Take 30 seconds to protect your loved ones, your property value, and your community by joining over 500 Sonoma Valley citizens and businesses – including the Sonoma Unified School District and the Sonoma Chamber of Commerce – by signing the online petition opposing medical marijuana dispensaries (MMDs) in Sonoma Valley. Individuals who’ve signed this online petition are not necessarily opposed to legalization or to medical marijuana. The issue is how medical marijuana is dispensed.
Research shows that MMDs bring (Sources verified – copy into browser: http://goo.gl/aL0vT):
Increased crime, violence and gang activity (Sources 1, 2, 3)
More drugs in our schools (4, 2)
Property value decline and blight (5, 2)
Peripheral sales of illegal drugs, including meth and cocaine (6a, 6b, 15)
Over-usage of our already reduced police and emergency services (1, 2)
Let’s examine the facts:
Sonoma Valley patients who need medical marijuana are already well-served. Ten companies deliver marijuana to the front door of any Sonoma Valley card holder; four of these offer free delivery (7). Further, a full MMD (Valley of the Moon Cooperative, and, possibly, Sonoma MMJ Cooperative) is only 12 minutes from the Springs; this is the same distance it takes to drive from the west side of Sonoma (Hanna Boys Center) to the east side (Friedmans).
In California alone (the birthplace of MMDs), bans or temporary bans are now in 244 cities and 26 entire counties (8). If MMDs are as harmless as proponents claim or worth the small tax revenue, why would scores of cities and counties go through the exorbitant cost and harrowing effort required to reverse approved MMDs? Our smart neighbors, including Petaluma, Windsor, Cotati and Rohnert Park have bans. Sacramento County has bans in unincorporated areas similar to the Springs.
The real motive for investors wanting to bring a MMD to Sonoma is greed. Just one Santa Rosa dispensary reported profit of $1.33 million in a single year! (9, 10). Proposition 215 (which allows medical marijuana for serious conditions like cancer, glaucoma and AIDs) created unintended consequences: while there are some cases of real need for medical marijuana, only 2 percent (6a) of dispensary patrons have these serious conditions.
Despite claims of tax benefits, MMDs actually drain tax dollars through indirect costs such as overuse of already scarce police and emergency services (11, 12, 13, 14, 3). The Sonoma Valley Chamber of Commerce carefully weighed the economic benefits/costs of MMDs and concluded, “The sales tax captured by MMDs is not a significant source of revenue” (15). And remember, 270 budget-pressed California cities/counties did their own analysis and said “no thanks” to the purported tax benefit.
Further, the very emergency services that you are helping to fund through your taxes will be less available to you. Where MMDs are located, police are inundated responding to pot-related crime (1, 2, 3). And since grow houses proliferate wherever MMDs are located, fire fighters are busy responding to fire hazards caused by the heat lamps in grow houses (16). Incidentally, grow houses go under the radar by installing solar and water-catch systems designed to obfuscate the sharp increase in utility usage (17). Of course, much solar/water conservation is innocent and laudable.
A dispensary in the Springs will hurt the City of Sonoma, and vice-versa, so this is a petition everyone needs to sign. If you like the Pipe Pirates vibe, just wait until a dispensary bullies itself into the Springs. You’ll see a windfall of drug-related stores and their customers up and down the Highway 12 corridor. Our tourists will be very impressed, but not in the way we’re hoping for. In turn, your property values will decrease (5, 2). But more importantly, we’ll lose our sweet, wholesome community that still has a bit of small-town camaraderie.
You voted to legalize marijuana? So did many of us who signed this petition. The issue here is how marijuana is dispensed (pharmacies are good).
Hopefully, Supervisor Valerie Brown will listen and advocate inserting simple language in our county MMD ordinance such as “MMDs are prohibited in the Sonoma Springs, with boundaries already defined by the Springs Redevelopment Advisory Committee.” It’s even easier for the Sonoma City Council to follow 244 California cities and adopt a ban. The path is simple – and your petition signature and emails are vital.
