<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Prop. 215 Fallout Wafts Its Way Across State Lines

California’s secondhand marijuana smoke is drifting north and east, and giving our fellow Western states political coughing fits.

The ramifications of Proposition 215, legalizing medical use of marijuana, have set off a tizzy in Nevada, where gambling and, in places, prostitution are legal but marijuana is not.

In Nevada, the state attorney general’s office said, prosecutors were assuming that California law stopped at the California line, and Nevada badge boys could ignore doctors’ orders and make felony dope arrests. But hold it right there, pilgrim--Nevada’s drugs laws are so written that anyone with a doctor’s legal prescription for any drug is in the clear.

And up in Washington, a rather hush-hush study of possible state cultivation of marijuana for medical use is hush-hush no more. The $70,000 study, sponsored by a Republican state senator whose wife died of cancer, was funded in anticipation of a battle over whether Washington should join California and Arizona in putting marijuana in the medicine cabinet--and whether the state should cultivate its own medical-grade marijuana.

When word filtered out, Mahmoud Abdel-Monem, dean of the Washington State University College of Pharmacy, got “at least a dozen calls a day from people wanting to know if they could get marijuana.”

Not unless they move to California and then get sick. For a Washingtonian, it’s hard to say which prospect would be worse.

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Paper rout: About 420 million pages--perhaps a thousand dozen trees’ worth of paper--died for our voting rights, but they may have died in vain.

So says the recycling watch group Californians Against Waste, which alleges that half of the 112-page voter information pamphlets sent out by the secretary of state for the Nov. 5 election violated state and fed guidelines because not only were they printed on “virgin” paper--nonrecycled paper--but on foreign paper to boot.

Although half of the press run of 15 million was done by a private firm on recycled newsprint-grade paper, CAW says the other half used unrecycled virgin paper from Canada, made from trees cut in the forests of British Columbia. O, Canada!

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Alzheimer’s Disease Program

Nine state-sponsored diagnostic and treatment centers for Alzheimer’s Disease have diagnosed and treated more than 8,000 cases statewide since 1989. Here are the university medical centers administering the program and the location, where different. For more information call (916) 327-4662.

CENTER: CASES

UC San Diego: 1,050

USC, Downey: 1,001

UC Davis, Berkeley: 993

UC Davis, Sacramento: 988

UC San Francisco: 896

UC Irvine: 880

Stanford: 840

UCSF, Fresno: 742

USC: 647

TOTAL: 8,037

Source: state Department of Heath Services’ Center for Gerontology

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Batting cleanup: Election season not only precedes the big day by many months, but now it ain’t even over when it’s over.

A flat-out tie in a City Council race in the Central Valley town of Kingsburg was supposed to be settled on a coin toss, but several people are questioning whether Rick Walley really did call “tails” and defeat Paul Kruper.

Walley says he did. He was certified the winner, but now Kruper says he’ll appeal. . . .

And up in Chico, a conservative councilman’s death has left the council divided 3-3, conservative and liberal. The six couldn’t even pick a mayor among themselves, much less choose a replacement for their departed colleague.

So they’ve agreed to a foolproof playground technique--drawing names from a hat. Now each of the six gets to be a mayor from one meeting to the next. But that seventh, deciding council seat is still vacant; it will probably take a $60,000 election to fill it.

And in Sacramento, where elections and term limits are changing the Capitol cast members faster than a summer-stock company hit by the flu, new Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante was introducing the state’s constitutional officers when he got to “state Treasurer Kathleen Brown”--who hasn’t been in office since she ran for governor in 1994--instead of the other Kathleen, Controller Connell. To the guffaws that followed, Bustamante promised, “That was the first of many” gaffes.

Not too many; term limits mean that in 1998, two years after making history, he’ll be history.

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One offs: One-person motorized skis foul the water and whine like mobs of mosquitoes, but they also bring tourist millions to South Lake Tahoe, where regulators are considering limiting their use or banning them. . . . Coconut oil, the densely saturated fat that stops up arteries faster than lard, did a pretty good job of clogging up Sacramento traffic arteries when a truck carrying 8,000 gallons--millions of fat grams’ worth--spilled the load at a busy freeway intersection. . . . An honest Watsonville third-grader who last year found and returned a dropped $100 bill--and got a $5 reward--has found and returned a wallet containing $213, and been rewarded with a squirt gun.

EXIT LINE

“Did you ever stop and think that with any question in life, you could respond with a line or a name of a Beatles’ song?”

--Rusty Goldman of Pacifica, at a recent Beatlefest in Burlingame. (Absolutely true. “I Wanna Be Your Man.” Response: “Help!”)

California Dateline appears every other Friday.