“Scripteasers”: Experienced Actors Meet New Scripts

Group Has Done “Cold Readings,” Play Critiques Since 1948

by LEO E. LAURENCE, J.D.

Copyright © 2011 by Leo E. Laurence • All rights reserved

Photo caption: Scripteasers host Jonathan Dunn-Rankin (right) stands with guest Alan Cruz, 21 before some of the host’s massive and wildly colorful art collection. Photo by Leo E. Laurence.

Some of the area’s finest experienced actors, directors, playwrights and guests get together every other Friday in the elegant hilltop home of Jonathan Dunn-Rankin, an experienced actor in the theatre and television.

They are called “Scripteasers,” and they meet to hear cold readings of stage plays where the ac-tors have never seen the script, and there are no rehearsals.

Curiously, after the cold reading, the whole group of about 30 or more people tear apart the script, many with an experienced eye, in a unique open discussion by everyone.

They aggressively probe the play, questioning whether the author’s premise is clear. Are the characters clearly defined and developed?

Is the dialogue effective and realistic? Did you hear trite words and phrases?

Did the script hold your interest, and why?

Are their staging or production problems?

Is the script marketable as it is?

After the people at Scripteasers have torn apart the new script in every technical and artistic way, the play’s author is giving a short opportunity to respond graciously.

History

“The ‘Scripteasers’ was formed on May 5, 1948 as The Dramatists’ Workshop to give script-writer members and guests the opportunity to hear their works read aloud by (experienced) local actors,” says their Web site, www.scripteasers.org

“At the group’s Silver Anniversary celebration in 1973, Hazel Burrows, the founding president, recalled how the name change (to Scripteasers) occurred during ‘an interminable meeting’ where such appellations as The Dramatists’ Guild were bandied about.

“Finally Aubrey Rankin, half in jest, threw out Scripteasers. It caught everyone’s fancy … ” the unique group’s Web site adds.

“For the past 63 years, the (Scripteasers) have been meeting on alternate Fridays in members’ homes to give unrehearsed ‘cold’ readings of new works, followed by a period of (in depth) con-structive discussion to aid writers in developing their craft,” the Web site explains.

The evenings are “topped off” with a popular period of light refreshments, when many roam about and enjoy the host’s fabulous art collection.

For years, Scripteasers have been meeting in Dunn-Rankin’s elegant hilltop home overlooking the bay and airport. Inside, all high walls are totally covered by brilliantly colored in modern art. One guest, Alan Cruz, 21, was fascinated by a hanging painting that uses oddly converging geomet-rical lines to change the image as the viewer changes position.

Large coffee tables and side pieces are filled with stunning sculpture.

Hanging above everyone's heads are several huge “mobile” sculptures hanging from high ceilings.

Attending a Scripteasers meeting in Dunn-Rankin’s large home is literally enveloping yourself in very brightly-colored art gallery.

Participants often arrive early to have time to look over Dunn-Rankin’s huge art collection.

Some of those who regularly attend Scripteasers are Mary Boersma, Tom Turner, Tom Furth and Nina Ternsaky.

Success!

The late Ruth Purkey, whom Dunn-Rankin called a “prolific writer,” was one of the local script-writers whose works withstood the critical, sometimes brutal and often hilarious hard-core test of the Scripteasers.

“Her works were carried in the Baker & French catalogue” — the standard source for theatres looking to produce copyrighted plays — he reported.

Another author who made it through the Scripteasers gantlet was Beatrice La Force of Alpine, who, Dunn-Rankin recalled, “wrote a collection of children’s plays that were produced.”

Scripts critiqued by Scripteasers have been produced at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. Others have been staged elsewhere or been produced as films. Scripteasers’ scripts have also been published in best-play anthologies and are carried in publisher’s catalogues.

“Actors in the Scripteasers’ ‘cold’ readings have appeared in local, regional and national theatres, on television and in film,” their Web site reports.

“The scripts are selected by our script coordinator, Richard Addesio,” explained Dunn-Rankin, standing near a stunning nude sculpture of the Greek god Adonis.

Tough Discussion

After the “cold” reading of the play at Scripteasers, the 30 or so attending critically discuss the play. They don’t try to rewrite the script, but they can offer biting tips on everything from casting issues to character development.

That discussion is very unique.

It is highly structured by a strong moderator, as participants and guests eagerly engage in tough discussion. The group can range from 21 to 81 years of age, but many are experienced personalities from local theatres.

There’s a unique procedural process that scriptwriters have to follow to be considered for a “cold” reading at Scripteasers.

“Your script must be original, fee of copyright restrictions and unproduced,” the group’s Web site states.

“Your first step is to submit your script via e-mail or as a hard copy.

“Your script must be (A) written in standard dramatic format, (B) be securely bound, (C) and contain the following information:

“(1) Category: stage play, screenplay, TV script, etc., (2) Type: drama, comedy, mystery, experimental, etc., and (3) Cast: number of roles broken down by women and men.”

Their e-mail address is thescripteasers@msn.com and their Web site is at http://www.scripteasers.org

These “cold” readings by Scripteasers every other Friday at the stunning Dunn-Rankin home are really open to anyone. There’s no fee to attend and they provide a fine spread of refreshments after the meeting ends.

City Council Votes to Restrict Marijuana Dispensaries

Despite Public Pressure, Virtual Ban Passes with Slight Amendments

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Photos © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan and Charles Nelson. All rights reserved

The San Diego City Council spent nearly six hours on Monday, March 28 listening to public input and debating a proposed permit process for medical marijuana dispensaries — and passed, with only slight changes, a measure that dispensary members and their supporters say amounts to a virtual ban. Though public speakers in support of giving medical marijuana users safe access to the substance through collectives far outnumbered opponents at each stage of the process — at the Planning Commission and the City Council’s committees as well as the Council itself — the Council listened to the voices of advocates of the so-called “war on drugs” and enacted an ordinance that would make it virtually impossible for dispensaries to locate anywhere in the city of San Diego.

Medical marijuana supporters — including patients who use dispensaries as well as their managers and attorneys, as well as volunteer activists — organized a massive campaign they called “Stop the Ban” to try to get the Council to adopt a looser regulation along the lines suggested by the Council’s Medical Marijuana Task Force. They packed the hearings before the Planning Commission and Council committees. They got constituents to write up to 3,000 letters to Councilmembers — the largest letter-writing campaign directed at the Council, according to organizer Ben Cisneros. And they staged a demonstration on the day of the Council meeting that drew up to 500 people, beginning at the Federal Building downtown and moving to the outside of San Diego City Hall. But the Council was clearly more attuned to the arguments of opponents that the medical marijuana laws are being abused by recreational users and that dispensaries are bad for the communities in which they are located.

The ordinance before the City Council would have limited dispensaries to industrial zones and a handful of commercial zones. It would have put dispensaries through the most severe permitting process required under city law — Process 4, which also covers new airports and mines. And it would have required that dispensaries be located at least 1,000 feet from schools, playgrounds, libraries, child care facilities, youth facilities, churches, parks and other dispensaries. Acting on a motion from District 3 Councilmember Todd Gloria, the Council cut the 1,000-foot distance to 600 feet and changed the permit requirement to the less onerous Process 3.

But they did nothing to change what dispensary advocates considered the most serious restriction in the proposed ordinance: the severe limits on just which zones dispensaries can locate in the city. They also didn’t change the part of the ordinance that requires all existing dispensaries to close before they can start the permitting process — which, advocates said, means that medical marijuana patients could have to wait up to a year or more before having safe access to the substance.

The new rules would keep dispensaries away from any areas in the city where people actually live and force them into areas well away from public transportation — a major hardship for sick people, especially ones whose illnesses make it impossible for them to drive. “For many sick patients, travel is difficult,” said Eugene Davidovich, local liaison to the nationwide medical marijuana organization Americans for Safe Access. “It is unnecessary and divisive to restrict [dispensaries] to industrial areas. This makes it impossible for them to locate within the city limits.”

