Evidently, the City has just made a move to restrict indoor grow operations*, something which must be pleasing the Neighborhood Watch Association no end, given their constant whining about the grow house** which is allegedly located somewhere in the neighborhood.
Now, the issue is that Mendocino County is caught in this strange limbo, because medical marijuana cultivation is legal (despite the fact that it is not legal on the federal level). So the ordinance is specifically targeted at medical marijuana, rather than generic cultivation of marijuana (which is illegal). Under the new ordinance, only 50 square feet per residential unit can be used for medical marijuana cultivation, and commercial growing is still, of course, not legal.
So what’s the distinction between a medical and an illegal operation? Medical operations have 215 cards, which are given out to medical marijuana patients. A grower can display a 215 card, claim that he or she is growing for a patient, and the operation is legal. What a lot of growers do is collect large numbers of 215 cards, which could theoretically be legitimate, but are more likely acquired in nefarious ways to make a commercial operation look legal. In other words, they claim to be growing pot for patients, but really they plan to sell it.
Now, some people are crying foul, claiming that this ordinance criminalizes medical marijuana. Personally, I think that the ordinance is a good thing, and not just for all the reasons listed in the article. Quite frankly, medical marijuana is abused rampantly, as I mentioned above. Commercial growers just buy 215 cards and claim that they are growing weed for medical use, and these same growers are setting up grow houses and making nuisances of themselves. The cops can’t respond, because the operations are technically legal.
This undermines the validity of cases in which medical marijuana might be a genuine necessity. 215 cards are handed out like popcorn, for a fee, from several physicians around town, and there’s not real control going on. In fact, it’s probably harder to get antibiotics from a doctor these days than a 215 card.
The obvious solution here is to decriminalize marijuana and other drugs so that they can be more effectively regulated, and so that people don’t have to stealth it up with grow houses. Grow houses cause fires, they stink, they are often surrounded by sketchy people and skeezy dogs, and, yeah, it kind of pisses me off to see viable living spaces used for agriculture. As the paper pointed out, criminal incidents have also been linked to medical marijuana operations (presumably the paper is referring to commercial operations masquerading as medical ones, since I know plenty of folks with a few plants who definitely don’t attract criminal activity).
The issue, of course, is that most growers don’t actually want to see marijuana legalized. Legalization would mean a dramatic drop in price, and, more importantly, it would mean that all of that income from growing would suddenly be taxable. In fact, legalization would probably deal a pretty hefty blow to the county economy, because growers spend a lot of money, and they tend to spend locally.
If we are going to have “legal” marijuana cultivation in the form of medical marijuana cultivation, I think that we do need to be legislating and controlling it more effectively, and this ordinance is a step in the right direction. People who claim that patients are being “criminalized” have clearly not seen the huge and obviously commercial grow operations with bouquets of obviously fake 215 cards staked at the end of every row of plants. By being responsible about it, we can show that medical marijuana has legitimate uses, and perhaps pave the way to more general decriminalization.
*For those of you not familiar with the ins and outs of marijuana cultivation, an indoor grow operation is, uhm, when you grow marijuana indoors. I don’t get into the debate about indoor vs outdoor pot at the moment, but suffice it to say that indoor growing is common along the coast because it gets cold and the plants don’t like that.
**A house which has been converted for the sole purpose of marijuana cultivation, sometimes with a single bedroom for a guard/trimming area.
