POT AND PORN

A couple of New Times folks had the chance to sit down with Sheriff
Pat Hedges the other day and, at his invitation, talk over the
various state laws governing medical marijuana.

First of all, let's just put it out there that Hedges must be a
fairly good sport. He gets his mug all over New Times occasionally,
and rarely in a flattering light, but even though he's a small guy
he's big enough to continue to talk, unlike another certain hulking
area politician, who shall remain nameless, since the voters have
kicked him out anyway.

I wasn't in the room, but I gleaned as much as I could from Kylie
Mendonca and Ed Connolly, who were, and then I exaggerated what they
said a bit and re-imagined the situation. You could say I
eavesdropped on the conversation. Sheriff Hedges would undoubtedly
understand. Here's roughly how I'm saying things went:

The good sheriff came armed with a small stack of documents that he
said represented the current state of law on medical marijuana. One
of them was a fairly recent piece of advice from Attorney General
Jerry Brown on how police should interpret the state's marijuana
laws. Hedges seemed to find in them some vindication for his actions
in inviting the feds to raid the local medical marijuana dispensary
last year. (I gather the timing for his talk was hedged on the recent
guilty verdict of the Morro Bay dispensary's owner, Charles Lynch.)

Hedges also provided the New Times folks with a copy of the so-called
420 law, the bill defining how medical marijuana can be provided in
California. Only Hedges either didn't seem to know or didn't much
care that state courts have since interpreted that law in ways that
would have explicitly worked in Lynch's favor.

More than that, he highlighted words, sentences and paragraphs in
both the law and Brown's advice memo that serve his anti-marijuana
agenda, yet glossed over or ignored those that don't.

But neither of those reasons were the weirdest part of the
conversation, as I gather things. No, the weirdest part was that
Hedges was laboring so hard to prove, in essence, that he would have
been under rights to arrest Charles Lynch under state marijuana laws.

An aside: according to Hedges, the most illegal thing Lynch did was
sell the marijuana, presumably for a profit. To that I say that
Hedges and I agree that Lynch should have given it away. Sheriff
Hedges and I apparently both enthusiastically support free pot.

But back to the issue: If Sheriff Hedges, as he argued so
ferociously, could have arrested Lynch under state laws, why didn't he?

If you're the top lawman, and you think somebody's breaking your
laws--he had deputies parked out front of Lynch's dispensary for
months--shouldn't you stand up and make the collar yourself? Why call
in big brother to do your dirty work for you?

I'll go ahead and answer that: You call in the nannies because it's a
slam dunk under federal law, wherein selling marijuana for any
purpose, medical or otherwise, is patently illegal. The jury didn't
really have much of a choice but to convict Lynch; he admitted he
sold pot. But the deck would have been stacked in Lynch's favor in
state courts, as both state voters and the Legislature have endorsed
medical marijuana.

And the funniest thing of all about the meeting was you'd have thunk
Hedges would have had a bit more on his plate that day, as it was
just days after his department had had a run-in with the feds of a
slightly different nature. Just days before, the FBI had served a
warrant on the home of one of the sheriff's deputies, carting away
the deputy's computer. And, folks, when the FBI comes for somebody's
computer, you can bet dollars to dirtbags there's a good chance it's
about kiddie porn.

So it was that just days later that same deputy, Bryan Goossens,
already by then on suspension from the Sheriff's Department, was
arrested by the FBI in a large-scale breakup of a child pornography
ring. Word is they found tens of thousands of images of child porn on
his computer.

Goossens' arrest has made national news since and can't in any way be
defined as good PR for the department. Did I mention that he was, at
least for a time, assigned as a School Resource Officer? Creep that, dog.

Now, the last time a sheriff's deputy got in legal trouble, I frankly
just didn't know what to make of it. The guy had pushed a cart of
groceries out of the store without paying and then mumbled some
nonsense to the cartboy about how it had happened. To that I say let
those who haven't stuffed a summer sausage down their pants in aisle
nine cast the first stone. But if the charges against Goossens--would
it be crass to point out that his initials would make his name BJ
Goossens?--are true, he's a straight-out creeper of the worst kind.
Good luck in jail!

Anyhoo, one might have thought the good sheriff would have had a bit
more on his mind than Charles Lynch and medical marijuana. But one
would be wrong. This is one lawman who seems at times to have pot,
more than most anything else, on the brain.