By James Lang
Cannabis club operators and patients in Santa Barbara say they’re shocked over recent raids and arrests by local law-enforcement agencies.
But for one Santa Barbara collective operator, the raids in late February were just another sign that that this seaside community is far from cannabis-friendly. James Lee, administrator of Green Well collective, recently found himself the target of intense public criticism for making a donation to a local school. Officials with the Santa Barbara County Education Office blasted Lee for the contribution, stating they had been victimized by the effort.
The intended recipient of the donation was El Pueblo Community School, an alternative facility for under-performing students. What did Lee try to give the school? A truckload of free soil and bags of fertilizer and composting material to help the students build a community garden—for which local boosters had solicited contributions from the public.
“We were just trying to help out,” Lee says. “When I learned that the principal (of El Pueblo) was opposed to it, I took her aside after she’d spoken to reporters and apologized, and said that [if] there was anything I could do to make sure this didn’t turn into a bad situation, she could contact me. A few hours later, I learned about the district’s press release and that we were being publicly scolded.”
In comments to reporters, county education office spokeswoman Wendy Shelton accused Lee of misrepresenting his collective as a nonprofit associated with landscaping when he’d originally called and made the donation offer. “We’d rather get soil from reputable soil people,” she said. Later, the office issued a statement thanking the landscaping company whose truck delivered the dirt for distancing itself from Green Well, adding that the company had been “as much a victim in this undertaking” as the school.
The remarks raised eyebrows among some observers aware of the dire financial straits currently facing Santa Barbara schools. Shelton’s comments came the same month that the school district slashed $6 million from its 2010-11 fiscal budget—the same amount it cut in 2007-08 and $5.6 million more than it slashed from last fiscal year’s budget—through teacher layoffs, increased class sizes and program reductions. One blogger remarked on the website Digital Journal that “beggars can’t be choosers” when it came to Lee’s attempted contribution.
The response by education office officials to the donation was also noteworthy in that it appeared more severe than their response to reports of dangerous soil contamination at the same school three years ago.
According to news reports, school officials were roundly criticized in 2007 by local activists for knowingly building El Puente on land contaminated with industrial waste chemicals. School officials responded to the criticism by saying they’d received only one health complaint from an El Puente student.
Shelton says the soil-donation dust-up was blown out of proportion in the media, and that the education office was simply following established policy when it rejected the contribution.
“The problem with this transaction was the total lack of communication all around,” she says. “At no time was the source of the soil revealed, and a press conference had been called to trumpet the receiving of the soil. We have policies against donations from alcohol distributors or tobacco companies. This was in keeping with our policy of what we can accept.”
While the education office’s Feb. 3 press release on the incident flatly stated, “This office is on record as opposing these dispensaries,” Shelton insists it is only opposed to dispensaries located near schools.
“This had nothing to do with marijuana—we don’t oppose the compassionate use of cannabis,” she says.
For his part, Lee insists that he had made it clear to school officials that Green Well was a cannabis club when he called to offer the soil. He adds that he learned some important lessons from the episode.
“I’ll definitely be thinking twice before trying to make another donation,” he says. “I’ll make sure the recipient acknowledges in writing that they know who we are and where the donation came from—it’s a learning process for us.”
Lee spoke just a week prior to the multi-agency police action in the Santa Barbara area, during which four cannabis clubs were raided, 12 people arrested and more than 12,000 cannabis plants and 100 pounds of dried cannabis seized. Green Well was not among the collectives raided.
