Thomas Fuller

It’s been a little more than a year since California legalized marijuana — the largest such experiment in the United States — but law enforcement officials say the unlicensed, illegal market is still thriving and in some areas has even expanded.

“There’s a lot of money to be made in the black market,” said Mendocino County Sheriff Thomas Allman, whose deputies seized cannabis oil worth more than $5 million in early April.

Legalization, Allman said, “certainly didn’t put cops out of work.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has declared that illegal grows in Northern California “are getting worse, not better” and two months ago redeployed a contingent of National Guard troops stationed on the border with Mexico to go after illegal cannabis farms instead.

Conscious of the consequences that the war on drugs had on black and Latino communities, cities like Los Angeles say they are wary of using criminal enforcement measures to police the illegal market and are unsure how to navigate this uncharted era.

California gives cities wide latitude to regulate cannabis, resulting in a confusing patchwork of regulations. Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego have laws allowing cannabis businesses, but most smaller cities and towns in the state do not — 80% of California’s nearly 500 municipalities do not allow retail marijuana businesses.

But the more fundamental reason for the strength of the black market in California — and what sets the state apart from others — is the huge surplus of pot. Since medical marijuana was made legal in California more than two decades ago, the cannabis industry flourished with minimal oversight. Now many cannabis businesses are reluctant to go through the cumbersome and costly process to obtain the licenses that became mandatory last year.

Of the roughly 14 million pounds of marijuana grown in California annually, only a fraction — less than 20% — is consumed in California. The rest seeps out across the country illicitly, through trafficking routes that have existed for decades.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/us/marijuana-california-legalization.html" id="186d3e1a-120c-3776-ab6d-083e6f1a3df2">The New York Times</a>.

COSTA MESA, Calif. — In the forests of Northern California, raids by law enforcement officials continue to uncover illicit marijuana farms. In Southern California, hundreds of illegal delivery services and pot dispensaries, some of them registered as churches, serve a steady stream of customers. And in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, the sheriff’s office recently raided an illegal cannabis production facility that was processing 500 pounds of marijuana a day.

Illicit Pot Sales Boom in California Despite Legalization

Stepped-up enforcement comes with a certain measure of irony — legalization was meant to open a new chapter for the state, free from the legacy of heavy policing and incarceration for minor infractions. Instead, there are new calls for a crackdown on illegal selling.

The struggles of the licensed pot market in California are distinct from the experience of other states that have legalized cannabis in recent years. Sales in Colorado, Oregon and Washington grew well above 50 percent for each of the first three years of legalization, although Oregon now also has a large glut of pot.

But no other state has an illegal market on the scale of California’s, and those illicit sales are cannibalizing the revenue of licensed businesses and, in some cases, experts say, forcing them out of business.

Entrepreneurs in the industry, which spent decades evading the law, are now turning to the law to demand the prosecution of unlicensed pot businesses.

“We are the taxpayers — no one else should be operating,” said Robert Taft, whose licensed cannabis business in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, has seen sales drop in recent months.

“This is starting to get ridiculous,” he said of the illegal pot shops, including nearby businesses that list themselves as churches and advertise marijuana as a kind of sacrament. “It’s almost like the state is setting itself up to lose.”

California gives cities wide latitude to regulate cannabis, resulting in a confusing patchwork of regulations. Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego have laws allowing cannabis businesses, but most smaller cities and towns in the state do not — 80% of California’s nearly 500 municipalities do not allow retail marijuana businesses. The ballot measure legalizing recreational marijuana passed in 2016 with 57% approval, but that relatively broad support has not translated to the local level. Cities like Compton or Laguna Beach decisively rejected allowing pot shops.

Regulators cite this tepid embrace by California municipalities as one of many reasons for the state’s persistent and pervasive illegal market. Only 620 cannabis shops have been licensed in California so far. Colorado, with a population one-sixth the size of California, has 562 licensed recreational marijuana stores.

Of the roughly 14 million pounds of marijuana grown in California annually, only a fraction — less than 20% according to state estimates and a private research firm — is consumed in California. The rest seeps out across the country illicitly, through the mail, express delivery services, private vehicles and small aircraft that ply trafficking routes that have existed for decades.

