WHERE TO NOW?

The failure of Proposition 19 bought us some catch-up years. Let's use
them wisely

(Nov. 11, 2010) Thirty-seven years ago, Californians voted on our
first Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana. The 1973 version was two
paragraphs long and got 33 percent of the vote. The 2010 version was
approximately 15 times as long and got 46 percent of the vote. Is this
a trend?

Let's hope not. The complexification of legalization illustrates how
many interests have piled onto what used to be a simple goal.
Legalization will never be simple again because it's now about a
burgeoning industry, not a plant - and yet that's the great
opportunity that Prop. 19's failure brings to Humboldt County.

Prop. 19 was written by Oaksterdam potrepreneurs who were among the
first to establish commercial relations with their local governments.
Humboldt now has a chance to catch up and grow California's billion-
dollar medical marijuana industry based upon the actual motherlode of
legalization, 1996's Proposition 215.

Prop. 215 was crafted by activists and idealists, not businessmen. It
created a legal exemption from pot laws for anyone with a doctor's
recommendation for a medical condition. Some consider this a
fraudulent get-out-of-jail-free card; more of us are coming to
understand that Prop. 215 was also, after 70 years of brazenly
discriminatory drug-law enforcement, an equal-opportunity medical
thumb that rebalanced the scales of justice.

Prop. 19, on the other hand, contained few ideals beyond legalizing
opportunities in a huge industry. Even its supporters (myself
included) had a hard time saying what we were supporting. Yet it's
easy to say why we supported whatever it was: 800,000 people are
imprisoned in this country every year, and tens of thousands of
foreigners are killed every year, because of drug laws that glamorize
and enrich lawbreakers. Great institutions are built upon this
injustice, such as our prison system, which is now larger than our
university system. Small ones also depend on it, such as the rural
schools, fire departments and health facilities of Southern Humboldt
County.

This is a complicated picture, and these complexities are now upon us.
If Prop. 19 had passed, we would be in an immediate race with well-
connected city industrialists to produce and promote abundant legal
marijuana. And we would be racing against people who wrote their own
rules.

Instead, thanks to Prop. 19's defeat, we have at least two years to do
what its backers did first in the Bay Area - create regulatory
understandings and relationships for evolving and promoting a
blossoming industry. That's good news. The bad news is that doing the
same here will require cooperation and compromise across Humboldt
County. I'm confident we can rise to this challenge, which we must
understand clearly.

Whether people like it or not, marijuana is the biggest industry in
the county. Like any big industry, it has effects both good and bad.
Unlike other big industries, its effects aren't regulated. In fact,
they're barely discussed. It's a great irony of our present political
situation that attempts to regulate Humboldt's potlands in our General
Plan Update and timber production zone guidelines - neither of which
even mention the "M" word - have failed spectacularly. One side wants
property rights respected but doesn't particularly care about
marijuana. The other side wants strong regulations such as Option A
but doesn't discuss marijuana's role in making such regulations
necessary, pre-empting discussion of mitigation.

Maybe these goals can be discussed openly and honestly now. Maybe
building a house on a Timber Production Zone parcel isn't half the
problem that Zonker Harris is: The Doonesbury cartoon character
recently told his parents in hundreds of newspapers that he's moving
to Humboldt to grow pot, along with thousands of other recession-
driven green-rushers already here and on their way, as publicized in
media ranging from the Los Angeles Times to Business Week. There had
been no wave of McMansion subdividers when the General Plan
controversies erupted, but there is a tidal wave of marijuana
subdividers flooding our rural areas right now, while current
residents use more water, land and resources every year to grow ever
more weed.

What's our carrying capacity? Is there a breaking point? Is functional
planning possible here, or must we, like the people of Mendocino and
Arcata before us, respond to the dark side of economic development
with a reactive backlash rather than a pro-active plan?

These aren't theoretical questions. Two weeks ago, after several
marijuana ordinance proposals were submitted to the Board of
Supervisors, Supervisor Mark Lovelace was assigned to design a
comprehensive plan for public input and a process for completing the
county's medical marijuana regulations. He'll announce the process in
January. This delay would have been scary if Prop. 19 had succeeded,
because we'd be holding those discussions while sprinting in a fixed
race. Since it failed, we have the time we need to conduct countywide
discussions of what pot means to our county, and perhaps agree on what
we want it to mean. We're lucky we have time to do this right.

Our discussions will be more interesting than typical policy
platitudinizing, because - sorry to state this baldly - no one in
government or planning even pretends to know the first thing about the
economic base of our county. So who will they learn from? Who will be
listened to? Who has a right to participate in these discussions
without fear? Who should be fearful? And what are we going to do about
Zonker Harris?

Whatever we decide, it's interesting times ahead for Humboldt County.
Pot made its prison break in 1996, and it won't go back to jail.
Whether our society will ever achieve complete legalization as it used
to be understood is anyone's guess, but if that should happen, it'll
be years from now. By then Humboldt can make the most of its historic
opportunities of land and brand, building a future worthy of its
world-famous yet extremely private enterprise. I hope we make the most
of our opportunities now - so we'll be ready for the next Prop. 19.

Charley Custer is Secretary of the Humboldt Medical Marijuana Advisory
Panel (HuMMAP.org) and a founder of Tea House Collective
(teahousecollective.org), which offers organically and sustainably
grown medical marijuana from Humboldt's family farms.