The biggest protests in Oakland in recent years have rarely, if ever, reflected the top priorities of its residents - and the pro-marijuana demonstration during President Obama's visit on Monday was no different. Like most Californians, Oakland residents support the 1996 state law that provided access to medical marijuana - and that support is reflected in the city's recent approval to permit more dispensaries in the city. But like most Americans, Oakland residents have bigger fish to fry than whether the state's largest pot dispensaries should be allowed to remain open. It's the larger dispensaries federal officials have said they intend to target. [continues 436 words]
In Oakland City Hall, gun violence in the streets apparently rates a distant second to a real emergency: the threatened closure of a medical marijuana dispensary. Over the past week and a half, seven people have been slain and 17 injured in shootings - but that apparently isn't enough carnage to warrant a response from Oakland's elected leadership. Federal action to close Harborside Health Center, however, prompted a swift response. Quick. Circle the wagons against the real bad guys. When the closure of a pot club gets an immediate response from City Hall, but a killing each day for a week doesn't, it casts serious doubts on the city's ability to get its priorities straight. [continues 553 words]
On many fronts, Oakland is in dire need of federal assistance. The city needs help reducing violent crime and would benefit from the feds' expertise in investigating allegations of government corruption. Unfortunately, Oakland doesn't need the kind of help federal authorities are giving us now. On Monday, officers with the Drug Enforcement Administration, Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Marshals Service raided Oaksterdam University, the state's first school for people in the cannabis industry, and the apartment of its founder, the outspoken and wheelchair-bound Richard Lee. [continues 356 words]
I supported Oakland's initial foray into the large-scale cannabis cultivation business because it placed the city in the catbird's seat in the event of the passage of Proposition 19, the recreational marijuana use initiative on the November ballot. Had the measure been approved by voters, the city's plan to allow industrial-size pot farms, creating a new revenue stream ripe with tax benefits, would have been a wise decision. Because even while the Oakland City Council said the measure was approved for the exclusive use of licensed medical marijuana dispensaries, the city would certainly have been well positioned to take advantage had a new law been approved. [continues 608 words]
It seems that Oakland Mayor-elect Jean Quan and her virtual campaign running mate, at-large Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan, didn't want to stand in front of the authorities on this one. By a 7-1 vote, the Oakland City Council last week suspended its legal marijuana farm ordinance because it's not as legal as it was billed to be. The council, on the advice of legal counsel and a letter of caution from the Alameda County district attorney's office, temporarily withdrew a plan to allow large indoor pot farms in the city. [continues 558 words]
For most California voters, Proposition 19 is a state initiative that would make recreational marijuana use legal, but I think the plan has social benefits that go well beyond legal pot parties. In the long run, a successful November run at the polls could provide a public safety payoff in low-income communities where street-drug dealing qualifies as a thriving commercial enterprise. The residual effect of drug-dealing is violence, which has decimated the communities where the drugs are sold. Generations of families have been lost to the cycle of drugs and violence and profits that, for some, are worth risking their lives over. [continues 605 words]
Federal authorities dead set against the spread of medical marijuana dispensaries in California may soon have another leak in the dike. In November, Albany residents will vote on an advisory measure over whether to allow a pot club in the small East Bay city of 14,000 residents on Berkeley's northern edge. Unlike some of its neighbors in the university town, Albany residents are known as a well-behaved collection of families, with few problems other than occasional high school shenanigans and over-imbibing customers at bars along San Pablo Avenue. [continues 707 words]
Problems Caused by Lack of Regulations Nearly a decade after forward-thinking officials in several Bay Area cities approved laws allowing medical marijuana clinics, they must figure out how to regulate them -- because few people on either side of the debate deny that the clubs are running amok. More than 60 of the dispensaries operate in the region -- from Livermore to Belmont -- as a result of Proposition 215, which California voters approved in 1996 to make marijuana legal for medicinal purposes. [continues 783 words]
Former President Bill Clinton said he didn't inhale, and ill-fated Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg said he only smoked it with a few students when he was a professor at Harvard University in the 1970s. At least Dan Siegel, a prominent Oakland attorney, school board member and mayoral hopeful, didn't pony up an excuse when he was detained Tuesday at the Oakland International Airport, and then handed a citation, for trying to board a Southwest Airlines flight after allegedly packing a small amount of marijuana to take with him. [continues 774 words]
