Calaveras County made national news this week because its famed, 2,000 year old tree, which had been a tourist attraction since 1880, fell down. Fortunately, Calaveras County also took action this week to keep out an invasive tree, the giant cannabis plants that grow like weeds. Tourists won’t be going there for marijuana, and fortunately, many giant sequoias are still standing. (Photos from the Calaveras Big Trees Association webpage)
Citizens Qualify an Initiative to Ban Marijuana Cultivation
Calaveras County will see California’s first ever citizen-initiated ordinance banning commercial marijuana activities decided soon by its Board of Supervisors or in a spring special election. It’s one of the first big push-backs against Big Marijuana since the November 8 election in which the state legalized pot.
County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Rebecca Turner today certified the petition sections filed by proponents of the initiative to ban commercial marijuana cultivation included more than enough valid signatures to qualify it for a special election. Sampling 500 of the more than 5,200 signatures submitted, the Elections Department found a validity rate of 87% which, applied to the total, would produce approximately 4,532 valid signatures, where the number needed for certification was only 3,143.
“We’re delighted with the results, but not surprised,” said Bill McManus, Chairman of The Committee to Ban Commercial Cultivation. “The high percentage of invalid signatures from the Measure D signature drive was not surprising due to their use of paid professional signature gatherers. By contrast, our all-volunteer team was much more careful and deliberate in their efforts.” “Nevertheless, we overshot the target by a wide margin,” he went on, “to send a strong message to our Board of Supervisors as to the will of the people in Calaveras County.” Committee member David Tunno added, “We only took about half the amount of time available to gather signatures, or the number would have been much greater.”
Photo from Citizens Against the Legalization of Marijuana
“Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana (CALM) congratulates The Committee to Ban Commercial Marijuana in Calaveras County for their successful initiative drive, and especially for being the first such success citizens’ campaign in the state of California. As far as we know, they are also the first in the U.S. We encourage the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors to enact their ordinance at the earliest possible date.” Said Carla Lowe, Founder, Co-chair, Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana, a statewide organization.
The Elections Department also notified the proponents that it will request a hearing on the matter before the Board of Supervisors at its regularly scheduled January 24 meeting. At this writing, it is unknown whether it will be placed on the agenda for that meeting, but when it is, the Board will have the options of adopting the ordinance, directing the Elections Department to schedule it for a special election, or doing nothing, triggering a requirement for the Department to schedule the ordinance for a special election in the spring.
Proponents of the initiative and authors of the proposed ordinance were Bill McManus of the Calaveras Project and David Tunno, former County Planning Commissioner. The ordinance bans all commercial marijuana cultivation, manufacturing, processing and delivery within unincorporated Calaveras County, as well as dispensaries, while providing an exception for qualified medical patients under specified conditions. The complete ordinance and additional information is available on their website, ban commercial cultivation.
Drug Policy Alliance, NORML and Marijuana Policy Project are optimistic. They’re huffing and puffing now, having won 7 out of 8 states with marijuana ballots in the November election. They also smirk knowing that President-elect Trump supports states’ rights for marijuana. In 20 or 30 years, they’ll have freedom and no one else really matters.
Pot lobbyists don’t explain the real picture. What if the whole country ends up just like Humboldt County?
The oldest, strongest marijuana culture in the USA is not in Colorado, but in Humboldt County, California, part of three-county region called the Emerald Triangle. REVEAL, an online investigative platform, reported on the secretive world of sexual abuse and rapes in marijuana country. (The pop culture magazine Rolling Stone doesn’t want the public to know.) There’s politically-motivated denial and deflection, but heavy weed smokers have lots of delusions.
There were 2,000 domestic violence calls in 2015, an increase of 80% over the previous four years.* A routine domestic violence call in December led to a huge bust for guns and weed. Marijuana gained a foothold in Humboldt nearly 50 years ago, and it seems guns and weed are a way of life since that time.
Humboldt County leads the way in environmental destruction, too. The area used to be dominated by the logging and fishing industries. But as those jobs went away, marijuana became the biggest industry.
See the video about the ecological damage from illicit marijuana grows
Environmental Damage
Environmentalists convinced politicians that the logging industry must stop cutting down the redwoods. So the marijuana growers found an opening and they’re clearing out the trees! Aerial views show the redwood forests pockmarked by marijuana grows. It doesn’t seem that High Times and Alternet have caught on to the irony that marijuana green is not environmentally green.
