OVERHEAD PROJECTOR

DA Ramsey Trots Out Some Bizarre Logic to Justify the Dispensary
Raids

We've got a couple of strong stories about medical marijuana in this
issue. Both show how difficult it has become for local law enforcement
to stop the spread of cannabis cultivation and dispensaries.

Our cover story ("The cannabis conundrum," by Managing Editor Meredith
J. Cooper and News Editor Melissa Daugherty) takes another, closer
look at the June 30 law-enforcement raids on cannabis collectives and
the homes of their operators. As it shows, a lot of time, effort and
taxpayers' money went into coordinating the 19 simultaneous raids-one
of which managed to target the wrong house. Oops.

Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey, by all accounts the
instigator of the crackdown, has a cut-and-dried take on the legal
issues. It's OK to grow medi-pot as long as certain rules are
followed, he says, but it's not legal under any circumstances to sell
it.

He's at odds with the state Attorney General's Office on this. In 2008
AG Edmund Brown issued a set of guidelines designed to clarify the
laws surrounding growing and dispensing medical marijuana. They held
that collectives could, among other things, "allocate" (that is, sell)
cannabis "based on fees that are reasonably calculated to cover
overhead costs and operating expenses."

As our story states, Ramsey's rather bizarre take on that provision is
that, because collectives accept new members regularly, overhead
constantly changes, and as a result it's impossible to set a fixed
price for cannabis.

Ramsey was once an Oroville Mercury reporter, which may explain
things, but even I know that overhead is calculated over time, not
from moment to moment. A nonprofit business-the Goodwill Store,
say-doesn't have to prove it's not turning a profit every minute of
every day, only when it balances its books at tax time.

We'll see how Ramsey's argument plays out in court-if charges are ever
brought.

More on marijuana: Our second cannabis-related story this week is
"Nightmare in the hills", Daugherty's sharp Newslines profile of
Patricia Vance. She's a tough-minded woman who's brave enough to do
battle with the pot growers who seem to be taking over her neck of the
woods in Yankee Hill.

As the story shows, pot gardens are proliferating in the foothills,
and there's little the authorities can do about it. Many of the grows
aren't being cultivated by your sweet-natured, Earth-loving hippies,
but rather by sketchy hard types who don't hesitate to tear up the
forest and steal water-and intimidate their neighbors-in the process
of making lots of money.

Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, has had many unintended or
unexpected consequences, none more ironic or unsettling than this one.

Walk that bike, dude: Every year at this time, students new to town
ride their bikes or skateboards on downtown sidewalks. They don't
realize it's illegal (fine: $37) and, worse, dangerous, especially to
people exiting stores. Well, now you know. So chill, friends. Please.