Cannabis Country

Prop 64, the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, which passed on Election Day, went into effect on midnight Nov. 9. While it’s still too early to make accurate predictions, the law has clearly made a difference in the lives of local citizens. Indeed, it’s now legal for individuals to grow marijuana for personal use and to posses it and smoke it in the privacy of their own homes, except in Windsor, Healdsburg, Sonoma and other communities that have adopted urgency moratoriums.
At the same time, smoking in public is illegal and punishable by a fine of not more than $100. Moreover, now as before it’s illegal to operate a motor vehicle under the influence of marijuana, although stoned driving will be difficult for law enforcement to prove because reliable testing doesn’t yet exist.
Then, too, recreational marijuana shops (as opposed to medical marijuana dispensaries) won’t open until January 2018; only time will reveal major changes.
Vegetable farmers are ready to diversify and to plant and harvest marijuana crops. Law-abiding citizens who have declined to smoke pot for years have started to get high since they no longer risk an arrest, jail and perhaps public humiliation.
Others who work for county agencies and who have been in the closet for years have begun to come out as smokers, though they remain cautious. As one long-time county employee (who wanted anonymity) put it, “Everyone smokes and no one smokes.”
Despite the passage of Prop 64, there’s strong local opposition to the spread of dispensaries and to the use of marijuana, except perhaps when it’s medicine that’s recommend by a doctor for a patient dying of cancer or HIV/AIDS and who needs it for pain relief and as an appetite enhancer.
Employers can fire workers if and when they test positive for marijuana and high school students who smoke weed face stiff penalties.
Local medical doctors like Jennifer Golick, who decried 64, are as loud and clear now as ever before in their opposition to marijuana use, especially among teenagers. The clinical director for Muir Wood Adolescent & Family Services, Dr. Golick argues in front of live audiences and in scholarly papers that marijuana impedes the development of the adolescent brain.
She also insists that pot has long-term negative effects on the corpus callosum, which she says, “helps the right brain and left brain work together.”
According to Dr. Golick, marijuana is “the gateway drug” as Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General, dubbed it 31 years ago, (although tobacco and alcohol might share that label).
Smoking pot, Dr. Golick says, is “not a rite of passage but substance abuse.” Moreover, she claims that, “cannabis withdrawal syndrome is a diagnosable mental illness and a psychosis and that it looks like schizophrenia.” A popular speaker at high schools across northern California, she tells students and parents, “This is not scare tactics.”
At Muir Wood Adolescent & Family Service — a residential treatment program in Petaluma — Dr. Golick aims to rescue northern California boys 13 to 17 who are diagnosed with “cannabis dependence.” Her critics, including Fred Gardner, the editor of O’Shaughnessys — a publication for doctors and health professionals who recommend cannabis for a variety of ills — suggest that she strays from scientific fact.
Sebastopol’s nationally renowned pot doc, Jeffrey Hergenrather, takes issue with Dr. Golick. “The problem is not that kids use marijuana, but that they are under-parented,” he explains. “Our society is breaking down. Teens find comfort in cannabis. They’re far better off with it than with pharmaceuticals and especially with opioids, which are now an epidemic among teens.”
For everyone who condemns marijuana there are probably just as many individuals who defend it, or so voting on Proposition 64 suggests. Across the state of California, 56 percent of the electorate approved the Adult Use of Marijuana Act. Granted, that’s a narrow margin, but it’s enough to change the law.
Organizations and individuals on both sides of the divide point to the example of Colorado, where recreational marijuana has been legal since 2012. Pro-cannabis forces say legalization is better than the prohibition of the past, while the anti-cannabis forces want to go back to the way it once was. Meanwhile, pot tourism in Denver is booming, marketplace competition has driven many small pot farmers out of the business and longtime stoners say that with legalization and commercialization the quality of the weed has declined.
The Denver Police Department, which recently started to keep track of marijuana-related DUIs, found that they doubled between 2013 and 2014, from 33 to 66, and then rose again in 2015, to 73.
“The reports about marijuana and driving in Colorado are misleading,” Matt Jones told me. The co-founder of Denver’s THC University, which offers online courses about cannabis to students around the world, Jones argues that there is “no direct cause and effect relationship between smoking weed and bad driving.” He also insists that the legalization of marijuana has not led to a spike in crime. Statistics back him up.
But tell that to Spencer Crum, the public information officer for the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department. “Steve Freitas, our sheriff-coroner, believes that we’ll have more armed robberies, more home invasions and more impaired driving,” Crum told me. “That’s what happened in Colorado. Prop. 64 will increase crime, drive up the supply of marijuana, drive down the price and rev up the whole drug trade.”
Stay tuned. The drug war and the war of words aren’t over yet.
Jonah Raskin is the author of Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War. He also shares story credit for the feature film, Homegrown.