Cannabis Chronicles

Some drug war warriors have no idea how idiotic they sound to educated individuals when they try and throw around fake drug war propaganda. Sometimes, they go so far as to be laughable. That’s actually the case with Humboldt County’s Sergeant Wayne Hanson, part of that county’s drug enforcement unit, who earlier this year maintained that 80% of all homicides are somehow related to marijuana.

Here’s a little piece from the North Coast Journal . . .

Drunk and stoned
by HANK SIMS

In case you missed it, there’s been a fascinating little war of words over marijuana, prohibition and murder playing itself out in the pages of the Santa Rosa Press Democrat over the last few days.

On June 10, the Press Democrat carried a long feature by Ukiah-based reporter Glenda Anderson about a region-wide upswing in marijuana cultivation and marijuana busts. There was a sidebar accompanying the story; it was headlined “Marijuana industry blamed for jump in killings, robberies.” In fact, this headline was misleading. Most of the article was about environmental damage wreaked by North Coast growers, the specter of foreign cartels and families “torn apart” by consumption of the demon weed.

Violence was cited only twice. Mention was made of a double murder near the eastern Mendocino town of Covelo last year. But the bulk of the story — the only thing that served to justify the headline — was an unsubstantiated quote from Humboldt County’s own Sergeant Wayne Hanson, of the sheriff’s Drug Enforcement Unit.

“If we average five homicides, four will be marijuana-related,” Hanson told the reporter. “People are killing people because it’s the same price as gold.”

Really? Four out of five homicides in Humboldt County are marijuana related? To put it kindly, this seemed like utter nonsense to Ellen Komp of SoHum’s Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, who responded with an understated yet fiery letter in Tuesday’s PD. Hanson’s statistics, Komp wrote, “…had no basis in fact.” She added that she had spoken to County Coroner Frank Jager, and that Jager had reported that none of the three homicides the county has tallied so far this year had been marijuana-related in any way.

Reached Monday, Hanson said that his figures were off-the-cuff, but that he basically believed them to be correct. “That was just an approximate guesstimate,” he said. “It may be lower. It’s not an exact quote, because I have not studied all the stats in the last five years.”

Well, to be fair to Hanson, it could be that he was thinking only of homicides in the county’s unincorporated areas — homicides handled by his department, the Sheriff’s Office. Six of the eight homicides in Humboldt County last year occurred within the Eureka city limits; none of them had anything to do with weed. There’s a couple of unsolved cases — including the disappearance of SoHum marijuana advocate Chris Giauque — that may well have had something to do with weed. But the last cut-and-dried case anyone can remember that definitely did have something to do with weed was the murder of Whitethorn teen Sean Akselsen in 2003.

So it’s safe to say that countywide, at least, Hanson’s off-the-cuff numbers were badly wrong. Considering the Sheriff’s Office alone, they were probably wrong. That’s what Jager thinks: “They may have a lot of crimes related to marijuana, but we don’t have a lot of homicides related to marijuana,” he said Tuesday.

The backdrop of all this, of course, is the recent move by the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors to call for the legalization of marijuana, a move that SoHum Supervisor Roger Rodoni has endorsed. Legalization would have two near-immediate consequences. It would all but put an end to any violence the illicit marijuana trade does engender, and it would see Sgt. Hanson assigned to other duties.

Undoubtedly Sgt. Hanson is sincere in his beliefs. We know that sometimes people let their ideology get ahead of their intelligence, and it’s obvious that’s what is happening here. A big tip of our wings to Ellen Komp and Hank Sims for their efforts on behalf of the truth . . . three_little_birds