'MEDICAL' MIKE'S HOME RAIDED

Talk about a buzzkill.

County drug task force agents raided the Paradise home of a medical
marijuana advocate Tuesday after receiving complaints from "Medi-cal"
Mike Nelson's neighbors that he was providing marijuana for
less-than-medical reasons.

And even while the agents uprooted and confiscated 62 marijuana plants
from Nelson's yard and garage, they left him with 18 bushy marijuana
plants tall enough to be seen growing two feet above his fence.

But that the drug agents didn't take all his "medicine" is little
consolation for Nelson, who's 41.

He's sick with active hepatitis C and often in pain from degenerative
disk disease, and said that even the 18 large plants he's left with
won't yield enough marijuana for him.

"I smoke a lot of pot," he said, drawing out the vowels in 'a lot.'
"I'm sick, and that's all that I can do."

Butte Interagency Task Force Commander Vic Lacey said his team arrived
at Nelson's house Tuesday morning to perform a probation search of the
Peck Lane home.

Nelson, who's on searchable probation for a DUI conviction, wasn't
home at the time, but his girlfriend of three years, Michelle "Rusty"
Crossley let them in.

The agents found 43 mature marijuana plants growing under artificial
lights in Nelson's garage and thirty more growing outside.

Scattered about the home, said Lacey said, were several stashes of
dried marijuana and a small amount of hashish.

Crossley, 35, holds a medical recommendation to use marijuana to
relieve fibromyalgia.

Because Butte County guidelines for the raising of medical marijuana
plants allow patients to grow up to six plants for their own use or
possess up to a pound of processed marijuana, Nelson and Crossley
would have been allowed to grow a total of 12 plants.

District Attorney Mike Ramsey said that Crossley claimed that part of
the crop was for another medical marijuana patient, whose
recommendation she couldn't find while the drug agents were at the
house.

Usually, Ramsey said, he requires that caregivers have the
recommendation of patients they're growing for on hand, but the agents
made an exception.

"Out of an abundance of caution, they allowed (Nelson and Crossley) to
keep enough plants for all three people," Ramsey said.

However, the "filthy and un-healthy" condition of Nelson and
Crossley's home caused enough concern among the drug agents that they
called Children's Services to respond for an investigation.

Crossley's three children -- a son, age 17, and two daughters, ages 15
and 12, were at school at the time of the raid.

Lacey said a Children's Services social worker interviewed the kids at
school.

While they weren't removed from the home, the agency is investigating
the living arrangements.

Crossley said that's what she's most worried about.

She claims to have never been in trouble with law enforcement before,
and that she only started smoking marijuana with Nelson, to relieve
her chronic pain.

Blind in one eye, she's on Social Security and disability and worries
about her kids. They've never been in trouble before, she said.

"I'm a very good mom," she said. "Nothing is more important to me than
them. They tell me everything. ... They don't use drugs."

Tuesday's raid seems to have knocked the proverbial wind out of
Nelson. Usually a firebrand spokesman for the legalization of
marijuana and the unfettered use of medical marijuana, he sat quietly
asking questions in his garden Wednesday, near tears.

When asked why he was growing so many plants when he knew the county's
medical marijuana cultivation guidelines, he said he was trying to
hybridize a powerful form of the plant and had been experimenting with
many different strains. He worries now about going to jail.

"I'm not a drug dealer," he said. "I'm giving people the help they
need. People who are dying, with cancer, like your grandmother."