A Pair of Volunteers Takes a No-Questions-Asked Approach in Their Public Health Mission

PENDLETON -- The 20-something woman approached the van looking jittery and conflicted.

Seeing that the back of the delivery-style truck was open, she meandered there. The boxy truck, with Umatilla-Morrow Alternatives Health Van written on the side, was parked at Pendleton's Stillman Park.

"Is this where you exchange needles?" she asked, hesitantly.

When volunteer Darrell Alston replied yes, she dug in her purse and came up empty. She punched a number into her cell phone and asked someone on the other end to "bring my dirties."

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Sheriff Mike Winters frowned as he showed a reporter a stack of photographs documenting Mexican drug cartels' marijuana-growing operations on federal land in Southern Oregon. The photos showed filthy camps, nitrogen-loaded chemical fertilizers, garbage tumbling into a stream.

"These grow sites are a disaster for the public," Winters said. "You can't believe what you see until you get into one."

It was the first time in memory a Republican has fretted so about the environment.

Of course, there is a sure-fire way to end the reach of drug gangs into Oregon's forests: End pot prohibition. Just declare defeat in the pot theater of the War on Drugs and move on.

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Nearly every problem associated with the relatively safe plant cannabis (kaneh bosm, marijuana) is actually a consequence of cannabis prohibition, persecution and extermination ("This Bud's For Who?" Nov. 24). Responsible citizens should be allowed to use cannabis recreationally and medically with out being confronted by government.

Another reason to re-legalize cannabis that doesn't get mentioned is because it is Biblically correct since God, The Ecologician, indicates He created all the seed bearing plants saying they are all good, on literally the very first page (see Genesis 1:11-12 and 29-30). The only Biblical restriction placed on cannabis is to accept it with thankfulness (1 Timothy 4:1-5).

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The environmental damage left by drug cartels lingers long after raids have shut down their Southern Oregon plantations

Southern Oregon's forests carry the scars created by drug cartels that abuse them to make money in the lucrative marijuana market.

An intense crackdown on Mexican drug cartel growing operations in Southern Oregon's hills appears to have pushed the cartels elsewhere, but they have left behind a legacy of environmental damage - and, potentially, a threat to other forest users.

Several of the 31 marijuana-growing sites busted on public lands in 2010 continue to be environmental hazards marked by hills of trash, scattered fertilizer and pesticides and contaminated creeks that spill into fish-bearing streams.

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Feds Smoke the Medical Marijuana Industry

Medical marijuana users seeking to obtain their medicine in Oregon and throughout the country may soon find themselves asking the loaded question -- Yo Obama, where's the weed at?

Maybe you feel you have the right to experiment with your own consciousness. Perhaps you are one to promote the legalization of all illicit substances. Or it might be the case that you identify with the late R&B singer Nate Dogg, who once sang, "Hey ey ey ey, smoke weed everyday," based on the fact that you enjoy (as he did) the recreational use of cannabis.

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Councilwoman, Neighbor Spar About Legal Grow Site

GOLD HILL - A city councilwoman says she will propose banning medical marijuana gardens within 1,000 feet of a school or park following a dispute with a neighbor who is a cardholder and grows her own supply.

The dispute has escalated to the point where Jennifer Mehta plans to launch a recall effort against her neighbor, Councilwoman Christine Alford.

It began when Alford filed complaints as a citizen in mid-September alleging that Mehta, with whom she shares an alleyway between Highway 99 and North Second Avenue, had erected a wooden privacy fence and had been growing a large marijuana crop in the city right of way.

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Speaking as a retired detective, thank you for calling for a rational approach to marijuana, that is legalize, regulate and tax. It has always been a horrific waste of our time to chase a green plant, while pedophiles lurk in Internet chat rooms and drunk drivers threaten those on the highway.

As the Thin Blue line shrinks in Oregon, our leaders need to have us focus on public safety, not the personal safety of adults in their home. During my time on the streets I learned the government cannot fix stupid.

Howard Wooldridge

Adamstown, Md. (Oct. 30)

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Law enforcement continues to spend time chasing marijuana growers. It will have to continue doing so until our lawmakers start applying better sense.

With our voter-approved medical marijuana program, spending law enforcement resources on catching small-time growers seems pointless.

The Linn County Sheriff's Office, for example, reports investigating 140 marijuana grow operations this past season. Only 20 of them turned out to be "illegal." The rest presumably were of a size and nature to be allowed under the law.

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The U.S. Department of Justice has been cracking down on medical marijuana in a way that threatens the liberties of people in states where medical pot has been legalized. That includes Oregon.

You would think Justice has more important things to do. Clean house, for instance. This is the agency that concocted "Fast and Furious," a scheme to allow guns to get into the hands of suspected traffickers for Mexican drug cartels in the hopes of catching somebody. Two of the weapons showed up at the murder of a Border Patrol agent last December.

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Recent Federal DEA Raids Rattle Licensed Medical Marijuana Growers

CENTRAL POINT - Dawn Repman feels like she's caught in the middle of a fight between the Drug Enforcement Administration and local medical marijuana growers.

Repman, 43, has smoked medical marijuana for the past year to treat chronic nausea caused by a kidney ailment. Up until Tuesday, she tended six plants on a plot given to her by the operators of Brian's Green Thumb Farm on East Gregory Road.