This illicit trade has been strengthened by the increasing popularity of vaping, cannabis-infused candies, tinctures and other derivative products. Vape cartridges are much easier to carry and conceal than bags of raw cannabis. And the monetary incentives of trafficking also remain powerful: The price of cannabis products in places like Illinois, New York or Connecticut are typically many times higher than in California.

The state’s illicit cannabis exports appear to be increasing even now, well into California’s second year of legalization. New Frontier Data, a data research company that specializes in cannabis, calculates that high demand and more advanced growing techniques will contribute to approximately half a million pounds more illicit cannabis this year compared with 2018.

The federal government still considers marijuana illegal, and the Drug Enforcement Administration says it still investigates marijuana-related crimes. But a spokesman, Rusty Payne, said the agency has a bigger crisis to attend to.

“We’ve got our hands full with the opioid epidemic to be honest,” Payne said.

In wildland areas, seizures of illicit pot by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife more than doubled in 2018, the first year that recreational cannabis was legal.

The department destroyed 1.6 million marijuana plants in 2018, up from 700,000 in 2017 and 800,000 the year before — all of them illegally grown.

“There’s a subset of people who are just refusing to get into the process,” said Nathaniel Arnold, the department’s deputy chief of enforcement.

The Bureau of Cannabis Control, the agency charged with regulating marijuana in the state, has received about 7,500 complaints, most of them about illegal operations, and has sent out more than 3,000 letters ordering illegal businesses to shut down.

“It’s only a matter of time before we start making a dent in the illegal market,” said Alex Traverso, a spokesman for the agency, who acknowledged there were probably more illegal shops in Los Angeles alone than licensed shops in the entire state.

Cat Packer, executive director of the Department of Cannabis Regulation in Los Angeles, said that even when illicit businesses were shut down, they often soon reappeared.

“It’s been a game of whack-a-mole in the city of Los Angeles,” she said.

But Packer also said the city was mindful that criminal enforcement in the past had disproportionately targeted people of color.

The city is seeking to find an effective enforcement policy that does not mimic the criminal interdiction policies of the past, Packer said. One strategy is to turn off water and power services to noncompliant businesses.

“We can’t do Drug War 2.0,” she said.

Taft, the cannabis entrepreneur, has sent 450 complaints to the Bureau of Cannabis Control and is unapologetic about his calls for an aggressive approach to illegal shops, which he says is the only way that California’s giant experiment will work.

His dispensary pays a cumulative state and local tax rate of 32.25%. Unlicensed shops pay no tax.

One of Taft’s biggest complaints is about Weedmaps, a phone app that allows users to locate marijuana businesses nearby, both licensed and illegal.

In February 2018, the Bureau of Cannabis Control sent a letter to Weedmaps saying the company was aiding and abetting illicit businesses and ordering it to “immediately cease all activity that violates state cannabis laws.”

Weedmaps replied that it was a technology company and not under the jurisdiction of the bureau. More than a year later, the company still lists hundreds of unlicensed shops.

Earlier this year, Taft resigned as a board member of the Santa Ana Cannabis Association because half the members, he said, were selling illegally and using legalization as a “shield.”

“They are playing both sides of the market,” he said.

On a recent weekday morning, Taft called the Bureau of Cannabis Control to lodge a complaint against his neighbor, a cannabis business that he said did not appear on the list of licensed businesses.

“We are being pillaged by these people,” he said. “My lawyers are ready to launch rockets!”

This June will mark the 75th anniversary of D-Day, when 160,000 Allied troops swarmed onto the beaches of Normandy in an invasion that would ultimately lead to the liberation of Europe from the Nazis.

The region is preparing for millions of visitors, since it’s likely to be the last major commemoration of the battle attended by survivors. Jake Larson is among those getting ready to make the emotional journey.

Larson, a World War II veteran who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, wears a pin on his hat with the shield and motto of his military regiment, “To the last man.”

For Larson, 96, the phrase has never been more meaningful.

“I am the last man,” he said Tuesday afternoon at his home, an old wood-clad farmhouse in Martinez.

Larson is the last surviving member of his company, a unit that stormed Omaha Beach and suffered terrible losses.

