Politics and Marijuana: an Award-Winning Mix

In the ‘70s, the key to untangling any political conundrum was to follow the money.

In California in the ‘90s, it may be that the secret is to follow the smoke.

State Sen. John Vasconcellos will be getting a top award next week from the liberal Drug Policy Foundation. He, in turn, will present the foundation’s journalism award to Garry Trudeau, the creator of the “Doonesbury” strip.

Here’s the smoking press release element:

Vasconcellos is getting the award for his legislative proposals supporting medical marijuana research, in the wake of Proposition 215. He is also the same fellow who crafted the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem, Personal and Social Responsibility, which was savagely mocked in the nation’s newspaper comics pages in 1987 by . . . Garry Trudeau.

Trudeau is being honored for last year’s comic lampooning of the raid on a San Francisco medical marijuana club ordered by an opponent of Proposition 215--Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren, who still thinks 215 is “a dumb idea” but has come out in support of research to settle once and for all the dispute, “Weed: good medicine or good time?”

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Mammals rule!: As the Mike Tysons and Evander Holyfields of the oceans, killer whales (kin to us other mammals) and great white sharks (stars of movies and nightmares) were long assumed to give the other species a wide berth.

But now a videotape that trumps anything on “Wild Kingdom” shows a 20-foot orca swimming off the Farallon Islands recently with her baby, not far from a ship of nature lovers. As the naturalists watched, the orca veered toward a dark shape and surfaced with a 10-foot-long great white shark in her teeth.

Great white shark expert Peter Pyle showed up with his underwater video camera and moved to within five feet of the attack, recording the whale killing the shark, and then offering it to her baby.

“She was encouraging her calf to feed,” and the baby “especially liked the liver,” recalled Mary Jane Schramm, who watched from the ship with other naturalists. “You know how hard it can be to get kids to eat. Not him, though.”

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Breast Cancer Awareness

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a good reminder for women who haven’t had recent mammograms to obtain them. In California breast cancer cases have increased slightly during the most recent seven years for which figures are available. The average rate over the period is 114 cases per 100,000 women in the population.

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YEAR CASES DEATHS 1988 18,942 4,121 1989 18,412 4,258 1990 19,578 4,292 1991 20,076 4,295 1992 20,833 4,116 1993 20,399 4,310 1994 20,739 4,404

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Source: California Cancer Registry, Sacramento

Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times

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Clink Lit 101: Raymond McCarty was looking at more than six months or six hundred pages.

So the judge threw the book at him: “The Odyssey.”

The Pleasanton man was facing serious jail time for not staying away from an ex-girlfriend as ordered. Instead, a judge sentenced him to four months and ordered him to produce a five-page book report on Homer’s epic about the Greek warrior’s journeys toward home.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Chris Lamiero suggested the compromise--”Rather than sit in jail, I thought he might expand his perception of the world through literature”--but turned down the judge’s recommendation for something more current, like John Grisham.

McCarty will be reading a paperback, inasmuch as no hardbacks are permitted in jail. With his ninth-grade education, he cautioned the judge not to grade too sternly. Homework is due Nov. 10.

(Years ago, three Kansas men were assigned the same kind of punishment--six weekends in jail and a book report on “The Ox-Bow Incident,” the classic novel about the lynching death of an innocent man--for beating a man they suspected of burglary. The three, who had faced prison time, soon complained that the sentence was too harsh.)

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One-Offs: Someone--probably several someones--stole a cast-iron display coffin from outside a Clovis mercantile shop. . . . The California Milk Advisory Board poll of 300 Californians found that nearly half believe Bigfoot exists (twice as many men as women), and that 6% of those say they met him (probably bowling with Elvis). . . . A two-strikes law in Santa Rosa requires owners of dogs found wandering the streets more than once to get their canines sterilized to limit the population of homeless dogs. . . . Fresno Rotary’s program of leaving 450 yellow bikes around town for people to ride as they need and leave for the next person has a flat tire, because the bikes have almost all gone missing. . . . Reaganomics guru Arthur Laffer, he of the famous curve and now of Rancho Santa Fe, reported dozens of his tenderly raised palm trees stolen, and now sheriff’s deputies have arrested a Bonsall man on suspicion of palm pinching.

EXIT LINE

“Even before the housing developments, we’re getting yet another vineyard. . . . I really don’t know where all of this cheap wine is going, but I guess somebody is drinking it.”

--Ronald Schlorff, biologist and the state Fish and Game Department’s crane specialist. The beautiful sandhill cranes are returning to winter in the Central Valley, as they have done for more than 12,000 years. The difference is that they are all but doomed by subdivisions and even vineyards ruining their ancient habitat. Quoted in the Sacramento Bee.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.