Pubdate: Sun, 13 Dec 2009
Source: Record Searchlight (Redding, CA)
Copyright: 2009 Record Searchlight
Contact:  http://www.redding.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/360
Authors: Andreas Fuhrmann, Bruce Ross
Note: R-S photographer Andreas Fuhrmann contributed reporting to this story.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Proposition+215
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Tehama+County
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/dispensaries
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?253 (Cannabis - Medicinal - United States)

TEHAMA COUNTY TOWNS WAGE BATTLE OVER MEDICAL POT COLLECTIVES

The medical marijuana collective next door to the Tehama County 
Sheriff's Office is, for now, closed - pushed to stop dispensing 
after a relentless campaign by Sheriff Clay Parker.

But across the street from the Sheriff's Office on Antelope 
Boulevard, BR Growing Supply and Hydroponics is not only open but 
thriving in its second location since its founding a year ago. 
Business was so good that owners Boyd and Rena Hedden set up shop in 
a larger storefront to peddle their array of liquid fertilizers, 
light-proof growing boxes, high-intensity lamps and other specialty 
horticultural equipment.

Some customers are cultivating strawberries or starting tomatoes, 
Boyd Hedden said, but he estimated 90 percent of his business comes 
from medical-cannabis growers. And in the depth of a brutal 
recession, this is one merchant with a smile on his face.

Californians voted to allow the medicinal use of marijuana 13 years 
ago through Proposition 215, but conflicting federal laws - and the 
U.S. Justice Department's eagerness to enforce them - kept patients 
and especially their suppliers mostly in the shadows. This spring, 
though, the Obama administration announced that federal authorities 
would not pursue drug charges in medical-marijuana cases so long as 
users followed state law. The "green rush" of entrepreneurs opening 
storefront "collectives" has brought a hidden subculture into the open.

It's also brought a backlash - nowhere more than in Tehama County, 
where county and Red Bluff city officials have waged the toughest 
battle in the north state against medical-marijuana dispensaries.

So far, they've won.

The one collective that bucked city officials and opened in Red 
Bluff, the Blue Toad, closed after three weeks when the city 
threatened to fine not just its founders, Lana Aguiar and her 
daughter, Ashley, but also their landlord for violating city codes.

Just outside the city limits, Sheriff Parker cited Mike and Dawn 
Jenkins, owners of the Red Bluff Patient Collective, for 35 straight 
days before the county stepped up the pressure and asked a judge to 
order the collective closed. In court on Dec. 3, the Jenkinses' 
attorney, Keith Cope, said they'd agreed to shut down until the 
Tehama County supervisors finish writing an ordinance to regulate 
local medical-marijuana dispensaries. They still face misdemeanor 
criminal charges related to defying the zoning ordinance and 
temporary moratorium.

Crackdown-minded authorities have won their battles. Outside the 
courtrooms and county offices, though, it's hard not to get a sense 
that they're on the losing side of a bigger cultural war.

Defying Stereotypes

To skeptics, smoking pot for your health is still an idea that 
doesn't pass the giggle test. In fact, many users employ a smokeless 
vaporizer or eat cannabis in baked goods or butter, but the bottom 
line for critics remains that it's an illegal drug whose users just 
want to get high.

Minds are changing, though, one at a time. And in tight-knit, 
conservative Tehama County, medical-marijuana supporters pop up in 
places that defy stereotype.

On the Red Bluff Round-Up board, where Director Joe Froome is facing 
criminal charges for growing marijuana. He was arrested in October 
and arraigned late last month, but argues he was doing it for 
bona-fide medical use through a nonprofit he's set up, Tehama County 
Holistic Health Cooperative Inc. He sat in at the Jenkinses' recent 
court date to show solidarity.

Among the lawyers. Cope, who's represented both the Red Bluff Patient 
Collective and the Blue Toad, is a straight-laced longtime prosecutor 
in Shasta County who could pass for Clark Kent. He's a Brigham Young 
University graduate who professes his deep admiration for his former 
mentor McGregor Scott, the ex-Shasta County district attorney and the 
region's U.S. attorney for most of President George W. Bush's 
administration. And he says his clients are not drug dealers but are 
trying to perform a public service of supplying medicine for 
patients, while complying with state law.

At last weekend's Red Bluff Gun Show, where event organizer Richard 
Day invited activists to set up a booth and distribute information 
about medical marijuana. Why? He knows a vendor whose girlfriend died 
of cancer, her pain eased by cannabis butter. "I believe, controlled 
correctly, there is a real need for it," Day said. He added that he 
was a little worried how the gun-show crowd might react - "As gun 
owners, we're classified as rednecks" - but feedback was 
overwhelmingly positive. "They weren't against it, as a medical form," he said.

A Dose of Relief

Day praised the ambassadorial skills of Ken Prather, co-founder of 
the Tehama Herbal Collective (THC) in Corning, the only dispensary 
operating in the county. He's worked to reach out to the community, 
speaking at the gun show, to the Kiwanis Club, to pretty much anyone 
who will listen. "The more we keep bringing them in the loop," he 
said, "the more it seems they accept it."