He says he often asks himself: Why me? How did he survive when so many thousands did not?

“I never thought I’d be alive 75 years later,” he said. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”

He remembers jumping off his landing craft into frigid water up to his neck, the incessant explosions, the German machine-gunners raking the beach with bullets. The image that comes back to him again and again is hiding behind a pile of sand and asking a fellow soldier if he had any dry matches to light a cigarette.

“I looked again, and there was no head under the helmet,” Larson said. “I thank that guy today. In that instant I had the ability to get up and run.”

More than 9,000 crosses and Stars of David are arrayed with perfect geometry at the arresting cemetery in Normandy that commemorates the American dead.

Larson says he has returned to France only in his mind since the war. His modest salary as a technician at a printing business in Berkeley never allowed him the luxury.

But this June he is flying from Oakland to Paris with his son thanks to an online fundraising campaign by two women, Linda Linnell and Angela Larsen, who met Larson at a coffee shop in Martinez.

“We gave him the check, and he was so touched,” Linnell said. “He said, ‘I can’t believe people would donate to me — they don’t even know me.’ ”

Larson is writing a memoir, and he calls the trip to France the last chapter.

“It’s unbelievable to this little old farm boy from Hope, Minnesota,” he said. “To me I’m in heaven.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/us/san-jose-sharks-normandy-la-measles.html" id="060d6ce2-2339-34b1-a619-6fe070a4bf69">The New York Times</a>.

(California Today)

D-Day Veteran to Return to Normandy for First Time in 75 Years

One year after the start of recreational sales, they are still just promises.

California’s experiment in legalization is mired by debates over regulation and hamstrung by cities and towns that do not want cannabis businesses on their streets.

California was the sixth state to introduce the sale of recreational marijuana — Alaska, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington paved the way — but the enormous size of the market led to predictions of soaring legal cannabis sales.

Instead, sales fell. Around $2.5 billion of legal cannabis was sold in California in 2018, half a billion dollars less than in 2017, when only medical marijuana was legal, according to GreenEdge, a sales tracking company.

“There are definitely days that I think that legalization has been a failure,” said Lynda Hopkins, who is on the board of supervisors in Sonoma County, which took a lead in licensing marijuana businesses but became embroiled in disputes over regulations and taxes, not to mention angry residents who did not want cannabis grown in their neighborhoods.

The easy part of legalization was persuading people to vote for it, industry analysts say. The hard part, now that it’s legal, is persuading people to stop buying from the black market.

In Colorado and Washington, licensed sales soared after legalization. One crucial difference with California is its massive surplus — the state produces far more pot than it can consume.

The tons of extra cannabis continue to leach out across the country into states where it is legal.

“The bottom line is that there’s always been a robust illicit market in California — and it’s still there,” said Tom Adams of BDS Analytics, which tracks the cannabis market. “Regulators ignored that and thought they could go straight into an incredibly strict and high-tax environment.”

The most recent official estimates of California’s cannabis production, a report published a year ago by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, showed the state producing as much as 15.5 million pounds of cannabis and consuming just 2.5 million pounds.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/us/buying-legal-weed-in-california.html" id="1ab72e3d-cbcf-3bfb-a1cb-10949975db39">The New York Times</a>.

Now for the Hard Part: Getting Californians to Buy Legal Weed

SAN FRANCISCO — A billion dollars of tax revenue, the taming of the black market, the convenience of retail cannabis stores throughout the state — these were some of the promises made by proponents of marijuana legalization in California.

California’s surplus — equal to 13 times Colorado’s total annual production — is smuggled eastward, especially across the Rockies and Mississippi, where the wholesale price is as much as three times higher.

Cannabis Benchmarks, a company that tracks marijuana prices, reported at the end of December that the average price of regulated cannabis in California was $1,183 a pound, compared with $3,044 in Illinois, $3,072 in Connecticut and $2,846 in Washington, D.C.

Supporters of legalization long ago acknowledged the problems of California’s surplus and said it would take years to address.

In 2016, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who takes office as governor next week, estimated that 85 to 90 percent of the cannabis that California produced was exported. “It’s a very serious issue,” he said, “and it’s going to create a dynamic where the black market will likely persist in a very stubborn way.”

