Pot legalization measure gets mixed reaction

An effort to put recreational marijuana on next year’s ballot in California was greeted with mixed reactions in Merced County.

An initiative to place the Adult Use of Marijuana Act on the 2016 ballot was filed Monday with the California secretary of state’s office.

Susan Bouscaren, president of Jack’s Greenhouse Association, a delivery service co-op that serves the Merced area, said now is the time to push to add California to the list of states where recreational pot is legal.

The state of California can use Washington, Oregon and Colorado as examples for regulating recreational marijuana use, Bouscaren said.

Bouscaren said her services cater to medical marijuana users such as cancer patients, people with chronic pain and veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. Legalizing recreational marijuana, she said, would help clear a lot of the gray areas among medical marijuana cooperatives and dispensaries in the state.

Clarity and answers regarding transportation issues and protection from the black market, for example, could benefit associations such as hers, she said.

If recreational use were to get the green light in next year’s elections, Jack’s Greenhouse would participate.

“We would go all the way,” she said. “Of course, it all needs to be done responsibly.”

The measure would allow adults 21 and older to buy an ounce of marijuana and marijuana-infused products at licensed retail outlets and also allow individuals to grow up to six pot plants for personal recreational use.

The new recreational market and the state’s existing medical marijuana industry would be regulated through the California Department of Consumer Affairs, and the state would impose the same 15 percent excise tax on medical and recreational marijuana.

Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke has long opposed recreational marijuana and been critical of medical marijuana laws, which he says create too many issues for law enforcement. Legalized marijuana, he said, would further burden his already short-staffed office and law enforcement agencies across the state.

“There are a lot of things that can go wrong,” Warnke said. “People grow it, people steal it, people get shot over it.”

Warnke pointed to a recent homicide in the Beachwood-Franklin area of Merced that investigators believe was sparked by a dispute over marijuana. Warnke said he doesn’t believe legalizing marijuana would curtail such violence.

“I don’t believe that for a minute. You’ll have more people wanting to use it and that will mean more people wanting to sell it,” he said. “The problem comes from the people wanting to sell it. That’s where the violence comes in, not the people just using it.”

Warnke said he understands measures to legalize recreational marijuana usually have a lot of support, but in general communities still lack control to make regulation work, he said.

“There are regulation issues that these supporters have not given enough thought to – driving under the influence, for example,” he said. “You test positive for marijuana use for many days after you smoke. If you get pulled over and test positive, are you under the influence or not? How are we going to regulate that? It needs a lot more thought.”

Lakisha Jenkins, owner of Kiona’s Farm’acy in downtown Merced, said she believes more education and research on the socioeconomic impacts of legalizing recreational pot are needed. Her holistic health center sells more than 500 variety of herbs and organic produce, including medical marijuana, she said.

“For me, one of the biggest concerns is that we are already scarce in resources,” she said, “and we don’t want to see an influx of people moving to California because they’ll see it as some sort of mecca.”

If such a measure were to pass in California, her shop would not participate because her business is strictly for health purposes, she said.

The campaign is being backed by former Facebook and Napster co-founder Sean Parker.

It is reported that other potential donors who have expressed interest in bankrolling the work to qualify the measure for the ballot and to mount a multimillion-dollar election campaign include a political action committee founded by the family of the late Progressive Insurance executive Peter Lewis; some members of the Chicago family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain; and Justin Hartfield, chief executive of online marijuana directory WeedMaps.

This story was originally published November 3, 2015 at 6:45 PM with the headline "Pot legalization measure gets mixed reaction."