TEHAMA COUNTY TOWNS WAGE BATTLE OVER MEDICAL POT COLLECTIVES

The medical marijuana collective next door to the Tehama County
Sheriff's Office is, for now, closed - pushed to stop dispensing
after a relentless campaign by Sheriff Clay Parker.

But across the street from the Sheriff's Office on Antelope
Boulevard, BR Growing Supply and Hydroponics is not only open but
thriving in its second location since its founding a year ago.
Business was so good that owners Boyd and Rena Hedden set up shop in
a larger storefront to peddle their array of liquid fertilizers,
light-proof growing boxes, high-intensity lamps and other specialty
horticultural equipment.

Some customers are cultivating strawberries or starting tomatoes,
Boyd Hedden said, but he estimated 90 percent of his business comes
from medical-cannabis growers. And in the depth of a brutal
recession, this is one merchant with a smile on his face.

Californians voted to allow the medicinal use of marijuana 13 years
ago through Proposition 215, but conflicting federal laws - and the
U.S. Justice Department's eagerness to enforce them - kept patients
and especially their suppliers mostly in the shadows. This spring,
though, the Obama administration announced that federal authorities
would not pursue drug charges in medical-marijuana cases so long as
users followed state law. The "green rush" of entrepreneurs opening
storefront "collectives" has brought a hidden subculture into the open.

It's also brought a backlash - nowhere more than in Tehama County,
where county and Red Bluff city officials have waged the toughest
battle in the north state against medical-marijuana dispensaries.

So far, they've won.

The one collective that bucked city officials and opened in Red
Bluff, the Blue Toad, closed after three weeks when the city
threatened to fine not just its founders, Lana Aguiar and her
daughter, Ashley, but also their landlord for violating city codes.

Just outside the city limits, Sheriff Parker cited Mike and Dawn
Jenkins, owners of the Red Bluff Patient Collective, for 35 straight
days before the county stepped up the pressure and asked a judge to
order the collective closed. In court on Dec. 3, the Jenkinses'
attorney, Keith Cope, said they'd agreed to shut down until the
Tehama County supervisors finish writing an ordinance to regulate
local medical-marijuana dispensaries. They still face misdemeanor
criminal charges related to defying the zoning ordinance and
temporary moratorium.

Crackdown-minded authorities have won their battles. Outside the
courtrooms and county offices, though, it's hard not to get a sense
that they're on the losing side of a bigger cultural war.

Defying Stereotypes

To skeptics, smoking pot for your health is still an idea that
doesn't pass the giggle test. In fact, many users employ a smokeless
vaporizer or eat cannabis in baked goods or butter, but the bottom
line for critics remains that it's an illegal drug whose users just
want to get high.

Minds are changing, though, one at a time. And in tight-knit,
conservative Tehama County, medical-marijuana supporters pop up in
places that defy stereotype.

On the Red Bluff Round-Up board, where Director Joe Froome is facing
criminal charges for growing marijuana. He was arrested in October
and arraigned late last month, but argues he was doing it for
bona-fide medical use through a nonprofit he's set up, Tehama County
Holistic Health Cooperative Inc. He sat in at the Jenkinses' recent
court date to show solidarity.

Among the lawyers. Cope, who's represented both the Red Bluff Patient
Collective and the Blue Toad, is a straight-laced longtime prosecutor
in Shasta County who could pass for Clark Kent. He's a Brigham Young
University graduate who professes his deep admiration for his former
mentor McGregor Scott, the ex-Shasta County district attorney and the
region's U.S. attorney for most of President George W. Bush's
administration. And he says his clients are not drug dealers but are
trying to perform a public service of supplying medicine for
patients, while complying with state law.

At last weekend's Red Bluff Gun Show, where event organizer Richard
Day invited activists to set up a booth and distribute information
about medical marijuana. Why? He knows a vendor whose girlfriend died
of cancer, her pain eased by cannabis butter. "I believe, controlled
correctly, there is a real need for it," Day said. He added that he
was a little worried how the gun-show crowd might react - "As gun
owners, we're classified as rednecks" - but feedback was
overwhelmingly positive. "They weren't against it, as a medical form," he said.

A Dose of Relief

Day praised the ambassadorial skills of Ken Prather, co-founder of
the Tehama Herbal Collective (THC) in Corning, the only dispensary
operating in the county. He's worked to reach out to the community,
speaking at the gun show, to the Kiwanis Club, to pretty much anyone
who will listen. "The more we keep bringing them in the loop," he
said, "the more it seems they accept it."

THC's startup, though, wasn't so friendly. The city of Corning
initially denied the request for a permit to open on Solano Street
downtown. Prather and his partners opened anyway.

