FOLLOW UP: CRAVER AGREES POT SMELLS BAD

County Air Quality director Dean Wolbach told The Daily Journal last week
complaints about stinky pot plants are on the increase.

While Sheriff Tony Craver has received a lot of criticism for developing a
registration system to better keep tabs of what is a "legal" medical
marijuana garden as prescribed by Proposition 215, he agreed with Wolbach
that ripe pot plants "stink like hell."

"I hate it; it's obnoxious," he said of the olfactory potency of weed. "We
receive a great many complaints."

But Craver said he has to simply tell people he has "no authority to
regulate" pot odors.

"There's nothing I can do about it," he said. "The law itself is written in
such a way that there's no regulation as to when and where people can grow it."

Craver said odor is not the only confusing problem with medical pot gardens.

"We have gardens growing in close proximity to school yards," he said,
"where on the one hand the law says you can't have controlled substances
within 1,000 feet of a school ground, but if it's classified as medicine
it's a different situation.

"It's going to remain this way until something happens and Congress comes
along and takes a different view and decides if it can be used as medicine
with regulations established for retail sale and the pharmacies handle it
just like any other controlled drug, like Vicodin," Craver said.

"On the one hand, the federal government is saying pot is a Type 1 drug,
which is totally illegal, and it doesn't recognize it as any legal entity
with medical value, and yet independent states are coming along saying they
recognize it and it has value."

Craver said politically this makes it difficult for Sacramento to come up
with a set of regulations to clarify the process of growing medical marijuana.

"Right now it's totally unregulated," he said. "Basically, it boils down to
the discretion of individual counties."

While Craver said he doesn't find the odor of pot plants pleasing, he said
the issue is another example of the adage: "One man's noise is another
man's music."

"I grew up on a dairy ranch, and every day I went to school smelling like
cow manure," he laughed. "I'm not the one to come up with a solution for
this problem. The answer is for Congress to take a different point of view
on this thing...so that we can have unbiased, comprehensive research in
terms of whether pot does have medical value."

Craver said it doesn't help when our nation has drug czars saying a person
"becomes an ax murderer with one hit" of marijuana.

"Somewhere in between is where the truth lies," Craver said. "Unfortunately
we may never find out."

In the meantime, Craver said law enforcement in the county is "sick to
death dealing" with pot garden problems.

As for the current situation, Craver said he thinks the public was sold a
misrepresentation.

"A lot of people are making a lot of money selling marijuana for
recreational purposes under the disguise of selling healing herbs," he
said, "and they're not paying taxes."

Whereas people feel sympathy for a terminally-ill person who smokes
marijuana in order to eat, Craver said he felt the fact that 18-year-old
kids are getting prescriptions for medical marijuana for "nervous leg
disorder" is not the same thing.

As for the county's marijuana registration program, Craver said law
enforcement had been "frustrated about not having any kind of comprehensive
way to authenticate somebody's claim for legitimacy through Prop. 215.

"The issue came up and I said, Well, what we'll do is establish and
maintain an effective registry of folks who want to voluntarily preregister
with us so we're able to authenticate their ability to have it,'" Craver
said. "I feel strongly about the Fourth Amendment and its protection
against unreasonable search and seizure."