This is our community. We have the right and responsibility to define it. If you agree, offer a moment to: 1) Sign the petition at thepetitionsite.com/1/SonomaNoMmd (last md must be lower case) and 2) Email a short statement opposing MMDs in Sonoma Valley to Supervisor Brown, Assemblyman Huffman, Permit & Resource Department, Sonoma City Council, and our group (vbrown@sonoma-county.org, Tisha.Simpson@asm.ca.gov, PPARKINS@sonoma-county.org, cityhall@sonomacity.org, care@sonic.net).
Members of Vision for a Safe & Wholesome Sonoma Valley
There is a time honored old saying: figures lie and liars figure. The people who are urging you to sign this petition don’t even sign their names….they just hide behind a meritorious sounding marching-and-chowder type society and quote a bunch of numbers which could be whole parsecs from the truth. They were handing us almost verbatim this same bravo sierra just about the time that Stan Pappas was opening the doors to his Pipe Pirates store and predicting that the entire planet was going to cave in on itself as a result.
I always question statistics like those quoted by these moral high horse types….we have been fed more than enough such propaganda by law enforcement and their idolator, David Bollin, concerning drinking and driving and they repeat to us like a cracked record that “half of all fatal traffic accidents are alcohol related”—-yes, and have you ever stopped to consider how an “alcohol related” accident is defined? The Cal State Highway Dept. defines an “alcohol related accident” as a collision involving at least one automobile and an alcoholic beverage container is located within fifty feet of the point of initial impact…..that container can be empty, full or any stage intermediate….it can be home to a colony of ants and have been sitting there for the last five years…doesn’t make a damn, it is the star mute witness that magically turns the accident into an “alcohol related” one.
According to none other than the U.S. Dept. of Labor, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) hasn’t budged a gnat’s hair in the past two years. Now if you are gullible and vacuous enough to believe that, then you are a choice target for the anti-pot NIMBY crowd above who are Hell bent on keeping a dispensary out of the Springs no matter how many overcooked “statistics” they have to ladle into your skull to do it. As with everything else in this country now, FOLLOW THE MONEY: these “Visioneers” have made it plain that they are sweating bullets over their own property values and the “image” of their precious Boyes Hot Springs while completely oblivious of the fact that, whether they or anyone else likes it or not, the Boyes has long since become a barrio and a Crack Central and has lost all of whatever charm it may have once had much of this largely thanks to the Sonoma County Board of Stuporvisors and CalTrans and the way they senselessly wasted nine months on the tax slaves’ dime artlessly butchering up the streets and sidewalks in and around the Highway 12 c0rridor. Boyes Hot Springs had alrteady achieved the status of a distinct eyesore and visual blight long before Stan Pappus even considered opening his head shop there so don’t even think of trying to wipe it off on him or his store …and don’t try to con any intelligent person into falling for your predictions that a pot dispensary would cause the bottom to drop out of a place that has already hit bottom.
Those of us who live between Sonoma Proper and the Boyes Hot Springs Area, spend many Monday Mornings cleaning up the waste left from those who travel between the two area’s. There’s a dealer on Verano Ave who’s traffic is compared to Taco Bell on late night Business and then there are the number of thefts that occur because of Those who are drunk or high need something to do when they are traveling. by the time the local authorty is called the criminal is usually gone.
Opening a medical marijuana dispensaries is only going to bring problems. If people choose to smoke their weed and then not be held accountable for their actions then I should be able to carry a loaded weapon to defend my home and family from those who choose to enter my property and inflict damages.
If that sounds too graphic, maybe the local residents should consider that most of the acts of larceny in the valley are to pay for illegal drugs accordingly to the Sonoma Valley Sheriffs who reported so in the reasons people gave for stealing in the first place.
I signed the petition and I publish my name. Thanks for publishing and spreading the word. The entire Sonoma Valley is too densely populated and children in close proximity and MMD’s should therefore me declared as unsuitable and prohibited in our area.
The City Council needs to address the concerns of the population and stop hiding behind the legal opinion that “because we don’t provide for it it cannot be done” because these MMD’s will continue to try to sneak in, open there doors illegally like the one did in The Springs in December, etc. Probing will continue unless we take action.
The Pipe Shops (Pipe Pirates) are also attracting illicit activity and also should be included in the ban. Nowhere in Sonoma Valley are there appropriate locations for marijuana pipe stores, nor MMD’s. They are one in the same and unsuitable for Sonoma Valley.