SHASTA COUNTY ON RIGHT TRACK WITH POT LIMITS

Marijuana growing is deeply controversial - with advocates of
"medicinal" cannabis sometimes angrily asserting their rights while
neighbors of rural pot gardens are increasingly fed up with how the
Green Rush has changed their peaceful country roads in the past few years.

Given that background, it's hard to imagine that Shasta County's
planners have every detail precisely right as they bring their first
draft of a medical-marijuana ordinance to the county's Planning
Commission, which will take up the issue this afternoon. (The meeting
is in the supervisors' chambers at 2 p.m.)

But the county is emphatically on the right track in the basic
framework of its proposals, especially when it comes to restricting
growing in residential areas.

The county's draft ordinance would allow marijuana to be grown only
by a patient or primary caregiver who actually lives on a property -
thus restricting the practice of stacking up marijuana
recommendations from purported patients here, there and everywhere
and using them to legally plant large and lucrative gardens.

The ordinance would also restrict the area devoted to marijuana -
scaling up with the size of the parcel. One-acre lots would be capped
at 60 square feet, while 20-acre parcels could have as much as 200 square feet.

The rules would further require setbacks from neighbors' homes or
property lines and a 1,000-foot "no grow" buffer around schools,
parks, churches, libraries and or any other "youth-oriented facility."

Those are tight limits but seemingly reasonable ones that will ensure
neighborhoods in the unincorporated county maintain their character.
People move to such areas precisely to enjoy the elbow room of rural
life, which includes the ability to use your property without having
to worry much about what the neighbors over the fence might think.
From growers' perspective, that can make it a perfect place.

But converting a property - fence line to fence line - into a
quasi-legal pot farm goes much too far.

Proposition 215 users have every right under California law to use
marijuana safely - and to grow it. That doesn't mean they have the
right to drag down whole neighborhoods.