You smell that? No, I don’t think it’s a pack of skunks, it’s something else… could it be, Santa Barbara County’s new recreational marijuana regulations?
The County Board of Supervisors’ Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Cannabis Operations in Santa Barbara County announced how the cannabis industry will roll out in Santa Barbara County on June 30. Supervisors Steve Lavagnino and Das Williams were there along with staff from the County’s Executive Office, Agricultural Commissioner, District Attorney, Planning and Development, Public Health/Environmental Health, and the Sheriff’s Office.
Talk about a who’s who of county government! It also illustrates what a multifaceted issue recreational cannabis is: It’s farming and agriculture, but it’s also a controlled substance. It concerns water rights and land use, but there’s also brick and mortar pot shops to consider.
But for an agricultural county that’s still in severe drought, weed can come across like a foreign invader, sucking up precious water reserves just so stoners can puff and pass. What about the wine grapes? What about the strawberries? What about the broccoli? What about the flowers?
Well, isn’t weed technically a flower?
Air pollution was another concern. I mean, some locals don’t need to imagine what it’s like living next to a field of pot plants. They know full well the pungency of a grow operation. And if you don’t smoke pot, the smell of it is not awesome, no matter what potheads say. It’s kinda like cigarettes—to everyone who doesn’t partake, it just stinks.
But neither stinks quite as much as a certain stretch of Nipomo lately. Anyone else caught a whiff of that ungodly, putrid stench off Highway 101 just between the Highway 166 and Tefft exits? It’s pretty hard to miss the smell of treated sewage when it smacks you in the face.
I assumed, wrongly, that it had something to do with cows or livestock, but nope, it was just human excrement treated by the Nipomo Community Service District’s Southland Wastewater Treatment Facility. How dare I assume cows were responsible for such a stench, some ranchers are probably thinking now, so I offer my bovine brothers and sisters a preemptive apology—It’s true, nobody stinks it up quite like people do.
That’s not to say that some of our local wildlife can’t smell it up either. Ask some residents of Buellton who’ve been dealing with some fallout in the rural paradise, not from pot plants or wastewater treatment, but raccoons, coyotes, and other beasts. The Buellton City Council is trying to do something about the problem by putting a ban on feeding wildlife.
One resident saw their air vents occupied by a mother raccoon and her brood. Ah, the smell of a raccoon den pumped into every room of your home, now that’s rural living!
If wildlife run rampant is that big of a problem in Buellton, I have to wonder: Would Buellton residents prefer the smell of a roving band of skunks or a big field of ripe weed? Or could they even tell the difference?
The Canary can always smell the difference between a skunk and a doobie. Send your thoughts to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 6-13, 2017.