News&Comment

Supervisor’s In Law happy with Weed Pharm. Neighborhoods, not so much

See related story here: Supervisor Gore – Recuse Yourself – SOS Neighborhoods SOSN: As if we didn’t have enough problems, they want to bring in cannabis tourists to their grows in our neighborhoods. Busses in your neighborhoods anyone?A once-controversial 37-acre ranch on the outskirts of Petaluma has kicked off 2021 on a high note. The…
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NEW YEAR RESOLUTION: A TRANSPARENT SONOMA COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

Despite the pandemic, citizens deserve open, transparent government. The Santa Rosa City Council in December voted to approve a transparent – government proposal that has labored through subcommittee and council consideration for six years (Press Democrat, December 12, 2020). The impetus was mass public demonstrations against the shooting of teenager Andy Lopez by a Sonoma…
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2018 Video – Supervisors show strong support for neighborhoods So what happened after that?

April 2018 Cannabis Study Session – Board of Supervisors expressed lots of concern about protecting our rural neighborhoods from pot grows. They sound like a group of neighborhood advocates. Whatever happened after that was a shocking transformation. Below clip summarizes their comments from that hearing most interesting to us: The 2 min version: Full meeting:…
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Press Democrat Marijuana

Just to be clear, the marijuana advocacy site, The Emerald Report, https://www.emeraldreport.com/ was started by the Press Democrat newspaper. Darius Anderson, an owner of the Press Democrat and the Sonoma paper, represents the pot industry (registered lobbyist for CannaCraft) and may very well be personally invested in some of the very grows ruining your neighborhood. His brother…
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How to Solve Cannabis’ Water Problem

“In June of 2015, BioScience published a research paper on the sustainability of cannabis. Naturally, one of the areas of analysis was water consumption. They found that an estimated 22 liters of water or more are consumed per plant per day during the June-to-October growing season. Applying this number to documented planting densities for greenhouses…
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Wine vs. weed in Napa Valley (Politico)

Grape growers worry that pot won’t pair well with the terroir they have spent a century and a half cultivating. “The report cites marijuana’s water demand — it estimates an acre of cannabis uses 1.1 million gallons per year, compared to 65,000-162,000 gallons per acre of wine grapes — and warns that a proposed 500-foot…
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From the field: We have slept with baseball bats and fire extinguishers in our locked master bedroom for 2-1/2 years

In 2016, we stood here in these chambers and gave our testimony about one of the most unexpected and difficult times we have endured in our life – living next to a commercial cannabis cultivation operation. During that time, we shared our concerns about ground and well water contamination; the depreciation and undesirability of our…
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From the field: I lived near a pot farm

I lived near a pot farm. The nearest greenhouse was less than 100 yards from my front door. Due to the dangerous risks this put on our family, we vacated our home in a rural residential area of Penngrove and moved to Richmond for 6 weeks. We returned to our home after the pot was…
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They call us NIMBY’s

Dear cannabis lobby, Calling your opposition NIMBYs is fun and easy! It’s a great way to erase myriad valid arguments against commercial pot production in rural neighborhoods. Just throw a label on them and BAM everything gets simple. They’re just NIMBYs. Damn clueless, selfish NIMBYs trying to stop progress. They just don’t get how good…
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How state marijuana legalization became a boon for corruption (Politico)

By making local officials the gatekeepers for million-dollar businesses, states created a breeding ground for bribery and favoritism. Jasiel Correia’s star was rising. The son of Cape Verdean immigrants in the working-class Massachusetts port city of Fall River — famed as the home of Lizzie Borden — Correia was a home-grown prodigy. At 23, he…
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