cannabisnews.com: Craver Agrees Pot Smells Bad





Craver Agrees Pot Smells Bad
Posted by CN Staff on September 16, 2004 at 12:29:43 PT
By Mark Hedges, The Daily Journal
Source: Ukiah Daily Journal 
County Air Quality director Dean Wolbach told The Daily Journal last week complaints about stinky pot plants are on the increase.While Sheriff Tony Craver has received a lot of criticism for developing a registration system to better keep tabs of what is a "legal" medical marijuana garden as prescribed by Proposition 215, he agreed with Wolbach that ripe pot plants "stink like hell."
"I hate it; it's obnoxious," he said of the olfactory potency of weed. "We receive a great many complaints."But Craver said he has to simply tell people he has "no authority to regulate" pot odors."There's nothing I can do about it," he said. "The law itself is written in such a way that there's no regulation as to when and where people can grow it."Craver said odor is not the only confusing problem with medical pot gardens. "We have gardens growing in close proximity to school yards," he said, "where on the one hand the law says you can't have controlled substances within 1,000 feet of a school ground, but if it's classified as medicine it's a different situation."It's going to remain this way until something happens and Congress comes along and takes a different view and decides if it can be used as medicine with regulations established for retail sale and the pharmacies handle it just like any other controlled drug, like Vicodin," Craver said."On the one hand, the federal government is saying pot is a Type 1 drug, which is totally illegal, and it doesn't recognize it as any legal entity with medical value, and yet independent states are coming along saying they recognize it and it has value."Craver said politically this makes it difficult for Sacramento to come up with a set of regulations to clarify the process of growing medical marijuana."Right now it's totally unregulated," he said. "Basically, it boils down to the discretion of individual counties."While Craver said he doesn't find the odor of pot plants pleasing, he said the issue is another example of the adage: "One man's noise is another man's music.""I grew up on a dairy ranch, and every day I went to school smelling like cow manure," he laughed. "I'm not the one to come up with a solution for this problem. The answer is for Congress to take a different point of view on this thing...so that we can have unbiased, comprehensive research in terms of whether pot does have medical value."Craver said it doesn't help when our nation has drug czars saying a person "becomes an ax murderer with one hit" of marijuana."Somewhere in between is where the truth lies," Craver said. "Unfortunately we may never find out."In the meantime, Craver said law enforcement in the county is "sick to death dealing" with pot garden problems.As for the current situation, Craver said he thinks the public was sold a misrepresentation."A lot of people are making a lot of money selling marijuana for recreational purposes under the disguise of selling healing herbs," he said, "and they're not paying taxes."Whereas people feel sympathy for a terminally-ill person who smokes marijuana in order to eat, Craver said he felt the fact that 18-year-old kids are getting prescriptions for medical marijuana for "nervous leg disorder" is not the same thing.As for the county's marijuana registration program, Craver said law enforcement had been "frustrated about not having any kind of comprehensive way to authenticate somebody's claim for legitimacy through Prop. 215."The issue came up and I said, Well, what we'll do is establish and maintain an effective registry of folks who want to voluntarily preregister with us so we're able to authenticate their ability to have it,'" Craver said. "I feel strongly about the Fourth Amendment and its protection against unreasonable search and seizure." Source: Ukiah Daily Journal (CA)Author: Mark Hedges, The Daily JournalPublished: Thursday, September 16, 2004Copyright: 2004 Ukiah Daily JournalContact: udj pacific.netWebsite: http://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/Related Articles & Web Site:Medicinal Cannabis Research Linkshttp://freedomtoexhale.com/research.htmPot Growers Need To Be Sensitivehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19497.shtmlPungent Pot Causing Stink in Mendocino Countyhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19492.shtmlPot Odors Wafting in Valleyhttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread19470.shtml 
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Comment #1 posted by Max Flowers on September 16, 2004 at 17:39:59 PT
18 year old "kids" eh?
If an 18 year old is old enough to join the military and go and die fighting in a foreign country, then he/she is old enough to have his or her physician's recommendation respected by all concerned---no matter what the claimed malady is.
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