In May of 2008, approximately 1000 gallons of red diesel overflowed from an indoor marijuana grow’s fuel room into a creek. A marijuana grower had left a valve open when pouring a larger diesel tank into a smaller one. The fuel had spread so far down the rugged stream bed that a neighbor smelled the pungent odor and investigated. He found “20 to 30 pools of red diesel” far below the spill. The environmental cleanup was a massive operation, one of the biggest in California history. The damage from this diesel fuel spill rivals the impact of an oil spill in the ocean.
Marijuana and Fire Damages
Fires are frequent throughout California, and marijuana sometimes causes these fires, including hash oil (BHO) explosions. The massive Soberanes fire this summer uncovered several illegal marijuana sites. Marijuana growers may have started the fire.
The true irony is that after recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado, these home explosions grew more frequent. In one week of April 2014, there were four BHO explosions. BHO fires didn’t occur in California before 2010, so liberalizing pot laws and expanding marijuana access created a new problem. (In 2010, pot was decriminalized in California.)
The man who started a fire in McKinleyville on December 26 fled the scene. It’s thought to be a hash oil lab fire. Photo above and on top by Marc Davis, published on the Redheaded Blackbelt.
Murders, Suicides and Missing People
If a tv news magazine were to expose the murder, rape and sex trafficking in Humboldt, reporters may be at risk. An investigative journalism report released in September revealed that some trimmigrants and girls end up getting abused or raped. The marijuana apologists mislead by insisting that murders and rapes happen because prohibition forces growers into hiding.
There were at least 22 murders in Humboldt County in 2016. Only 134,000 people live in the county. (Often it’s difficult to distinguish murder from suicide, which occurs at a rate twice the national norm.) Humboldt reported 352 missing people in 2015, more per capita than any other county in the state.
Nonetheless, Humboldt County has wonderful examples of love and community spirit. Recently, residents of Eureka came out in the heavy rain to honorJennika Suazo, a teen girl who died suspiciously.
Domestic Violence, DUIs and Humboldt’s Other Problems
Humboldt County district attorney Maggie Fleming sat down for an interview with Paul Mann of the Mad River Union recently. (The entire article is in Lost Coast Outpost.) “We see DUIs all day long in this community …. There are people who are drinking or using prescription meds or smoking marijuana or using methamphetamine or heroin and driving at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. Some of our fatalities are in the middle of the day,” Fleming explained.
She listed multiple factors powering Humboldt crime: high rates of driving while intoxicated; the county’s nightmarish marijuana, drug and alcohol culture; the prevalence of domestic violence and the deep-rooted poverty that inflicts childhood trauma and impairs children’s health, often with lifelong afflictions, including criminal behavior. She definitely sees the crime as a result of the drug culture. Both those with substance abuse problems and those selling drugs for financial gain instigate the crime.
“I see firsthand how marijuana is a social and environmental disaster,” a policeman from the Emerald Triangle wrote to PopPot.org. “Youth access, abuse, transient population moving in to grow or trim, associated criminal behavior all rising.”
The homeless population in Humboldt creates a dilemma. Here’s what was left when several squatters were forced out of a Eureka home on Oct. 31, 2016.
“Where there is pot …there are other drugs…..and all the behavior associated with lives less enabled,” he said. “The money isn’t worth the social cost to our world.”
–Emerald Triangle policeman
Having a marijuana culture adds to the use of other drugs. Laid back from smoking too much dope? Try amphetamines to get back up again.
Acceptance of drugs also leads to rampant alcohol abuse; booze enhances the effect of the drugs. People think the homelessness problem in Humboldt is caused by mental illness, but one social worker in the area disagrees. He is certain that rampant drug/alcohol abuse precipitates the problem. Politicians in both parties remain clueless about how drug use creates mental health problems. Their ignorance will continue as long as it’s politically incorrect to blame pot for anything.
Seven hundred homeless children without parents or guardians in nearby Mendocino County, also part of California’s “Emerald Triangle” growing region. These street kids sometimes work on the pot farms, but basically, no one has ever loved them enough to care for them. They’re likely to become drug users too, and the cycle of multi-generation drug use will continue.