The distinction between legal cannabis businesses and scofflaws is about to become much sharper. The loosely regulated system of medical cannabis cooperatives that has existed for two decades will be illegal after Jan. 9. This gives law enforcement more clarity.

Jonathan Rubin, the head of Cannabis Benchmarks, says market forces — low prices and extreme competition — will also force many smaller California marijuana companies out of business.

This is straining another promise made by proponents of legalization: that small producers would be protected.

“The icon for cannabis is going to become the Marlboro Man,” Hopkins, the Sonoma County supervisor, said referring to the symbol of the tobacco industry, to which critics often compare the cannabis business. “In California, we’ve done what we always do — regulate, regulate, regulate, which ultimately gives significant advantage to large companies with significant economies of scale.”

The popular image of California’s marijuana growers may still be hippies hiding out in the forests of Humboldt County but increasingly the reality is more like the operations of NorCal Cannabis Co. in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco.

The company has converted what was a semiconductor factory into a cannabis production facility where employees walking down antiseptic hallways wear latex gloves and supervise an Israeli-style irrigation system and a $1 million air filtration system. Next door is a company that makes coatings for aircraft cockpit gauges.

Legalization has been liberating for big players like NorCal Cannabis.

“This is our coming-out party,” said Jigar Patel, the president of the company, who toured the facility in a white lab coat. “It’s waking up and doing what you love without wondering if the man is behind you.”

But for hundreds of other smaller producers, the paperwork alone has been enough to put them out of business. A cannabis producer must submit applications to as many as five state agencies, including obtaining a certificate to ensure they are able to use a scale.

Lori Ajax, the head of California’s Bureau of Cannabis Control who is sometimes called the state’s cannabis czar, described 2018 as “rough” both for the regulators and the industry.

Her office is planning a public information campaign to try to persuade consumers to stop buying illegal pot.

“We have to get more consumers buying from the licensed market,” she said.

Legalization was promoted as helping to end the war on drugs. But Ajax says California has no choice but to “step up” enforcement of cannabis scofflaws.

“As a state, we have to get more aggressive,” she said.

With less than two dozen enforcement officers, she will need help from other government agencies.

Ajax said she was encouraged by the “surge” of applications by cannabis businesses at the end of 2018. The Bureau of Cannabis Control has issued 2,500 temporary licenses. Yet this is still a fraction of the tens of thousands of cannabis businesses in the state.

Adams of BDS Analytics says 2018 was a year of “constantly diminishing forecasts” of cannabis sales. But he and others believe the legal market can only grow, especially after the disputed decision by Ajax’s office to allow cannabis delivery services to operate across the state — even in areas where local municipalities have chosen to ban pot businesses.

Increased sales could push tax revenue closer to the forecasts on the 2016 ballot, which predicted revenue would reach the “high hundreds of millions of dollars to over $1 billion annually.”

Through September, Sacramento has collected only $234 million in cannabis taxes. Colorado, with a population half the size of Los Angeles County, collected around the same amount last year.

Gov. Jerry Brown, who leaves office Monday, described cannabis revenue as unreliable in a recent interview with The New York Times.

“I have not counted on any revenue from marijuana,” he said. “Who’s counting on the marijuana revenue? People said that to make it more plausible for voters.”

Still, in many ways 2018 was a banner year for cannabis legalization. Canada became the first industrialized country to allow sales of recreational cannabis; the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that banning cannabis was unconstitutional, paving the way for legalization; Vermont and Michigan legalized recreational marijuana and Oklahoma became the 30th state to legalize medical marijuana.

Ajax sees a solution to California’s cannabis surplus if and when marijuana become legal nationwide.

“It would be wonderful if we could sell to other states,” she said.

Lawyers for Kevin Cooper, who was convicted in 1985 of murdering Douglas and Peggy Ryen and two of their children in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, had petitioned the governor for clemency in 2016.

Brown said in July that he would consider additional DNA testing in the case, and on Monday he ordered the retesting of a shirt, towel, hatchet handle and hatchet sheath.

