MEDICAL MARIJUANA USER MISTAKES NEIGHBORS FOR THIEVES

It's a confusing scene these days when it comes to marijuana.

The stuff is officially illegal, yet officially on a "low priority" for law
enforcement when it comes to "mom and pop" gardens.

Adding to the complexity is the medical marijuana I.D. card program, which
is flowering as an offshoot of Proposition 215.

One local mother, whom we shall name "Mary" for the sake of anonymity,
encountered some of this confusion the other day, when her 15-year-old son
had a run-in with her pot-growing neighbor.

Now, the plants this fellow is growing are legal, and hence the anonymity
in this tale. He has a medical condition and is an I.D. cardholder.

"Last year I kept smelling skunks for three months," said Mary, who hadn't
realized that the green stuff growing a few feet above her fence was herb.

Last week, her son and his 14-year-old cousin were marveling out loud about
how much money the hearty buds proliferating above the fence would be
worth, when the neighbor confronted them, thinking they were thieves.

"He really scared the boys," Mary said. "They told me they said hi' but he
didn't hear them and just kept yelling. He's very paranoid. Someone's tried
to steal his plants before."

So the boys ran inside, but the guy came over and was banging on the front
door, she said. Mary said the neighbor called her at work and said someone
tried to break into her house.

It was about at this point that the boys split on their skateboards, and
the man chased them in his car. "He had the boys arrested for breaking into
their own home," Mary said, though she explained that things got cleared up
fast. The boys were just warned to leave the neighbor alone.

"My sister, the mother of the other boy, called the Sheriff's Office,"
continued Mary. "She was told, This is legal; it is his property, but we
understand that they were innocent.'"

Mary said her sister "went in and really told them this isn't fair.'

"The other sheriff said You wouldn't believe what we have to do; we have to
turn our head because that's our instructions,'" related Mary.

"I got off work and went and talked to (the neighbor), and got the whole
story," Mary said. "He thought someone was trying to rob the plants, heard
the boys talking, said something and they didn't answer."

At first she thought the boys had been looking over the fence, but it was
then that her sister pointed out the towering herb plants. "I didn't even
notice it; I never look in anybody's yard," she explained, "but I can go to
my back door and see them from my sliding glass door. They must be about
eight feet high."

Mary strikes one as being fairly open-minded, but she's upset by the
incident. "The neighborhood's in kind of a furor," she said. "We heard this
is happening a lot. There's no real regulations for where we can grow it or
how."

As for her neighbor, Mary said: "He's sick; he's got medical marijuana
that's fine. I actually voted for medical marijuana, but it's not what I
understood it to be. People don't understand what's going on. You may have
voted, but did you think about the implications? Have we thought about that?

"How do we protect our children," she queried. "If you're using it for
medical reasons, getting help for medical problems, that's good. But it
causes danger to the community and they're not totally together when
they're using it regularly."

Mary thinks some rules should be worked out, but, as part two of this
article will point out, that's not so easy to do in Sacramento.

"If you have a pool, you have to have it locked," Mary reasoned.

In Part 2, Sheriff Tony Craver discusses the topic with the Daily Journal.