“I don’t think you should be taking the collectives from downtown,” said medical marijuana patient Michael Corbett. “I have to use public transportation to get around, and it takes three and one-half hours to get there [to an industrial zone] and back. I’m a Viet Nam vet with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), chronic depression and arthritis. The medical marijuana helps me quite a bit, especially with my sleep apnea.” Corbett also warned that if medical marijuana users have to travel long distances to obtain the substance, criminals will target them. “I’ve had people follow me and wait for me,” he said. “If [my dispensary] were in an industrial area, I’d probably get jumped for my product.”

“The new ordinance will make access so restrictive, patients either won’t get their medicine or will have to go to the black market,” said marijuana dispensary director James Schmucktenberger. “If this ordinance passes, [my client] Linda will either not have medicine or will have to drive miles out of her way, which she is physically incapable of.”

“My father was on oxygen a few years ago,” said collective supporter Brianna Lenville. “I saw him take [pharmaceutical] drugs that made him sicker. Without medical cannabis [marijuana] he probably wouldn’t be here today. Think about the patients and their families, and what they will lose, before you vote to take away safe access.”

The controversy over dispensaries is just the latest wrinkle in the ongoing contention over medical marijuana since November 1996, when Californians became the first voters in the U.S. to allow the use of marijuana for medical reasons. Dale Gieringer, who was one of the authors of the medical marijuana initiative, Proposition 215, spoke to the City Council and said, “I’m surprised that it’s taken so long for the state to implement the law.” Among the issues involved are the continued ban on all uses of marijuana from the federal government — which gives agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) the authority to raid medical marijuana collectives in California and other states that have laws allowing medical use.

In more liberal cities like San Francisco, local governments have refused to allow local police to cooperate with DEA raids against medical marijuana dispensaries and gardens as long as the patient collectives who operated them were legal by state and local standards. In San Diego, the city police and county sheriff’s department have frequently worked with DEA agents to raid medical marijuana facilities. In 2009 President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, promised that he would stop the DEA from raiding medical marijuana facilities where state laws allowed them — but the raids have continued anyway.

“No city has successfully regulated medical marijuana dispensaries with rules as restrictive as these,” Gieringer told the San Diego City Council. He held up his own city, Oakland, as an example for San Diego to follow. “We did it not by taking them out of commercial zones,” he said. “We had city staff look through the properties, accept those that looked good and reject those that looked bad, and we haven’t had problems since. Sacramento, San Francisco and West Hollywood, California, and Denver, Colorado, all have successfully regulated dispensaries by allowing them in commercial zones.”

Stephen Whitburn, a former candidate for the San Diego City Council (he lost to Todd Gloria) and the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, and a member of the city’s Medical Marijuana Task Force, suggested that the ordinance should be more along the lines of what the task force originally recommended. That would essentially have treated medical marijuana dispensaries similarly to pharmacies, allowing them to locate in all commercial areas. It would have followed state law in keeping them 600 feet from schools or other dispensaries, but would not have had the more severe restrictions that got written into the city ordinance after the task force recommended it.

Like Gieringer, Whitburn acknowledged that there are “good” and “bad” dispensaries — ones that take the medical mission seriously and others that operate as fronts to service people who want to use the drug recreationally — and he said the best way for the city to separate the wheat from the chaff would be to allow local community planning groups to do it. “Different neighborhoods have different issues around medical marijuana, and planning groups want a voice,” Whitburn explained. “In District 3 a lot of people want them. Many people there know people who have benefited from medical marijuana. In District 4 there are concerns that dispensaries would add more challenges. In other districts there’s more imbalance. In District 2, some of the most vocal opponents to dispensaries come from Pacific Beach and some of the most vocal supporters come from Ocean Beach.”

Whitburn argued that the city should pass a minimally restrictive ordinance and let neighborhood planning groups decide, on a case-by-case basis, how many dispensaries can locate in their areas and which operators they will allow. “If a planning group thinks a dispensary is proper, fine,” Whitburn explained. “If not, fine. We should give the neighborhoods a say.”

Rev. Mary Moreno Richardson of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral near Balboa Park — speaking for herself and not for her church or denomination — gave an impassioned defense of dispensaries and made it clear she’s one minister who doesn’t want them kept away from churches. “For 25 years I’ve worked in social services in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and San Diego,” she said. “I serve as a chaplain with incarcerated youth and [people convicted of] trafficking. I have seen the destruction of drugs — and also the destruction from the ‘war on drugs.’ This is a war against the poor, sick and disabled.”

Richardson announced that the California Council of Churches, on whose board she sits, opposed the ordinance “because rezoning to limit medical marijuana [dispensaries] is detrimental to people with real medical needs. If there are abuses, deal with those. Compassion for people with diseases and in pain is part of the common good. This ban would affect the most vulnerable people in our community. … I have seen first-hand the benefits of medical marijuana for people, including senior citizens, who are living in chronic pain. I know one 80-year-old woman who was in pain from a fall and could not take prescription drugs because they made her nauseous. She tried medical marijuana lotion, which gave her incredible relief. … I believe we should have collectives near churches because they help relieve suffering.”

Ben Cisneros, a City Heights resident and medical marijuana advocate, noted that the proposed ordinance was so restrictive the city’s planning department hadn’t been able to come up with a map showing where dispensaries could locate legally under it. “Medical marijuana dispensaries have broad support throughout California and contribute to the community,” he said. “At every hearing, supporters [of dispensaries] have far outnumbered opponents. … If this ordinance passes, many San Diegans will turn either to pharmaceuticals or to the black market, and crime will increase.”

Gieringer, Davidovich and Corbett also talked about one little-discussed aspect of the dispensary issues: the amount of money they raise for the city’s parched coffers by charging sales tax. “In San Diego, we have between 25,000 and 60,000 legal patients, and that’s $10-20 million in taxes,” Gieringer explained. “If San Diego tries to close all the clubs, they will lose money and lose jobs, and you will be dragged down in litigation, just as you were in 2005 when the courts overturned your decision on adult entertainment facilities.”

The Opposition

The speakers against medical marijuana — some of whom wanted to see the ordinance pass without amendments and some of whom wanted it even more restrictive — generally either argued against the medical use of marijuana itself, often saying it sends “a mixed message” to teenagers considering recreational use, or said that dispensaries attract crime to the neighborhoods they’re in by giving criminals easy targets. Scott Shipman, representing a group called San Diegans for Safe Neighborhoods, said that his organization’s position is “in favor of regulations that would prohibit [offering] marijuana for sale.”

According to Shipman, nothing in Proposition 215 allows businesses to sell marijuana. The state law governing dispensaries requires that they be organized as nonprofit collectives or cooperatives, but Shipman said that’s just a façade. “There’s no doubt that these stores are businesses,” he explained. “These stores are increasing recreational drug use. Many counties and cities are seeing the harm in these stores and are prohibiting them. According to an article in the Arizona Sun, less than 2 percent of the people who use these stores have serious illnesses like cancer or AIDS.” Shipman said that the city should ban dispensaries completely, or if it doesn’t do that it should at least add colleges and universities to the list of institutions dispensaries must be at least 1,000 feet from — a restriction actually considered in the council committee process, but ultimately dropped.

“I live in District 2, I’m the mother of two teenagers and I’m concerned that these [dispensaries] are encouraging my kids to accept marijuana use,” said Marcy Beckett. “The shops are selling to recreational users, and that is affecting our communities. For $40, anyone can get a doctor’s recommendation, and then they can buy from these stores and sell it to anyone, including our kids. This is back-door legalization, and we voted against that last November” — referring to Proposition 19, defeated by California voters last fall (and, ironically, opposed by some people involved in growing medical marijuana who feared it would hurt their business).