In his order the governor said that the purpose of the testing, which will be carried out under the supervision of Daniel Pratt, a retired judge, was to see whether DNA from any another person in the FBI’s database is present on the items.

Cooper, who has been sentenced to death, has exhausted all his appeals. His case had been championed by, among others, Sen. Kamala Harris and columnist Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times.

The request for retesting was fiercely contested by the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office, which in a 94-page filing urged the governor to “consider the overwhelming evidence of Cooper’s guilt” and to allow his “clearly deserved death sentence to remain in place.”

The filing quoted extensively from Josh Ryen, the only surviving family member, who was 8 years old at the time of the killings.

Brown granted Christmas Eve clemencies that included 143 pardons and 131 commutations. Among them was one for Sear Un, an immigrant from Cambodia who avoided deportation because of the governor’s pardon. Brown will leave office at the end of his term next month.

Given a commuted sentence was Richard Richardson, the editor-in-chief of San Quentin News. After serving more than 20 years for robbery, Richardson will be given the opportunity to appear before the Parole Board and make his case for earlier release.

The governor rejected a request by the mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, to have the sentence of her brother commuted. The mayor’s brother, Napoleon Brown, has spent 18 years in prison for involuntary manslaughter and armed robbery.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/24/us/kevin-cooper-commutation-jerry-brown.html" id="e693fb31-525d-3369-a658-014cb8673005">The New York Times</a>.

SAN FRANCISCO — Gov. Jerry Brown of California on Monday ordered a limited retesting of evidence in a highly contested murder conviction.

Jerry Brown Orders DNA Testing in California Death Row Case

Lawyers for Kevin Cooper, who was convicted in 1985 of murdering Douglas and Peggy Ryen and two of their children in an affluent suburb of Los Angeles, had petitioned the governor for clemency.

Brown had previously declined to allow advanced DNA testing in the case, but on Monday he ordered the retesting of a shirt, towel, hatchet handle and hatchet sheath.

Given a commuted sentence was Richard Richardson, the editor-in-chief of San Quentin News. After serving more than 20 years for robbery, Richardson will be given the opportunity to appear before the parole board and make his case for earlier release.

Mike Wondolowski often finds himself in the middle of it. He may be on the chaise longue on his patio, at his computer in the house, or tending to his orange and lemon trees in the garden when the powerful, nauseating stench descends on him.

Wondolowski lives a half-mile away from greenhouses that were originally built to grow daisies and chrysanthemums but now house thousands of marijuana plants, part of a booming — and pungent — business seeking to cash in on recreational cannabis, which has been legal in California since January.

“If someone is saying, ‘Is it really that bad?’ I’ll go find a bunch of skunks and every evening I’ll put them outside your window,” Wondolowski said. “It’s just brutal.”

When Californians voted to legalize recreational marijuana in 2016, there were debates about driving under the influence and keeping it away from children. But lawmakers did not anticipate the uproar that would be generated by the funk of millions of flowering cannabis plants.

As a result of the stench, residents in Sonoma County, north of San Francisco, are suing to ban cannabis operations from their neighborhoods. Mendocino County, farther north, recently created zones banning cannabis cultivation — the sheriff’s deputy there says the stink is the No. 1 complaint.

In Santa Barbara County, cannabis growers confronting the rage of neighbors are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars installing odor-control systems that were designed for garbage dumps.

The smell from commercial cannabis farms, which brings to mind a mixture of rotting lemons and sulfur, is nothing like the wafting cloud that might hover over a Phish show, pot farm detractors say.

“It’s as if a skunk, or multiple skunks in a family, were living under our house,” said Grace Guthrie, whose home sits on the site of a former apple orchard outside the town of Sebastopol. Her neighbors grow pot commercially. “It doesn’t dissipate,” Guthrie said. “It’s beyond anything you would imagine.”

When cannabis odors are at their peak, she and her husband, Robert, sometimes wear respirators, the kind one might put on to handle dangerous chemicals. During Labor Day weekend, relatives came to stay at the house, but cut short their visit because they couldn’t stand the smell.

“I can’t be outside more than 30 minutes,” Robert Guthrie said of peak odor times, when the cannabis buds are flowering and the wind sweeps the smell onto his property. “The windows are constantly closed. We are trapped inside. There’s no escape.”

