the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Drunk and stoned

(June 21, 2007)  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 SergeantWayne 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.

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