Marijuana cultivation on the rise in urban areas...
You're in the Columnists - Bill McEwen section
Marijuana cultivation on the rise in urban areas
Posted at 12:18 AM on Sunday, Sep. 19, 2010
By Bill McEwen / The Fresno Bee
I interrupted attorney and grape grower Ken Clark in the middle of harvest to talk about the medical marijuana situation in Fresno -- the one that the Board of Supervisors has declared an emergency.
Clark has represented medical marijuana dispensaries and patients. He says that marijuana sometimes is the only medicine that works. Clark says he knows this because he's seen it.
"A friend of mine -- conservative, Republican, never taken a drug in her life -- had cancer and was undergoing chemo," Clark says. "She couldn't hold food down without it."
The trouble is, the good in California's medical marijuana law is being trampled by abuse and illicit profit. The past two weeks in the Central Valley have seemed like a repeat of 1920s Prohibition: attempted rip-offs, a shooting death, deputies making busts and saying that the persons have ties to organized crime.
There are differences, however. It was illegal to make, sell and transport alcohol anywhere in the United States during Prohibition, and Al Capone was the king of the bootleggers.
In California today, some pot is legal, most is not and law enforcement is most concerned about Mexican drug cartels. The complicating asterisk is that the federal government considers all marijuana illegal.
Last week, I took a ride in a Fresno County Sheriff's Office helicopter to see what's out there. In one east-central Fresno neighborhood, four homes had marijuana plants fence to fence.
"Each one of them has $250,000 or $500,000 growing in the backyard," says Lt. Rick Ko, commander of narcotics for the Sheriff's Office. "With one crop, they can buy a new house."
East and west of the city, I flew over multiple marijuana plots larger than an acre. The bigger ones had lookout towers so that growers could protect the pot and see who might be coming.
Ko said deputies had visited each of the pot farms and found them to be legal based on the number of plants recommended by doctors for patients.
"They usually are a couple of plants under what they're allowed," Ko says.
I'll repeat a question asked in a previous column. With doctors recommending as many as 98 plants for some patients, who possibly could smoke that much pot? And where does this magic number 98 come from?
As none of the Fresno doctors listed on the Internet as "medicinal cannabis practitioners" returned my phone calls, I turned to Clark.
He said that patients who can't smoke marijuana for health reasons -- asthma, for example -- use it in other forms, such as mixed with food or turned into oil.
"That takes a huge number of plants," Clark says. "Just like it takes five pounds of grapes to make one pound of raisins."
Clark says that the doctors he knows are careful with their recommendations. Still, he acknowledges that some patients are receiving recommendations for more than they need -- weed that Ko says ends up being sold illegally throughout California and even out of state.
Now, about these 98-plant recommendations: Why not 100 or 150 plants?
Ko says that it's federal drug-enforcement policy to go after people growing 100 or more plants for themselves and leave everyone else alone. Thus, patients don't want 100-plant recommendations and, apparently, their doctors (wink, wink) agree that they don't need that much, either.
Clark also says that the county and the city of Fresno should regulate medical marijuana gardens because of the theft and violence threat.
"I don't think there should be huge grows," he says. "Any outdoor grows should be completely shielded all the way around, and the plants shouldn't be allowed to grow above a certain height."
The challenge now for the Board of Supervisors and the City Council is to clean up after a law that does help people, but also has brought back Prohibition-era consequences.
All I can say is good luck.
THE COLUMNIST CAN BE REACHED AT
[email protected] OR (559) 441-6632.