“As a professor at San Diego State University (SDSU), I’m concerned about youngsters,” said Shirley Forbing. “I am all for people who need [medical marijuana] and are supported by their primary physicians.” Forbing’s main argument was that, because the human brain is still developing until a person is about 25, no one younger than that should be allowed to use marijuana for any reason. She also said that “marijuana has 423 chemicals, and over 2,000 when combusted,” and that the percentage of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the component mostly responsible for marijuana’s euphoric (or “high”) effect, has increased in the last 10 years from 2.2 to 9.5 percent — a claim that drew groans from the medical marijuana supporters in the audience.

The most spectacular arguments against allowing dispensaries came from a tall, white-haired man named Royal Magnus, who introduced himself as a former police officer and prison counselor who now works in substance abuse prevention. “In the back of the line of people coming forward to attend this meeting I saw 15 people smoking grass,” he said. “They are arrogant troublemakers and I don’t want them in my neighborhood.” He told the Councilmembers to “use logic” while admitting that “I speak emotionally.” He said that if dispensaries are allowed in San Diego, “crime will increase and people will die. That’s what they told me when I was packing a gun. It’s the arrogance of the community behind it.” After claiming to have closed down a meth lab by reporting its proprietors on child abuse charges, Magnus leveled an attack on sex researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey, calling him a pervert who rigged his researches to justify his own perversions and started the breakdown in morality that led to the approval of medical marijuana use.

The Council

After hearing over five hours of public comment, Councilmember Gloria led off the Council’s debate by acknowledging that, while the ordinance as written “reflects community input, some of the regulations are unduly restrictive.” Though he said he was “concerned that there was no grace period for existing cooperatives” — no time to allow them to remain in operation while they comply with the new regulations — ultimately he did not push the issue with his fellow Councilmembers.

Councilmember Marti Emerald noted that the Council was actually considering two separate ordinances — one dealing with land use and zoning, the other with public safety — and asked for a clarification that a dispensary would have to prove they were in compliance with both before they could open. “This is not a ban,” Emerald insisted. “It’s going to impact the number of facilities open, but the folks who will still have their doors open will be those who play by the rules and won’t make their patients subject to raids.”

“This issue is a contentious one,” said Council president Tony Young. “We’ve got a federal government that does not support the state law and believes we are breaking the law by allowing this to exist in our city. I don’t believe it will work unless the state and federal governments are on the same plane. I also want to make sure that people who need the medicine are able to get it. None of you addressed the issue that medical marijuana is very easy to get for people who don’t need it, and that’s a problem” — ignoring supporters of medical marijuana like Gieringer and Whitburn, who had acknowledged that problem and called for a more flexible ordinance to allow legitimate dispensaries to operate while closing down others.

Throughout his remarks, Young repeatedly said, “I know that’s true,” representing himself as knowing more about the issue than the patients, the dispensary owners and others directly involved in it. “I deal with young people all the time and see young people who have their [medical marijuana] cards. Sometimes they go to these facilities to get medical pot and sometimes the pot they have on their persons is for the streets. We do want to make sure these operations don’t proliferate to the point where they’re unmanageable. Right now we have two facilities in District 4 and two others we had to shut down because they weren’t operating in ways conducive to our community.”

Though he seconded Gloria’s motion and ultimately voted for it, Young seemed more interested in scoring points against the medical marijuana community than in supporting it. “The way the industry has comported itself in its ads have not presented the industry very well,” he said. “The ads have said if you don’t need it medically, you can still get a card. Cards are too easy to get. You can get one over the Internet or over the phone, and that’s something we can’t regulate.” Young made it clear he was voting for the ordinance because without a city law in place, “tomorrow we might have 180 [dispensaries] and the next week we’ll have 265. I will support the motion, but it’s not in the best interests of San Diego.”

The two medical marijuana dispensary ordinances both passed 5-2, with Councilmember David Alvarez absent and Carl DeMaio and Lorie Zapf opposed. Both DeMaio and Zapf made it clear that they voted against the ordinances because they didn’t find them restrictive enough, and DeMaio — whose signature issue, both as a Councilmember and a prospective candidate for mayor of San Diego — also said he was worried about the cost to the city of regulating dispensaries. “We cannot keep adopting programs we have no way to pay for,” he said — not answering but just ignoring the supporters’ argument that dispensaries actually bring tax money into the city’s treasury.

DeMaio also made it clear he’s against medical marijuana on principle except for the most serious health conditions. When Proposition 215 was on the ballot, he said, “California voters were told it would only be for people who were severely ill or in acute pain. The initiative has been abused for the purpose of obtaining marijuana for recreational use, and if you won’t admit that we’re not in the same spot.” He also said that Gloria’s amendments “actually weaken our obligation to protect neighborhoods. With over 165 dispensaries [citywide], I hear from my constituents that we already have too many.”

“This ordinance has severe flaws,” said Zapf. “I wanted to see universities in there [as places dispensaries could not be located near]. One-half of the people buying medical marijuana are between 18 and 29. My first and foremost concerns are safe children and preserving communities. My staff estimated that at least 90 percent of the potentially vacant sites [available for dispensaries under the ordinance] are in my district” — which, if true, would seem to argue for a less restrictive ordinance that would have allowed dispensaries in more areas of the city. “I can’t support turning my district into a ‘pot district’,” Zapf concluded.

S.A.M.E. Rally Against Hate Crimes, Bullying Draws 70

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTOS, top to bottom: Marchers, René Torres, Maya Conti, Jacob Harshbarger, Toni Atkins, Kevin Beiser, Connor Maddocks, Rev. Robbie Robinson, Katherine Mendonça, Lisa Kove, Joshua Napier (singer), Tannyr Denby (singer, “The Equality Song”). (Photo of Jacob Harshbarger by Fernando Lopez, courtesy http://unfinishedlivesblog.com; all others by Mark Gabrish Conlan, © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine.)

“On January 20, I was walking down the streets of Hillcrest and two kids, 13 and 17, yelled ‘Faggot!’ at me,” San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) member René Torres told an audience of about 70 people at the group’s “Our Streets, Our Lives: One Life Is Too Many” rally against hate crimes and bullying at the North Park Community Park March 26. “Within a few minutes, they were hitting me. I called for help, and some straight people came to my aid. I thank them, but where was our community? Are we just a marketing niche or are we going to stand together for our lives?”

“I can tell my parents that I’m Bisexual,” said Maya Conti, a 10th grader at King/Chávez High School, “and I have friends who support me, but a lot of the kids at school not only aren’t supported by their parents, they get homophobic texts and messages on Facebook and MySpace” — making the point that teen bullying is yet another long-standing reality that the Internet has enabled its perpetrators to carry out more efficiently. “They don’t have any down time when they get out of this cycle,” she added.

“Maya was in fifth grade in Chula Vista when people started calling her ‘lesbo,’” her mother, Lucila Conti, recalled. “It’s also at home. Friends of Maya have parents who treat them like dirt. I really would like to see the schools start organizing more Gay-Straight Alliances (GSA’s) and more students coming to S.A.M.E. meetings. It does get better, but we have to be the voice that makes it better.”

“Last Hallowe’en, I was brutally beaten outside my home,” recalled Jacob Harshbarger, who couldn’t attend the S.A.M.E. rally but wrote a statement that was read on site by S.A.M.E. activist Joshua Napier. “While I still find it hard to remember many of the details of that night, what still haunts me are the enraged voices of my attackers repeatedly yelling things like ‘Faggot!’ and ‘Come kick the fairy.’ Thanks to neighbors who had been woken up by all the commotion, the attack ended. If it weren’t for them, I don’t know how bad things would have gotten.”

Things got bad enough for Harshbarger that night. According to a report posted to the Unfinished Lives Web site, http://unfinishedlivesblog.com/2010/11/02/, his assailants were “a mixed-gender gang” of three women and two men who accosted him near his North Park home while he was walking his dog. They accosted him, called him a “fucking faggot” and slammed him against the wall of his house, causing a loud “bang” that fortunately alerted one of his neighbors. Harshbarger had a concussion, was bruised behind his eyes and needed 13 stitches to close a split lip.

