WILDOMAR COULD BECOME MEDICAL MARIJUANA PIONEER

Think Wildomar and concepts such as a feisty spirit (it says so right
on the city website) and anti-government bent (one of the reasons it
took the community so long to incorporate) might come to mind.

Reefer madness probably isn't one of them.

Yet which southwest Riverside County city is on the verge of allowing
retail outlets to sell medical marijuana to patients?

That would be wacky Wildomar at the forefront of distributing the
wacky weed.

Or so go the fears of critics who envision the community turning into
the cannabis capital of the area, hippies on the street corner doling
out joints, political types toking at City Council meetings and the
dawning of the Age of Aquarius near.

Lest you wonder what I've been smoking myself, I'm exaggerating the
fears just a tad. OK, a country mile.

Exaggeration is what City Councilwoman Sheryl Ade worries about, which
is why she chants this mantra about the issue: "Educate, educate, educate."

She says the people using medical marijuana are "everybody people,"
folks who need it to alleviate pain. It's got nothing to do with that
1960s stereotype of hippies, flower power, anti-war protests.

Ade favors nonprofit collectives in Wildomar, nondescript places where
people can pick up their medical marijuana. Wildomar would be the
county's second city -- Palm Springs was the first in 2009 -- to pass
a law allowing such joints, I mean places.

As to the notion this would turn Wildomar into another sin capital
such as Las Vegas as some residents expressed at a planning commission
meeting last week, Ade doubts it.

"Nothing will change in Wildomar," she says.

As to her belief that people need to be more educated, talk to Paula
Carter, who runs a collective from a home office in Lakeland Village.
She'd rather do it in her hometown of Wildomar, but that's not allowed.

So how many local residents are part of Carter's collective that she
distributes medical marijuana to? I thought she'd say about 25, maybe
50. Not even close. She has about 420, including a retired judge, a
former FBI agent, some lawyers and a couple of doctors.

Or do as she suggests and Google weed maps. Click into the
Temecula-Murrieta area and see there are 14 outlets listed, from the
Ministry of Cannabis to Mr. Herbs Collective.

Carter's point is plenty of medical marijuana is being distributed in
southwest Riverside County. She's a former firefighter and paramedic
who started using medical marijuana when she had intestinal cancer a
couple of years ago after finding she didn't care for the narcotics
prescribed for the pain and nausea. She switched to medical marijuana
and was more content.

Carter and her husband Michael have run the collective for about a
year. To her, it's an industry that's here to stay, no matter what
critics conjure up. Given the size of her clientele and the number of
local collectives, it's hard to argue, wacky as it may sound to some.