LIMITS WITHOUT CONSIDERATION

Before any of us decides that Mendocino County should vote for Measure
B and adopt the state limits of six plants, etc, we should know these
limits were decided without any real consideration by the legislators,
by patient advocates or by doctors.

Measure B proponents are telling us six plants has to be enough for
any patient, because those numbers were arrived in Sacramento by
holding hearings into the proper limit, and getting medical input on
the subject. They are wrong.

No hearings into the amount of marijuana needed by a patient, nor how
much usable marijuana a plant will produce, were held when the state
law went into effect in 2004. No public or medical input went into the
establishment of the six-plant limit.

California Health and Safety Code section 11362(a)-(f), enacted in
2004, says a patient or caregiver may possess no more than six mature
plants or 12 immature plants. This law originated as SB420, which was
the result of an effort by then-Attorney General Bill Lockyer to enact
legislation to provide a state medical marijuana user card, and to set
some guidelines for medical marijuana, following the passage of the
Compassionate Use Act in 1996. Lockyer set up the Attorney General's
Medical Marijuana Task Force for this purpose.

The task force met for three or four years, and was unable to come to
agreement on any appropriate plant number limits. The medical
marijuana representatives who sat on the task force proposed numbers.
Law enforcement Advertisement representatives who were also members of
the task force passed up their opportunity to have input in to the
plant limits by refusing to suggest any number, opposing the entire
idea of medical marijuana, even though the voters had overwhelmingly
passed it into law.

Ultimately, because no agreement could be reached, legislative staff
people proposed the six plant limit, and without hearings, this number
was written in to the bill and passed. The bill was successful in
establishing an identification card to be issued by the counties,
which remains in use. It was not successful in setting limits based on
either science or the needs of the patients.

This is the very reason the same law permits counties and cities to
exceed the enacted limits, because the local counties just might know
more about their communities and its residents than legislators in
Sacramento. Fifteen other counties in the state have taken the
opportunity allowed by the law to tailor their medical marijuana
ordinances to their own needs. Mendocino County should continue to
allow itself this opportunity in consideration of our local citizens.