Pubdate: Thu, 14 Aug 2014
Source: Los Angeles Times (CA)
Copyright: 2014 Los Angeles Times
Contact:  http://www.latimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/248
Author: Joe Mozingo

IN DECAYING RESORT, A POT FIGHT

Clearlake, Calif. - Transients hole up in the old cottage resorts 
where vacationing families once came to fish and swim. Rotted docks 
and pier pilings litter the lake's shoreline.

Much of this city, in fact, and others nearby in Lake County, looks 
as if it was plucked from Appalachia - with weeds and unpaved 
streets, stray dogs and backyard marijuana crops.

But across the water in the county seat of Lakeport, civic and 
business leaders talk of bringing back tourism, of planting more 
vineyards instead of weed.

They are tired of the hot August stink, when every neighborhood patch 
is in full bloom. They are tired of the thuggish out-of-towners, the 
stream diversions and the violent crime.

Last year, residents successfully pushed county supervisors to ban 
marijuana growing on parcels smaller than an acre and limit most 
rural spreads to six plants.

Pot growers organized and forced a June ballot referendum to rescind 
the law, losing by fewer than 500 votes out of 15,000 cast.

Now those who hope to preserve marijuana cultivation are taking their 
case to the voters again - in the form of competing initiatives.

A coalition of growers and activists is pushing a plan that it says 
would promote reasonable, regulated and limited growing of medical 
cannabis. Hippie grower Ron Kiczenski says their measure would ensure 
that a few established farmers dominate, keeping prices high and most 
residents out of the market. His proposal would establish marijuana 
growing as a human right.

And opponents of both are gearing up for battle. In this forgotten 
place of both stunning beauty and deep-set poverty, between Mendocino 
and Napa counties, residents in November will sort out an existential 
crisis at the ballot box.

Michael Horner has the smooth pitch of the medical cannabis movement: 
no stoner chuckle and no cough. His hair is gelled into a fashionable 
peak and his beard is trimmed.

Sitting among the pines in his backyard on Boggs Mountain, the 
marijuana activist explains the initiative his group, the Emerald 
Unity Coalition, is pushing.

By making it legal to grow up to 48 plants in Lake County, he says, 
the measure is about responsibility, environmental friendliness, 
patients and access to safe, clean medicine. It is not about money.

The former mortgage broker points into the trees. He says there are 
70 vacant lots in his neighborhood.

"You can buy one of those lots for $5,000 and grow marijuana on it," 
he says. "I know at least five back there that are." No permits, no 
legal water source and no inspections.

Under his group's initiative, the 42-year-old says, a marijuana 
enforcement division would keep growers in line. But for every bad 
actor in the industry in Lake County, "there's 10 patient-farmers who 
want to be compliant and legal and good stewards of the environment 
and community."

Speaking to a reporter about Horner later that evening, an opponent 
asks: "Did he show you his ankle bracelet?"

It turns out that Horner, who acknowledges that he abused alcohol and 
meth until sobering up 10 years ago, served time for indecent 
exposure and fleeing a police officer. After being targeted by the 
sheriff last year in a raid, he was convicted of possessing anabolic steroids.

He wears an ankle monitor

Horner's bail bondsman is Rob Brown - a buffalo rancher, bounty 
hunter, foster parent and high school wrestling coach. He is also the 
county supervisor leading the effort to push out the marijuana industry.

At 54, Brown is a third-generation Lake County resident. He is built 
like a shot-putter, looking and talking much less like a politician 
than a guy you wouldn't want to skip bail on.

"It's not the marijuana, it's the culture that comes with it," Brown 
says, sitting in his county office. "It's the culture of 20- and 
30-somethings that want to come up here because they're too damn lazy 
to work. They want to smoke their weed and make their money and not 
have to work."

He leans libertarian. If he had cancer and thought marijuana would 
make him feel better, he would use it. And the current law allows that.

But he doesn't want people coming here "destroying the county to grow 
a thousand plants to take to L.A."

His cellphone goes off - its ring tone a police siren.

He answers it on speaker phone. "What?" he barks.

"I can't believe I'm in here again," a young man's voice says.

"I can't either, what's that, about five times this month?... Call me 
back in an hour." Brown hangs up. "He's a grower," he explains. "But 
he's also a cranker (meth user). That's the thing. There used to be 
the day you'd have the weed people and you had the speed people. Not 
any more. The lines have blurred. They're selling weed to buy speed. 
And they're doing speed to stay up all night and guard their weed."

As a foster parent, Brown says, he's taken in a dozen neglected 
children from such households over the years. "They're making their 
kids miss school so they can garden while their dad sleeps. 
Ten-year-old kids. It's disgusting."

As a rancher, he's found 7,500 pot plants hidden on his property, 
along with a booby trap. After he ripped them out, someone shot some 
of his buffalo and sawed down his fences so the animals could escape.

But it's as a bounty hunter that he's seen the darkest side of the industry.

A young woman jumped bail on him in 2010 and he got a tip from her 
mother that she was being held as collateral until her boyfriend paid 
off a marijuana debt. Brown found her in a house, beaten and drugged. 
She had been sexually assaulted.

"Just dirt-bag meth addicts," he says. "But it was about marijuana."

With a salt-andpepper beard to his sternum, the maverick in the Lake 
County marijuana war believes weed is an inalienable right.

Kiczenski's ballot initiative is grandly called The Freedom to Grow 
Plants, Human Rights Restoration Act of 2014, and it would allow 
anyone to grow any plant for their own use - including, as his 
opponents note, coca leaves and opium poppies.

But by limiting people with less than an acre to four plants, 
Kiczenski says, Horner's measure would keep most of Lake County out 
of the market. He says that is the path to the corporate takeover of marijuana.

Kiczenski, 50, is not new to the legalization movement.

In 1993, he mailed half a pound of marijuana and a pair of hemp 
running shorts to President Clinton. He then showed up at the White 
House to get arrested, hoping a show trial would highlight his cause. 
But they turned him away.

The next year, he and some friends put up a giant hemp banner that 
said "re-legalize farming" along a highway into Yosemite. They called 
the sheriff and the local television station and said they had 
planted 20,000 cannabis seeds, saving some to plant right in front of them.

Kiczenski was charged with cultivation and faced three years in 
prison. He represented himself at the trial in a conservative county. 
Proposition 215 allowing medical marijuana use hadn't passed yet. He 
kept blurting out why he believed growing cannabis was a human right, 
as the judge told him to stop. The jury acquitted him. Now a resident 
of Lake County, Kiczenski says the right-to-grow initiative is the 
next epic battle.

"What are people supposed to do up here?" he asks. "There's no work. 
Half the people grow."

County leaders, he says, "want to create a different demographic. If 
they could, they'd just bulldoze this place to get rid of us and make 
it look like Napa County."

"Where are we supposed to go? We're like an island of misfits."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom