40,000 IN CO-OPS? NO - BUT REALITY IS STILL SOBERING

Do Redding's 17 medical-marijuana collectives really have 40,000
unique, individual members, nearly half the city's population? Almost
certainly not.

Lt. Jeff Wallace, head of investigations for the Redding Police
Department, surveyed the city's dispensaries to gather data for a
Women's Fund forum on drug abuse this week. Adding up their
membership rolls, he found, the city's 17 licensed collectives
collectively have 40,000 members including, he said, 6,000 at the
single largest.

The hole in the method is that while the city's medical-marijuana
licensing ordinance says an individual can be a member of only one
collective, that's a difficult law to enforce.

So there's a lot of duplication and overlap. Is the real number of
collective members 20,000, 10,000 or 5,000? It'd be fascinating to
know - and to know how many card-carrying Proposition 215 patients
the north state area has - but given the questions of medical privacy
and the legal reasons to keep quiet, it seems like any number is just a guess.

The eye-popping but dubious marijuana number aside, more
scientifically rigorous data gathered by the Women's Fund, largely
from state and local public health departments, reveal that Shasta
County definitely has a drug problem:

From 2006 to 2008, Shasta County had the second highest rate of drug
and alcohol use by pregnant women of all 58 counties in California.

From 2007 to 2009, the county's rate of drug-related deaths was
three times the statewide rate, with 173 drug-related deaths in those years.

In 2010, more than 230 county child abuse cases were linked to drugs.

The county also has a higher than average rate of teen marijuana use,
according to the California Healthy Kids Survey. That predates the
2009 explosion of storefront marijuana shops, and little data is
available on trends since. The 2009-10 school year's survey at the
Shasta Union High School District, however, saw a marked increase -
as many as seven percentage points over past years, depending on the
grade level - in reported marijuana use, a troubling early sign.

The collectives might well be fostering an even more entrenched
culture of drug use, as critics fear, and the trends bear watching.
But it's just as likely that we've simply seen a long-present side of
Redding come out of the shadows.

Whatever the dispensaries' true membership, and whatever the ratio of
bona-fide patients to abusers of the "medical" loophole, their
proliferation is a symptom of our local drug problem more than its cause.