“The challenges didn’t end with the attack,” Harshbarger said in his statement. “As I dealt with healing wounds and missing work, I also had to deal with an unresponsive police department. They failed to fully investigate the crime scene and question witnesses. They told me it would take two years to get my case solved — even though they had acquired one of my attackers’ cell phones. I felt that the system that was supposed to be there to protect me was treating me as though it was my fault.”

Fortunately, Harshbarger had a community member on his side — marriage equality activist Fernando Lopez — who “refused to sit by and let this happen,” he said. In addition to lobbying the police to take the attack seriously — “Within 48 hours my attackers were behind bars,” Harshbarger said ¬— Lopez also documented Harshbarger’s injuries in a photo posted on the Unfinished Lives site. In his statement, Harshbarger thanked Lopez, former Assemblymember Lori Saldaña and City Councilmember Todd Gloria, and said there was a silver lining in the dark cloud of his attack.

“The dialogue is no longer about my one incident,” he said. “The community has been reawakened to the ongoing need for safety, education and a continuing, collaborative relationship with law enforcement. Knowing that you are taking the time to carry the torch of awareness warms my heart and gives me hope. So please stay vigilant and stay vocal, and never stop fighting for yourselves, your safety or your rights.”

S.A.M.E. held the March 26 rally to build that “torch of awareness” and picked a North Park location not only because Harshbarger’s attack had taken place in North Park but to show that both San Diego’s Queer presence and the danger from anti-Queer violence extend far beyond the so-called “Gayborhood” of Hillcrest. The featured speakers were California State Assemblymember Toni Atkins — who preceded Gloria on the San Diego City Council — San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) board member Kevin Beiser (the first openly Queer person to sit on that board) and Rev. Robbie Robinson, a local African-American minister.

Atkins began her speech by noting that anti-Queer hate violence is not only a nationwide but international problem. “In Edinburgh, Scotland, the murders of three Gay men have that community living in absolute fear,” she said. “Ugandan human rights activist David Kato was murdered a few months ago after his photo appeared in a newspaper. A recent study showed that in Brazil, an LGBT [Queer] person is murdered every day and a half, and that number is increasing. But this is not just a problem that happens somewhere else.”

Referring to the assault on Jacob Harshbarger as well as another attack around the same time “that appeared to be motivated by homophobia,” Atkins stated that “in January, thugs with paint-ball guns terrorized our neighborhood, including an attack on a group standing in the parking lot of our own LGBT Center. That was accompanied by homophobic shouting. A paintball attack might be seen by some to be just a messy nuisance, but at the time, the victims knew only that something had hit them, and they could feel something that could have been blood at the spot where they were shot, all while someone shouted hateful slogans at them.”

Atkins claimed that hate crimes “are actually down in San Diego, thanks to the work of the District Attorney, the San Diego Police Department and the Stonewall Citizens’ Patrol,” a group of volunteers who drive through Hillcrest and other nearby areas at night and report any sign of incipient hate violence to the police. “In San Diego, every anti-LGBT hate crime will be fully investigated and prosecuted,” said Atkins (showing more confidence in local law enforcement than Jacob Harshbarger had!). “But one homophobic hate crime is still one too many. LGBT people have been targeted far more than any other minority group. This violence still occurs, and that’s why your visibility is important.”

Beiser, who in addition to being a school board member is also a math teacher at Granger High School — he won the “Teacher of the Year” award just before he ran for the board — recalled that during the campaign over Proposition 8, which banned legal recognition of same-sex marriage in California, “I heard people called names I don’t dare repeat here.” His response was to partner with the organizers of the National Day of Silence and make hot-pink signs declaring the school a “hate-free zone.”

“All schools need to be safe working and learning environments,” Beiser said. “It’s important for me to say the words ‘Lesbian,’ ‘Gay,’ ‘Bisexual’ and ‘Transgender’ because when we have meetings, the other teachers don’t dare say the word ‘Gay.’” He talked about how all five SDUSD board members, despite party and ideological differences, are working to develop an anti-bullying policy they hope will be a national model. “We also just received a large payment from Verizon,” he said, “with which we can pay for safe zones with signs, equipment, counselors, training and support.”

“Transgender people have been a major target,” said Connor Maddocks, facilities manager at the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center and female-to-male Transgender person who had spoken to S.A.M.E. earlier that month on Transgender issues and how they relate to marriage equality. “Bullying took many forms including, for me, a lifetime of being teased. I felt alone in a world surrounded by so many people. For myself and countless Transgender victims, we feel that we are the freaks, we are the ones not ‘fitting in,’ we don’t conform. … Until we figure out who we are, we can’t find ourselves in life and overcome our inner depression.”

Maddocks said that Transgender people face even more bullying and hate-motivated crime than Lesbians, Gay men and Bisexuals. “Every day we are tortured, beaten, murdered, fired from our jobs, thrown out of our houses,” he said. “We may be the least understood and the smallest group in the LGBT community, but that means there are more of us to join the fight. We need your help, and we are here in turn to help you. There cannot be a cause to stop bullying just against Gay people or just on the basis of religion. We are soldiers in this war, and when you hear a joke about sexism or racism or gender identity or sexual orientation, speak out and say it’s not O.K. to do that. We will make it very uncool to be a bully.”

“I marched in the 1960’s,” said Rev. Robinson. “I witnessed crosses being burned. It’s about equal rights and equal justice for all. We need to push legislators about the threshold of what constitutes a hate crime. It’s hard to prosecute a hate crime because the threshold is so nebulous. Prosecutors will try to duck it. Until we get our legislators to change that thinking and change the laws, you’re going to be marching a long time.”

S.A.M.E. structured the March 26 “Our Streets, Our Lives” event with an opening rally, a march through North Park and another rally, this one an open-mike event, to close. “This is the first time I’ve been at a S.A.M.E. rally,” said Sean, a young man who kicked off the open-mike portion of the event. “In high school I worked for a mega-church for eight years and said [being Queer] was a choice. … There are a lot of Gay people who don’t like other Gay people. There are some Gay people who don’t care about Gay rights. The rights we have are because people fought for them.” Sean thanked S.A.M.E. for staging the event, apologized for his past work for an anti-Queer church and acknowledged singer Lady Gaga for “Born This Way,” the song she introduced at this year’s Grammy Awards whose message is to be who you are and be proud of it.

Katherine Mendonça of the San Diego YWCA linked anti-Queer violence and bullying to another issue of concern to her group: domestic violence against women by their male relationship partners. (Oddly, she didn’t acknowledge that domestic violence occurs in Gay and Lesbian couples, too.) “Domestic violence, like hate crimes and bullying, affects us all,” she said. “It is a crime in which abusers use power and control against their victims. It affects children for generations. Domestic violence, like bullying and hate crimes, knows no social, economic or racial class. One in every four women will experience domestic violence during her lifetime. An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of an assault by an intimate partner each year. In California, 700,000 women experience intimate-partner violence each year: three times the national average.”

She mentioned the case of Diana Gonzalez, a San Diego City College student who was murdered last October 10 by her estranged husband — three weeks after she filed a police report saying he’d kidnapped and raped her. According to Mendonça, the man was arrested for “a few days” but the district attorney did not file charges against him, so he was let go and was later able to kill her. The community responded on December 9 with a march and vigil from City College to the district attorney’s office. “In San Diego, the fatality rate from domestic violence-associated crimes increased 100 percent from last year,” she said.

Mendonça also talked about violence and neglect of Queer youths. She cited a report from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) and the National Coalition for the Homeless that claimed there was “an epidemic of homelessness” among Queer youth. “Danny, a Gay teen, was already trapped as early as seven years old in the tragic downward spiral that led to his homelessness,” she said. “Danny was shoved from one foster home to another, and repeatedly molested. He spent two years in a juvenile correctional facility. At 17, he tried living with his aunt, but she soon ordered him to get his ‘Gay ass’ out of her house. Homeless, Danny got cash by reading people’s Tarot cards, and places to sleep by having survival sex.”

“The worst kind of hate crime is legalized hate crime,” said Lisa Kove, S.A.M.E. member and organizer of DoD Fed Globe, a support organization for Queers in the military and in civilian jobs with the U.S. Department of Defense. (As always, Kove felt legally compelled to state at the beginning of her speech that she was not representing the views of the Defense Department, her employer.) Kove said that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning Queers from serving openly in the U.S. military is still in place — the bill Congress passed last December merely started a process, expected to last at least a year, by which the military will study the issue and “certify” whether they can allow the policy to die — as is the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act,” passed by Congress in 1996 that bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages and allows states to refuse to recognize legal marriages of same-sex couples in other states.

And it’s even worse in other countries, Kove said. “In Uganda, they’re passing laws not only providing the death penalty for Gays but saying that Gays who leave the country should be hunted down and killed,” she stated. (She didn’t mention that U.S. fundamentalist Christian churches and organizations have visited Uganda and lobbied the Ugandan legislature to pass these laws.) Kove said that some people she’s worked with in the U.S. military got post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) just from the burden of having to serve under “don’t ask, don’t tell” and keep quiet about important parts of their personal lives.

“This nonsense about ‘certification’ is because they know the policy is wrong,” Kove said about “don’t ask, don’t tell.” She said she hoped the Log Cabin Republican Club’s suit to invalidate “don’t ask, don’t tell” in court will win so the military will be forced to end the discrimination and not be able to drag out the issue and keep the policy going through the “certification” process. “Oppression needs to die,” said Kove. “Oppression is the basis of all inequality of all people that are treated in a discriminatory manner. No group that is ever treated in a discriminatory manner stays there. There is always the point of confrontation, and that is when the oppressed meet with the oppressor, and eventually equality happens.”

Queer Democrats Say Don’t Sign the “Great Schools” Initiative

Plan Would Add Four Non-Elected Members to San Diego Unified’s Board

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTO: L to R: Richard Barrera, Scott Himmelstein

The predominantly Queer San Diego Democratic Club voted overwhelmingly at their March 24 meeting to urge people not to sign an initiative offered by a group called “San Diegans 4 Great Schools” but actually sponsored and financed by two multimillionaires, Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs and CAC hedge fund CEO Rod Dammeyer. The club took this action after hearing a debate between Scott Himmelstein, director of the Center for Education, Policy and Law at the University of San Diego (USD) and spokesperson for the initiative; and Richard Barrera, president of the board of the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD), who spoke against it.

The debate revolved around the most controversial aspect of the initiative: the expansion of the SDUSD board from five to nine members. The new members wouldn’t be elected by popular vote, as the five current ones are. They would be appointed by a nine-member committee consisting of the presidents of San Diego’s three largest universities — San Diego State University (SDSU) and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), which are public institutions, and USD, which is private and owned by the Roman Catholic Church — along with the chancellor of the San Diego Community College District, the parent chairs of four district advisory committees and either the president of the San Diego Chamber of Commerce or the head of the San Diego Economic Development Corporation (EDC). According to Himmelstein, six of these nine people would have to agree on the candidates for the appointed school board positions.

The initiative does several other things. Right now school board candidates run in district-only primaries but the general elections are citywide. The San Diego City Council used to be elected that way until 1987, when voters passed an initiative for district-only elections. The San Diegans 4 Great Schools initiative would make school board elections district-only as well, a change actually proposed in the 1990’s but opposed by the San Diego Democratic Club for fear that it would make it easier for the radical religious Right to run stealth candidates and take over the school board. The initiative would also limit school board members to three four-year terms and require each school in the district to come up with a plan to improve its students’ learning, as measured by test scores, and file it not only with the school board but the Mayor and City Council as well.

“Our Center for Education, Policy and Law did a seven-year study of the district from 2003 to 2009,” Himmelstein said. “Only about half of our students in elementary and middle school are reading and computing math at grade level. And if you are a student of color, low-income or a special-needs student, according to national tests 80 percent of them are not reading at grade level. Recently the tests on science came out, and according to them 29 percent of our fourth-grade students and only 20 percent of our eighth-grade students are proficient in science: dismal results by any measure.”

Himmelstein acknowledged that “the district is going through some significant financial issues right now,” but said that from 2002 to 2009 per-pupil spending went up 25 percent without any improvement in test scores. The initiative came together, he said, from a group of about 60 people who decided that the way to improve SDUSD students’ performance was to revamp the district’s governing board and make the district’s administration more stable. “Our district has had quite a turnover in superintendents and board members in the last few years,” Himmelstein explained, “and in my view it’s had some not-good effects on students, teachers, administrators and the community as well.”

Indeed, Himmelstein said his group first came together to place an ad in the San Diego Union-Tribune pleading with former superintendent Terry Grier to stay in San Diego in 2009; he quit to take a similar job in Houston and Bill Kowba, the district’s chief financial officer, took over as interim superintendent and won the permanent appointment to the job earlier this year. (In his score card of four permanent and three interim superintendents at SDUSD in the last decade, Himmelstein counted Kowba twice.) Himmelstein said his group looked at Boston, New York and Chicago as models for their reform proposals, though later in the meeting he acknowledged that the initiative had been shaped around public opinion polls in San Diego to maximize its chances of passing.

According to Himmelstein, an all-elected school board who have to run citywide campaigns allows “special interest dollars to come into play” since “it’s very expensive to run citywide. We have had a history in this city of both the downtown business community and special interests on the labor side contributing heavily to elections.” He said the appointed members would “bring some balance to our school board, some expertise, more debate and more consensus.”

Barrera said that the principal gap in Himmelstein’s presentation was he didn’t offer an explanation for how thoroughly revamping the school board will actually lead to improved student performance. “Scott cannot connect the dots, Barrera said. “He cannot say how the problems he talks about are in any way addressed by taking away the rights of hundreds of thousands of voters to determine who’s on the school board, and giving that power to a handful of people who define ‘special interests.’” Barrera acknowledged the recent history of “dissension between administrators, educators and community groups” at SDUSD but said that the current board has addressed that and also cut back spending on administration so more of the money the district does have goes to the classroom.

“In the last two years we have faced the worst financial crisis in the history of this district,” Barrera said, “and despite the fact that we’ve had a 20 percent cut in our general fund, we’ve seen a 20 percent increase in student academic achievement as measured by the same test scores Scott is citing. I’m not a big fan of test scores. I don’t regard them as the be-all and end-all of student achievement by any means. But if you go back over the last two years, you see the percentage of students scoring proficient in literacy and math go up 20 percent, and the percent showing proficiency in science go up by over a third, all while our budgets have been cut by over 20 percent.”

Barrera also said that compared to other big-city school districts, San Diego is “number one in literacy in California, and number three in math — and about to go to number one. We’ve risen to number one in science.” According to Barrera, on the national level San Diego ranked number four of 18 large urban school districts in the nationwide science tests Himmelstein was citing — and did better than Boston, Chicago and New York, the cities Himmelstein cited as models. “That’s not good enough,” Barrera conceded, “but there has been good, steady progress, and we understand clearly that it’s not the result of the superintendent and the school board. It’s the result of the work that’s going on at the schools: teachers, parents, principals, students and community members coming together and working as teams — not a top-down administration imposing its will, driving up costs and not achieving results.”

Responding to a club member’s question on who the so-called “special interests” are, Barrera said that the Great Schools initiative would actually increase, not decrease, the influence of special interests on the school district. He said having board members appointed by a committee including the presidents of UCSD and SDSU — which train most of the district’s principals and teachers, respectively — would create a conflict of interest that would get in the way of negotiating with those institutions over issues like “the way they train our teachers and their limits on admissions to local students so they can get more money from out-of-state students.”

Barrera also said that the San Diego Chamber of Commerce “includes many corporations who are vendors to the school district” and the four parent committees whose chairs would have a role in making the board appointments — dealing with academically gifted students, low-income students, English learners and special-education students — “each have a vested interest in the school board.” He suggested school board members appointed by the committee the Great Schools initiative would set up “will advocate” for the agendas of the people who appointed them. “To say this somehow takes special interests out of the choice of who’s on the school board is ridiculous,” Barrera said.

“I would totally disagree with Richard’s characterization of [the committee members] as ‘special interests,’” Himmelstein replied. “The university presidents are the prime consumers of our product, and their interest is students who compete well. The four parent leaders are concerned with their own children and other students. Let’s talk about major employers. What’s their special interest? People who can read, compute, come into their companies and be productive citizens.” He also said that, contrary to Barrera’s claim that adding four non-elected members to the school board dilutes democracy, the initiative process by which they’re putting their proposal on the ballot requires that the people vote for it in order to pass it.

Former club president Stephen Whitburn raised the concern that one of the people appointing the non-elected school board members will be the president of USD, a private university owned by the Roman Catholic Church. “One of the strongest opponents of Gay equality has been the Roman Catholic Church and Roman Catholic doctrine,” Whitburn said, adding that as a Gay man he could not support a proposal that would give a Catholic university president a voice in choosing four members of the local school board.

“My experience with USD is it’s not run by the Catholic Church,” Himmelstein said. “It has a history as a Catholic university, but none of the decision-making has to do with the church.” Himmelstein also disputed Barrera’s claim that San Diego Community College District Chancellor Constance Carroll opposed the Great Schools initiative even though she’d be one of the nine members on the appointing panel. “She can’t take a position, but she’s said she would serve,” Himmelstein said.

“I can guarantee you the Community College Board will oppose this initiative,” Barrera said. He also cited the SDUSD’s response to the Queer bullying issue as an example of why the school board should remain all-elected. “We had a series of tragedies focused on LGBT [Queer] kids this year, and a group of community leaders came to our district and asked us to do something,” he recalled. “We passed a resolution and set up a task force to develop a policy. We answered to the kids in our district, not to the Catholic Church or any other outside group. We answered to our kids because that’s what the voters elected us to do.”

Club treasurer John Gordon and former president Craig Roberts both questioned the Great Schools’ campaign’s use of paid signature gatherers to get their initiative on the ballot. Gordon accused the campaign’s signature gatherers of “using cliché marketing and other misleading words” in getting people to sign, and asked Himmelstein, “Have you personally monitored that and approved the script?”

“The signature gathering has nothing to do with USD,” Himmelstein responded. “Ninety-nine percent or greater of all initiatives get on the ballot by hiring signature-gathering firms. We do give them a script, or the contractor does.” He also insisted that San Diegans 4 Great Schools “is a separate campaign with separate offices” from the USD Center for Education, Policy and Law, which he runs as his day job.

“Paid petitioners lie about what initiatives will do,” said Roberts, who also admitted he was troubled that the proposal lumped together ideas he could support with others he opposes. “I’d support district elections and more elected school board members,” said Roberts. “I’m uncertain about term limits and I’m opposed to the appointed members. I’d like to be able to vote for the items I like and against the ones I don’t, and I want to know why I can’t do that.”

“This is the product of people who researched it and got input from the public,” Himmelstein said. “Based on our work, we felt this package has the best opportunity to be passed. When the school districts puts their own initiatives on the ballot, they do polling, too.”

Barrera said that the district elections and term limits are essentially loss leaders, put into the proposal so the sponsors can get voters to give them what they really want: the non-elected board members. “If Scott and his folks had wanted to work with us to expand the school board and have it elected by district, I would have welcomed that,” Barrera said. “What Scott and his folks want are the appointments, so they bury it in term limits, which poll well. Their campaign won’t be about appointing school board members; it will be about term limits, based on the polling.”

Veteran San Diego activist and former Congressional candidate Nancy Casady raised the possibility that the four appointed board members would work as a group and seek the support of one elected member to join their bloc, so they could have absolute control of the board. “You’re presuming that all four of the appointed board members would agree on every issue,” Himmelstein responded. “That wouldn’t be the case. People have different thoughts. A larger board would be healthier and offer better debate. It’s harder to get to five votes than three, so there will be more compromises.”

“Most of our kids live in the southern part of San Diego, in my district and Shelia Jackson’s district,” Barrera said. “Currently, those communities can elect two of the five school board members. Under this proposal, they could elect two of nine. Our students are already underrepresented, and under this plan they’d be even more underrepresented.”

Himmelstein portrayed the choice before San Diego’s voters — first over whether to sign his group’s petition and then, if it qualifies, whether to vote for it — as a black-and-white one: either accept the dysfunctional status quo or adopt his group’s plan. “If you are satisfied with the results of the current system over a long period of time, where over one-half of our kids are not proficient, you can do the same thing,” he said. “This provides an opportunity for better results. Change is never easy.”

“The biggest threat to stability in the schools right now is the state’s financial situation,” Barrera said. “If Jerry Brown’s initiative [to keep the state’s current sales taxes and vehicle license fees in place] does not make it onto the ballot or does not pass, we’re talking about devastating the school system, ending the school year at the end of March and putting students in overcrowded classrooms the rest of the year.”

The club had to go through some procedural hoops to vote on the initiative because its executive board had originally scheduled the March 24 meeting just to discuss the issue and hear from both sides, not to take a position. As a result, the club members had first to pass a two-thirds motion to suspend the rules so they could vote on it. A motion to suspend the rules so the club could endorse against the proposal failed with 15 in favor and 10 opposed — short of the two-thirds threshold — but, after former president Roberts said he would be willing to support a motion urging people not to sign it, the motion to suspend the rules for that purpose passed 22 to 2, and the final vote on urging people not to sign it was so lopsided in favor club president Doug Case didn’t bother to count it.

ACTION ALERT:

City Council Considers Virtual Ban on Medical Marijuana Dispensaries

Advocates Mobilize at Activist San Diego a Week Before March 28 Vote

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

PHOTO, left to right: Rev. Canon Mary Moreno Richardson, Stephen Whitburn, Eugene Davidovich, Ben Cisneros, Rachel Scoma.

LISTEN TO THIS EVENT! Check out the audio link at http://zengersmag.posterous.com/

The San Diego City Council will vote Monday, March 28 on an ordinance which purports to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries in the city — but which activists say will actually put them all out of business and make it either difficult or impossible for patients needing medical marijuana to get it safely. That was the message five panelists brought to Activist San Diego at a March 21 meeting at the Joyce Beers Community Center in Hillcrest. Despite widely varying backgrounds, they came to organize people to oppose the City Council’s proposed ordinance and pressure the Council to amend it so dispensaries can open and function legally, but without the “Wild West” atmosphere that currently allows dispensaries not only to exist but to cluster in particular neighborhoods.

The speakers at Activist San Diego included Ben Cisneros and Rachel Scoma, who worked together in San Diego on the campaign for Proposition 19, an initiative on last November’s ballot which would have repealed state laws against recreational use of marijuana. After it lost, they continued to work on marijuana-related issues as part of Canvass for a Cause, a group that stations people outside large stores and shopping malls to meet people and educate them directly about medical marijuana, marriage equality and other hot-button issues.

Also on the panel were Stephen Whitburn, former San Diego City Council and County Board of Supervisors candidate and member of the city’s Medical Marijuana Task Force; Eugene Davidovich, San Diego-area liaison for the national medical-marijuana group Americans for Safe Access; and Rev. Canon Mary Moreno Richardson of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral. (She made clear that she was speaking as an individual and was not representing either St. Paul’s or the Episcopal church as a whole.)

The ordinance the City Council will take up March 28 would allow medical marijuana dispensaries only in industrial zones and so-called “community commercial” zones — which already eliminates most of the city. According to Davidovich, it would require all existing dispensaries to close — though it’s not clear whether that would take effect immediately or there’d be a six-month grace period allowing them to wind down in an orderly way — and in order to open a dispensary, organizers would have to apply for a “Process 4 Conditional Use Permit” from the city’s planning commission. It would likely take a year or more just for the permit process to reach the commission, Davidovich argued.

