

The judge ordered the dispensary and Joseph to pay $130,000 in civil penalties for violating state laws, $88,165 to cover attorney costs, $106,549 for investigative costs, and $1,115 in court fees.

-- John Hoeffel

Status of L.A. medical marijuana dispensaries

140 pot shops must close

In a letter sent Monday, the office targeted dispensaries that did not file applications to participate in a lottery to choose 100 that will operate in the city. The city clerk received 228 applications from dispensaries and is reviewing them to make sure they meet the qualifications for the drawing, which include having been in business since Sept. 14, 2007.

Asha Greenberg, the assistant city attorney who has overseen the enforcement efforts, warned in the letter that the city could sue violators and seek financial penalties, as well as pursue administrative actions “to discontinue the use and padlock the property.”

“The next step for us is to wait and see if these places close, and if they don’t close, LAPD will investigate them, and we will take legal action against the ones that remain,” she said.

The move restarts a process that began 10 months ago when the city sent warning letters to 439 dispensaries. That effort was disrupted when scores of dispensaries sued to challenge the city’s restrictive medical marijuana ordinance. A judge declared parts of the law unconstitutional in December and the City Council adopted a new ordinance in January.

Greenberg said the 140 dispensaries were identified from the earlier list. “We basically whittled it down to these that are currently open and operating, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t more out there,” she said. “We keep getting information that places have reopened or new ones have opened up.”

-- John Hoeffel

Fines and not Court?

The Auburn Planning Commission voted Tuesday night to recommend the City Council amend the city’s municipal code to make penalties for running dispensaries in the city civil rather than criminal infractions.

According to Will Wong, community development director for the city of Auburn, in 2004 the city adopted an ordinance putting regulations on the dispensaries, but in 2006 the city amended its code to prohibit the facilities altogether.

Wong said fines for operating a dispensary in Auburn would start at $100 for the first violation, $200 for the second and $500 for the third.

Wong said if someone tried to run the illegal business without a license, they would also be fined for that.

According to city documents, non-criminal penalties avoid conflict with the Compassionate Use Act and the Medical Marijuana Program Act, which “decriminalizes possession and cultivation of marijuana for specified medical purposes.”

Wong said hydroponic shops are not considered the same as dispensaries, because they don’t sell marijuana. So, they are legal in the city.

“Selling merchandise is not a problem,” Wong said. “We would have no grounds (for legal action). Someone could use it to grow tomatoes.”

Wong said people interested in opening dispensaries have asked him about business licenses, and he has had to explain the city’s prohibition policy.

Wong said if a time ever came where Auburn could no longer prohibit the facilities, the city would have to think about putting standards on them again.

The City Council still needs to approve the municipal code language change before it would go into effect.

Neighboring Sacramento County is home to dozens of medical marijuana dispensaries.

Reach Bridget Jones at bridgetj@goldcountrymedia.com

More arrested for Cotati Robbery

Cotati police Wednesday announced the arrest of six more people for a recent home invasion robbery, bringing to 11 the number held on suspicion of taking marijuana at gunpoint.

The six were arrested with the help of Los Angeles police officers and soon will be transported to Sonoma County from Southern California, according to Sheriff's Lt. Dennis O'Leary, who temporarily is working with the Cotati police.

The robbers allegedly first met one of the home's occupants on Jan. 22 on a Cotati street. Gunmen later forced their way into a La Salle Avenue duplex, tied up its three occupants and escaped with an unknown amount of marijuana.

Police later pulled over two vehicles in Petaluma that matched descriptions of some of the getaway cars. Officers found marijuana and four firearms and arrested five men on charges of armed robbery, burglary and false imprisonment.

The six new suspects are John Delgado, 19, and Cory Elliott, 20, both of Simi Valley; Ashley Canale, 19, and Josef Lugo, 29, both of Chatsworth; Hulofton Robinson II, 27, Inglewood; and Garrett Koffmoore, 24, Woodland Hills.

— Robert Digitale

Preliminary hearing to be set in medical pot bust case

GUELPH — Lawyers for the three men charged with drug trafficking following a bust at the Medical Cannabis Centre of Guelph last May are expected to set a preliminary hearing date on March 29.

Two of the men, Rade Kovacevic and Scott Gilbert appeared in a Guelph provincial courtroom Monday, where the matter was adjourned.

Guelph Police laid the drug trafficking, possession for the purpose of trafficking and drug production charges after they searched the centre at 62 Baker St., last May 6, as well as five other addresses on Dublin Street, London Road, Arrow Road and Quebec Street.

More than 20 kilograms of dried marijuana were recovered by police as well as several vials of ground marijuana, 258 marijuana plants, a quantity of marijuana-laced muffins, scones, cakes and cookies and more than $10,000 cash. Police estimated the value of seized drug items at in excess of $100,000.

Court heard the preliminary hearing will likely be set for three days. The Crown is expected to call the police officers who obtained the search warrant at the Baker Street medical centre.

Kovacevic is to be represented by Toronto lawyer Leora Shemesh and the other two men are to be represented by another Toronto lawyer, Marcy Segal.

Collectives against the new tax law

By John Hoeffel, Los Angeles Times

March 5, 2011

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0304-pot-tax-20110306,0,5657717.story


When Oakland's voters slapped the nation's first tax on marijuana sales a year and a half ago, the city's dispensaries backed the ballot measure, pushing it as a way to be seen as legitimate businesses.

