Santa Cruz County to regulate recreational marijuana grows

“My relationship with cannabis has been to help me with insomnia, and I had lower back pain from a football injury from when I was in high school,” said Santa Cruz resident Chris Carr.

Carr has been using medical marijuana for years. Now he’s an employee at a dispensary in Santa Cruz, and he said people’s perception of the drug has come a long way.

“This is a new era. It’s a paradigm shift in our society and in our history here as Californians,” Carr said.

That’s why voters overwhelmingly supported legalizing recreational marijuana in November and the state now allows people to grow up to six plants themselves.

On Tuesday, the Santa Cruz County will vote on a list of rules about how people can grow it.

“We ask that it be in an enclosure that can be locked so kids can’t get into it or other people can’t get into it, and that they have some setbacks from a neighbor’s yard and it not be seen from the public right-of-way,” supervisor John Leopold said.

Community leaders and distributors agreed that regulating marijuana is the right move.

“I think what we’ve learned over the last couple of years is Santa Cruz County, the residents here are interested in having a reasonable set of regulations around cannabis. Allowing people to grow this plant at home is something that on a small scale shouldn’t bother anybody,” Leopold said.

Some argue it’ll also shrink the dangerous market that’s not following the law.

“With more people having the right to cultivate their own, there’s less incentive to try to monetize off of the black market,” Carr said.

The new rules would take effect 30 days after the supervisors vote, if it passes.

The next item on the agenda will be commercial cultivation.