On the Gold Line

I was on the Gold Line, our light rail line that runs from Union Station all the way out to deep in the heart of East L.A.

A teenage girl was telling her friend what happened a few nights ago when a big thunder and rain storm interrupted the electricity in her house. Everything went dark in part of the house. It gets dark here in the winter around 5:00. She said they stumbled around and found some candles and lit those. And then she said her mom panicked. Her grow room lights were out.

Grow room? This was getting interesting. It wasn't hard to gather from the conversation that her mom was growing pot indoors, and now she was worried because her crop was in the dark.

Somehow, because the lights were out in only part of the house, it must have been a tripped GFI or a blown fuse. That's my guess. So her mom managed to get an extension cord and a light strip to the grow room and fire up the lights again.

Whew! American entrepreneurial ingenuity to the rescue. The grow room was once again lighted and all was right with the world.

Turns out it was all legal, as the girl explained to her friend. Her mom has a medical marijuana card, she said, and she was growing for one of the pot co-ops we have all over Los Angeles. We have more pot dispensaries in L.A. than Starbucks, in fact there are about 1,000 medical marijuana co-ops n Los Angeles, and not nearly as many Starbucks.

This is driving the City Council nuts, trying to put most of them out of business with one regulation or another. Problem is, medical marijuana is legal, and the cops can't just bust in and arrest pot dealers like they could in the old days, although the City Attorney claims he is about to do just that. City Council has warned him not to, and he threatens to ignore City Council.

A voter initiative has just qualified for the November 2010 ballot to tax and legalize marijuana in California. Polls show a majority of locals might just vote for it. Heaven knows the state could use the revenue.