After nearly one year of recreational sales in California, much of the cannabis industry remains underground. Stung by taxes and voluminous paperwork, only around 5 percent of marijuana farmers in the state have licenses, according to Hezekiah Allen, executive director of the California Growers Association, a marijuana advocacy group. Sales of legal cannabis are expected to exceed $3 billion this year, only slightly higher than medical marijuana sales from last year. Tax revenues have been lower than expected, and only about one-fifth of California cities allow sales of recreational cannabis. The dream of a fully regulated market seems years off.

The ballot measure legalizing recreational marijuana passed in 2016 with a comfortable majority of 57 percent. Many of those complaining about cannabis odors say they were among those who supported it. They just don’t want it stinking up their property, they say.

“Just because you like bacon doesn’t mean you want to live next to a pig farm,” said Lynda Hopkins, a member of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, whose office has been inundated with complaints about the smell.

The odor question is also roiling local politics.

Marijuana businesses in Carpinteria recently donated $28,000 worth of lab equipment to Carpinteria High School, according to Philip Greene, the chief of operations for Ever-Bloom, a cannabis producer that helped coordinate the donation. The high school is flanked by cannabis greenhouses that have sent odors wafting in. In the past two years, students have complained of headaches, parents have grown angry and the high school has had to warn visiting sports teams that they might encounter the odor.

The donation has not yet been made public, but is seen by some as an effort to offset the damage done by the stench. In an interview, Maureen Foley Claffey, a member of the Carpinteria School Board, said it would send a “confusing and problematic” message to students to accept it. Claffey lashed out at the superintendent, Diana Rigby, for soliciting donations from the cannabis industry at a time when members of the community are battling the stink.

“Are we that desperate for cash that we are willing to take it from anyone without regard to the source and the message?” she said. “I guess money talks.”

Rigby, the superintendent, did not return phone calls or email requesting comment.

In Sonoma County, hearings on cannabis ordinances at the board of supervisors overflow with representatives from the cannabis industry, who wear green, and angry residents, who wear red.

Of the more than 730 complaints Sonoma County has received about cannabis this year, around 65 percent are related to odor, according to Tim Ricard, the county’s cannabis program manager.

“There’s been a tremendous amount of tension in the community,” said Hopkins, the Sonoma supervisor. “If I had to name an ice-cream flavor for cannabis implementation it would definitely be rocky road.”

Cannabis executives recognize that pot grows can be odorous but say their industry is no different from others that produce smells.

“You have a smell issue that sometimes can’t be completely mitigated,” said Dennis Hunter, a co-founder of CannaCraft, a large marijuana business based in Santa Rosa in Sonoma County. “But we have dairy farms here in the area or crush season for the vineyards — there’s agricultural crops, and a lot of them have smells.”

Britt Christiansen, a registered nurse who lives among the dairy farms of Sonoma County, acknowledges that her neighborhood smells of manure, known locally as the Sonoma aroma.

But she says she made the choice to live next to a dairy farm and prefers that smell to the odor that drifted over from the marijuana farm next door to her house.

“We opened the door and the smell kicked us in the face,” Christiansen said. Her neighbors banded together in October and sued the operators of the pot business; the case is ongoing.

One problem for local governments trying to legislate cannabis odors is that there is no objective standard for smells. A company in Minnesota, St. Croix Sensory, has developed a device called the Nasal Ranger, which looks like a cross between a hair dryer and a radar gun. Users place the instrument on their nose and turn a filter dial to rate the potency on a numerical scale. Charles McGinley, the inventor of the device, says a Level 7 is the equivalent of “sniffing someone’s armpit without the deodorant — or maybe someone’s feet — a nuisance certainly.”

A Level 4, he said, is the equivalent of a neighbor’s freshly cut grass. “It could still be a nuisance, but it wouldn’t drive you away from your front porch,” McGinley said.

Standing next to a flowering cannabis bud, the smell would easily be a Level 7, McGinley said.

The Nasal Ranger is in use in Colorado, the first state to legalize recreational marijuana, but California counties and cities are still struggling with the notion that smells are subjective.

