Pubdate: Sun, 1 Nov 2009
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2009 Los Angeles Times
Page: Front Page, first column, continued on pages A18 & A19
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/bc7El3Yo
Website: http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Alana Semuels, Reporting from Hayfork, Calif.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?253 (Cannabis - Medicinal - United States)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?115 (Cannabis - California)

MARIJUANA FARMERS BASKING IN THE SUN

Looser Laws on Medical Pot Bring Big-City Strangers to Small-Town 
Northern California.

Education has long been preached as a way to keep kids away from 
drugs. It's the walk to school that has Supt. Tom Barnett worried.

This hardscrabble Northern California town has become a hotbed for 
medical marijuana farming. Kids stroll much of the year past pungent 
plants flourishing in gardens and alleys. The red-and-black clad 
Timberjacks football team moved its halftime huddle on a recent 
Friday night to avoid the odor of marijuana smoke wafting over the 
gridiron from nearby houses. Some students talk openly of farming pot 
after graduation, about the only opportunity in this depressed timber town.

"It's not a subculture here," said Barnett, who heads the Mountain 
Valley Unified School District. "Marijuana is drying in their houses. 
It's falling out of their pockets."

Los Angeles isn't the only place struggling with repercussions 
unleashed by its permissive medical marijuana laws. Here in Trinity 
County, cannabis cultivation is upending the rural culture and 
economy of one of the state's most hard-luck regions.

Drawn by the sunny, cool climate -- and a local ordinance permissive 
of medical marijuana farming and possession -- big-city refugees have 
brought a decidedly urban edge to hamlets such as Hayfork, about 60 
miles west of Redding.

This town has no stoplights. No home mail delivery. Nearly a quarter 
of its 1,900 residents are poor. But that hasn't stopped outsiders 
from bidding up the price of real estate with sun-soaked southern 
exposures, all the better to cultivate plants that can grow 12 feet 
high or taller.

The sheriff's office estimates 10,000 plants are growing in a single 
remote subdivision known as Trinity Pines. Lots on its 
southwest-facing slope sell for as much as $50,000, up from about 
$3,500 five years ago, according to Steven Hanover, an area real estate broker.

Fall harvest season brings strangers with dreadlocks and cash boxes. 
Some farmers guard their crops with electric fences, razor wire and 
snarling dogs. Hikers have been threatened at gunpoint for wandering 
too close to where they aren't wanted.

"It's just torn the fabric of our society," said Judy Stewart, a 
69-year-old retiree who has lived in Trinity County for more than 50 
years. "It's pitted people against one another."

'Pot Paradise'

How Trinity County, a sprawling, lightly populated area twice the 
size of Rhode Island, came to be dubbed "Northern California's pot 
paradise" by High Times magazine is a story of law, lawlessness and geography.

Just a little more than 14,000 residents are spread across its 3,000 
square miles. People live as they like in its mountains thick with 
trees, separated from civilization by windy roads and "No 
Trespassing" signs. For decades, that's made it easy for some 
residents to grow marijuana without much interference.

Trinity County has "always been a pot county. Our climate in these 
little mountain valleys is conducive to great cannabis," said Mike 
Boutin, who runs Grace Farm, a collective in the western part of the 
county. He said he originally moved there to grow and sell medical 
marijuana on the black market. He now cultivates it legally because 
of California's Proposition 215.

Known as the Compassionate Use Act, that statewide ballot initiative 
approved by voters in 1996 allowed patients suffering from cancer, 
glaucoma and other illnesses, as well as their caregivers, to grow 
and possess the drug to ease their discomfort.

Concerns by patients and law enforcement that the law was too 
ambiguous prompted the Legislature in 2003 to clarify just how much 
pot could be grown legally. California guidelines currently allow 
half a pound of dried marijuana and six mature or 12 immature plants 
for patients who obtain a doctor's recommendation. In addition, the 
law gave cities and counties flexibility to adopt more generous 
guidelines. Trinity in 2007 upped its limits to 12 mature pot plants, 
24 immature plants and 3 pounds of dried weed -- a policy that was 
later revoked after residents complained.

State law also permits nonprofit cultivation cooperatives where 
patients can, in effect, pool individual plant limits. That opened 
the way for large growing operations like Grace Farm, which has 20 
members from across the state.

Grace Farm Family

Among them is Jacqueline Patterson, 31, who uses marijuana to treat 
her cerebral palsy and a severe stutter. The single mother of four 
lives in publicly subsidized housing in Marin County. She fears she 
would be booted from the program if she tried to grow dope at home or 
buy it from street dealers. She travels to Trinity twice a year to 
pick up 3 pounds of marijuana, which she gets free in exchange for 
working for the co-op. The collective charges most patients about 
$170 an ounce.

