County Officials Set Record Straight on Measure a Lawsuit A couple of false rumors regarding Butte County's laws and officials have been spreading via social media. Take, for instance, an obituary for District Attorney Mike Ramsey posted on Facebook. Appearing before the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday (April 7) in Oroville, Ramsey assured the panel that he's very much alive. He also said the fabricated obituary was posted by a resident of the Berry Creek area-the same origin of a second false rumor on Facebook regarding Measure A, the ballot initiative passed into law by voters last November that restricts medical marijuana gardens by square footage rather than number of plants. [continues 607 words]
Medi-Pot Advocates File Lawsuit Protesting Butte County's New Cultivation Law A few years ago, Anne Murphy of Chico had accepted that her disease would eventually put her in a wheelchair. In 2005, she'd been diagnosed with primary-progressive multiple sclerosis, a form of the degenerative illness that doesn't go into remission, and Murphy's body had steadily weakened to the verge of complete immobilization. Then she started regularly ingesting cannabis. For the last 2 1/2 years, she's used medical marijuana to remedy specific symptoms, such as uncontrollable spasms in her limbs, and to stave off her disease's general progression-all with minimal use of traditional pharmaceutical drugs, she says. Now Murphy, 68, walks with a cane and feels more mobile than she has in years. Using pot medicinally has also helped Murphy and her diabetic husband, 61-year-old Ron Halvorson, manage their weight. [continues 991 words]
As Supes Move Forward on Medi-Pot Restrictions, Advocates Promise Public Vote Just minutes before the Butte County Board of Supervisors meeting in Oroville on Tuesday (Jan. 28), a young man sat on a bench outside the chambers rolling what very much appeared to be a joint, evidently unconcerned by the county sheriff's headquarters located just up the sidewalk. It was a sign that local pot advocates-some perhaps a bit more brash than others-had shown up in force to protest recently proposed changes to the county's medical-marijuana ordinance. Indeed, the chambers were filled to capacity with medi-pot growers and users, many of whom blasted proposed amendments to the ordinance as prohibitively restrictive during the public-comment section of the meeting. [continues 968 words]
Medical-Marijuana Advocate Hopes to Stop Changes to County Ordinance Andrew Merkel, chairman of the board of the Western Plant Science Association, believes further restrictions on the county's medical-marijuana ordinance will hinder patients' access to medicine. Andrew Merkel began using pot to treat his attention deficit disorder when he was 14 years old, and has been an advocate for medical marijuana ever since. Now 38, the decidedly casual real-estate agent chairs the board of the Western Plant Science Association-a local medical-marijuana advocacy group-grows marijuana on his 5-acre property in Chico and, of late, has been making a push to stop the Butte County Board of Supervisors from making further changes to the county's marijuana-cultivation ordinance. [continues 778 words]
County Supervisors Consider Changes to Grading Ordinance From the start, County Counsel Bruce Alpert made it clear that the workshop held during the Butte County Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday (Sept. 24) would not be specifically about growing pot. "Today, we're talking about the grading ordinance, not the marijuana [cultivation] ordinance," Alpert said, though he emphasized that the county "is not naive to the fact that these issues have become intertwined." Indeed, the influx of grading permits received by the county's Department of Public Works this spring was largely due to the marijuana cultivation ordinance passed earlier this year, Alpert acknowledged. [continues 723 words]
Cartels Add Danger, Environmental Degradation to Local Landscape In a pine grove just off highway 70 on the doorstep of the Plumas National Forest, evidence of a recently busted Mexican marijuana cartel's 6,000-plant operation is abundant. Though the cartel camp was shut down in late August, there are still lines strung among the trees where drying marijuana was hung and a complex irrigation system is intact. There are open bags of fertilizer, car batteries, bottles of rat poison, empty and full 5-gallon propane tanks, bags of filthy clothes and every other kind of trash imaginable strewn across the forest floor. [continues 774 words]
