That shift in cultivation, caused in
part by record-breaking seizures by drug agents of plants grown outdoors, has
been blamed for a housing shortage for Humboldt students, residential fires and
the powerful — and distracting — smell of the plant in some neighborhoods
during harvest.
“I naïvely thought it was a skunk,”
said Jeff Knapp, an Arcata resident who has a neighbor who is a grower.
In May, Arcata declared a moratorium
on clubs to allow the city council time to address the problem. Los Angeles,
which has more than 180 registered marijuana clubs, the most of any city, also
declared a moratorium last year.
“There were a handful initially and
then all the sudden, they started to sprout up all over,” said Dennis Zine, a
member of the Los Angeles City Council. “We had marijuana facilities next to
high schools and there were high school kids going over there and there was a
lot of abuse taking place.”
But while even advocates of medical
marijuana say they recognize that the system has problems, they question the
bans. “I think there’s no doubt there’s been abuse, but there’s probably no
system created by human beings that hasn’t been abused,” said Bruce Mirken, the
director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington,
which promotes the drug’s legalization. “But the answer to that is not the
wholesale throwing out the baby with the bath water.”
All told, about 80 California cities
have adopted moratoriums with more than 60 others banning the clubs outright,
according to Americans for Safe Access, which advocates for medical marijuana
research and treatment. Eleven counties have adopted some sort of ban or
moratorium.
Such laws have led to a kind of
Prohibition patchwork of “wet” and “dry” areas. In Visalia, a city of 120,000
in the state’s Central Valley, the local club was denied a permit on Main
Street, so instead set up shop on a lonely section of country highway. Other
clubs have retreated into people’s homes.
Kris Hermes, legal campaign director
for Americans for Safe Access, said that despite the bans, 8 counties and about
30 cities had also established regulations meant to legitimize the clubs.
Mr. Zine said the moratorium in Los
Angeles would allow city officials time to develop regulations and zoning,
something advocates for medical marijuana say they welcome.
“There’s tons of human behavior that
you and I might not want to have anything to do with,” said Allen St. Pierre,
the executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws, or Norml, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington. “But if they are
legal, there ought to be a legal means to purchase the commodity and do
business.”
Such regulations were passed in 2005
in San Francisco, which now has a 10-page application for a club permit.
Kevin Reed, owner of the Green Cross,
was the first owner to get a permit in January. But he said some of the city’s
other two dozen clubs were struggling to get their paperwork. “It’s taking
substantially more time to move through the permit process than was envisioned,”
Mr. Reed said in an e-mail message. The city’s board just extended the permit
deadline until next year.
New regulations are also in the offing
for local and state law enforcement, which has often found itself confused by
the overlapping — and sometimes contradictory — federal, state and local laws.
Under a state law that took effect in 2004, counties can set their own limits
on the amount of medical marijuana; in Mendocino, for example, growers are
allowed 25 mature plants, while most counties allow six.
Jerry Brown, the state attorney
general, plans to release guidelines this summer to clarify the differences.
“These dispensaries aren’t supposed to
be big profit centers,” Mr. Brown said. “This is supposed to be for individual
use.”
The 2004 law also recognized the right
of patients and caregivers to cultivate marijuana as a group, something law
enforcement officials say has been abused.
Bob Nishiyama, the major crimes task
force commander in Mendocino County, said there were places with 500 plants and
20 Proposition 215 letters tacked to a fence. “And technically, that’s legal
because people can have 25 plants,” he said. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
By any measure, medical marijuana in
California is a moneymaker. In March, a group of California club owners
testified before the state Board of Equalization that their industry had pumped
some $100 million in sales tax into state coffers, representing more than $1
billion in sales.
Like many law enforcement officials,
Mr. Nishiyama says he does not have a problem with medical marijuana, just with
those who are exploiting it.
“If you’re growing six plants and
smoking it in your own house, I could care less,” he said.
Most states that have passed
subsequent medical marijuana laws have been more precise than California voters
were in 1996. New Mexico, for example, allows only patients with seven medical
conditions, including cancer, AIDS and epilepsy, to receive medical marijuana.
