Originally published at: Innocent people in Humboldt County are being fined millions for cannabis crimes | Boing Boing
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Ah, that’s some Brazil (Gilliam film) level bureaucracy… wow
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Set foot in Humbolt County, Ca. and you’ll understand this completely. It’s as back asswards as it can get.
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Do you want Breaking Bad? because this is how you get Breaking Bad.
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So they let the county be poisoned, raped and exploited by illegal grow operations for decades and decide that now is a good time to begin enforcing laws? I have dozens of friends (in New York!) who would migrate out to Humboldt every season to trim and harvest and no one ever reported issues with law enforcement. Looking for unregistered RVs would be a more effective way to find illegal grow operations.
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If they can’t get their money under the table they’ll get it over the table.
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Archibald Buttle…or Archibald Tuttle?
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Just a minor nitpick…
“…And the county wants their money.”
Not THEIR money.
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who’s going to pay for all the aerial reconnaissance if not the targets of that reconnaissance? i mean does it really even matter if they broke the law? /s
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Wait, Pot is legal in CA.
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Once fined, owners face a legal labyrinth to prove their innocence…
Prove their innocence? That flies in the face of how the legal system (supposedly) works. It’s up to a prosecutor to prove their guilt in a court of law. There are also serious 4th Amendment issues here. They shouldn’t be trying to work their way through a bureaucratic legal process, they should be proactively suing the county. The ACLU might even take this one up. Unbelievable.
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There are limits on who can grow it and how much they can grow and apparently some counties have permit requirements. Part of the trade-off for legalizing marijuana was that laws were going to be formed around its production and sale that resulted in revenues for various government entities… Humboldt County appears to be applying the laziest and most exploitative methods for generating said revenue.
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But the revenue so generated is only theoretical. None of the people issued citations actually has the money to pay the fines, since they are so excessive. The county hasn’t gotten that money yet, and if they do, they will have to give it back once any of these cases makes it to court. This is the equivalent of cheating on school testing so your numbers look good.
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I wouldn’t be so sure that no one has actually paid any fines. There are probably people who received a fine and just paid it, rather than go to the trouble of trying to fight it. There are also those who look into their local laws and willingly pay whatever permitting fees are required to actually grow marijuana. I’m not saying Humboldt county is in the right here by any means, but you can see how and where they’ve decided to take enforcement of licensing to the extreme.
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If you are cited for not getting a permit to do something you are not doing, and that fine is assessed at $10,000 per day and you aren’t a billionaire, you aren’t paying that fine. You can’t. You don’t have the money. If Humbolt county wants to enforce permits for cannabis grow operations all it needs to do is determine who is growing without a permit. Instead its “inspectors” are looking at satellite photos and issuing citations because there is an outbuilding on the property. That’s just extreme laziness.
As a Humboldt County resident, I can assure everyone that the Sheriff’s office is complete sh*t. It used to be well known that October was the time you’d see/hear the helicopters from CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) flying overhead, especially in Southern Humboldt. They are few and far between since pot became legalized. The illegal grows cost money, ruin the environment and bring undesirables to the area. People disappear in Humb. County, never seen again. Sheriffs have gotten lazy and depend on crap like this to generate money. They make all kinds of excuses, but it’s pretty obvious what their priorities are, and it’s not reducing harmful grows.
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This is a very salient point as these victims have one thing that all of the illegal and exploitative grow operations don’t: taxable real estate.
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