Those plants were among more than 400 that were jerked out of the ground by DEA agents during a morning raid. So far, no one at the garden has been charged with a crime, and neither the U.S. Attorney's Office nor the DEA will comment on the raids agents have performed on two large cooperative marijuana farms in the Rogue Valley over the past two weeks.

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An Albany woman plans to open a marijuana processing business next month to convert the weed provided by medical cardholders into a smokeless substance.

Owner Rhea Graham, 50, who has a medical marijuana card, said she expects to be flooded with customers when she begins operating Albany's Canna Kitchen & Research on Friday, Nov. 11, Veterans Day.

Her business will be at 2300 Ferry St. S.W. Suite 1, and the phone number is 541-981-9078.

"I chose that day because I am a 20-year Air Force veteran, the power of 11/11/11, and I expect people will want to drop by after the parade," she said.

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Jackson County Handgun Licenses Could Hit All-Time High This Year

A wallet containing both a medical marijuana card and a concealed handgun license is no longer a pipe dream for Medford resident Julie Jankowski.

Thanks to an Oregon Supreme Court ruling in May, Jankowski and other medical marijuana patients can obtain a concealed handgun license in Jackson County.

"I feel I have every right to use my medicine," Jankowski said. "I have every right to have a concealed handgun license."

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EUGENE, Ore. -- Sometime after midnight on a moonlit rural Oregon highway, a state trooper checking a car he had just pulled over found pot on a passenger.

The discovery was not surprising in a marijuana-friendly state like Oregon, but the 72-year-old woman's defense was: She insisted the weed was legal and given to her by the federal government.

A series of phone calls from a dubious trooper and his supervisor to federal authorities determined that the glaucoma patient was not joking: The U.S. government does grow and provide pot to a select few people across the United States.

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The International Space Station may have to be abandoned for a while if the Russians can't fix what might be wrong with the Soyuz launch vehicle, which now is the only means of getting people there. This raises an old question: Why exactly is that space station there? For years it has circled the Earth in near orbit. Its ostensible purpose is research. Every once in a while we hear of some school project in which seeds or bugs or even mice are taken to the space station. The results of this experimentation don't come readily to mind. Maybe one of the purposes of the station is to give school children something to think about.

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Ehlen Drive Business Gets Conditional Approval From Planning Director

As far as Linn County is concerned, Sheri Levit can go ahead and keep running her "horticultural resource center" for Oregon medical marijuana patients and anyone else.

Robert Wheeldon, director of the county's Planning and Building Department, has given the business on Ehlen Drive his conditional approval.

In a letter dated Aug. 26, Wheeldon responded to a code interpretation request filed by Corvallis attorney George B. Heilig on behalf of the center's landlord, Ron McReynolds.

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Medford's current and former police chiefs will appeal a $75 fine for violating state election laws by allegedly advocating against the passage of Oregon's medical marijuana initiative last fall to the Mail Tribune.

Medford police Chief Tim George and Randy Schoen, who retired from the agency in June, were notified Monday that the Secretary of State's Elections Division ruled the pair stepped too far in outlining what they considered the negative impacts on police agencies should Measure 74 pass. The measure, which would have allowed state-licensed medical marijuana dispensaries, failed.

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In the first such case to be prosecuted in Oregon, the owner of a medical marijuana dispensary in Aloha pleaded guilty Tuesday afternoon to charges related to unlawful distribution of marijuana.

Kathleen "Kat" O'Shea Cambron, 44, co-owner of the Wake 'n' Bake Cannabis Lounge, 18918 S.W. Shaw Street, was arraigned Tuesday afternoon in Washington County Circuit Court.

She pleaded guilty to two counts of felony distribution of marijuana and was sentenced to three years of probation.

The Westside Interagency Narcotics Team served warrants at the Wake 'n' Bake on June 15, along with residences associated with the store and its owners, after detectives learned the business was allegedly selling pot to customers in violation of the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act.

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Federal Prosecutor Says It's Illegal Drug Sales

A man with a few bucks in his pocket walks into Curtis Shimmin's new Eugene enterprise and leaves a short time later carrying a brown paper bag filled with marijuana.

This is clearly an illegal drug deal, U.S. Attorney for Oregon Dwight Holton says.

But Shimmin - who sought advice from his own attorneys before opening Kannabosm in a rented commercial space at 401 W. 11th Ave. - begs to differ.

He insists that he's not in the business of selling pot to dope users.

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Sheriff Mike Winters' Opposition to a Gold Hill Medical Marijuana Patient's Concealed Handgun License Is on Its Way to the U.S. High Court

Jackson County Sheriff Mike Winters appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday in his latest bid to block the issuance of a concealed handgun license to a Gold Hill medical marijuana patient.

Winters has asserted that he can't issue the license because it would violate federal law, specifically the Gun Control Act of 1968.

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Marijuana is a medicine; it is not the horrible monster you have been led to believe. We have been lied to since the 1930's. Get the facts!

This medicine is a gift that we are withholding from our people while forcing patients to get it on the black market and putting fear in the hearts of our people because of willful misinformation.

It is time to do a 180 and then move forward. Our government can admit they have lied for years in the name of big money and can cut all ties with it and we can change our ways back to having marijuana and hemp in our lives to make medicine, paper, rope, fabric, oil, and the like and get the United States of America back on her feet.

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