Barely four months after Oakland cracked down on the number of medical marijuana clubs in a downtown area known as "Oaksterdam," pot clubs are sprouting along a strip a few miles southeast of the city limits. Seven clubs, including at least one pushed out of Oakland, have planted themselves along East 14th Street in unincorporated Alameda County. Maybe they should call the new pot district "East Oaksterdam." No sooner had the dispensaries opened their doors than the nearby residents of Ashland and Cherryland began hollering. Their opposition reached the elected county leader for that area, Supervisor Nate Miley. [continues 675 words]
Oakland is one of the Bay Area's only big cities with a cottage industry growing right next door to City Hall. But in this case, some city officials are unwilling to let the market decide. A small community of medical marijuana clinics has emerged in the past year along Telegraph Avenue in downtown Oakland, creating an alternative -- and questionably legal -- health-care district known to the locals as "Oaksterdam." Some of the clinics are in the nondescript buildings along the avenue, but others, like the Lemon Drop on Telegraph Avenue and the Bulldog Cafe on Broadway, operate as public cafes with one notable difference: Some shops feature private areas that are accessible only to members carrying city-issued medical pot cards. [continues 779 words]
The brightly colored pills could be mistaken for candy, especially by the young people they are intended for. The pills are known as ya ba, a Southeast Asian methamphetamine. And while the drug has not gained a foothold in the East Bay, that is where thousands of doses have been smuggled into the country, federal authorities said. Earlier this month, U.S. Customs officials in Sacramento arrested 14 people involved in the transport and distribution of the drug, and seized 45 shipments from ships docked at the Port of Oakland and at the U.S. Postal Service's international mail facility in West Oakland. [continues 666 words]
Many Immigrants Addicted To Drug Every once in a while, like a gentle tap on the shoulder, Laotian war refugee Chiem Saetern gets a little reminder of the old days. It's always a bit of a surprise for the white-whiskered Saetern, now 72, but every so often he catches the unmistakable scent of opium in the air. Most recently, the pungent aroma hit the North Richmond man as he stepped into a friend's car. "I've tried to encourage (friends) to stop, and some say they are trying to quit, but I can't be sure," said Saetern, whose son, Kao Saetern, 47, interpreted for him. "They believe if they stop the opium, they will die," he said. The physical withdrawal from opium is identical to that for heroin, a more popular opium derivative. The condition can last five days or more. And although quitting won't kill, it can make an addict feel next to dead for a while. Saetern kicked the addiction during a two-year stint in a refugee camp in Thailand, but thousands of his Hmong, Mien and Laotian contemporaries now living in Northern and Central California are not as fortunate. More than 30 years after the first wave of Southeast Asian immigrants arrived in America, opium use is still strictly a mom-and-pop operation. There is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that most of the immigrants still using opium are elderly. Many were born in the Golden Crescent, a swath of agricultural highlands stretching from Burma to Laos where most of the world's opium poppies are grown. Some, like Saetern, were opium farmers who cultivated the cash crop and used it regularly. In recent years, the adult children of elderly Southeast Asian addicts have intervened and enrolled them in methadone clinics or drug rehabilitation programs to help them break their drug habits. "We have adult children bringing their uncles, grandfathers and mothers in here all the time," said Alicia Hererra, director of the detox unit at The Effort, a Sacramento drug rehabilitation program. [continues 625 words]
``You lookin' for Mike?'' the man asked yesterday, as he nonchalantly slid the cylinder-shaped brown paper bag away from view. ``You just missed him,'' said the 49-year-old San Pablo man who requested anonymity. ``Cops came and hauled him away a cupla hours ago.'' Mike Fitzgerald is one of the San Pablo Eight, a crew of public drinkers that police say are the worst in town. Still, a person's gotta feel pretty special to know that the police care enough to enforce a law especially for you. [continues 669 words]
Director not worried by recent court rulings In the midst of legal actions taken against medical marijuana clubs in San Jose and San Francisco recently, Oakland's pot club appears to be the last one standing clear and easy -- in a manner of speaking -- in the Bay Area. Unintimidated by a recent court ruling ordering the closure of the San Francisco club and the recent arrest of San Jose director Peter Baez on drug dealing charges, Jeff Jones, executive director of the Oakland club, says his organization will endure -- one way or the other. [continues 173 words]
But a discerning nose can pinpoint location Under the watchful eye of a security guard, a few people gathered one day last week outside an Oakland office front that blends in with its surroundings on Broadway. The absence of signage marking the building as the home of the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative is by design. Still, to some the location is no secret. Federal agents, local police and the city officials who endorse the club know where it is. Citizens are informed on a need-to-know basis. [continues 672 words]
