Calaveras County made national news this week because its famed, 2,000 year old tree, which had been a tourist attraction since 1880, fell down. Fortunately, Calaveras County also took action this week to keep out an invasive tree, the giant cannabis plants that grow like weeds. Tourists won’t be going there for marijuana, and fortunately, many giant sequoias are still standing. (Photos from the Calaveras Big Trees Association webpage)
Citizens Qualify an Initiative to Ban Marijuana Cultivation
Calaveras County will see California’s first ever citizen-initiated ordinance banning commercial marijuana activities decided soon by its Board of Supervisors or in a spring special election. It’s one of the first big push-backs against Big Marijuana since the November 8 election in which the state legalized pot.
County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Rebecca Turner today certified the petition sections filed by proponents of the initiative to ban commercial marijuana cultivation included more than enough valid signatures to qualify it for a special election. Sampling 500 of the more than 5,200 signatures submitted, the Elections Department found a validity rate of 87% which, applied to the total, would produce approximately 4,532 valid signatures, where the number needed for certification was only 3,143.
“We’re delighted with the results, but not surprised,” said Bill McManus, Chairman of The Committee to Ban Commercial Cultivation. “The high percentage of invalid signatures from the Measure D signature drive was not surprising due to their use of paid professional signature gatherers. By contrast, our all-volunteer team was much more careful and deliberate in their efforts.” “Nevertheless, we overshot the target by a wide margin,” he went on, “to send a strong message to our Board of Supervisors as to the will of the people in Calaveras County.” Committee member David Tunno added, “We only took about half the amount of time available to gather signatures, or the number would have been much greater.”
Photo from Citizens Against the Legalization of Marijuana
“Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana (CALM) congratulates The Committee to Ban Commercial Marijuana in Calaveras County for their successful initiative drive, and especially for being the first such success citizens’ campaign in the state of California. As far as we know, they are also the first in the U.S. We encourage the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors to enact their ordinance at the earliest possible date.” Said Carla Lowe, Founder, Co-chair, Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana, a statewide organization.
The Elections Department also notified the proponents that it will request a hearing on the matter before the Board of Supervisors at its regularly scheduled January 24 meeting. At this writing, it is unknown whether it will be placed on the agenda for that meeting, but when it is, the Board will have the options of adopting the ordinance, directing the Elections Department to schedule it for a special election, or doing nothing, triggering a requirement for the Department to schedule the ordinance for a special election in the spring.
Proponents of the initiative and authors of the proposed ordinance were Bill McManus of the Calaveras Project and David Tunno, former County Planning Commissioner. The ordinance bans all commercial marijuana cultivation, manufacturing, processing and delivery within unincorporated Calaveras County, as well as dispensaries, while providing an exception for qualified medical patients under specified conditions. The complete ordinance and additional information is available on their website, ban commercial cultivation.
Drug Policy Alliance, NORML and Marijuana Policy Project are optimistic. They’re huffing and puffing now, having won 7 out of 8 states with marijuana ballots in the November election. They also smirk knowing that President-elect Trump supports states’ rights for marijuana. In 20 or 30 years, they’ll have freedom and no one else really matters.
Pot lobbyists don’t explain the real picture. What if the whole country ends up just like Humboldt County?
The oldest, strongest marijuana culture in the USA is not in Colorado, but in Humboldt County, California, part of three-county region called the Emerald Triangle. REVEAL, an online investigative platform, reported on the secretive world of sexual abuse and rapes in marijuana country. (The pop culture magazine Rolling Stone doesn’t want the public to know.) There’s politically-motivated denial and deflection, but heavy weed smokers have lots of delusions.
There were 2,000 domestic violence calls in 2015, an increase of 80% over the previous four years.* A routine domestic violence call in December led to a huge bust for guns and weed. Marijuana gained a foothold in Humboldt nearly 50 years ago, and it seems guns and weed are a way of life since that time.
Humboldt County leads the way in environmental destruction, too. The area used to be dominated by the logging and fishing industries. But as those jobs went away, marijuana became the biggest industry.
See the video about the ecological damage from illicit marijuana grows
Environmental Damage
Environmentalists convinced politicians that the logging industry must stop cutting down the redwoods. So the marijuana growers found an opening and they’re clearing out the trees! Aerial views show the redwood forests pockmarked by marijuana grows. It doesn’t seem that High Times and Alternet have caught on to the irony that marijuana green is not environmentally green.
In May of 2008, approximately 1000 gallons of red diesel overflowed from an indoor marijuana grow’s fuel room into a creek. A marijuana grower had left a valve open when pouring a larger diesel tank into a smaller one. The fuel had spread so far down the rugged stream bed that a neighbor smelled the pungent odor and investigated. He found “20 to 30 pools of red diesel” far below the spill. The environmental cleanup was a massive operation, one of the biggest in California history. The damage from this diesel fuel spill rivals the impact of an oil spill in the ocean.
