El Dorado ordinance fuels outcry over pot-growing boom
By Peter Hecht, Sacramento Bee
The tense public hearing was three hours in Tuesday when a friend pushed Joyce Hall in her walker to address the El Dorado County Board of Supervisors. The frail, 100-pound woman rose, grasped the lectern with both hands and began to cry.
“You’re going to kill us,” said Hall, 57, a Garden Valley resident and medical marijuana patient who suffers from a rare immune disorder that causes severe weight loss. For the past year, a caregiver has been growing 12 marijuana plants on Hall’s property under a September 2013 county ordinance that permits individual patients to grow 200 square feet of plants in fenced off plots away from neighbors’ property lines.
But El Dorado County Sheriff John D’Agostini, who originally supported the policy, now says the county’s marijuana ordinance was a “big mistake.”
The sheriff blames the ordinance – intended as a compassionate action for local medical marijuana patients – for broadcasting a “weed friendly” message. He says it has attracted criminal profiteers who are ripping up public and private lands and cultivating hundreds of thousands of plants on a scale vastly exceeding county guidelines.
THE REAL REASON WEED IS ILLEGAL: “[L]ook, we understood we couldn’t make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn’t resist it.”
…“[T]he Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
–Nixon aide John Ehrlichman
http://www.beyondthc.com/report-identifies-dr-mikuriyas-accuser-at-nimh/
It still remains that there is so much money in drugs that those of us just living in neighborhoods live with every harvest with the skunk smell wafting from the grow houses in the immediate area, and wondering when the next fire starts from an overheated electrical system, or the angry young men running the operation kick the crap out of or run over some innocent person who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Regulate pot production out of neighborhoods unless it is for verified private consumption at just a few plants.
Just legalize it already.
Bootleggers and smugglers (yeah, the Kennedy’s too) only make money off of the fact things people want are illegal. Legalize pot, let the Man take over and it will probably get better, be cheaper and eventually be SO out of style that no one does it.
Except the people who really do use it for medication. Then the big pharmaceutical companys will take over and the prices will skyrocket while some droning voice on the TV ad tells you the side effects include paranoia, euphoria, and rectal bleeding.:-)