Be careful of wishes
Anti-maskers Remedy?
Last week I told you about a group calling itself “The Mendocino Patriots” who are staging no mask, in-your-face protests in Ukiah stores that require customers to wear C-19 masks.
These “Patriots” are opposed to the state and county’s health orders mandating “universal masking” in “all indoor public settings.”
A reader sent me an email suggesting that all anti-maskers and anti-vaxers should “be banned from receiving hospital care if they contract Covid since they most likely are responsible for spreading the Pandemic to others who are following the rules.”
What do you think, is that what’s called poetic justice?
Or is it a case of desperate times call for desperate measures?
Seriously, most anti-vaxers who end up in the hospital with C-19 or a variant, convert quickly to true believer status and urge others not to follow their regretful example, and go get the Jab.
Be careful of weed wishes
Hang on a second while I tune up the world’s smallest violin so I can play the world’s smallest but saddest tune.
This sonata is dedicated to all the giant pot growers and corporations who’ve been issuing PR statements, letters-to-the-editor, Op-ed pieces, and multi-media platform propaganda regarding their imminent demise because of alleged Draconian regulatory over-reach of state and local Weed Ordinances.
The Mr. and Ms Bigs of the pot industry are now demanding that state and local ganja officials send in the cavalry to rescue them because as Flo Kana execs announced recently, “We’re Not Going to Take It Any More.”
What Flo Kana is not going to take anymore, among other things, is paying their taxes under state and local pot ordinances.
They say they’re going broke, they’re downsizing and retrenching, all due to the monopolistic economic influences of the evil illegal black market which deals exclusively with tax-free weed.
Ipso-facto, the Bigs need to be unburdened of their over-burdened tax burden.
As Sonoma County-based Cannacraft, one of the largest cannabis businesses in the North Bay, put it in an opinion piece this past week, “It stinks to be in the cannabis industry in California right now. We aren’t just speaking metaphorically either. Four years after cannabis advocates and workers celebrated the opening of the largest legal recreational marijuana market in the world, misguided licensing and taxation policies have created an emporium of dysfunction. Today, hundreds of California cannabis farmers are choosing to let crops rot in the fields rather than risk a money-losing harvest or returning to the illicit market.”
OK, I’m going to keep this real short.
Here’s what you need to know. All of what follows is what I’ve written and spoken about starting five years ago when the state and local governments initiated regulating cannabis.
State and local governments were motivated to enact pot ordinances because of the lure of easy money, i.e. greed, in the form of taxes and fees.
Growers were motivated by the lure of easy money, i.e. greed, in the form of cash revenue.
As I’ve said for many years to all the folks who clamored for legalization of marijuana, be careful of what you wish for. Because with legalization comes regulation, and with regulation comes taxes, code enforcement, licensing, inspections, and ramped up scrutiny from regulatory and enforcement agencies.
And they’re now discovering that the money is not so easily earned and it also comes with all kinds of consequences, including the unintended kind. For example, the county’s cannabis ordinance experiment brought in, and continues to bring in, unwanted outsiders, rogue growers, cartels, murderous violence, and the environmental degradation persists to the degree that the North Coast Water Board issued an emergency finding that our area is “inundated” with marijuana and watersheds and water sources are seriously degraded.
These are the basics of any regulatory scheme and framework: There is a cohesive system of regulations and the means to enforce them. They fit like hand and glove. You can’t have one without the other. Yet, that has been the very situation this county has been in since the cannabis ordinance was enacted nearly five years ago. The hand and the glove have never fit.
Economically speaking, without enforcement over-production of product occurs resulting in people and companies can’t move the product to the so-called legal market. That scenario leaves only one viable alternative. If you want to pay your bills and survive in some fashion, you access the black market.
Assuming this county would ever get serious about enforcement, I’ve estimated it would take five years to clean up all the illegal grows.
As you’ll find out in a second, it appears my clean-up estimate could be way off the mark,
Militating against that ever occurring is the county just doesn’t have the appropriate resources, funding or “can do” political will to administer and enforce any cannabis ordinance.
There’s also another prodigious fly-in-the-ointment regarding the likelihood of establishing a feasible, workable weed ordinance.
Just recently Mendocino County Sheriff Matt Kendall told the Louisville Courier Journal there are as many as 10,000 illegal grows in his county. He said he tries to target the worst 100, which is all his small force can handle in a year.
“I’m fighting a dragon with a needle,” Kendall said.
Based on Kendall’s estimate of targeting 100 grows a year out of a total of 10,000 illegal sites, it’ll only take 100 years to get the job done.
Now that sounds like a workable plan.
Don’t forget, when it comes to weed legalization, be careful what you wish for.