Pueblo is a Warning to Other Places
Four years after Colorado legalized marijuana, the small city of Pueblo is another example of how pot commercialization can destroy life for the residents. “I can no longer allow my 13-year-old to walk the dog, one mother said. There was recently a murder 3 blocks from our house.” Pueblo failed to pass two referendums which would have closed dispensaries and growing sites in the city and county. Some people think of marijuana as an economic panacea for lost jobs in the steel industry. However, it has created a huge increase in the homeless population. Pueblo doctors recently made videos showing the damage marijuana is doing to the health care in the community.
Buyers in Pueblo West, Co line up on Jan. 1, 2014 to legally buy marijuana when the state’s first pot shops opened. (Source: AP Photo/John Wark). The Press prefers to emphasize that so much money can be made, rather than the destruction with legal pot. It hasn’t turned out as orderly as this photo.
International cartels have moved into Pueblo and bought up property for their marijuana grows. The black market is booming. Russians, Cubans, Argentinians and Cambodians have come to town. Pueblo, Boulder and Denver lead the state in the percentage of high school students using pot, but in Pueblo there are more problems. Fully 12% of high school seniors have also used heroin.
What about America’s future? Is marijuana growing also going to replace tobacco growing in Kentucky and Tennessee? Will it be a substitute for the coal mines that shut down in West Virginia and Pennsylvania? When policy is driven by knee-jerk reactions without careful planning, chaos follows.
At this time, the United States has more than half of the world’s illicit drug users. Six percent of America’s high school seniors are daily marijuana users. It appears that the legacy of drug use is going to continue creating this problem for America’s children. Humboldt County is the future of our country if we continue to believe marijuana use is perfectly harmless and normal.
* This statistic and much of the information on sexual abuse, missing persons, domestic violence, rape and abuse of trimmigants comes from the massive report by Shoshana Walter, published in Reveal, The Center for Investigative Reporting on September 8, 2016.
This testimony is from a mother in California who spoke in front of the capital in Sacramento with Moms Strong on October 4, 2016.
Today’s pot can be far more dangerous than it used to be. There is “weed” 300-800 times stronger than it used to be, “edible cookies and candy,” and honey oil or “dabs” sometimes called hash oil, which is up to 90% THC.
I learned all of this the hard way. Thankfully, I’ve joined a group no parent would ever want to belong to called Moms Strong. How does one become a member of this group? You don’t want to know …It began 5 years ago with my gifted son who went off to college. His elite state college on the central coast warned us of the dangers of alcohol but nothing about the dangers of drugs.
He was seeking a way to belong by joining a fraternity and a consulting club, tutored students and lived in a dorm with roommates. He tried drinking, despite the warnings, but found he couldn’t handle it.
Friends in the dorm offered him pot and he thought it would be safer. That first hit took him down a long path into darkness.
He was able to obtain a medical marijuana card from a doctor over the phone–to treat insomnia. The doctors rarely suggest which type of THC product the patient should use. Here in California, marijuana edibles, as well as weed and “dabs” (butane hash oil) are delivered to medical marijuana cardholders via the Internet dispensaries.
By his 2nd year, there were early warning signs that things were not going well. The changes were:
Falling off the Dean’s list
Disconnecting from close friends and family
Increasing fears, paranoia, insomnia and stress
Breaking the law by selling pot to friends
Fighting with roommates and quitting the frat
Decreased feelings of self-worth
During his 3rd year, he went from a casual to an addicted user. From weed, he went to edibles and onto dabs which triggered psychosis within a few months. He noticed he couldn’t carry on a normal conversation or work math problems. His college friend contacted me via FB reporting my son’s disturbing voice mail:
“Hey..I’m not sure if I want to live. I’m seeing flying mustaches. So call me if you think I should live.”
We brought him home, took him to our local ER where we hoped to get help for him. The doctor thought he was having a 1st time schizophrenic outbreak, tested his blood and found “just pot” and placed him on a 72 hr. involuntary hold. It was the worst night of my life seeing my son so afraid and being powerless.
A psych expert sent him to a behavioral hospital to rule out bipolar mania.
At that hospital, the experience was a nightmare. They had no knowledge of cannabis-induced psychosis, instead diagnosed him as bipolar and prescribed Lithium. He forced to be among people trying to harm themselves or others.