And when voters in 10 California cities decided on pot taxes in November, the elections were largely uncontroversial. The taxes all passed by more than two-thirds.

But in Los Angeles, where voters decide Tuesday whether to create a pot tax, medical marijuana activists who once urged City Hall to tax and regulate them are hoping to defeat the proposal, angered by the council's decision to limit the number of dispensaries to 100 and choose them by lottery.

"The city has done nothing for the patients, and I don't see why the patients have to pay a sin tax. We're not a topless bar," said Yamileth Bolanos, a dispensary operator who leads a group of the city's oldest collectives. "The city hasn't even been able to enact an ordinance that creates safe access."

Measure M would require the city's dispensaries to pay a 5% business tax on gross receipts, which is 10 times more than the city's highest tax. Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who proposed the tax, estimated that it would raise at least $10 million. The city faces a $54-million budget shortfall through June.

"It seemed to me it was a way to bring more revenue to the city to keep us from laying off any more city workers, or firefighters, or cops," Hahn said. "And I think it's a fairness issue. I think they should pay their fair share of taxes to the city. We are expending enormous resources to pass an ordinance that allows them to operate in the city of Los Angeles. I mean, we've spent building and safety time, city attorney time, city clerk time. We're going to be spending code enforcement time."

The no campaign is low-key and low-budget, targeted at urging the city's medical marijuana consumers — enough to support hundreds of retail stores — to show up to defeat what opponents disparage as an unfair tax on a medicine. But there are also a few heavyweight opponents, including Police Chief Charlie Beck, Sheriff Lee Baca, Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley and the city's two biggest daily newspapers.

On the yes side, the campaign is run by an Oakland political consulting firm that worked on last year's marijuana legalization campaign. The campaign is backed by some of the city's public employee unions, but no dispensary has publicly endorsed it. "Some are vehemently against, some are sitting on the side, and I would say a few, but not many, recognize this is how business works and will normalize their dealings with the city," said Andre Charles, a consultant with The Next Generation.

The debate centers on whether the tax is fair or even legal.

Under the city's medical marijuana ordinance, dispensaries are required to operate as nonprofits, though city officials believe many do not. The city attorney's office has told the council that the tax measure violates the city's municipal code, which exempts charitable organizations from business taxes.

This is the main reason the Los Angeles Times and the Daily News of Los Angeles editorial boards gave a thumbs-down to the initiative.

But many dispensaries that have business licenses from the city Office of Finance are already paying city taxes. Antoinette Christovale, the general manager, said her office does not track how many dispensaries there are in the city or how much money is collected from them.

Dispensaries cannot receive tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service because the sale of marijuana is illegal under federal law. That means they cannot receive exemptions from the state or the city, which rely on the IRS determination.

William W. Carter, chief deputy city attorney, said that his office had to stick to the fact that Los Angeles' laws bar taxes on charitable organizations, even if they are not tax-exempt. "We interpret the law based on what it says in black and white, not on how other departments have applied it," he said. The city attorney's office, as the lawyers for the City Council, has not taken a position on the measure.

Councilman Bernard C. Parks, who opposes the measure, believes dispensaries would sue to overturn the tax. "If it passes, you'll be saying a year from now, 'Where's the tax money?' " he said. He also believes it would require the Office of Finance to add a layer of bureaucracy. Christovale said her office has not studied what it might cost to collect the tax.

Beck, who as police chief typically tries to stay out of politics, said he opposes the measure because it undermines laws that allow marijuana to be distributed only as a medicine and only by nonprofits. "When we tax it, then we wink and nod toward the fact that it is not a medicine, it is a recreational drug," Beck said. "I think that it's a wrong position for the city to take. We're not taking the moral high road. It's like saying, 'Hey, let's tax prostitution because it's happening anyway.' "

Bolanos and other medical marijuana advocates also oppose the tax as too high for a medicine. What proponents call a fair share is nearly 40 times as much as tobacco sellers and pharmacies pay. Dispensaries are also required to charge sales taxes, which are 9.75% in Los Angeles.

But Hahn said she settled on a 5% gross receipts tax because it is similar to what other California cities have imposed on the lucrative businesses, including Oakland, which tripled its tax to 5% in November. Oakland expects the tax to bring in $1.3 million this year, enough to hire seven police officers.

The potential for revenue has drawn support from unions such as United Firefighters of Los Angeles City and Service Employees International Union, Local 721, which represents about 11,000 city workers. "At the time of this financial crisis right now we need to find more ways to generate more revenues," said Bob Schoonover, Local 721's president. "We're not really making a judgment call on this at all, but marijuana is being sold, so we just think they should pay their fair share of taxes, that's all."

SEIU 721 donated $5,000 to the yes campaign, the only reported contribution so far. The campaign still hopes to raise $5,000 more. The yes position will be on some slate mailers, and the campaign has a Facebook page and a website, yesonlameasurem.com.

The no campaign, which also has a website, notaxonmedicine.org, is largely the work of a few outspoken activists, including Bolanos and Richard Eastman, who credits pot with helping him to suppress his AIDS. "I don't believe my medicine is a sin," he said. "That's what they're trying to sell with this tax."

Bolanos has spent about $800 raised from supporters and Eastman about $500, mostly on literature ("Get the greed out of the weed!") aimed at dispensary customers who would pay for the tax. "I'm going out to as many dispensaries as I can," Eastman said. "I'm a working wrecking crew."

john.hoeffel@latimes.com