THE POLITICS OF POT

Elected Officials in Chico and Elsewhere Struggle to Come to Grips
With an Explosion of Pot Dispensaries

Dawn Jenkins grew up in the Mormon Church, where her father was a
bishop. Her husband, Mike, has owned a pool-service company in Red
Bluff for decades. They have deep roots in the community.

They also happen to operate the town's only medical-marijuana
dispensary, called the Tehama County Patients Collective.

Mike has been a medical-marijuana patient and testifies to the herb's
value as medicine. He and Dawn believe in the importance of providing
other patients with legal, affordable marijuana and are confident
that the law is on their side. So, when they were looking for a
storefront for a medical-marijuana dispensary and one came open right
next door to the Tehama County Sheriff's Office, they didn't hesitate
to rent it.

Granted, they had to act fast. They knew the county soon was going to
impose a moratorium on dispensaries. They incorporated their
nonprofit business, they say, on Sept. 11 and rented the building on
Sept. 12, a Saturday. The county's moratorium did not go into effect
until mid-October.

That's when Sheriff Clay Parker started coming to the Jenkinses' shop
on a daily basis to issue them misdemeanor code-enforcement citations
charging them with operating an illegal dispensary and a business in
violation of the zoning. Each ticket carries a penalty of up to a
$1,000 fine and a year in jail.

The Jenkinses sell their marijuana for about one-third of the cost on
the street--$35 for an eighth of an ounce, for example. And they have
pledged to return any income above expenses to the collective's
members in the form of such benefits as a meditation room, access to
chiropractors and an organic cafe.

During a recent interview at the dispensary, Dawn Jenkins told CN&R
Managing Editor Meredith Cooper that lately Parker had asked for
copies of the collective's members' information and threatened to
obtain a search warrant. "We're concerned about our patients' right
to privacy," she said.

Parker is always polite and "very nice" when he drops by, she said,
but the pressure is affecting them. "I'm trying to be relaxed, but
there's still paranoia [about being arrested]. I shouldn't have
that--it's legal." A tear rolled down her cheek.

"I feel OK in my heart about what we're doing," she continued. "But
it's affecting our family, our good name. Why are we being harassed?"

The Jenkinses' situation is unique, of course, but it's also fairly
typical of the challenges facing parties on both sides of the
medi-pot issue, those who wish to grow and sell it and the public
agencies seeking either to keep dispensaries and growing operations
out of their communities or find ways to control them.

The conflict has been simmering for years, ever since the passage of
Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, legalizing the
use of marijuana for medical purposes. Lately, though, it has become
a front-burner issue, as dispensaries have mushroomed throughout
California and cooperative marijuana grows have greatly increased the
amount of pot on the market. Marijuana is now estimated to be a
$17-billion business, making it the largest agricultural sector in the state.

All across the state, cities and counties have responded in varying
ways. At least 120 cities, one-fourth of the state's total, and eight
of its 58 counties have banned dispensaries outright. The most recent
was Nevada City, the hip little Gold Rush town in the pot-growing
epicenter of Nevada County. In September its City Council voted, 3-2,
to ban medi-pot shops.

Officials in cities that have banned dispensaries often cite Los
Angeles as a case in point. There are now estimated to be anywhere
from 400 to 1,000 dispensaries in that city, and most have opened
following a moratorium that was adopted in 2007 but rarely enforced.
In October a judge ruled that the moratorium had been illegally
extended, leaving the city with no rules to use to shut down the
stores that had opened.

The L.A. City Council is struggling to come to grips with the
explosion of pot shops and the angry reactions of neighbors who say
the stores open wherever they want and attract nuisances such as
traffic and real dangers in the form of robberies.

At the same time the council is concerned, according to the Los
Angeles Times, that without the dispensaries genuine
medical-marijuana users would be forced to purchase their medicine on
the black market, subjecting them to potential danger.

