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."