As Voters Ponder Prop. 64, Experts Cite the Effects Pot Can Have on Young Users.

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO - Devan Fuentes made it all the way through San Clemente High School without drinking or using drugs. He vividly remembers the first time he smoked pot. He was visiting a friend at Occidental College, and decided the moment had come.

"They brought out a giant three-foot bong," Fuentes told me the other day in a rustic coffee shop tucked into this town's historic Los Rios neighborhood. "I heard a lot of people don't get high their first time, so I held it in for a long time, one large hit. Immediately, I couldn't feel my legs."

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On Tuesday, President Obama commuted the sentences of 111 federal drug offenders.

In his first term, Obama endured the sting of critics like me who called him one of the stingiest modern presidents when it comes to the presidential pardon power.

In his second term, Obama is making up for lost time. With 673 commutations , the Washington Post reports , Obama has approached 690, the number of commutations issued by the previous 11 presidents.

Obama deserves credit for doing the right thing.

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Big Numbers

The Aug. 23 deadline to register existing commercial cannabis activity with the county of Humboldt has come and gone, and the planning and building department is staring down a giant pile of paper. A final count, conducted partially by hand, came up with a total of 2,259 registered grows.

Steve Lazar, senior planner in the Cannabis Services Division, says the lag between receiving registrations and staff's ability to enter information into the county's database means the scale of and type of registered grows are still unclear. Nonetheless, he says the response from the cultivation community has been heartening.

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A few years into the state legalization experiment, we know one big thing: A legal marijuana industry can function more or less like any other kind of business.

What don't we know? Pretty much everything else. We don't know what legalization will mean for youth marijuana use, or which medical conditions marijuana can treat. With less than three full years of legalization in Colorado and Washington state, there's still very little data.

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Dungeon Raid Shines Light on Concentrated Cannabis

Last week's raid of downtown Chico's Dungeon tobacco shop is just the latest event highlighting the proliferation of concentrated marijuana production in the area. In 2015, law enforcement seized 56 butane honey oil (BHO) labs in Butte County and in Chico alone, there were three BHO lab explosions. This past June, the City Council answered the call to do something about it, voting to restrict the sale of butane to 600 mL per person every 30 days.

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Re "Medi-pot measure moves on" (Downstroke, July 14):

Fool us once, fool us twice, but please don't be fooled again. We need to pay attention to the details. The rights of patients to have access to medical marijuana are protected. Measure L is not about patients getting medical marijuana. Measure L pretends to be about the need for regulation and taxation of the pot trade, but it is really about the vast explosion of the use of Butte County as a center for huge indoor and outdoor grows, dispensaries every 1,000 feet, honey oil labs and the destruction of our environment, water, wildlife and pets-a virtual domination of our economy and landscape.

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Every time I take the kids downtown or anywhere for a nosh we have to walk through clouds of pot smoke. I get such a contact high it borders on a panic attack. I'm not saying it should go back to the old days where we sneaked into alleys, but is there any way to promote responsible, considerate consumption?

- -M. H.

On behalf of all public pot smokers everywhere, let me say: Sorry? I mean, I get it. Most cities in California these days don't really try to enforce laws against using marijuana in public, because then they would have to write hundreds of tickets per day and nothing else would get done.

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EDITOR: I take issue with Paul Gillixson's column ("Do we want to become the mecca for marijuana," Sunday). Gillixson is a victim of his own paper. No one is advocating what he advanced in his column - except maybe the editors who create these illusionary headlines. (Oh wait, Gillixson is one of those editors.)

The city of Santa Rosa has, against all odds, accomplished precisely what the voters wanted and intended when they passed Proposition 215 nearly 20 years ago. We specifically asked our elected officials to "implement a plan to provide for the safe and affordable distribution of marijuana ..."

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A Recap of Successful and Failed Marijuana Bills at California's Capitol.

California lawmakers' first legislative session since passing last year's historic medical-pot regulations wraps up this week. And, for the most part, they did good work when it comes to marijuana: Patients' rights were protected, legal bridges between the old system and the new were built, and a lot of bad ideas (and a few good ones) never made it to the governor's desk.

First off: Medical-marijuana patients will not face increased statewide taxes at the dispensary, now that a taxation bill is dead for the year. The proposed tax was one of about dozen related laws that were introduced in Sacramento, but mostly died by Wednesday's end-of-session deadline. As of Tuesday morning, here's where the most viable bills stood:

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Patrick Kennedy, a recovering drug addict, former Rhode Island congressman and member of the nation's most famous political family, is spearheading a national campaign to thwart legalization of recreational marijuana.

Hezekiah Allen, a former Humboldt County marijuana farmer like his parents and grandparents, is a Sacramento lobbyist who heads the state's largest group of cannabis growers.

They aren't exactly political bedfellows, but the two share a concern over California's Proposition 64 on the November ballot: Both believe it would open the door to Big Marijuana corporate dominance, threatening the culture and livelihood of the small-scale farms entrenched for decades on the North Coast.

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The California State Sheriffs Association claims marijuana seriously impairs driving and has other adverse consequences (AP, Mercury News, June 28). Yet researchers find that while obviously inadvisable, marijuana only modestly affects driving (Journal of Drug And Alcohol Dependence, June 23, 2016).