Advised by its city attorney that the sale of marijuana, even to
qualified medi-pot users, is illegal, the council has sought a way
around that. The result is an ordinance that would redefine the sales
transaction by allowing "cash contributions, reimbursements and
compensations" for actual expenses, as long as the dispenseries
comply with state law, the Times reports. That includes requiring
them to operate as non-profits.

The council is also considering putting a cap on the number of
dispensaries allowed in the city. A vote was set for Dec. 2, after press time.

Neighboring West Hollywood, on the other hand, reports few problems
with dispensaries. That's because when it was faced with an explosion
of dispensaries in 2005, the Times reports, "it imposed a moratorium
on them, clamped interim rules on the ones that were open, passed a
strict ordinance and capped the number allowed at four, all within two years."

As a result, it's been more than two years since a city resident
complained about a dispensary, and when the ordinance was updated
recently, nobody spoke against it and it passed unanimously.

That's what Dylan Tellesen and his partners in a group calling itself
the Citizen Collective want the Chico City Council to do--adopt an
ordinance that allows legitimate, nonprofit dispensaries such as
theirs while controlling their number and the way they do business.

After a halting start in its effort to come to grips with the
medi-pot issue, the council has tasked its Internal Affairs Committee
to come up with a proposal. The IAC is also trying to figure out how
to deal with backyard marijuana grows, which neighbors often consider
a nuisance because of the mature plant's "skunky" odor and because
attempted thefts sometimes result in violence.

There are two principle obstacles to setting up a dispensary. One is
that there are no zones in the city that specifically allow them. The
other is that Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey believes
state law does not allow marijuana sales and has threatened to
prosecute anyone who operates a storefront dispensary.

On the other hand, said Mike Maloney, Chico's chief of police, there
seems to be an interest on the part of at least some council members
to figure out a way to provide "limited access on a controlled basis"
to legitimate users.

Maloney shares that interest. "We [the police] can bang our heads
against the wall like traditional law-and-order people or recognize
that the trend today is toward greater liberalization," he said
during a recent phone interview.

It used to be, he said, that when Chico police had reason to believe
marijuana was being grown in a house, they'd obtain a search warrant,
then "kick down the door and arrest anyone who was there. Now we just
knock on the door, ask if they have a medical recommendation and ask
to see the plants. If they don't want us in the back yard, we leave."

Maloney's personal experiences have influenced his attitude. When he
was 17 years old, he was hospitalized for what turned out to be a
treatable form of cancer. His roommate on the cancer unit was a
26-year-old man with a terminal form of the disease.

"The only thing that brought him relief between bouts of vomiting
from chemotherapy was marijuana," Maloney said in a recent phone
interview. "I could see first-hand the benefits he was receiving."

On the other hand, he continued, "a 20-year-old kid with anxiety
because he can't get a job [and therefore needs medical marijuana],
well, that's a crock."

Without overtly saying so, Maloney appeared to leave the door open to
a more liberal enforcement policy should the council approve a
limited number of dispensaries inside city limits.

What Maloney and other law enforcement officials would much prefer to
see, however, is for marijuana to be treated as a legitimate
medicine, one prescribed by doctors and available at pharmacies.

"The best way to fix the problem would be for Congress to change
[marijuana] from a Schedule 1 drug to Schedule 2 or 3," Tehama County
Sheriff Parker said in a phone interview. That way it could be
studied to determine its actual medicinal uses, he explained.

"If someone got a prescription from a doctor and had it filled at the
pharmacy, that would take all the ambiguity out of it," Parker said.

Because pot is classified as a Schedule 1 drug, on par with heroin
and cocaine, it is largely unavailable for legitimate research to
determine just what its medicinal qualities are. The result is that
doctors are able to recommend it for just about any ailment in the book.

There have been some small studies showing that cannabis relieves
migraine headaches, reduces hypertension in the eyes of glaucoma
patients, relieves nerve pain and stimulates appetite in HIV
patients, offsets the nausea of chemotherapy, and is effective
against various forms of severe, chronic pain.

Otherwise, though, its medicinal effects are mostly unknown, and the
states that have legalized medi-pot have done so largely on the basis
of anecdotal evidence and popular belief.

Needless to say, perhaps, the current suppliers of medical marijuana
aren't big fans of treating it like other medicines and distributing
it through pharmacies. If that happens, they believe, big Pharma and
corporate agribusiness will step in and take over what up to now has
been literally a homegrown, grass-roots industry--and a highly
profitable one, at that.

Nor do supporters of marijuana legalization want to go that route.
They want marijuana to be taxed and sold openly, like beer and wine,
to adults 18 and older. Their purpose is not to enhance the
availability of the drug, but rather to remove it from the black
market and thereby eliminate the criminality associated with it.

That's the reasoning behind Assembly Bill 390, by Tom Ammiano (D-San
Francisco). He believes the bill could generate much-needed
revenue--the Board of Equalization has estimated $1.4 billion
annually, though the figure is sketchy and hotly disputed--and free
up peace officers to focus on worse crimes.

It would also help to relieve the pressure on the criminal-justice
system. The Sacramento Bee recently reported that more than 78,500
people were arrested in 2008 on pot-related offenses, according to
state records, at a cost to California taxpayers of billions of dollars.

The damage done by criminalizing marijuana--the creation of an often
violent black market, the families broken apart by imprisonment, the
lives ruined and the huge financial cost to society--is far worse
than anything caused by the herb itself, they argue.

It's unlikely that Ammiano's bill will pass, if only because the
state would then be in conflict with federal law, which prohibits
marijuana possession. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently
announced a new policy of not prosecuting those involved in
distributing or using medical marijuana in states that have approved
it, but that exemption does not apply to any other use of the drug.

Also, as Chief Maloney pointed out, "What happens if we legalize pot
in California but everywhere else it's illegal? It's a monster that
we're dealing with."

As venerable columnist Peter Schrag notes in a recent piece on the
online California Progress Report, "the Dutch, who have drawn a lot
of attention to their legalization and distribution of marijuana
through 'coffee houses,' are under pressure from their European
neighbors to change the law. Too many residents of Belgium, France
and Germany, it appears, are bringing pot back to places whose
residents are not as open minded. In response, the Dutch are
beginning to reduce the number of coffee houses."

Nevertheless, the movement toward legalization continues. At least
two petitions are currently circulating in California that would
legalize the herb for personal use and allow--and tax--its sale.

One is sponsored by Richard Lee, founder and president of a marijuana
emporium in downtown Oakland called "Oaksterdam University." Among
other things, reports Nick Miller, writing in the Sacramento News &
Review, it houses "medical-marijuana collectives, pot-friendly coffee
houses, [and] a weed university complete with a student center and store."

Last July, Oakland became the first city in America to place a
special tax on cannabis sales. It's expected to generate as much as
$1 million annually, on top of the state sales tax revenues it also
brings in. Statewide, pot sales generated $18 million in sales tax
revenues in 2008.

Lee is confident marijuana eventually will be legalized in
California--and polls back him up. A Gallup poll in October showed
that 44 percent of Americans favor legalization, a rise of 13 points
since 2000. In the West, the number in favor is 53 percent, and in
California--the first state to legalize medical marijuana--it's even higher.

On Nov. 24, the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Mark and Dawn Jenkins,
appearing in Tehama County Superior Court, agreed to close their
dispensary until at least their next court date, which was set for
Dec. 2, according to an article in the Red Bluff Daily News.

Sheriff Parker told the CN&R a sign went up on the door to the
collective Wednesday morning stating it had been "temporarily closed
during legal litigation" and that it would reopen "when a judge says we may."

The Jenkinses have told the CN&R they don't believe the moratorium
applies to them because they opened the dispensary before it went into effect.

The Tehama County court will decide on the citations, Parker said,
but ultimately some other court needs to sort out the legal mess that
Proposition 215 has engendered.

In the meantime, he said, medical-marijuana patients can get their
pot either by growing it themselves or joining a collective grow.
They can't walk into a dispensary, instantly join a collective and
buy it--not in unincorporated Tehama County, anyway.

Not yet.