YES on Measure B

To the Editor:

As your article April 18 covering our City Council vote on Measure B failed to accurately relay the points I made, allow me to clarify.

Defense of the 25-plant limit is the wrong position for The Left, wrong for liberals, populists, environmentalists, and social democrats. Defense of our 25 plant status quo is a mistake for progressives because that stance alienates a struggling working class that resents those growers who labor less than one quarter of the year, make quadruple, pay no taxes, and fly every winter to beach towns south of the border.

Profit seeking grower hypocrisy is an additional factor in working class support for B. All know that weed prices remain high in quasi-legal Mendocino only when coupled with continuing federal prohibition. Commercial growers refuse to support legalization because the resulting price deflation would crush their standard of living. Yet any threatened CAMP or local law enforcement is "fascistic injustice."

While I am of that Yes on B faction supporting marijuana legalization and taxation, my decades as a high school teacher have taught me this drug is hostile to our educational mission. Because the drug generates such lethargy, stoners have invariably been my weakest students.

Beyond the intellectually debilitating influence of the high itself, Mendocino's grower culture sends adolescents the message that book learning, academic effort, and taxpaying hard work are for losers.

Yes on B.
Phil Baldwin