Also included in the ordinance is a stringent set of so-called “sensitivity areas” further restricting where dispensaries could locate. They would have to be at least 1,000 feet away from schools, playgrounds, libraries, child care facilities, youth facilities, churches, parks and other dispensaries. The planning commission and the City Council committees that heard the ordinance even considered, but ultimately didn’t approve, a requirement that the dispensaries be located 1,000 feet from colleges and universities. Both Davidovich and Whitburn said that the Medical Marijuana Task Force, which was supposed to come up with a set of regulations the city could adopt, issued a fair and reasonable plan that balanced community and law-enforcement concerns with the rights of medical marijuana patients to get their medicine.

Whitburn said the Task Force looked at ordinances passed in other cities and tried to pull together the best parts of each for a plan for San Diego. “The Task Force was diverse,” Whitburn said. “We had people interested in making [medical marijuana] available and people very skeptical towards the whole idea of medical marijuana. But we came to a consensus that medical marijuana needs to be available and needs to be regulated. Unfortunately, as they’ve moved through the process, the regulations have become much more strict, and a lot of us fear they will make it more difficult to access medical marijuana.”

Last September, City Councilmember Todd Gloria — who represents District 3, considered the most liberal in the city, and whose predecessor, Toni Atkins, was a strong medical marijuana supporter — told KPBS reporter Alison St. John that the strict proposal reported by the Planning Commission and the Council’s Land Use and Planning Committee was the best deal the medical marijuana community could get from the current Council. “What we had to do was craft a series of rules that would provide patients with safe access while responding to the concerns of some of those in the community who feel that some of the locations are inappropriate,” Gloria told St. John.

But medical marijuana activists saw the proposed ordinance as a back-door attempt to eradicate all dispensaries in San Diego. “When we saw what was happening in San Diego with this ordinance, we partnered with other organizations because of our concerns about how this ordinance would eradicate access,” Davidovich said. “We had previously had a City Council ordinance that addressed patient cultivation, but for many years patients have been lobbying the City Council for an ordinance that would provide guidance for caregivers and providers. … We have 50,000 patients in San Diego County, and if this ordinance passes every dispensary will be forced to close.”

The proposed ordinance is “a pretty complicated document,” said Scoma, who in addition to being a community activist is also a recently licensed attorney. “It would absolutely shut down every collective [dispensary] in San Diego.” She said the requirement to apply for a permit with the planning commission, followed by the appeals process if the planning commission denies it, “would cost a lot of money and time, and it would be a very political process.” She compared Process 4, the application process dispensaries would be forced to go through, with the far less stringent Process 1 for pharmacies, which can pretty much locate in any part of the city open to retail businesses at all. She noted that Process 4 is also the one you’d have to go through if you wanted to open an airport.

Whitburn offered a brief history of medical marijuana in California, beginning with the passage of Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, by voters in November 1996. “The problem is the law was passed by initiative, and it wasn’t clear,” Whitburn explained. “That has resulted in years of trying to hammer out what you can and can’t do. The city’s first Medical Marijuana Task Force came up with guidelines for how much you could possess and how you could transport it.”

Unfortunately, Whitburn said, those guidelines assumed that people would “grow their own.” Both the city’s original ordinance and laws later passed by the states governed how many plants you could grow at once and how much usable marijuana you could have in your possession at any one time. “But if you’re really ill, maybe you’re not in a position to grow it yourself, and in that case you ought to be able to get a medical substance the same way you’d go to a pharmacy.”

Scoma said that the requirement that dispensaries can only be located in industrial areas would be particularly devastating to patients. “If you’re a multiple sclerosis [MS] patient, since MS patients aren’t legally allowed to drive, you would either have to get a friend to take you or go on the bus,” she said. “This ordinance would take us from 180 collectives in San Diego today to zero immediately and one, two or three a year from now. It will absolutely act as a de facto ban for one year, and probably for 10 years.”

“A lot of people [who use medical marijuana] are too ill to drive,” Cisneros added. “They can’t travel for long distances. A lot of people are too poor to afford cars, and a lot of the areas [where dispensaries could locate under the Council ordinance] are undeveloped lots, or may be owned by landlords who don’t want to rent to medical marijuana facilities.”

Cisneros brought up three points medical marijuana activists would particularly like the Council to change about the ordinance. First, he said, is to allow dispensaries “in all industrial and commercial zones.” Second is to cut the “sensitivity areas” to be the same as state law, which requires dispensaries to be 600 feet away from schools but doesn’t impose any other location requirements. They also want the distance between dispensaries cut from 1,000 to 500 feet. Third is to eliminate the stringent permit process and instead allow dispensaries to apply for permits on the same basis as pharmacies.

Both Whitburn and Davidovich addressed the tough political climate facing medical marijuana users in San Diego. Instead of following a state mandate to issue medical marijuana patients ID cards, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors sued in federal court to have Proposition 215 thrown out on the ground that federal anti-drug laws pre-empted it. The suit dragged on for years before it expired when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the County’s appeal. Nonetheless, the County has approved an ordinance on dispensaries that in practice has prevented any from locating anywhere in the unincorporated areas of San Diego County, which the Supervisors govern directly.

Another crusader against medical marijuana in San Diego County is the elected district attorney, Bonnie Dumanis, who has paid lip service to the legitimacy of medical marijuana but has also launched a series of spectacular and highly publicized raids against dispensaries. Whitburn pointed out that her office has proceeded under the assumption that dispensaries are always illegal — despite an opinion by the California Attorney General that they are legal within certain regulations.

What’s more, Dumanis has committed a lot of law enforcement power to close down dispensaries — including the San Diego Police Department, San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — and the heavy publicity she’s scored for the raids have helped associate medical marijuana with crime and violence while sometimes having brutal effects on patients. “I witnessed one raid in Del Cerro where the police, sheriff’s deputies and DEA agents went after one middle-aged man in a wheelchair and threw him to the ground,” said Rev. Richardson.

“I definitely think their calculus is political,” Cisneros said of the San Diego City Council. “My impression is not that the Councilmembers feel, as individuals, that medical cannabis [marijuana] patients should be isolated and made to suffer. They feel the political winds are blowing with the prohibitionists.” He recalled that when the Planning Commission considered the ordinance, “we saw 10-20 anti-cannabis prohibitionists speak in favor of the ordinance because it’s so restrictive, and one speak against it because he doesn’t want to see any cannabis available in San Diego.”

On the other side, Cisneros said, “70 to 80 people came to speak against the ordinance on the ground that it’s a de facto ban.” Nonetheless, the Commission responded by making the ordinance even more restrictive, “including adding colleges and universities to the ‘sensitivity areas,’” he said. “It wasn’t a lack of support from the community. What we saw was a political disconnect between the will of the people and the position of the City Council. People who support medical cannabis were not seen as an organized constituency.”

Activists like Cisneros decided that they needed to change that by showing that medical marijuana patients and their supporters would organize for reasonable regulations and in defense of dispensaries’ right to exist. What they decided to do, rather than organize rallies and marches, was get people to write handwritten letters to the Councilmembers urging them either to liberalize the ordinance currently before them or scrap it altogether. Staff members of elected officials have a hierarchy by which they judge public comments, depending on how difficult they are to make: a pre-packaged postcard or e-mail is judged at the bottom of the list, a phone call a bit higher, a typed letter a bit higher and a handwritten letter is considered “the gold standard,” Cisneros explained.

“We wanted to do something big and flashy and measurable to put pressure on the City Council,” Cisneros said. “They think rushing through a restrictive ordinance is the most expedient thing. We’ve got about 3,000 letters to the City Council, and we think it’s the largest letter-writing campaign ever done to the San Diego City Council on a specific, pending ordinance.” The other advantage of a letter-writing campaign over mass demonstrations, Cisneros said, is that letters contain their senders’ addresses — and that means Councilmembers will know the letters came from their district and thus will have a harder time ignoring them.