Marijuana and Fire Damages
Fires are frequent throughout California, and marijuana sometimes causes these fires, including hash oil (BHO) explosions. The massive Soberanes fire this summer uncovered several illegal marijuana sites. Marijuana growers may have started the fire.
The true irony is that after recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado, these home explosions grew more frequent. In one week of April 2014, there were four BHO explosions. BHO fires didn’t occur in California before 2010, so liberalizing pot laws and expanding marijuana access created a new problem. (In 2010, pot was decriminalized in California.)
The man who started a fire in McKinleyville on December 26 fled the scene. It’s thought to be a hash oil lab fire. Photo above and on top by Marc Davis, published on the Redheaded Blackbelt.
Murders, Suicides and Missing People
If a tv news magazine were to expose the murder, rape and sex trafficking in Humboldt, reporters may be at risk. An investigative journalism report released in September revealed that some trimmigrants and girls end up getting abused or raped. The marijuana apologists mislead by insisting that murders and rapes happen because prohibition forces growers into hiding.
There were at least 22 murders in Humboldt County in 2016. Only 134,000 people live in the county. (Often it’s difficult to distinguish murder from suicide, which occurs at a rate twice the national norm.) Humboldt reported 352 missing people in 2015, more per capita than any other county in the state.
Nonetheless, Humboldt County has wonderful examples of love and community spirit. Recently, residents of Eureka came out in the heavy rain to honorJennika Suazo, a teen girl who died suspiciously.
Domestic Violence, DUIs and Humboldt’s Other Problems
Humboldt County district attorney Maggie Fleming sat down for an interview with Paul Mann of the Mad River Union recently. (The entire article is in Lost Coast Outpost.) “We see DUIs all day long in this community …. There are people who are drinking or using prescription meds or smoking marijuana or using methamphetamine or heroin and driving at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Some of our fatalities are in the middle of the day,” Fleming explained.
She listed multiple factors powering Humboldt crime: high rates of driving while intoxicated; the county’s nightmarish marijuana, drug and alcohol culture; the prevalence of domestic violence and the deep-rooted poverty that inflicts childhood trauma and impairs children’s health, often with lifelong afflictions, including criminal behavior. She definitely sees the crime as a result of the drug culture. Both those with substance abuse problems and those selling drugs for financial gain instigate the crime.
“I see firsthand how marijuana is a social and environmental disaster,” a policeman from the Emerald Triangle wrote to PopPot.org. “Youth access, abuse, transient population moving in to grow or trim, associated criminal behavior all rising.”
The homeless population in Humboldt creates a dilemma. Here’s what was left when several squatters were forced out of a Eureka home on Oct. 31, 2016.
“Where there is pot …there are other drugs…..and all the behavior associated with lives less enabled,” he said. “The money isn’t worth the social cost to our world.”
–Emerald Triangle policeman
Having a marijuana culture adds to the use of other drugs. Laid back from smoking too much dope? Try amphetamines to get back up again.
Acceptance of drugs also leads to rampant alcohol abuse; booze enhances the effect of the drugs. People think the homelessness problem in Humboldt is caused by mental illness, but one social worker in the area disagrees. He is certain that rampant drug/alcohol abuse precipitates the problem. Politicians in both parties remain clueless about how drug use creates mental health problems. Their ignorance will continue as long as it’s politically incorrect to blame pot for anything.
Seven hundred homeless children without parents or guardians in nearby Mendocino County, also part of California’s “Emerald Triangle” growing region. These street kids sometimes work on the pot farms, but basically, no one has ever loved them enough to care for them. They’re likely to become drug users too, and the cycle of multi-generation drug use will continue.
Pueblo is a Warning to Other Places
Four years after Colorado legalized marijuana, the small city of Pueblo is another example of how pot commercialization can destroy life for the residents. “I can no longer allow my 13-year-old to walk the dog, one mother said. There was recently a murder 3 blocks from our house.” Pueblo failed to pass two referendums which would have closed dispensaries and growing sites in the city and county. Some people think of marijuana as an economic panacea for lost jobs in the steel industry. However, it has created a huge increase in the homeless population. Pueblo doctors recently made videos showing the damage marijuana is doing to the health care in the community.
Buyers in Pueblo West, Co line up on Jan. 1, 2014 to legally buy marijuana when the state’s first pot shops opened. (Source: AP Photo/John Wark). The Press prefers to emphasize that so much money can be made, rather than the destruction with legal pot. It hasn’t turned out as orderly as this photo.
