FUTURE OF LEGALIZED POT HAZY IN CALIFORNIA

LAYTONVILLE, Calif. - The man in brightly colored tie-dye frowns when
he grabs a pruner from his work shed and heads to his garden.

James Taylor Jones approaches a bushy marijuana plant, 6 feet tall
and almost as wide. The pruner's blade grabs hold of the stalk, and
Jones squeezes the handles together.

Snap.

He walks to another plant and does the same.

"This one is Headband," Jones says, naming the variety.

"Don't tell me that as you're cutting it," his wife, Fran Harris, pleads.

Thus ends the Peace and Love Medical Marijuana Collective.

Here in Mendocino County - where generations of mom-and-pop outlaws
have made a living growing pot and dodging the cops - who could have
predicted that legality would be more uncertain than illegality?

For the first time in their lives, Jones and Harris expected to be
completely legit pot entrepreneurs this year. But spooked by federal
raids of other northern California growers, scared about the risks
even though they said they followed state and local laws, they
decided to shut the collective down midway through the growing season.

"We don't want to go to jail," Jones says. "It's that simple."

"It's such a huge gray area right now," Harris says. "What appears to
be legal now might not be legal next year."

Stories like Jones and Harris' offer a reminder that marijuana
legalization - if ever it comes - likely won't be a smooth process.
Predictions of what a world of legalized marijuana would look like
are based on assumptions that can't be verified and expectations that
may prove slippery.

Pundits and some politicians extol the tax money legal marijuana
could bring in. But if legalization sends prices plunging, so, too,
would the revenue.

Others argue legalizing marijuana would cripple the black market. But
if new regulations and taxes encourage growers and users to remain
underground, the black market - and the drug cartels that feast on it
- - would continue to thrive.

Individual states may legalize marijuana first - California voters
will decide this year on limited legalization. But if the federal
government doesn't go along, does any of it really matter?

In short, all the things that make medical marijuana such a
complicated and contentious issue would likely only intensify with
full legalization.

"The gray area in marijuana, I've never seen it decrease," said
Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman. "Courts don't agree with
legislators, who don't agree with voters, who don't agree with the governor."

Allman's office provides a good example. In an effort to separate the
good marijuana growers from the bad, Allman and other county
officials created a crop certification program. People growing under
California's medical-marijuana laws could have up to 99 plants on
their property if they followed certain rules, like putting a tall
fence around the plants and having a sheriff's deputy come out for an
inspection.

The Sheriff's Office also began selling zip ties with the words
"Mendocino County MMP" - for "Medical Marijuana Program" - on them.
Growers paid $25 apiece for the ties and received some peace of mind
that their plants were legal. Last year, Allman's office sold $30,000
worth of zip ties.

But this summer, federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents
raided a medical-marijuana grower in the county and eradicated her
plants - the first time zip-tied plants in the county had been
pulled, according to locals.

"I felt that I would be safe because of Sheriff Allman's program,"
said Joy Greenfield, the 69-year-old fashionably dressed grandmother
with pink-painted fingernails whose "grow" the DEA agents raided. She
was speaking before a roomful of growers gathered in Ukiah in late
July to hear her story and talk about the situation.

Declining to disclose details of the ongoing federal investigation,
Allman suggested there was more to the raid than just busting a
run-of-the-mill medical-marijuana grower. But either way, he said,
his program can't buy cover from the DEA.

"The Sheriff's Office is not a pot-protection racket," he said.
"You're not talking to Jimmy Hoffa here."

Predictions about potential marijuana tax money provide another good
example of the uncertainty.

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, a noted libertarian, estimated in a
February report that legalizing marijuana would bring a $20.1 billion
boost to government budgets nationwide. About two-thirds of that,
Miron reasoned, would come in savings from not enforcing marijuana
laws. The remaining $6.4 billion, he estimated, would be from new tax
revenue. (Colorado's boost, he wrote, would be an estimated $145.2
million in savings and $34.8 million in tax revenue.)

In calculating tax revenue, Miron assumed marijuana usage rates would
remain the same while prices would drop by half. A study by the
nonprofit RAND Corp., though, suggests both of those assumptions
might not hold.

In the report, RAND researchers say legalization in California could
drop the price of marijuana by as much as 80 percent. But having
prices dip so low, they wrote, might create a marijuana consumption
surge of more than 50 percent. Uncertain tax rate structures, usage
patterns and even pot potency also muddle the revenue picture, the
RAND researchers concluded.

Vanderbilt University law professor Robert Mikos has predicted that a
significant portion of the marijuana market might stay underground
even after legalization, both to avoid taxes and to avoid the risk of
federal prosecution.

"A marijuana tax may not be the budget panacea many proponents
claim," Mikos wrote in a study to be published this year. "To be
sure, there are reasonable arguments favoring legalization of
marijuana; rescuing the states from dire fiscal straits, however, is
not one of them."

That all of this instability would rattle northern California
marijuana growers is understandable. Marijuana is to the region what
automobiles are to Detroit or beer is to Milwaukee - a source of both
economic support and social pride. As the area's traditional timber
and fishing industries have declined, the importance of marijuana has
only increased.

Legalization, by dropping the price of marijuana and opening the
industry to the more cautious, threatens to undo northern
California's advantage and thus its pot economy. Prices have already
fallen for the region's marijuana from about $4,000 a pound to about
$2,000 a pound as a result of the medical-marijuana boom, growers said.

"I don't think people need to worry about mass dislocation
immediately," said Pebbles Trippet, a revered marijuana activist in
the region. "We just need to get prepared to alter our way of life."