Pubdate: Thu, 16 Sep 2004
Source: Ukiah Daily Journal, The (CA)
Copyright: 2004, MediaNews Group, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/581
Author: Mark Hedges
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis - California)

FOLLOW UP: CRAVER AGREES POT SMELLS BAD

County Air Quality director Dean Wolbach told The Daily Journal last week 
complaints about stinky pot plants are on the increase.

While Sheriff Tony Craver has received a lot of criticism for developing a 
registration system to better keep tabs of what is a "legal" medical 
marijuana garden as prescribed by Proposition 215, he agreed with Wolbach 
that ripe pot plants "stink like hell."

"I hate it; it's obnoxious," he said of the olfactory potency of weed. "We 
receive a great many complaints."

But Craver said he has to simply tell people he has "no authority to 
regulate" pot odors.

"There's nothing I can do about it," he said. "The law itself is written in 
such a way that there's no regulation as to when and where people can grow it."

Craver said odor is not the only confusing problem with medical pot gardens.

"We have gardens growing in close proximity to school yards," he said, 
"where on the one hand the law says you can't have controlled substances 
within 1,000 feet of a school ground, but if it's classified as medicine 
it's a different situation.

"It's going to remain this way until something happens and Congress comes 
along and takes a different view and decides if it can be used as medicine 
with regulations established for retail sale and the pharmacies handle it 
just like any other controlled drug, like Vicodin," Craver said.

"On the one hand, the federal government is saying pot is a Type 1 drug, 
which is totally illegal, and it doesn't recognize it as any legal entity 
with medical value, and yet independent states are coming along saying they 
recognize it and it has value."

Craver said politically this makes it difficult for Sacramento to come up 
with a set of regulations to clarify the process of growing medical marijuana.

"Right now it's totally unregulated," he said. "Basically, it boils down to 
the discretion of individual counties."

While Craver said he doesn't find the odor of pot plants pleasing, he said 
the issue is another example of the adage: "One man's noise is another 
man's music."

"I grew up on a dairy ranch, and every day I went to school smelling like 
cow manure," he laughed. "I'm not the one to come up with a solution for 
this problem. The answer is for Congress to take a different point of view 
on this thing...so that we can have unbiased, comprehensive research in 
terms of whether pot does have medical value."

Craver said it doesn't help when our nation has drug czars saying a person 
"becomes an ax murderer with one hit" of marijuana.

"Somewhere in between is where the truth lies," Craver said. "Unfortunately 
we may never find out."

In the meantime, Craver said law enforcement in the county is "sick to 
death dealing" with pot garden problems.

As for the current situation, Craver said he thinks the public was sold a 
misrepresentation.

"A lot of people are making a lot of money selling marijuana for 
recreational purposes under the disguise of selling healing herbs," he 
said, "and they're not paying taxes."

Whereas people feel sympathy for a terminally-ill person who smokes 
marijuana in order to eat, Craver said he felt the fact that 18-year-old 
kids are getting prescriptions for medical marijuana for "nervous leg 
disorder" is not the same thing.

As for the county's marijuana registration program, Craver said law 
enforcement had been "frustrated about not having any kind of comprehensive 
way to authenticate somebody's claim for legitimacy through Prop. 215.

"The issue came up and I said, Well, what we'll do is establish and 
maintain an effective registry of folks who want to voluntarily preregister 
with us so we're able to authenticate their ability to have it,'" Craver 
said. "I feel strongly about the Fourth Amendment and its protection 
against unreasonable search and seizure."