Meanderings in Blogland

Dang, I don’t remember moving to Florida, but it looks like I have. It seems like with each election, Mendocino County becomes more and more Florida-esque. A coupla years back, Mendo County closed most of its precincts and went to mail-in ballots. I hear this has to do with handicapped access—they can’t get penalized for precincts that aren’t accessible if the precincts aren’t open at all—or something like that, I guess.

Howzabout a system where people who want/need mail-in ballots can get them, but people who like to vote the old fashioned way can? Dang, I hate mail-in ballots.

But for true-blue Florida-ishness, just look at the “results” of Measure B. More than three weeks after the voting, we still don’t know the results. Maybe they’ll announce the results Friday. Maybe. They’re still counting 10,000+ “absentee” ballots. In a sparsely populated county like Mendocino, that’s a good chunk of the total. For crying out loud, how long can it take even a small staff to count 10k votes?

The Measure B foolishness is further compounded by the fact that the California Supreme Court threw out California’s limits on medical marijuana before the election. These are the same limits that Measure B seeks to inflict on Mendocino. Nobody seems to know if Measure B will mean anything if it passes.

If the county ever bothers to count the votes, and the measure passes, it’ll be up to the courts to figure it out.

It would be difficult to overstate the degree to which marijuana permeates the economy and culture of Mendocino County. The traditional foundations of the local economy—timber and fishing—are either dead or comatose, leaving us with a tourism-based service economy and a few wine grapes. We can’t all get jobs as $7/hour motel maids, even if we wanted to.

I’ve worked a few retail sales jobs since I moved to Mendocino 13 years ago. Frequently, people would come in to the store, make large puchases, and pay with cash. Often, I could literally smell the marijuana on the money. How many of the retail purchases in the area are paid for with pot money? How many of the people staying in the inns are celebrating their harvests? How many of the real estate transactions are for growing facilities? There’s no way to know for sure, but cannabis—and cannabis money—are omnipresent here.

Over the last several years, Mendocino County has liberalized its regulations regarding cannabis cultivation. As of last year, a gardener with a doctor’s prescription could legally grow 25 plants at a time as medicine. Inevitably, many people conjured up medical excuses to grow, and much of this pot wound up on the market for receational use. Is that a bad thing? It depends on who you ask.

There are always some law and order Republican types who think of cannabis as the evil killer weed and want it eradicated and its growers and users imprisoned. Another group opposed to liberalized medical marijuana is the the large growers. Their business was illegal before medical marijuana cultivation was allowed, it’s illegal now, and it’ll continue to be illegal for the foreseeable future. They’re opposed to medical marijuana out of economic self interest: all of those small growers flood the market and lower the price they receive.

From this only-in-Mendocino alliance has sprung Measure B. It dramatically lowers the legal cultivation limit to six plants. It’s billed as an effort to crack down on the large growers, but it actually benefits large growers; not only does it reduce their competition, but it diverts law enforcement to the Mom and Pop 25 plant gardens and away from real crime.

Meaure B is a big step backwards. I recommend voting NO.

You can read more about Measure B from the No on B Coalition, the supporters of B have a site, too of course, full of horror stories of how cannabis is destroying Mendocino County. It even has some feeble attempts at satire.