“California is an aberration, because
it does not designate specific disease types, it does not designate weights or
plant source, and it has what might be the most fungible or elastic definition
of care-giver,” said Mr. St. Pierre, of Norml. Every proposition after
Proposition 215 has been “narrower and narrower and more restrictive in scope,”
he said.
Also complicating law enforcement’s
job is that marijuana is still illegal in the eyes of the federal government,
which has been increasingly aggressive about prosecuting club owners they feel
have crossed the line into commercial drug dealing.
Among those recently convicted in
California include a doctor and his wife from Cool who were given five years
each in March for conspiracy to sell marijuana and growing more than 100
plants; a club owner from Bakersfield who pleaded guilty in March to possession
of 40 pounds of marijuana with intent to distribute; and Luke Scarmazzo, a
28-year-old club owner and aspiring rapper who faces 20 years to life in prison
after a conviction last month for running a multimillion-dollar club in Modesto
that the government called a criminal enterprise.
And last year, the Drug Enforcement
Administration threatened to seize buildings from landlords who rented space to
clubs, resulting in some closings across the state.
For all the federal and local
opposition, marijuana as medicine has become an accepted part of life in many
communities in California. Advocates say the drug helps patients with
everything from the wasting effects of chemotherapy and AIDS to treatment of
anxiety and headaches.
But it is not cheap. At Med X, the
raided Los Angeles club, the most expensive marijuana, called Blueberry Kush,
was priced at $490 an ounce. That economic impact includes numerous ancillary
businesses that serve the cannabis culture, including thriving horticulture
shops, and Oakland’s Oaksterdam University, a trade school where students can
sign up for semester-long courses on marijuana cultivation.
For some, growing has become a second
career. In Arcata, a 29-year-old man, who asked that his name not to be used
for fear of arrest, said that he earned about $25,000 every three months from
selling marijuana grown in a back room to club owners from Southern California.
But others in Arcata are less
welcoming. Kevin L. Hoover, the editor of the local newspaper, The Eye, has
made a practice of confronting people he believes are growing marijuana. Their
houses are easy to spot, he said — covered windows, tall fences, cars coming
and going late at night. “Sometimes the whine of fans,” he said.
Those fans, of course, are eating
electrical power, something that also irks many.
“We’re all trying to reduce our carbon
footprint, but in these places the meters are spinning off the wall,” said
Mayor Mark Wheetley of Arcata. “When do you say, enough is enough?”
At a time when many consumers are
scrambling for cash, working parents face an added source of pressure: a
squeeze on maternity-leave pay and time off. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Employers are cutting back on post-childbirth
pay for mothers and offering shorter leaves, on average, for both moms and
dads, compared with a decade ago. This comes despite research showing attentive
nurturing has particular developmental power in a baby's first year, and that
longer leaves can ease postpartum depression in some mothers. The pattern
heightens the need for parents to plan carefully for time off post-childbirth.
Only 16% of employers offer full pay
for childbirth leave, down from 27% in 1998, based on a nationally representative
sample of 1,100 employers by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute. The
average maximum length of job-guaranteed leaves for new mothers shrank too, to
15.2 weeks from 16.1 weeks a decade ago; leave for dads fell to 12.6 weeks from
13.1.
Employers aren't deliberately
targeting new mothers with pay cuts; rather, maternity leave has been caught in
the crossfire over rising disability costs in general. Most maternity-leave pay
in the U.S. comes in the form of disability pay, allotted for the six to eight
weeks typically needed to heal after childbirth. New mothers are being hit by a
cost-cutting move among employers toward paying only a fraction of full pay to
workers on short-term disability, rather than 100% as was common in the past,
as an incentive for employees to return to work as soon as they're able.
Nevertheless, the pattern risks
pressuring new parents to race back to work too fast. New mothers' average time
off work has already taken a nose dive since the early 1980s, the Census Bureau
says; only 42% of working mothers took more than three months as of 2002, the
latest data available, down from 54%.
For many parents, even three months
isn't enough. Michelle Kwok, a medical resident, was only four weeks into a
planned three-month leave with her first baby when she realized she needed more
time. The California mother asked for an extension and used up sick and
vacation days she'd saved, to eke out a total of six months. Fortunately, she
and her husband had been living frugally and could afford the extra time.
But other dual-earner parents load up
on debt. An online poll of 419 working parents conducted for this column by the
parenting Web site UrbanBaby.com found that while many relied on a partner's
income, savings or employer coverage to finance most of their parental leave
time, about 23% used credit cards or loans -- not a wise strategy, financial
planners say.
A better approach: "As soon as
you know you're pregnant or even before, start stashing away money and start
banking the days" of paid vacation or sick leave provided by your
employer, says Jill Gianola, a Columbus, Ohio, financial planner.
Research your employer's time-off
policies to see how many paid vacation or sick days you're allowed to carry
over year-to-year. That time may be shrinking too: More employers are limiting
year-to-year carryover to roughly two weeks from about four to five weeks a
decade ago, says Carol Sladek, principal at Hewitt Associates -- largely
because they want workers to use the leave each year for R&R.
To finance additional time off,
consider setting up an automatic monthly checking-account deduction to a
savings account. For her second child, Ms. Kwok and her husband banked her pay
increase from her promotion to attending physician and lived primarily on his
income as a product manager and photographer. While that meant bypassing the
new cars, big house and pricey Jimmy Choo shoes she might have enjoyed, Dr.
Kwok says, "the time with our children is more important."
Set a budget that includes $600 to
$1,800 a month in projected child-care costs, based on the average in your
area, and start living by it before the baby comes, advises Peg Downey, a
Silver Spring, Md., financial planner. Although you won't need child care for a
while, the savings will help cover time off and other new-baby expenses.
Samuel Mluge steps outside his office
and scans the sidewalk. His pale blue eyes dart back and forth, back and forth,
trying to focus.
The sun used to be his main enemy, but
now he has others.
Mr. Mluge is an albino, and in
Tanzania now there is a price for his pinkish skin.
“I feel like I am being hunted,” he
said.
Discrimination against albinos is a
serious problem throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but recently in Tanzania it has
taken a wicked twist: at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed
and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a
growing criminal trade in albino body parts.
Many people in Tanzania — and across
Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out,
often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition
that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here.
Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and
hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich.
As the threats have increased, the
Tanzanian government has mobilized to protect its albino population, an already
beleaguered group whose members are often shunned as outcasts and die of skin
cancer before they reach 30.
Police officers are drawing up lists
of albinos in every corner of the country to better look after them. Officers
are escorting albino children to school. Tanzania’s president even sponsored an
albino woman for a seat in Parliament to show that “we are with them in this,”
said Salvator Rweyemamu, a Tanzanian government spokesman.
Mr. Rweyemamu said the rash of
killings was anathema to what Tanzania had been striving toward; after years of
failed socialist economic policies, the country is finally getting development,
investment and change.
“This is serious because it continues
some of the perceptions of Africa we’re trying to run away from,” he said. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
But the killings go on. They have even
spread to neighboring Kenya, where an albino woman was hacked to death in late
May, with her eyes, tongue and breasts gouged out. Advocates for albinos have
also said that witch doctors are selling albino skin in Congo.
The young are often the targets. In
early May, Vumilia Makoye, 17, was eating dinner with her family in their hut
in western Tanzania when two men showed up with long knives.
Vumilia was like many other Africans with
albinism. She had dropped out of school because of severe near-sightedness, a
common problem for albinos, whose eyes develop abnormally and who often have to
hold things like books or cellphones two inches away to see them. She could not
find a job because no one would hire her. She sold peanuts in the market,
making $2 a week while her delicate skin was seared by the sun.
When Vumilia’s mother, Jeme, saw the
men with knives, she tried to barricade the door of their hut. But the men
overpowered her and burst in.
“They cut my daughter quickly,” she
said, making hacking motions with her hands.
The men sawed off Vumilia’s legs above
the knee and ran away with the stumps. Vumilia died.
Yusuph Malogo, who lives nearby, fears
he may be next. He is also an albino and works by himself on a rice farm. He
now carries a loud, silver whistle to blow for help.
“I’m on the run,” he said.
He is 26, but his skin is thick and
leathery from sun damage, making him look 20 years older.
Many albinos in Tanzania are turning
to the Tanzanian Albino Society for help. But the nonprofit advocacy group
operates on less than $15,000 a year. That’s not enough for the sunscreen, hats
and protective clothing that could save lives.
Mr. Mluge, 49, is the society’s
general secretary. He grew up with children pelting him with chalk in class. He
said he had learned to live with being constantly teased, pinched and laughed
at.
“But we have never feared like we do
today,” he said.
Al-Shaymaa J. Kwegyir, Tanzania’s new
albino member of Parliament, said, “People think we’re lucky. That’s why
they’re killing us. But we’re not lucky.”
She said it was a curse to be born in
equatorial Africa, where the sun is unsparing, with little or no protective
skin pigment. Albinism rates vary throughout the world; about 1 person in
20,000 is an albino in the United States.
It is no accident that the Tanzania
Albino Society’s office is on the grounds of a cancer hospital. Many of its
members are sick.
The smell of the wards is
overpowering, a nose-stinging mix of burn salves and rotting flesh. Many of the
albino patients are covered with scabs, sores, welts and burns.
One patient, Nasolo Kambi, sat on his
bed, recovering from a recent round of chemotherapy for skin cancer. His arms
were splattered with dark brown splotches, like ink stains on white paper.
“People say we can’t die,” he said,
referring to a superstition that albinos simply vanish when they get older.
“But we can.”
Police officials said the albino
killings were worst in rural areas, where people tend to be less educated and
more superstitious. They said that some fishermen even wove albino hairs in
their nets because they believed they would catch more fish. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
On the shores of Lake Victoria, in
northern Tanzania, albinos are a touchy subject. When asked if they used albino
hairs in their nets, a group of fishermen just stared at the sand.
One traditional healer, a young man in
a striped shirt who looked more like a college student than a witch doctor,
said: “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. But that’s not real witchcraft. It’s the work of
con men.”
Police officials are at a loss to
explain precisely why there is a wave of albino killings now. Commissioner Paul
Chagonja said an influx of Nigerian movies, which play up witchcraft, might
have something to do with it, along with rising food prices that were making
people more desperate.
“These witch doctors have many strange
beliefs,” he said. “There was a rumor not so long ago that if you use a bald
head when fishing, you’ll get rich. There was another one that said if you
spread blood on the ground in a mine, you’ll find gold. These rumors come and
go. The problem is, the people who follow witch doctors don’t question them.”
Mr. Mluge said whispers swirled around
him whenever he walked down the sidewalk.
“I hear people saying, ‘It’s a deal,
it’s a deal. Let’s get him and make some money,’ ” he said.
At home, at least, he is not an
oddity. His wife is an albino. So are all five of his children. Some have
already had skin cancer, in their teens.
The night used to be theirs, a time
when Mr. Mluge and his fair-skinned sons and daughters could stroll outside
together without worrying about the sun.
Now they bolt themselves in, peering
through bars.
Just two weeks ago, while Mr. Mluge’s
children were sleeping, a car pulled up to their house and four men got out to
look around.
“I’m worried,” he said. “They know we are
here.”
Mr. Mluge said he tried to read the
license plate. But he couldn’t make out the numbers, and the car drove off.
Pennsylvania lawmakers have been only
modestly irresponsible when it comes to making sound policy on public pensions
compared to their brethren in say, Kentucky, where the retirement fund for
state workers has an unfunded liability of more than $26 billion. New Jersey's
legislators are almost as bad, with a state pension fund $25 billion in the
hole.
By comparison, the Pennsylvania State
Employees Retirement System (SERS) is in excellent shape funded at 97.1
percent, which amounts to a $914 million unfunded actuarial liability. What's a
few hundred million here and there?
However, the Public School Employees
Retirement System (PSERS) is in appreciably worse condition, funded at 85.8
percent, with an unfunded liability of $9.4 billion.
That's the good news. The bad news is
that the state and its taxpayers face a pension "rate spike" in
2012-13, according to a white paper by outgoing Budget Secretary Michael Masch.
You might call this "the inevitable day of reckoning," created back
in 2001 and 2002 when legislators generously increased pensions for themselves
(50 percent) and state and school employees (25 percent). It soon became evident
that lawmakers and their pension experts had made a slight error in
forecasting, or ignored market reality, and put off the impact of their
foolishness to the future.