The arrangement has allowed her "to acquire medicine affordably," 
said Patterson, who moved in 2007 from Missouri where medical 
marijuana is illegal. "Grace Farm has really given me more of a 
family out here in California."

But locals in Trinity say California law is so permissive that almost 
anyone can get a doctor's "recommendation" needed to grow their own 
marijuana or buy it at dispensaries. ID cards -- which patients can 
use as proof they have a physician's recommendation for medicinal 
cannabis -- are voluntary. And because state guidelines aren't hard 
and fast, some doctors recommend that their patients be allowed to 
grow many more plants than the suggested ceiling.

Officials say they're powerless to do much about it.

"All they need is a recommendation by a doctor on a match book," said 
Roger Jaegel, a county supervisor who represents an area that 
includes parts of Hayfork. " Dr. Seuss could be writing these prescriptions."

The upshot, critics say, is that a law crafted to help sick people 
has morphed into a lucrative trade, one in which rural farms are 
supplying urban dispensaries that cater to mostly recreational users 
armed with doctors' recommendations. Growers have flocked to Northern 
California's "Emerald Triangle" of Trinity, Mendocino and Humboldt 
counties for cheap land, a good climate and loose oversight.

In the college town of Arcata, home of Humboldt State University, 
buildings that once housed car dealerships now host cannabis 
dispensaries, said Kevin Hoover, publisher of the Arcata Eye 
newspaper. He said entrepreneurs have converted entire homes into 
indoor greenhouses rigged with "grow lamps." That's blighting 
neighborhoods and exacerbating the town's housing shortage, Hoover 
said. Home invasions and fires are up.

"What's happened is that a lot of the people who are in it for the 
money have found all the loopholes," Hoover said. "They're gaming the 
whole thing to enable more of an industrial production of marijuana."

Out-Of-Towners

In Hayfork, some farmers plant pot near public roads. Cars with 
out-of-state license plates pour into town during the fall harvest. 
Authorities suspect that a shooting in Trinity Pines was linked to 
marijuana. Many residents now avoid that area.

"We're beginning to feel like Colombia," Jaegel said. "It's a 
difficult thing for small communities to have to put up with."

Marijuana advocates say that trouble makers are a small minority and 
that the true danger is drug cartels operating large illegal 
operations on public forest land.

Indeed, the Trinity County Sheriff's Department -- with a total of 15 
officers -- devotes most of its drug enforcement efforts to fighting 
those organized gangs. Partnering with the U.S. Forest Service, 
they've closed 45 illegal sites in the county since June. They've 
arrested dozens of laborers and collected nearly 400,000 illegal 
plants this year, up from 250,000 last year. Weapons have been found 
at nearly every site they've raided.

Last summer alone in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, the 
government spent nearly $1 million removing 29,085 pounds of debris 
- -- including 14 illegal dams that had been built to siphon water to 
the farms, 1,004 pounds of fertilizer and 159,240 feet of irrigation 
pipe -- from abandoned marijuana farms.

Officials see a link between these cartel operations and 215 gardens: 
Americans' insatiable demand for drugs.

"I just wish recreational pot smokers could understand what they are 
supporting," said Joshua Smith, natural resources project manager at 
the nonprofit Watershed Research & Training Center in Trinity County. 
"They're supporting clear-cutting the forest, pesticides, de-watering 
the streams, poaching wildlife, Mexican drug cartels and human trafficking."

Money Talks

Lack of job opportunities is also driving the trade here. Logging, 
once a major employer, has all but disappeared. Trinity County's 
unemployment rate of 15.9% in September was one of the highest in the 
state. Its median household income of $35,439 is the third-lowest in the state.

Some say that the marijuana industry, for better or for worse, brings 
some economic benefits. Farmers buy water tanks and other equipment 
at local stores; laborers eat at area restaurants. A scruffy young 
man named Jaya traveled from New York to pick up work in the recent 
harvest. Eating ice cream at the Family Dairy Store in Hayfork 
recently, he communicated by scribbling on a notepad because, he 
wrote, he had given up speech "in loving silence."

Locals might not cotton to these outsiders. But at least their money spends.

"The only thing that keeps this economy going is the growers," said 
Dennis Cooney, owner of the Northern Delights coffee shop in downtown Hayfork.

But retiree Stewart, who owns several rental properties, is sick of 
the changes. She's tired of battling tenants who try to grow 
marijuana on her land. She's weary of hearing gunshots and seeing 
rough-looking strangers loitering around town. She fears growers will 
only be emboldened by U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.'s recent 
statement that the federal government will halt raids on legal dispensaries.

"It gives them the license to really be in your face," Stewart said. 
"I'd leave in a heartbeat if I could." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake