PROSSER - Another benefactor has stepped forward to reward the Prosser School District and another organization for their refusal of a $14,000 donation from a marijuana grower.

Rich Gerlitz, a Richland resident and 1971 graduate of Prosser High School, and his wife, Jan, recently gave $7,000 checks to the district and the Prosser branch of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Benton & Franklin Counties after both turned down money from Randy Williams, owner of Fireweed Farms just north of town.

Williams approached the district about donating some money after he made about $600,000 during a Nov. 15 marijuana auction. Superintendent Ray Tolcacher and the Prosser School Board turned it down, saying it could send mixed signals to students about marijuana.

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Blame Legalization

The news came during the final minutes of a two-hour city council meeting, after most people had trickled out of the room. A handful of PowerPoint slides made it plain: Mayor Ed Murray is going after marijuana.

Apparently, members of Murray's staff have spent the winter working on new rules for medical marijuana providers and in the process found a target in pot couriers. The administration has now directed the Seattle Police Department to take aim at those delivery services-yes, even the ones that require clients to have medical authorization-even though, until now, pot deliverers have enjoyed the luxury of operating and advertising openly without much attention from law enforcement.

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Government agencies and legislative bodies, which usually move at a slug-like pace, can act quickly, especially if no one is particularly seeking the change. The Department of Justice announced last week that Indian tribes can grow and sell marijuana on their lands as long as they follow the same federal conditions laid out for states that have legalized the drug, the Associated Press reported. Never mind that many tribes oppose legalization and only a few have expressed interest in the marijuana industry. But the choice is there, just in case. (Which is a good thing.)

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The Planning Commission Will Hold a Hearing Today As It Seeks Recommendations for the County Council on Marijuana Businesses in Unincorporated Areas.

EVERETT - Marijuana-enterprise owners are expected to plead for their businesses at a public hearing before the Snohomish County Planning Commission on Tuesday.

Neighbors who oppose pot operations also plan to weigh in before the commission makes a recommendation to the County Council.

The council asked for recommendations as it considers amending the rules for marijuana businesses in the spring. In October, the council imposed a temporary moratorium on new pot operations in some of the county's rural areas after some neighbors voiced opposition.

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'1 Strike' And Then ...

Police, Prosecutors to Enforce Crackdown, City Council Told

The city of Seattle plans to shut down marijuana-delivery services, which became popular after the state legalized recreational marijuana.

David Mendoza, a policy adviser to the mayor, said in a City Council briefing Wednesday that the mayor's office will work with Seattle police on operations against these businesses. Delivery services - which are illegal - will get a single chance to stop operating, Mendoza told the council.

"One strike and we seize your product and tell you to close," said Mendoza.

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THE world is watching Washington's historic experiment with marijuana legalization, and we're screwing it up.

A painstakingly slow launch of recreational marijuana stores, with their sky-high prices and scarcity in Seattle, gets most headlines. But the truth is that experiment is utterly undermined by a much larger, wildly unregulated medical-marijuana market.

Medical-marijuana dispensaries appear to outnumber Starbucks stores in Seattle, yet local regulators and law-enforcement agencies are doing almost nothing to police bad actors hiding behind the ubiquitous green crosses.

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Uncle Ike's Pot Shop will stay open - for now, at least.

Mount Calvary Christian Center, which is next door to the recreational pot store in the Central District, has sued over the store's location, and asked a judge to close the store until the lawsuit is decided.

King County Superior Court Judge Jean Rietschel on Friday said no.

"An injunction is an extraordinary remedy ... and the burden is on the plaintiff," Rietschel said. "I will not grant it."

Mount Calvary Christian Center is suing Uncle Ike's, the city of Seattle and the state Liquor Control Board, alleging that the store is about 250 feet from a teen center operated by the church.

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A team at Washington State University is working to develop a breath test that could quickly determine whether a driver is under the influence of marijuana.

Law-enforcement officers already use preliminary breath tests in the field to estimate drivers' blood alcohol content. But no similar portable tool exists to test for marijuana impairment using a breath sample.

Stoned drivers have become an increasing concern since Washington voters legalized recreational use of marijuana in 2012. A quarter of blood samples taken from drivers in 2013, the first full year the initiative was in effect, came back positive for pot.

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Licenses, Zoning, Product Testing

Murray Says Seattle Can't Wait for Legislature to Act

Mayor Ed Murray's office outlined its plan to regulate Seattle's proliferating medical-marijuana industry Monday, including a new city license and standards for testing, packaging and advertising.

Under the proposed system, business owners would have to get criminal-background checks. The city would inspect the businesses and be able to levy fines or suspend or revoke licenses for violations.

David Mendoza, an adviser to the mayor on marijuana issues, said selling multiple times to a minor or a person without a medical authorization would be enough to lose a license.

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PROSSER - School officials Monday flatly turned down a $14,000 donation from a local marijuana farmer, taking a strong stand against youth marijuana use.

"We're not taking it; end of story," said Ray Tolcacher, Prosser School District superintendent.

The donor, Randy Williams, now is looking for another local recipient.

"I never thought it'd be a problem to give money away," said the owner of Fireweed Farms, a marijuana producer north of this city of 5,800.

Williams' next choice is the Prosser branch of the Boys & Girls Club. The youth nonprofit will "evaluate internally," said Brian Ace, executive director of Boys & Girls Clubs of Benton and Franklin Counties.

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A Benton County Superior Court judge ruled that local governments can ban recreational-pot businesses, according to a news release from the state Attorney General's Office.

It's the third ruling that supports localities preventing pot businesses from operating, and it hews closely to the informal opinion presented by state Attorney General Bob Ferguson earlier this year.

"Three judges in three different parts of the state all ruled from the bench. None of them said we need more time to think about it," Ferguson said about the judges' rulings. "If those who wrote the legislation wanted to require jurisdictions to sell marijuana, they should have said so."

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PROSSER, Wash. (AP) - Washington state's first marijuana auction brought in about $600,000.

Fireweed Farms of Prosser sold about 300 pounds of pot to state-licensed processors and retailers Saturday, the Tri-City Herald reported. Bidding took place under a black tent fronted by tall heaters, and the event was monitored by at least two representatives of the Washington Liquor Control Board. Bidders could smell plastic bags of buds before offering a bid.

The marijuana was planted in May and harvested between late September and mid-October. Fireweed Farms owner Randy Williams had sold some of his marijuana to recreational processors earlier this year, but the auction represented the bulk of his harvest.

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PROSSER - The state's first pot auction unfolded Saturday afternoon behind the screened fences of a denuded marijuana farm.

About 300 pounds of dried flower with names like Girl Scout Cookies, One Arm Bandit and Purple Kush sold for an estimated $600,000 to recreational retailers and processers for just dollars a gram.

The auction at Fireweed Farms in Prosser was limited to licensed processors and retailers and media members. It was monitored by at least two state Liquor Control Board officers.

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A Washington state farmer is selling a ton of marijuana - literally 2,000 pounds - to the highest bidder in one of the first large-scale legal pot auctions in modern U.S. history.

On Saturday, Randy Williams of Fireweed Farm in Prosser, Wash., will offer for sale the marijuana he's been growing all summer. Most legal marijuana in Colorado and Washington, the only states with legal recreational marketplaces, is grown indoors under electricity-hogging lights in much smaller batches.

Colorado's marijuana growers this fall harvested their first crops of outdoor-grown cannabis, and now farmers like Williams are bringing their pot to market in Washington. At retail prices, Williams' crop could be worth $6 million. Many of the plants are a dozen-feet tall, grown in the wine region just north of the Columbia River Valley in south-central Washington.

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Duane Abbott, accused in the vehicular homicide of 7-year-old Cadence Boyer on Halloween night, was allegedly under the influence of marijuana at the time, according to prosecutors. Four nights later, the people of Oregon voted to approve the recreational use of marijuana, joining Washington and Colorado. Brad Reed, spokesman for Oregon's Yes on 91 campaign, is quoted as saying "We feel the people .. took a close look at what prohibition was doing and made a good decision." It is my guess that the grieving family and friends of Cadence Boyer would disagree wholeheartedly.

Scott Rainey

Vancouver

[end]

Regarding the article "Regular pot smokers have shrunken brains, study says," [Nation & World, Nov. 10] this study misses the mark on reporting concrete findings of regular pot use.

Taken at face value, it tells us what we're already used to hearing: "smoking is bad, and it will make you dumb." This, of course, is contingent upon that fact that most "regular pot smokers" started toking up before the brain could fully develop. But the study fails to tell us with clarity which comes first - the smaller brain or the pot smoking.

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Business Squeezed Out of Main Street Site

City Rules on Where They Can Set Up Shop

Seth Simpson and David Ahl are so dead-set on selling marijuana in downtown Bellevue that they say they've spent at least $500,000 on a space on Main Street.

An effort to sell medical marijuana at the location didn't survive city zoning rules when they first started leasing the spot more than two years ago.

But the pair thought they had a better chance of opening a recreational-pot shop called Greenside Recreational there when the state Liquor Control Board (LCB) issued them a permit to sell on July 7, the same day the board publicly announced its first retail marijuana-permit holders.

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Ambiguous Federal and State Laws Are Making New Marijuana Retailers' Work Inefficient and Inconvenient.

LAKE STEVENS - Reed Evans called several banks looking to open an account for Cannablyss, his family's recreational marijuana business and the only pot retail store in Lake Stevens.

He had no luck. He got his name on a waiting list at a credit union in Seattle, but most financial institutions are shying away from doing business with the still-young industry.

"We pay most bills in cash, we literally drive to the PUD and give them a couple of hundred dollars and we drive to our landlord to pay the rent," Evans said.

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Seattle May Have Hundreds of Medical-Marijuana Businesses, but Regulation Is So Loose and Spread Out Among Agencies That Nobody Really Knows. the City Vows to 'Come Knocking,' but It May Take the Legislature to Straighten It All Out.

As the recreational-pot market develops, a growing number of Seattle medical-marijuana businesses are operating in a legally gray, loosely regulated space.

What regulations do exist often are ignored because a patchwork group of agencies involved relies mostly on complaints to take notice of bad actors and doesn't shut down businesses breaking the law.

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17 Private Meetings

3 Board Members Met With Police, Others About Legal Marijuana

(AP) - The Washington Liquor Control Board broke the state's open-meetings law 17 times as it began working on rules for the recreational-marijuana industry, a judge ruled.

Thurston County Superior Court Judge Christine Schaller issued the ruling Friday in a case brought by Arthur West, a critic of the legal-pot law.

The judge said that although the board broke the law, it didn't take any actions at the meetings that would warrant throwing out the marijuana rules it eventually adopted.

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