Ever-Bloom in Carpinteria is one of a number of marijuana businesses that have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars to mitigate the stink. Two previous systems failed, but the current one, modeled on devices used to mask the smell of garbage dumps, sprays a curtain of vapor around the perimeter of the greenhouses. The vapor, which is made up of essential oils, gives off a menthol smell resembling Bengay.

Dennis Bozanich, a Santa Barbara County official charged with cannabis implementation who has become known as the cannabis czar, says the essential oil odor control has been largely successful. But not every grower can afford to install it.

On weekends, Bozanich becomes a cannabis odor sleuth, riding his bicycle through Carpinteria sniffing the air for pot plants. He recently drove through the area with a reporter, rolling down the windows on a stretch of road with cannabis greenhouses. He slowed the car and puzzled over where a cannabis odor was coming from.

“I’ve got one stinky location right here and I can’t quite figure it out,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/19/us/california-marijuana-stink.html" id="069f6c7b-e9fd-3d75-a1af-f290cf22e1c9">The New York Times</a>.

'Dead Skunk' Stench From Marijuana Farms Outrages Californians

CARPINTERIA, Calif. — They call it fresh skunk, the odor cloud or sometimes just the stink.

Pacific Gas &amp; Electric said extreme winds overnight forced the shutdown, which the utility organized to prevent equipment from sparking fires.

The second phase affected bedroom communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and added to the 500,000 customers who had already lost power earlier Wednesday.

A fire after midnight in the town of Moraga, home to St. Mary’s College, prompted evacuations and burned around 50 acres but was brought under control before dawn.

Pacific Gas &amp; Electric expects the weather to subside in most of its operation areas by noon Thursday and will deploy a fleet of helicopters and more than 6,000 technicians to inspect the lines before they are brought back on.

Many in Northern California had harsh words for PG&amp;E.;

Citing a weather forecast ideal for wildfires and staring down billions in potential liabilities from past blazes, PG&amp;E; decided sparks from its electrical equipment or a downed power line would pose a greater risk than grumbling customers.

But some residents and state officials felt the utility had overstepped.

State Sen. Bill Dodd, a Democrat who represents northern counties of the Bay Area, said the situation was “beyond frustrating” in a statement on his website.

“Public safety power shut-offs have a role to play when they’re needed to prevent massive wildfires,” he said. “However, many of my constituents are disturbed that the power was shut down before the winds started to pick up in the North Bay.”

“Sadly, poor performance by PG&amp;E; is par for the course, so it’s not surprising,” he added.

One police department poked fun at the utility’s less-than-ideal rollout, which included problems with its website and early maps that left some residents confused about whether they would be affected. The department, in Pleasanton, posted a fake outage map on Facebook, with the entire state scribbled out in red.

“Remain calm,” the post read. “Use your cellphone light to search frantically for the one flashlight you think you have in the house. It will be dead of course. Search for batteries.”

Others did not appear to share their sense of humor. California Highway Patrol said that it was investigating a report that a PG&amp;E; vehicle had been shot at in Colusa County, north of Sacramento.

Quick, charge the Tesla.

Before the power went out Wednesday, lines grew at gas stations across the Bay Area. And this being California, a queue had also formed at a row of Tesla superchargers in downtown Los Gatos.

“It’s the new world,” said Mira Wooten, who was charging her white, two-week-old Model 3. “Instead of lines for gas, there are lines for power.”

Gregory Hansen, who charged his blue Tesla sedan at the same station, was in Silicon Valley on business. The night before, he had charged his car at his home in the El Dorado Hills, east of Sacramento, right before the power went out.

You might grow up used to modern conveniences, Hansen said, “then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Well, holy crap, I guess maybe we need a generator, or maybe we should start buying more freeze-dried food.’”

The power cuts hit the agricultural economy.

The harvest season is in full swing in the Sacramento Valley, but the power outage has idled some processing operations.

Mariani Nut Co., a family business that runs many of the nut processing facilities around the city of Winters, said that 75% of its processing capacity had been taken out by the shutdown. Matt Mariani, a partner in the business who manages retail sales and marketing, said about 100 employees were not working Wednesday because of the outage.