That doctor suggested he take a leave from college and go into an outpatient therapy program. Within 3 days, he started smoking pot again. In a couple months, he stopped taking the Lithium as he hated how it made him feel. We were powerless over his drug use.
He returned to college for his fourth year, but then withdrew with failing grades. Just a year and a half after his 1st psychotic break, he experienced symptoms for 3 days reported by this same friend:
Hearing voices, distrusting everyone (including his best friends)
Getting lost in his head and then suddenly saying “That’s what they want you to believe” or “They’re coming for me.”
Running from friends through traffic, scaring bystanders, with his friends trying to make sure he didn’t hurt himself or anyone else.
They waited for him to snap out of it, to no avail. They took him to the Emergency Room where he got no help; they called me AGAIN. We had 2 more ER visits which resulted in a medication to help the psychosis, advice on how to stop smoking pot.
My son just couldn’t kick smoking pot. Within a few weeks, his rock bottom hit when he had a car accident, totaled the vehicle, and got a DUI. Thankfully he did not harm himself or others.
He called me begging for help to quit smoking pot. We agreed he would go to a dual diagnosis drug rehab where he was first thought to be schizophrenic. But after proper medication, he was diagnosed with cannabis-induced psychosis.
My son learned he has a sensitivity to THC. He quit and is struggling to stay clean. He takes medication to counteract the THC cravings from his three-year marijuana addiction. He is still hoping to finish college and his future is still not set in stone. He doesn’t see flying mustaches any longer, or any other hallucinating visions, but it sure was scary. We are thankful that his whole life has not gone up in smoke.
Prop 64 will make it easier for anyone to try the “Russian Roulette” of today’s pot, without any warnings. Marijuana must be avoided, especially to those under age 25 — and maybe up to age 28 — because the brain is still developing, marijuana must be avoided.
Please vote No because of all the young minds that are at stake.
The Emerald Triangle can’t hide behind its secrets after a report of widespread abuse, sexual exploitation and worker exploitation was published last week by Reveal News. There’s both worker and sexual exploitation. Cosmopolitan Magazine published another version of the story. Here are some of the most hideous incidents affecting children and teens.
A girl from Humboldt County started working for a local grower at 12. He gave her methamphetamine to speed up her work as a trimmer, and passed her around to pay off debts. She ran away to a homeless shelter and found that pimps were using it for a hunting ground.
Two other teens in that same homeless shelter report having been trafficked for sex. Both local and out-of-town teens may be involved.
They give girls weed, alcohol and food in exchange for trimming. Sex is also expected to go with it.
A 15-year-old runaway from southern California, was kept inside a box and forced to have sex with the two growers from Lake County, near Humboldt County, who had found her.
Federal prosecutors said they directed her to trim marijuana and have sex with them, sometimes while chained to a metal rack. For several few days, she was kept inside a box.
The men also shocked the girl with a cattle prod and told her she would be shot by neighbors if she attempted to leave, an employee later told police. The men were initially charged with human trafficking. When federal authorities took over, the trafficking charges were dropped. The men are expected to plead guilty to lesser charges of employing a minor and illegal marijuana cultivation. (The Cosmopolitan article has more information about this incident.)
Parents Opposed to Pot stands by its belief that preventing drug use is the key to preventing social problems and so much human suffering. After exploitation, teens and other workers who came to the area to work in the marijuana industry frequently end up homeless.
After exploitation, teens and other workers many end up in homeless shelters
In summer and fall, temporary workers come in town to work the marijuana harvests. These “trimmigrants” sometimes end up homeless and without jobs. In one article, it’s reported that 100 European “trimmigrants” were stiffed for pay, broke, without a place to go and ended up in homeless shelters. Mexican and other immigrants also face abuse.
There’s a frequent “missing persons” problem in the area, which shows up through a quick search on the Internet. Sometimes the lost people are found, but at least 5 women have never been found.
Reveal is based in San Francisco and is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, found in 1977. Journalists Shoshana Walter and Elle Snow (not her real name) did outstanding jobs in their respective publications, Reveal.org and Cosmopolitan. Elle is a victim of sexual trafficking and she is now working against this problem and has started an organization in Eureka, Game Over. Listen to Against Their Will.
