News Commentary | Who’s Up, Down, and Out in Weed Wars

This story first appeared on Newsmakers with Jerry Roberts on June 21, 2019.

Community conflict over cannabis remains Topic A in Santa Barbara’s political whirl, more than a week after the L.A. Times dropped its epic take on how the county came to be California’s capital of cultivation.

The story fueled a political narrative, pushed by a posse of outraged citizens, galvanized by Carpinteria-based national journalist Ann Louise Bardach, that casts Supervisor Das Williams as the villain of the piece — an alleged Rasputin of Reefer responsible for passage of a county pot ordinance heavily weighted toward growers that, among other features, has yielded the two largest weed tracts on the planet.