Tahoe-Truckee trying to understand new pot laws
By Sage Sauerbrey and Alexandra Spychalsky, Moonshine Ink
The phrase of the year is “gray area” regarding the Golden and Silver states’ new green issues. Confused? So is everyone else. When California — the first U.S. state to outlaw marijuana, as well as the first state to approve its medicinal use — legalized recreational cannabis alongside Nevada last November, it commenced an unprecedented effort to define what that will mean on a legal, regulatory, and even cultural level.
Legally, California and Nevada share a few hard and fast laws as of Jan. 1, 2017. Both allow the recreational possession and use of up to one ounce of unconcentrated cannabis or 8 grams of concentrated cannabis for users 21 and older, as well as the cultivation of up to six plants, but the sale of recreational cannabis is still prohibited. This paradox will exist until the relevant regulatory agencies begin issuing licenses on the anticipated date of Jan. 1, 2018.
According to Alison Bermant, a lawyer who specializes in marijuana law in the Truckee-Tahoe area, there are “thousands of people growing marijuana in this community.” In spite of these numbers, Bermant says that she hasn’t had a cultivation case come across her desk in more than five years; all of her marijuana related clients are non-locals who were nabbed by one particular CHP agent for transporting illegal amounts of marijuana with the intent to sell. Bermant calls Interstate 80 one of the largest drug trafficking highways in the country, and Truckee is a convenient stopover town on the route to non-legalized states. Bermant says that many of the growers in this community are operating lawfully under Proposition 215, which permitted medicinal marijuana in California in 1996, but their legal protection has an expiration date.
