<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : It Wasn’t Easy, but a User Got Pot From the Police

Top of the props, or, still more smoke than fire from the medical-use-of-marijuana initiative.

Mountain View police seized six marijuana plants--along with a doctor’s letter written the day after the election in which Proposition 215 passed--from a 43-year-old electrician who used home-grown pot for AIDS-related conditions.

But after three days, and pleas from the man’s distraught wife, and a directive from the Santa Clara County D.A.’s office that it will not prosecute medical cultivation of marijuana, police gave everything back.

By then the plants were dead, but, hey, it’s a precedent: Mountain View’s police may be the first to return a controlled substance.

Over in San Jose, medical marijuana users may be seeing the first buds of cannabis capitalism. A falling-out between ex-business partners who had planned to open the city’s first legal medical marijuana club may mean two clubs. One organizer is already promoting his outlet’s “top quality marijuana,” handicapped elevators and 300-plus parking spaces.

What’s next, price wars? Leveraged buyouts? Double coupons?

And given all that, San Jose may approve commercial zoning rules to treat marijuana “dispensaries” like any other business when it comes to where they can operate.

Of course no one could use the product on the premises: In San Jose, it’s against the law to smoke in public buildings and offices.

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Banner year: Forget about selling the Lincoln Bedroom--what about the west facade of the state Capitol?

Complaints about banners being hoisted up the sides of the Capitol to welcome convention groups to Sacramento induced the Legislature to, uh, suspend the practice for now.

The Rules Committee had charged groups $34 to hang a small banner and $68 for a large one, the best billboard bargain in town. It was an enormous banner welcoming one insurance company’s agents that finally did it for some lawmakers, who pointed out that the signs could be considered a form of advertising or endorsement.

Within days of that decision, the Capitol’s west steps were rented to a movie company which turned the site into . . . Montgomery, Ala.

Suddenly, it was Dixie 1963 in the river city, and there, starring as Gov. George Wallace in the eponymous TNT film, stood actor Gary Sinise, declaring as Wallace had in January 1963, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

Wallace’s “forever,” as it turned out, was already over.

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Bugged: Every era has a beat to beat up on. 1940s parents deplored the jitterbug; in the ‘50s it was Elvis whose pelvis led the way to perdition; in the 1960s adults blamed the Beatles.

Beatles are just as ruinous today, responsible for flooding in the Central Valley. Or so you might think to read Rep. Richard W. Pombo’s letter to constituents. The Washington Post quoted the Tracy, Calif., Republican as writing he was “heartbroken . . . angry . . . devastated” at what that darned Elderberry Beatle was doing.

“The fact of the matter is that our levee’s [sic] have not been maintained because they have been deemed habitat for bugs and rodents like the Elderberry Beatle!”

“That’s right,” writes Pombo, who is behind an amendment to the Endangered Species Act. “Holes in the levee’s [sic] due to rodents and bugs have created a catastrophe all in the name of preserving habitat.”

The elderberry longhorn beetle is a threatened species inhabiting bushes sometimes found on the levees, but the Stockton Record checked with farmers and officials, and the consensus was that what flooded the “levee’s” was heavy rain.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Assault Weapons

Since the state’s Assault Weapon Control Act of 1989 took effect in 1990, 62,299 semiautomatic assault weapons, owned by 37,821 Californians, including AK47s, semiautomatic rifles, Uzis and shotguns, have been registered. Here is a look at registered assault weapons, by county:

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POPULATION NO. OF NO. OF RANK COUNTY RANK ASSAULT WEAPONS OWNERS 1. Los Angeles (1) 21,563 13,030 2. Orange (3) 5,497 3,228 3. San Diego (2) 4,566 2,756 4. San Bernardino (5) 2,896 1,909 5. Santa Clara (4) 2,886 1,656 6. Alameda (7) 2,545 1,502 7. Riverside (6) 2,101 1,284 8. Sacramento (8) 2,072 1,278 9. San Mateo (12) 1,857 939 10. Contra Costa (9) 1,725 1,088

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NOTE: Seven non-California residents have registered 10 assault weapons for use in the state.

Source: California Dept. of Justice, Sacramento

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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One-offs: Levi Strauss & Co. has paid $25,000--approximately 20,000 times the original price of about $1.25--for a pair of 100-ish-year-old Levi’s, one of the oldest in existence. . . . Modesto’s July 17 community festival to honor filmmaker George Lucas, who put the town on the movie map with the film “American Graffiti,” won’t be using the G-word in its celebration. . . . The school newspaper staff at San Francisco’s scrappy Mission High, “the poorest school in the district,” is being honored by Columbia University for its investigative journalism.

EXIT LINE

“My main complaint from customers is there are too many straight people here.”

--Morgan Gorrono, manager of The Cafe, a well-known San Francisco gay bar that was reprimanded by the city’s human rights commission for its policy banning heterosexual couples from kissing. Quoted in the San Francisco Examiner.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.