Search Results: moonshiners (4)

Cheeba!
Allen St. Pierre, NORML: “They’re moonshiners. It’s a tiny group of people who don’t comport”

Medical marijuana patients in Washington state are offended after Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), called medicinal cannabis dispensaries “moonshiners” in a Huffington Post interview.

“They’re moonshiners,” St. Pierre said of the dispensaries which opposed Initiative 502, passed by 54 percent of Washington voters. “It’s a tiny group of people who don’t comport.”
Of course, painting all Washington patient collectives with this broad brush — especially when St. Pierre is 2,600 miles away and doesn’t know what the FUCK he’s talking about — is the height of irresponsibility. I’ve been in close to 90 medical marijuana access points in Washington state, and I can personally tell you that the vast majority are not profiteers, and definitely not “moonshiners.”
“Now patients that grow in collective gardens are ‘moonshiners’ according to the head of NORML!” responded patient advocate Steve Sarich of Cannacare on Facebook Wednesday morning. “Only state-run marijuana is acceptable to NORML?”

All photos by Sharon Letts
Pure Life Wellness is located on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles

By Sharon Letts
On the heels of continued raids by the DEA of four legally run dispensaries in Los Angeles, West L.A. dispensary owner Yamileth Bolanos is pretty much at the end of her Hemp rope, so to speak.
Bolanos, who is founder and owner of Pure Life Wellness, has been at the forefront of cannabis activism in the city of Los Angeles, where recently dispensaries were threatened with closure by city officials.
With the creation of GLACA, the “Greater Los Angeles Cannabis Alliance,” Bolanos, with other longtime dispensary owners, banded together to create their own entity in order to deal with the powers that be, driven by the philosophy that “strength in numbers” matter.
“We founded GLACA in 2006 to help create ordinances on how dispensaries should behave, because the city would not instate ordinances until 2010,” Bolanos said. “Those who were operating safely and were respectful of their neighbors needed a way to differentiate from profiteers who did not care about patient safety, or were otherwise problematic in their behavior.”

Santa Rosa Press Democrat
Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman: “We are, of course, supportive of legitimate medical marijuana here.”
 

Tell me what company you keep and I’ll tell you what you are.
   ~ Miguel de Cervantes, “Don Quixote de la Mancha Part II” (1615)
By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town

Northern California Correspondent
Conventional wisdom for anyone living north of Santa Rosa is that marijuana is an integral component of California’s economy. In the beginning, growers were tolerated by the locals as misfits of society who had migrated north to avoid the world of straight jobs and or had fled to Mendo with the ‘back to the county’ movement to grow their organic beans and fruit.
Venerable local institutions such as the timber and fishing industries were leery of the young freaks with their torn jeans and rusting VW vans. Their fears were soon justified when that first generation found that there were endless acres of hidden land stashed in them there hills.
If a guy could find a secluded patch in the hills that was close to water and had sun, he had the makings of his first clandestine start-up. The Timber giants viewed the encroaching growers as threats to their land, their water, and to the political dominance that they held in NorCal since the mid-19th century. 
By the 1980s, the marijuana industry was entrenched and blooming, much to the chagrin of local law enforcement and community leaders. These former lazy rejects were driving new trucks, sending their kids to school, and buying their veggies at Safeway just like everyone else.  
Thirty years later it is estimated that cannabis industry generates around 13 billion dollars in annual sales. And that’s what is available to count. The timber industry is now a hollow trunk of its former self. The salmon and other fish populations have been so drastically depleted in the last few decades that fishermen can’t rely on their yield from season to season. Many fishing boats on the coast have gone belly up.

Photo by Jack Rikess
The environmental damage of a grow like this is hard to calculate.

​By Jack Rikess

Toke of the Town
Northern California Correspondent

Here’s a story about unreal estate that could only happen behind the Green Curtain.

Only in Mendo, where your business is your own and few questions are asked on a good day, could a story like this happen. I thought only in Mendocino County could three tattooed guys rent 50 acres to legally grow marijuana from a guy who didn’t own the land. That is, until I found out how long this one guy’s been doing it. Now I can only wonder how many more are out there.