THC's startup, though, wasn't so friendly. The city of Corning 
initially denied the request for a permit to open on Solano Street 
downtown. Prather and his partners opened anyway.

"I own a couple homes down here and I know the mayor," said Prather, 
an off-and-on Corning resident since age 4, "and I told him that I'd 
sell everything and sue them" if the city tried to shut the 
collective down. Four months later, it's still in business, with more 
than 1,000 members.

Prather said the collective complies with all tax laws and labor 
regulations, and maintains tight security and surveillance. The 
police have been in for tours. County health inspectors even checked 
the kitchen to ensure THC's "edibles" were being made under sanitary 
conditions.

Prather recognizes, though, that there's still a long road to acceptance.

"I've got people I've known all my life in this town who won't talk 
to you about the marijuana thing, but they'll talk to you about other 
things," he said. "It's kind of weird how backwoods they are about it."

Laying Low

The continuing taboo about marijuana and simple concern for privacy 
keep many Proposition 215 patients quiet, said Lana Aguiar of the 
now-shuttered Blue Toad in Red Bluff.

"People don't want to talk about their medical problems," she said. 
"I wish there was a way to find out how many residents of Red Bluff 
there are with 215s - most won't tell you."

Those who will tell tend to be closest to the movement.

Prather said he broke his neck in 1995, requiring two surgeries and 
huge quantities of painkillers in the years since. Marijuana is no 
cure, but by using it he "went from being on really high doses of 
methadone to low doses of methadone. I'm actually a functioning person."

If cannabis means a day awake and alert for Prather, it's a night's 
sleep for Alissa Eastman.

Eastman is a stay-at-home mother of two young children in Red Bluff 
who's gathered petition signatures and lobbied City Hall for more 
patient-friendly regulations. She's used cannabis, she said, to treat 
severe vomiting she attributed to an infection, then later during her 
pregnancy - "a little bit," she stressed - for extreme nausea.

After the birth of her second child, she said, even after he started 
sleeping through the night, she couldn't. Her physician diagnosed 
nervous tension. "My doctor prescribed sleeping pills, and I didn't 
want them," she said. Instead, she turned to cannabis. "I don't use 
it that much. I just use it for when I need it."

Eastman also reflects a divide among patients. A devotee of herbal 
medicine and natural healing, she says she would like to open a 
collective, but one with a broader focus - "more of a healing center 
than a pot dispensary."

To Eastman, many dispensaries are too profit-driven and play loose 
with the rules. "I've been to a few of the Redding collectives" - the 
city has at least 20 - "and I was appalled."

At the same time, she blames bad laws for creating a black market.

"It's ridiculous to think somone won't try to profit off it, because 
that's what our world created," she said. "People want it. It's in 
high demand. And it's illegal. It's prohibition."

The Law Is Still Evolving

That might not always be the case.

Sheriff Parker predicts that, in the next decade or so, Congress will 
change marijuana's status as a "Schedule I" drug, which under Drug 
Enforcement Administration rules is deemed to have no valid medical 
use. Just last month, the American Medical Association called on the 
federal government to ease up, in part to allow more rigorous medical 
research about marijuana.

"That's the way I think we need to solve the problem, but it doesn't 
have a lot of political traction," Parker said. "There are a lot of 
people who say it has no use, so we're not changing it from a Schedule I."

Paradoxically, if the federal government eased its no-exceptions ban, 
it could leave marijuana more closely regulated. If it were available 
by prescription, that would mean set doses for set times under close 
medical supervision, rather than the frequently loose 
"recommendations" that cannabis doctors now hand patients. At the 
same time, while collectives must - at least on paper - operate as 
nonprofits, legally prescribed marijuana could be sold with Big 
Pharma-sized profit margins.

Legalize It?

Some would go further. Red Bluff City Councilman Jim Byrne, 83, said 
he supports the shutdown of the Blue Toad, which he said was 
violating city code (and, incidentally, was across the street from 
his house near downtown Red Bluff). But he also said he wouldn't mind 
seeing marijuana simply legalized.

"Personally I think - I know this is anathema - if it was legalized, 
the city could certainly use the sales tax," Byrne said. "And there's 
so many people doing it, what difference does it make? You might as 
well face facts."

That sentiment is one Californians will have a chance to debate at 
length next year. Three separate legalization initiatives are 
circulating, and at least one has serious backers and is thought 
likely to make the ballot.

Before that family-size can of worms is opened, though, nearly every 
city and county in the north state is wrestling with just how to 
regulate newly overt medical marijuana. Red Bluff's City Council 
voted for the strictest possible local ordinance in early November - 
banning all sales and cultivation, indoors or out - before backing 
off two weeks later and deciding to explore slightly more lenient 
rules. Even as Tehama County authorities have leaned on the Jenkinses 
to shut the Red Bluff Patient Cooperative, the Board of Supervisors 
has held workshops that medical-marijuana advocates describe as fair 
and open-minded.

The board might not have a choice. As lawyer Keith Cope said of his 
clients, "They're here to stay." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake