It has been estimated that approximately 500 marijuana plants and related product were destroyed yielding a street value of approximately $1.5 million. Unfortunately due to the time of year, a large majority of the illegal cultivation operations had already been harvested. Recently, through a basic aerial search using standard mapping technology, we have identified approximately 25 properties that appear to be cultivating or show infrastructure consistent with marijuana cultivation operations…
— from an Archuleta County Sheriff’s Office memo shared with the Board of County Commissioners on December 7, 2021.
At the conclusion of an executive session on Tuesday, December 7, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners reconvened in public session and considered the hiring of a new County Administrator.
Commissioner Ronnie Maez made a motion to re-advertise the job opening for an additional 30 days, but neither of the other two commissioners would second the motion.
Then Commissioner Warren Brown made a motion to initiate contract negotiations with candidate Derek Woodman, and Commissioner Alvin Schaaf seconded that motion. The resulting vote was 2-1, with Commissioner Maez voting ‘No’.
Some of our readers may be familiar with Mr. Woodman, who has been the Archuleta County Undersheriff for the past three years, replacing former Undersheriff Tonya Hamilton. One of the first times I heard Mr. Woodman speak in public was February 5, 2019, when the BOCC — Steve Wadley, Ronnie Maez and Alvin Schaaf — voted unanimously to build a new 54-bed jail in Harman Park. The commissioners had been advised that they could save the taxpayers a considerable amount of money if they built a smaller jail, and indeed, some of the people who testified at the public hearing, that day, opposed a 54-bed jail. (I was among those advocating, that day, for a smaller jail, and opposing the BOCC’s scheme to put the taxpayers $15 million in debt without a dedicated revenue stream to pay the debt.)
Undersheriff Woodman did not agree with the idea of a smaller jail.
From the official minutes of that February 2019 meeting:
Undersheriff Derek Woodman, 777 CR 600, advised he has over 35 years of law enforcement experience and has witnessed the growth of communities along with the issues at hand. He agreed with Commissioner Wadley regarding the safety of staff and inmates. He explained there were currently 29 inmates being housed in LaPlata County and stressed the need for a 54-bed jail, which he believed would be at full capacity once functioning.
The new County jail has been operating for over a year now. It currently houses 24 inmates — less than half the planned occupancy. The reports I’ve heard from jail personnel suggest that’s a typical number of inmates. But Undersheriff Woodman, with 35 years of law enforcement experience, believed the jail, once functioning, would be at full capacity.
Speaking for myself, I was not surprised by the vote on Tuesday, selecting a Sheriff’s Office employee as finalist for the County Administrator position. The Archuleta Board of County Commissioners has been dominated by former law enforcement officials for the past three years, with former policeman Steve Wadley and former Sheriff’s Office employee Alvin Schaaf both serving on the BOCC, and now with Commissioner Warren Brown — also a former Sheriff’s Office employee — filling Steve Wadley’s position.
But the reason I am writing about Mr. Woodman has little to do with his selection as County Administrator finalist, nor with the fact that, as County Administrator, he would apparently be supervising his own wife, Tina Woodman, who was recently hired as County Human Services Director.
I’m writing instead about a proposal brought forward by Undersheriff Woodman, Emergency Operations Manager Mike Le Roux, and Development Director Pam Flowers, during the Tuesday, December 7, BOCC work session.
This past September, “Archuleta County Sheriff’s Office received information regarding possible marijuana cultivation offenses in unincorporated Archuleta County.” The Sheriff’s Office managed to obtain 12 search warrants, which led to three felony arrest warrants and four misdemeanor summons, and facilitated the destruction of “approximately 500 marijuana plants.”
Another result of all this activity was the three-page proposal from developed by Sheriff’s Office in collaboration with County Building and Planning, presented on Tuesday. You can download the three-page proposal here.
From the proposal:
“It is our belief that black and grey market marijuana operations are prolific within Archuleta County and as a result would like to propose an amendment to the current Archuleta County Land Use Regulations (LUR)…”
Archuleta County is facing some huge social problems as we head into 2022. Some of the problems are already at a crisis level.
Is marijuana cultivation one of those problems?
I’m asking this question, because no one at the Tuesday, December 7 BOCC work session was willing to ask it.
Disclosure: I did smoke marijuana when I was in college — and yes, I did inhale — back in the 1970s, when it was still illegal to possess it. But I rarely possessed any; I usually took a toke of whatever was being passed around by one of my roommates.
As I recall, it was not a crime, even then, to smoke someone else’s marijuana. The crime was ‘possessing’ it. But I might be wrong about that; this was a long time ago, and the memories are slightly hazy.
I gave up using marijuana a few years later, because it brought up unpleasant paranoid feelings for me. (Reportedly, a fairly common reaction to marijuana use.) I found it very easy to stop, physically… although more difficult from a social perspective. Almost all my friends, back then, were marijuana smokers, and I felt like an ‘outsider’ when declining to share a joint going around the room.
My current drugs of choice, 50 years later, are coffee, and red wine. But I subscribe to the belief, based on my own personal experiences, that marijuana is the least harmful drug in common use here in America — less addictive and less harmful than alcohol — and with healing and analgesic properties still being discovered.
Since 1970, however, the U.S. government has classified marijuana as a Schedule I drug — more dangerous than, for example, Schedule II drugs like cocaine, morphine, fentanyl, and oyxcodone.
This is yet another case of elements within the federal government perpetrating a massive misinformation campaign on the American people. This campaign of deception during the 1930s, by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and other federal agencies and elected officials, has been well documented in numerous academic papers and published books.
Marijuana was never a narcotic. In fact, it was being used medicinally in the 1930s, and the American Medical Association actively opposed the federal Marihuana Tax Act of 1937…