Marijuana users know their performance is impaired and compensate by slowing down and being especially attentive. By contrast, inebriated drivers are seriously impaired. They merely think they are in control; in fact, they speed, weave across lanes, have lethally slower reaction times, and cause thousands of accidents (National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, 2015).

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A Bill Headed to Brown's Desk Would Give Shops a Six-Month Grace Period to Pay $106 Million in Taxes.

SACRAMENTO - Estimating that two-thirds of the medical marijuana stores in California have failed to pay sales taxes, state officials on Tuesday took a carrot-and-stick approach to persuade pot shops to pay the $106 million owed.

With the state preparing to license medical marijuana shops in 2018, the Assembly sent Gov. Jerry Brown a bill Tuesday that would establish a tax amnesty program to help bring scofflaws into compliance with the law.

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Opponents of the fall measure to legalize recreational marijuana for California adults argued Tuesday that broader marijuana use would endanger motorists.

Speaking to The Sacramento Bee editorial board, Doug Villars, president of the California Association of Highway Patrolmen, criticized Proposition 64 for lacking an established standard such as what exists for alcohol. It's illegal for those with 0.08 percent or more of alcohol in their blood to drive.

"That's a big deterrent, which keeps people from going out at these higher levels and driving, which obviously has the effect of lessening the amount of traffic accidents in California, lessening the amount of injury accidents and lessening the amount of traffic fatalities we have on a statewide basis," he said.

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State water officials will be in Ukiah today to explain their role in ensuring that marijuana is grown in an environmentally safe manner under the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act.

According to the State Water Resources Control Board, officials are developing a "regulatory program to protect California waters from harmful activities related to cannabis cultivation. The program will prohibit waste discharges from agricultural practices, land clearing and grading activities in rural areas and forests."

Along with staff from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the California Department of Food and Agriculture, water officials will discuss their efforts to "develop and adopt interim principles and guidelines to ensure that water diversion and discharge associated with commercial cannabis cultivation do not affect the instream flows needed for fish spawning, migration, and rearing, and the flows needed to maintain natural flow variability."

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Marijuana is the very definition of a cash crop -and the windfall will only grow if California voters legalize recreational pot in November.

But what to do with all that cash?

It's a pressing problem and it isn't fixed by Proposition 64.

The big hurdle is that the federal government still treats marijuana medical or otherwise as an illegal drug. So major banks and other financial institutions won't take pot businesses as customers for fear of losing their federal charters. That forces dispensaries and other marijuana businesses to deal almost entirely in cash, an invitation to robbery and shady accounting.

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California politicians have traditionally opposed legalizing marijuana. In 2010, amid fierce debate about the pot legalization measure Proposition 19, every statewide elected official expressed disapproval. In more recent years, officials have suggested they wanted to wait to see how legalization played out in other states.

Proposition 64, a recreational marijuana initiative on the fall ballot, is generating a slight thaw in political perspectives on legalizing the drug. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a candidate for governor in 2018, is the measure's highest-ranking supporter. But still many others remain undecided or in opposition.

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The town hall meeting, in a cavernous garage on an industrial side street in Gardena, was billed as an opportunity to learn about cannabis from some of the industry's experts.

I assumed there would be strong arguments made in favor of Proposition 64, the November ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use.

But it hardly seemed necessary. From what I could tell, most of those in the room were already on board. Some had recently started businesses or were contemplating how to get a piece of what assuredly is going to be a huge economic pie if Proposition 64 passes.

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UPLAND - At least once a week, commercial real estate agent Tom Mitchell said he is approached by operators of medical marijuana dispensaries looking to open up shop in town.

The problem is, such enterprises are illegal in Upland and have been for several years.

To skirt around the problem, the operators often offer to pay three times the asking rent and six months' security deposit. Some are willing to pay any legal fees they may incur, said Mitchell, who manages three commercial properties in Upland with about 100 tenants.

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"Santa Rosa wants this industry here. I think this is probably going to be the New Age Amsterdam."

- - Larry Schaeffer, owner of Cherry Kola Farms near Penngrove, a medical cannabis collective

Really? Says who?

I don't mean to be rude. But who in the world made the decision that Santa Rosa wanted to become the new Amsterdam?

Even Amsterdam doesn't even want to be Amsterdam - or at least the Amsterdam perceived by hordes of party-minded tourists. Contrary to popular belief, the Dutch never legalized marijuana. They've just basically tolerated it for years and only for possession of small amounts (5 grams or less) sold in official "cannabis cafes." But the government in recent years has been tightening the rules for these cafes, forcing many to shut down. And forget about growing it. It's illegal. You won't go to prison but try to grow as few as five plants and you could end up facing heavy fines and eviction.

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As Californians get ready to vote Nov. 8 on whether to legalize recreational marijuana, there are broader public health questions to consider.

A pregnant woman has morning sickness so severe she can't keep food down, so she stirs some cannabis-infused oil into her morning tea to regain her appetite.

An elderly man has chronic pain that keeps him up at night, so he smokes marijuana most nights before he and his wife go to bed.

There's a growing body of research that suggests marijuana can help with conditions such as nausea and pain while posing only modest health risks for adults. But as Californians get ready to vote Nov. 8 on whether to legalize recreational marijuana, there are broader public health questions to consider, from whether it affects developing fetuses to the impacts of secondhand smoke.

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