Mariani said the timing of the outages was disappointing, with the holiday season approaching and many large nut orders already in. Many farmers have concerns about spoilage.

“If they don’t get their products in and dried on time they could see some risks,” Mariani said.

Nearby, Elia Arce, the owner of El Pueblo Meat Market and Taqueria, said she was forced to reduce her workforce to three from 12 because of the blackouts.

She feared that meats, cheeses and other food items would spoil.

“If this continues, we have to throw everything away,” Arce said.

This article originally appeared in

SAN FRANCISCO — About 800,000 electricity customers in Northern California were without power Thursday after the state’s largest utility carried out the second phase of its intentional power cut.

PG&E Power Outage Expands in California

Large areas of Northern California remained without power Thursday as a major outage rocked the region for a second day. About 600,000 electricity customers were affected Thursday morning after the state’s largest utility carried out the second phase of its intentional power cut.

Pacific Gas and Electric said extreme winds overnight forced the additional shutdown, which the utility organized to prevent equipment from sparking fires.

The second phase affected bedroom communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and added to the hundreds of thousands of customers who had lost power on Wednesday. As of Thursday morning, the company had restored power to 137,000 customers.

But other customers may be without electricity for several more days, said Melissa Subbotin, a spokeswoman for the company. High winds in some areas were not forecast to subside until Friday, she said.

A fire after midnight Thursday in the town of Moraga, home to St. Mary’s College, prompted evacuations and burned around 50 acres but was brought under control before dawn.

Pacific Gas and Electric says it will deploy a fleet of helicopters and more than 6,000 technicians to inspect the lines before they are brought back on, a process that could take up to five days.

‘This isn’t the end of this.’

When Ben Faus went to sleep Wednesday night at his home in the foothills above the Monterey Bay, he knew there was a chance his power would go out. About 3 a.m., when he was jolted awake because his electric sleep apnea breathing machine stopped working, he knew the blackout had arrived. “All of a sudden, I was like, ‘I can’t breathe,’” he said.

Faus, 74, is a retired pharmacist who has lived with his wife in the Central Coast town of Aptos for three decades. On a cold and clear Thursday morning, they were among tens of thousands of residents in Santa Cruz County, as well as large metro areas in San Jose and Oakland, who woke up to a blackout as part of PG&amp;E;’s fire-precaution plan.

In a region where officials this week issued a red-flag fire warning for the Santa Cruz Mountains, Faus said he appreciated the effort to prevent sparks but the utility was not doing enough to keep residents informed of when and how long power would be turned off. “I can see the reason they’re gun-shy, but I think they’re overdoing it,” Faus said. “I almost feel like they’re trying to show people just how vital they are.”

Outside a Safeway grocery store just after dawn Thursday, dead traffic lights caused backups. Commuters toting travel mugs from homes without power begrudgingly got back into their cars without coffee when security guards informed them the store would open late.

While many residents said they had received emails or calls warning them that PG&amp;E; may cut power this week, most said they had trouble getting access to online maps and were unaware after a day of delays on Wednesday if the shut-off would actually happen.

Beth O’Shaughnessy and her family of four lost power at their Larkin Valley home with 13 horses, dogs and other pets around 11 p.m. Wednesday night. Though the family has a generator for winter storms in the mountains, they had held off on stocking up food because of the uncertain timeline and long lines for fuel. “We weren’t sure if we would be able to get gas, so we didn’t want to get too much stuff,” she said. “One thing at a time, one meal. I’m kind of keeping that in the back of my head.”

Gayle Clark, a 69-year-old Air Force veteran, watched the commotion outside the grocery store with interest as he walked his brown Doberman. Clark, an electrical contractor who said he has worked for utilities elsewhere in the state, has for the past five months lived in a trailer with a generator after he was unable to find a landlord willing to accept a subsidized housing voucher. For as long as California’s fire problem endures, he expects similar scenes in the future. “This isn’t the end of this,” Clark said. “This is the beginning.”

The economic losses are only starting to be tallied.

Michael Wara lost power at his home in Mill Valley at 2 a.m. Wednesday. He has no hot water, internet connection or cellular service.

Thomas Fuller

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