To hear Lompoc’s top two public safety officials talk about the legalization of cannabis is like listening to tales about a green-leafed apocalypse.
“People are going to jump the fence and rip the grows; there are going to be fights in backyards and brawls,” Police Chief Pat Walsh said during an Aug. 1 City Council meeting. “We are the big fish when it comes to any kind of drug. They are imbedded in our community, the cartel, … they definitely have California on lockdown, and I’m worried about that.”
Walsh predicted that robberies, violence, and complaints would increase if the city passed an ordinance regulating the commercial sale, cultivation, and manufacturing of marijuana and its byproducts. He also said he was concerned about the impact of normalizing cannabis on children, who he believes the industry will explicitly market to.
Acting Fire Chief Mark Bray referenced two cannabis oil lab fires in Lompoc’s recent history as evidence of the dangers of increased pot cultivation. The fires were caused by a butane extraction technique used to pull oil out of the leaves and stems of marijuana, wreaking extensive structural damage and injuring a firefighter and an extractor.
“One would have to believe that an increase in grow houses would lead to an increase in honey oil production,” Bray told City Council members.
Both officials used statistics from Colorado, a state that legalized weed in 2012, to bolster the claims they made during the City Council hearing about a potential marijuana ordinance. The city’s adhoc committee on marijuana, which met four times between January and May, recommended that council members pass something with “minimal oversight” on marijuana grows, manufacturing, and sales, citing the fact that a majority of Lompoc residents voted to pass the Adult Use of Marijuana Act (Proposition 64) in November 2016 and the potential for a new revenue stream. The council did not discuss specifics and pushed a decision on the issue to an unspecified future meeting, expressing the need to be “fresh” and not tired during the discussion, which would likely take hours.
The comments made by public safety officials sounded like heavy-handed fear-mongering, according to some of the residents who spoke up during the public comment portion of the Aug. 1 hearing. Those residents included former Lompoc narcotics officer Donnie Bumanglag, who said he was concerned that the city’s top cop was telling people things that simply weren’t true. He pleaded with people to do their own research before jumping to conclusions.
“These things that we are trying to implement, we need to recognize them for what they are. … These tickets, they become warrants … that can then lead to a loss of freedom for something benign,” he said during the meeting, referencing the residents’ calls to ban recreational marijuana in town. “I’m a veteran, I’m a former ranger, and I expect that when the state and our constituents vote for something that we get to use those rights as free Americans.”
Chief Walsh responded to criticism by saying it would be silly if he didn’t oppose marijuana.
“The fire chief and I are responsible for the safety of our community and so the barometer I’m looking at is what’s happening in the states that have already legalized marijuana. And what I’m looking at is not good,” he told the Sun on Aug. 15. “I’m talking about for profit, big marijuana, is a bigger mess than big tobacco if you think about it.”
Joe A. Garcia, who founded the Lompoc Cannabis Coalition, told the Sun that every time someone brings up the potential for an increased public safety risk related to legalized marijuana, he feels like they’re making an argument in favor of actually having regulations in place.
“People are operating individually. The cartels are operating and thriving because of the way that we’ve gone about things in our wars against drugs and marijuana,” Garcia said. “It’s time for the city and state to step in and regulate.”
‘Marijuana-related’
Garcia questioned Chief Walsh’s statements regarding an increase in marijuana-related driving offenses in Colorado. Walsh grabbed his data from a September 2016 Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area report called The Legalization of Marijuana in Colorado: The Impact.
Using graphs in a power point presentation as illustration, Walsh said there has been an increase in the number of traffic deaths associated with marijuana. Since legalization in Colorado, he said, that number has jumped by 55 percent. The average number of drivers who tested positive for marijuana per year between 2009 and 2012 was 55, while the number averaged at 85 per year between 2013 and 2015. The report also states that the number of drug-impaired driving cases related to marijuana in Denver increased from 33 in 2013 to 66 in 2014.
The report Walsh used in his presentation is frequently cited by those who speak out against marijuana legalization, including Denver District Attorney Mitchell Morissey. Morissey wrote a letter in 2016 published by the Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana political action committee that urged California voters to reject Proposition 64. In the letter, he claimed that cannabis had fueled a crime increase around Colorado, citing numbers from the trafficking area report as proof.
Fact-checking website Snopes.com rated Morrisey’s allegation as unproven, using this statement made in the report’s introduction as evidence, including: “This report will cite datasets with terms such as ‘marijuana related’ or ‘tested positive for marijuana.’ That does not necessarily prove that marijuana was the cause of the incident.”
Garcia said that marijuana stays in your system for 30 days or longer; therefore, testing positive for pot doesn’t equate to being high. The state of California is currently attempting to come up with a way to test for marijuana impairment more accurately. Garcia added that with the legalization of weed, it makes sense that more people would have the substance in their system, but it could simply mean that they have used marijuana in the days or weeks prior to being tested.
Violence and crime
During Walsh’s Aug. 1 presentation to City Council, he also said that violent crimes were up 46 percent in Colorado and property crimes were up 106 percent, although he didn’t specify where the data came from.
“This doesn’t include the black market stuff that’s going on or the cartel operators that are going on behind the scenes,” Walsh said.
While public consumption citations have increased in Boulder and in Denver, according to information gathered by Walsh, the Sun found a March 2016 report by the Colorado Department of Public Safety that said that the total number of marijuana arrests decreased by 46 percent between 2012 and 2014, from 12,894 to 7,004. The report also states that the total number of marijuana-related court filings declined by 81 percent in Colorado between 2012 and 2015, from 10,340 to 1,954.
According to the same report: Colorado’s property crime rate decreased by 3 percent from 2009 to 2014 and Colorado’s violent crime rate decreased by 6 percent, but Colorado Organized Crime Control Act filings associated with marijuana increased from 10 in 2006 to 40 in 2015.
The Colorado Department of Public Safety notes that these findings should be considered preliminary, rather than indications of trends that will continue into the future.
“Legalization may result in reports of increased use, when it may actually be a function of the decreased stigma and legal consequences regarding use rather than actual changes in use patterns,” the report stated. The impact from reduced stigma and legal consequences make certain trends difficult to assess and will require additional time to measure post-legalization.”
Garcia told the Sun that when it comes to Santa Barbara County, he doesn’t see a pattern or history of increased violence or crimes associated with marijuana. He said the fears peddled by chief Walsh are supersized.
“Some of these things may happen, the possibility will always be there. These things, if anything, point to the need for regulations.” Garcia said. “They believe that there are going to be gun battles in the streets because of cannabis, which is frankly ridiculous.”
Executive Editor Camillia Lanham can be reached at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 17-24, 2017.