That future is fast approaching. The
white paper projects a one-year jump four years from now in the commonwealth's
contribution to PSERS from $340 million to $728 million, a 114 percent
increase. School districts will have to dig deeper under the current formula,
as their contribution goes from $261 million to $662 million, a 153 percent
increase. To fund SERS, the state's contribution will have to rise from $244
million to $358 million, a 47 percent increase.
And that assumes that after zero
growth in the funds' investments this year, they will get back on track in
subsequent years and achieve annual 8.5 percent gains. If not, the math could
get a lot worse.
Against this background, state and
school retirees are pushing for a cost-of-living increase. However deserving
they may be, the increased obligations this would impose on the pension fund
would come at a bad time. An analysis of House Bill 2084, which would provide
the COLA, found it would raise the unfunded liability of PSERS by $3.04 billion
and SERS by $1.57 billion. That works out to a combined employer payment into
the system of $514 million each year for 20 years, according to the Public
Employee Retirement Commission.
Not surprisingly, Masch says in his
white paper that the Legislature should not consider any further pension
enhancements until it passes pension reform legislation to avoid the coming
spike in payments and to guarantee the long-term solvency of both public
pension funds.
The Legislature got in this mess by
reducing or eliminating state and school district payments into the pension
funds when the good times were rolling. Money that should have been going into
the fund was instead spent on other things. Consequently, it became all the
more difficult to return to making the pension payments that the state and
schools should have been making all along, regardless of investment returns. No
matter how often it happens, we seem to forget that when stock markets are up
that they also can go down. But isn't that what the state's actuarial experts
are paid to remind lawmakers about?
To avoid the looming rate spike, Masch
proposes gradually increasing the amount of employer payments currently slated
to go into the funds starting in the fiscal year that starts July 1. Instead of
a combined payment of $574 million to the two funds from the state and school
districts, he would raise it to $715 million in fiscal 2008-09, a $141 million
increase. Under current law, the state's payment to PSERS in 2009-10 would
actually decline 10 percent, which is crazy.
Instead of a 167.7 percent spike in
combined payments in 2012-13, under Masch's proposal the increase would be
limited to 11.1 percent. His plan also would automatically adjust payments
modestly to account for the pension funds' ups and downs, even a long-term
market drought.
Alas, this plan may suffer from being
too fiscally sensible to be politically acceptable. But public-pension
obligations have the potential to bankrupt governments, as we already are
seeing in some parts of the country. Legislators would be well advised to give
Masch's common-sense solution serious consideration.
Early this year, the crew members of
the Mareena 1 fishing trawler had just finished hauling in their catch 15 miles
off the coast and were settling into their bunks for a few hours of sleep when
they were awakened by machine-gun fire.
Nine heavily armed men in a speedboat
attacked the trawler, and the boat’s cook was shot in the stomach. He bled to
death while the pirates, who had boarded the boat, ate, took naps and stole
everything that was not welded down.
“There were attacks before, but it’s
the worst now,” said Geoffrey, the captain of the Mareena 1, who gave only his
first name out of fear of reprisals. “Formerly, we had hijackings and they
would steal everything, but now they attack and they are shooting and taking
lives.”
The waters off the 530-mile Nigerian
coastline have been called the most dangerous in the world by a maritime
watchdog group after a precipitous rise in the number of attacks over the past
year. And while kidnappings of foreigners and attacks on oil installations in
Nigeria have gained international attention, it is often those with a far lower
profile who bear the greatest burden of the lawlessness at sea.
Pirate attacks on fishing trawlers
increased from 4 reported cases in 2003 to 107 in 2007, according to the
Nigerian Trawler Owners Association. In January this year, there were 50
attacks on fishing boats. At least 10 fishermen were killed.
Until recently, Nigeria was Africa’s
largest supplier of crude oil (Angola has overtaken it), and it is the fifth
biggest exporter of oil to the United States. But for years it has been dogged
by violence and kidnappings in its oil-producing Niger Delta region. Some of
the violence has been politically motivated, carried out by groups seeking to
gain control over the region’s oil wealth, but the bulk of it has been the work
of criminal gangs and pirates.
After more than 200 foreigners were
kidnapped in the Delta in 2007, foreign oil companies pulled out their
nonessential employees and increased security rather than rely on the
undermanned Nigerian Navy. With foreign vessels no longer an easy target,
pirates have been forced to look elsewhere for their victims.
Louis Sheehan
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