International cartels have moved into Pueblo and bought up property for their marijuana grows. The black market is booming. Russians, Cubans, Argentinians and Cambodians have come to town. Pueblo, Boulder and Denver lead the state in the percentage of high school students using pot, but in Pueblo there are more problems. Fully 12% of high school seniors have also used heroin.
What about America’s future? Is marijuana growing also going to replace tobacco growing in Kentucky and Tennessee? Will it be a substitute for the coal mines that shut down in West Virginia and Pennsylvania? When policy is driven by knee-jerk reactions without careful planning, chaos follows.
At this time, the United States has more than half of the world’s illicit drug users. Six percent of America’s high school seniors are daily marijuana users. It appears that the legacy of drug use is going to continue creating this problem for America’s children. Humboldt County is the future of our country if we continue to believe marijuana use is perfectly harmless and normal.
* This statistic and much of the information on sexual abuse, missing persons, domestic violence, rape and abuse of trimmigants comes from the massive report by Shoshana Walter, published in Reveal, The Center for Investigative Reporting on September 8, 2016.
Did the Marijuana Industry Set Up the State’s Conflict with Kelsey Osborne?
Kelsey Osborne gave her daughter a marijuana smoothie. She said the girls was having seizures, suffering withdrawal symptoms from Risperdal. Later, Child Protective Services gave custody of her children, Madyson and Ryker, ages 3 and 2, to their father.
This story from Idaho shocks for several reasons. It’s very disturbing that a parent would give a three-year-old Risperdal in the first place. Furthermore, cannabis oil poses big risks for changes to a toddler’s brain; it shouldn’t be done without medical supervision.
Risperdal is allowed for children five and over, but it comes with huge risks as a treatment for autism. The powerful drug is also used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Interviews with the mom do not explain why the daughter, Madyson, took Risperdal.
Did a doctor prescribe this medicine to Madyson? Or is the Risperdal claim an outright falsehood? If it is true, two wrongs do not make a right.
The legal battle underscores our inability to address root causes. Why isn’t the United States searching for reasons behind the increase of autism and seizures in children today?
There’s no information about how much conflict with the father may have contributed to the battle. If Kelsey’s mistake was an honest one, it’s disturbing that the children would be taken from their mother. Is it possible that Kelsey Osborne’s actions were a deliberate attempt to set up legal conflict? Could the marijuana industry be instigating this legal battle?
The marijuana lobbyists deliberately manipulate public sympathy when they want to change laws.
The case of Shona Banda in Kansas is another case with a lot of missing information. She lived in Colorado before moving back to Kansas. Banda has Crohn’s Disease, a very painful condition which people often treat by diets and probiotics. While some people can do well keeping this disorder under control by following strict, individualistic diets, some need Rxs to minimize flare-ups. It’s not clear whether or not Banda tried the natural diet cures, and if the Rx medicines failed to work for her.
Those who are against marijuana can expect the marijuana industry and lobbyists to actively promote these battles. We need to push credible evidence of marijuana’s negative side effects and the risks to brain health.
Legal battles with the marijuana industry should force anti-pot activists to admit the many problems with pharmaceutical drugs. Americans need to stop expecting panacea medicines. Otherwise the marijuana industry will continue to promote pot as the miracle cure all for any medical condition. Why do we continue to be so gullible? Above picture is from KBOI TV and from Twitter.
Our condolences to the family in Colorado who lost two sons to overdose deaths. How did this tragedy happen? Here is what we’ve been told:
Teenage son number one got caught with a little weed. Then it was teenage son number two. According to the prevailing culture of Colorado, their parents didn’t think that they had that much to worry about. It’s a rite of passage and a expression of teen-aged angst. Everyone does it. Be glad they aren’t smoking tobacco or eating too much junk food, we rationalize.
Teenage son number one then tried opiates. Then son number two followed. Such progression isn’t at all uncommon. It’s not surprising to treatment providers. Marijuana use significantly increases the risk of opiate addiction, and there’s plenty of medical evidence to back it up.
In December, we learned that both sons — their parents’ only children — have died within six months of each other. Can you imagine this couple’s devastation? Our hearts break for them.
Having two sons is normally a blessing. We must make the most of it when we have them. A family in Colorado, starting with “it’s just pot, is now left with nothing but the memories. Let’s stop advocating for policies that interfere with our children’s well-being. (unspecified photo)
The United States cannot afford marijuana legalization. Why are we giving young people the impression that marijuana and drug use is inconsequential. We are contributing to the 52,000+ overdose deaths in 2015 by pretending there’s a safe way to use drugs. Promoting “responsible use” of drugs is promoting a lie.