Indeed, Cisneros closed the meeting by not only urging the members of Activist San Diego to write letters but giving them pens, paper and table space to do so. He said the deadline for mailing letters to City Councilmembers on this issue is Wednesday, March 23, and afterwards he wants people to make phone calls. The address for letters is 202 “C” Street, San Diego, CA 92101. The phone numbers for the various City Councilmembers are as follows (and if you don’t know which Council district you’re in, you can find out by logging on to http://www.sandiego.gov/citycouncil/ and entering your Zip code):

District 1: Sherri Lightner (Dem.), (619) 236-6611, (858) 484-3808
District 2: Kevin Faulconer (Rep.), (619) 236-6622
District 3: Todd Gloria (Dem.), (619) 236-6633
District 4: Tony Young (Dem.), (619) 236-6644
District 5: Carl DeMaio (Rep.), (619) 236-6655, (858) 673-5304
District 6: Lorie Zapf (Rep.), (619) 236-6616
District 7: Marti Emerald (Dem.), (619) 236-6677
District 8: David Alvarez (Dem.), (619) 236-6688

The activists are also staging a major rally on the issue for Monday, March 28 — the day of the City Council vote — starting at noon at the Federal Courthouse, 940 Front Street downtown, a few blocks from City Hall. The rally will last until 1:30 and will be followed by a march to City Hall, where the Council meeting will begin at 2 p.m. For more information, visit www.stopthebansd.org

Anti-War Protesters Target Obama

300 Turn Out for Annual Anti-War Demonstration

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The annual anti-war demonstration sponsored by the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice (SDCPJ) in mid-March had a markedly different tone this year from the actions in 2009 and 2010. Then the protesters and rally speakers had soft-pedaled criticism of President Obama, still holding out hope that he would fulfill his campaign promise to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq and would come to realize that the war in Afghanistan — already America’s longest-lasting combat — was unwinnable and would withdraw there, too. Instead, Obama chose the eighth anniversary of former President George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq to launch U.S. air raids on Libya, thereby getting us involved in a third war against a Muslim country — and one young man at the rally summed up the attitude of most of the 300 people there by wearing a T-shirt with the famous Shepard Fairey image of Obama, and under it the words “War Criminal.”

The anti-Obama hard line was apparent from the speeches at the rally, too. “Barack Obama is a war criminal,” said Hugh Moore, who as the representative of the Green Party couldn’t resist the temptation to remind the crowd that he hadn’t voted for Obama. “And I am a war criminal, too,” Moore added, “because I pay taxes and support this regime.”

Though nominally an anti-war demonstration, both the speeches and the protesters’ signs linked the war to virtually the entire array of Left-wing causes. Many of the speakers pointed to the huge amounts of money being spent on the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and how those sums, if spent at home instead, could pay for universal health care and other social programs both federal and state governments are relentlessly cutting. Others linked the wars to the crisis in Wisconsin, where Republican governor Scott Walker pushed through his state’s legislature a bill that virtually eliminates public employee unions’ ability to represent and advocate for workers, and to the similar budget crisis in California, where governor Jerry Brown and a Democrat-controlled state legislature can’t find two Republican votes in each house to put on the ballot a measure to continue the state’s current sales and car license taxes.

“We have spent $1.3 trillion on these wars,” said Barry Lambdendorf, president of the San Diego chapter of Veterans for Peace. “For that money, we could provide 60 million people with scholarships for four years in the university. We could give 250 million people health care for one year. In Wisconsin, the state budget deficit is $3 billion — about what we spend on the wars in one week. In California, our proportionate share of these wars is $160 billion per year. The state’s budget shortfall is $27 billion. We’re told ‘there isn’t enough money,’ but there’s always enough money to give tax cuts to the rich and subsidize the oil companies. There’s enough money to bail out Wall Street, but not enough for health care, education, infrastructure, or rebuilding our inner cities, we’re told. But we always have money for perpetual war.”

Lambdendorf also mentioned the even grimmer cost of the wars in human life. “Six thousand men and women have died, 43,000 have been seriously wounded and one-third to one-fourth of all those who have served in the last 10 years have post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. “According to one study, 650,000 people have been killed in Iraq, and every day the U.S. issues an apology to Pakistan and Afghanistan for killing civilians in drone attacks. Every time we do this, we create more enemies, and the U.S.’s standing in the world goes down.”

Zahi Damuni of the San Diego branch of Al-Awda, the coalition of Palestinians and others calling for the “right of return” of Palestinians whose families were driven out of Israel since the Zionist state was founded in 1948, was the first speaker who announced to the crowd that U.S. bombing raids on Libya had begun that very day. He said that the raids on Libya, and the invasion of Bahrain by the Saudi Arabian military to suppress citizen protests similar to those that brought down dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt, “tell you a lot” about the U.S.’s role in the Middle East.

“U.S. support for [deposed Egyptian president Hosni] Mubarak for 30 years was supposed to be forgotten,” Damuni said. “The regime in Egypt is a military dictatorship funded by the U.S. with $1.3 billion per year, and this regime has supporessed the people for demonstrating for Palestine and against the hermetic seal of Gaza” — the blockade, maintained jointly by Israel and Egypt, to starve the Palestinians of Gaza into submission and impose collective punishment on them (banned by international law) for having dared to elect Hamas to govern them. “The straw that broke the camel’s back [in Egypt] was the economy and the difference between the handful of very rich people at the top and the overwhelming majority of poor people making about $2 per day. This led to one of the most historic revolutions of all time.”

Other speakers pointed out that the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. is becoming more unequal and approaching the level of Egypt. Dr. Jeff Gordon, a veteran physician and activist who served on the California Medical Board during Jerry Brown’s first governorship in the 1970’s and 1980’s, said he took care of veterans with PTSD, drug addiction and suicidal tendencies. “I also have patients suffering from economic disease,” he said. “I live in a world of trauma and tragedy. I want to talk about the pain on the streets. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are one problem, but this country stands on the precipice of social and economic collapse. The problem is the strangulation and death of the American middle class.”

Gordon bolstered his matter-of-fact presentation with a blizzard of statistics showing that over the last 30 years, the U.S. economy has doubled in size but virtually all the extra wealth and income generated by that growth has gone to the fraction of the population at the top. “Today a 30-year-old male, if he’s lucky enough to have a job at all, is earning about what a 30-year-old male made 30 years ago,” he said. “The top 150,000 households in the U.S. make more money than the bottom 120 million.” He blamed this on Ronald Reagan and every president since, both Republicans and Democrats, pointing out that economic policies for the last 30 years have steadily cut taxes for the rich and deregulated the economy — and that continues even though those policies caused the 2008 depression.

One of the measurements Gordon cited to document America’s growing economic inequality is called the “Gini coefficient,” after the Italian statistician and sociologist Corrado Gini, who published the concept in 1912. Gordon explained that a society in which everybody had exactly the same income would have a Gini coefficient of 0, while one in which one person had all the income would have a Gini coefficient of 1. He said that the most egalitarian country in the world is Sweden, with a Gini coefficient of .25. “Currently, the U.S. has a Gini coefficient of .45,” Gordon explained. “Canada’s is .32, Great Britain’s is .34, Russia’s is .42. Even before its revolution, Egypt had a distribution of .34. The U.S.’s income inequality is approaching that of Costa Rica, .46; Argentina, .46; Ecuador, .48; and that poor country down the street, Mexico, which is .48.”

What all this means, Gordon said, is “while you’ve been hanging around the last 10 years, America has become a banana republic. We are totally in thrall to the caudillos. Beward: we are on the cusp of fascism: a subjectivist, nationalistic, authoritarian form of government, which will be based on violence and for the benefit of the business class. I hope the turmoil in Wisconsin politics and the turnout on the street there represents the start of an awakening of the American public to the false premises of the destructive Midwest and Southern Republicans.”