"I own a couple homes down here and I know the mayor," said Prather,
an off-and-on Corning resident since age 4, "and I told him that I'd
sell everything and sue them" if the city tried to shut the
collective down. Four months later, it's still in business, with more
than 1,000 members.

Prather said the collective complies with all tax laws and labor
regulations, and maintains tight security and surveillance. The
police have been in for tours. County health inspectors even checked
the kitchen to ensure THC's "edibles" were being made under sanitary
conditions.

Prather recognizes, though, that there's still a long road to acceptance.

"I've got people I've known all my life in this town who won't talk
to you about the marijuana thing, but they'll talk to you about other
things," he said. "It's kind of weird how backwoods they are about it."

Laying Low

The continuing taboo about marijuana and simple concern for privacy
keep many Proposition 215 patients quiet, said Lana Aguiar of the
now-shuttered Blue Toad in Red Bluff.

"People don't want to talk about their medical problems," she said.
"I wish there was a way to find out how many residents of Red Bluff
there are with 215s - most won't tell you."

Those who will tell tend to be closest to the movement.

Prather said he broke his neck in 1995, requiring two surgeries and
huge quantities of painkillers in the years since. Marijuana is no
cure, but by using it he "went from being on really high doses of
methadone to low doses of methadone. I'm actually a functioning person."

If cannabis means a day awake and alert for Prather, it's a night's
sleep for Alissa Eastman.

Eastman is a stay-at-home mother of two young children in Red Bluff
who's gathered petition signatures and lobbied City Hall for more
patient-friendly regulations. She's used cannabis, she said, to treat
severe vomiting she attributed to an infection, then later during her
pregnancy - "a little bit," she stressed - for extreme nausea.

After the birth of her second child, she said, even after he started
sleeping through the night, she couldn't. Her physician diagnosed
nervous tension. "My doctor prescribed sleeping pills, and I didn't
want them," she said. Instead, she turned to cannabis. "I don't use
it that much. I just use it for when I need it."

Eastman also reflects a divide among patients. A devotee of herbal
medicine and natural healing, she says she would like to open a
collective, but one with a broader focus - "more of a healing center
than a pot dispensary."

To Eastman, many dispensaries are too profit-driven and play loose
with the rules. "I've been to a few of the Redding collectives" - the
city has at least 20 - "and I was appalled."

At the same time, she blames bad laws for creating a black market.

"It's ridiculous to think somone won't try to profit off it, because
that's what our world created," she said. "People want it. It's in
high demand. And it's illegal. It's prohibition."

The Law Is Still Evolving

That might not always be the case.

Sheriff Parker predicts that, in the next decade or so, Congress will
change marijuana's status as a "Schedule I" drug, which under Drug
Enforcement Administration rules is deemed to have no valid medical
use. Just last month, the American Medical Association called on the
federal government to ease up, in part to allow more rigorous medical
research about marijuana.

"That's the way I think we need to solve the problem, but it doesn't
have a lot of political traction," Parker said. "There are a lot of
people who say it has no use, so we're not changing it from a Schedule I."

Paradoxically, if the federal government eased its no-exceptions ban,
it could leave marijuana more closely regulated. If it were available
by prescription, that would mean set doses for set times under close
medical supervision, rather than the frequently loose
"recommendations" that cannabis doctors now hand patients. At the
same time, while collectives must - at least on paper - operate as
nonprofits, legally prescribed marijuana could be sold with Big
Pharma-sized profit margins.

Legalize It?

Some would go further. Red Bluff City Councilman Jim Byrne, 83, said
he supports the shutdown of the Blue Toad, which he said was
violating city code (and, incidentally, was across the street from
his house near downtown Red Bluff). But he also said he wouldn't mind
seeing marijuana simply legalized.

"Personally I think - I know this is anathema - if it was legalized,
the city could certainly use the sales tax," Byrne said. "And there's
so many people doing it, what difference does it make? You might as
well face facts."

That sentiment is one Californians will have a chance to debate at
length next year. Three separate legalization initiatives are
circulating, and at least one has serious backers and is thought
likely to make the ballot.

Before that family-size can of worms is opened, though, nearly every
city and county in the north state is wrestling with just how to
regulate newly overt medical marijuana. Red Bluff's City Council
voted for the strictest possible local ordinance in early November -
banning all sales and cultivation, indoors or out - before backing
off two weeks later and deciding to explore slightly more lenient
rules. Even as Tehama County authorities have leaned on the Jenkinses
to shut the Red Bluff Patient Cooperative, the Board of Supervisors
has held workshops that medical-marijuana advocates describe as fair
and open-minded.

The board might not have a choice. As lawyer Keith Cope said of his
clients, "They're here to stay."