Graduate School Blog and Local Politics

It seems I will need to make this blog official for my library school. I have a fair bit of experience so I will include some local topics which are driving libraries to explore those topics in their collections, from periodicals and books to self-help. Patrons are interested, but the politics and budgeting are complex.

My community is rocked by serious illegal and borderline legal activities of squatters growing dope, often on public land, getting their information from the library where I volunteer. What they are doing is illegal, or sometimes barely legal with special permits. The sheriff has gotten involved with the DEA and CAMP inspecting operations for violations, as there's a legal limit to the number of plants allowed for the few legal growing operations. Many are growing more plants than their permit allows, and they move them elsewhere when they get caught. The local growers use drones to spy on neighbors fields to attack in force and steal their crops, leading to quiet but nasty wars between operations. As this is a rural county, sometimes people just "disappear", meaning they are murdered and it might not go reported, something I'm not privy to other than hearing the gunfire.

Furthermore, the growers are mostly squatters so few of them pay taxes. They visit the library for books on growing tips, soil fertility, processing dope, and use the research computers to organize dope sales on Facebook or other social media sites, using email and black market codes on their blogs to arrange sales very much illegally. Legal marijuana does not involve this, so what they are doing is illegal, and worth investigating if you were in law enforcement.

This is awkward for the library staff because their facilities are supposed to protect intellectual freedom but are instead being used to assist in drug activities. The library funding is at risk if there are arrests over this, or if the DEA starts monitoring activity at the library. My suggestion to stop this is to block SSL and HTTPS support on every browser so they can't use encrypted logins to websites and thus the computer will tell them every time they try they could be snooped. This is not exactly subtle, yet gets the point across while stopping the drug trade in a public building meant for education and self improvement rather than narcotics trafficking. It's also cheaper to apply this IT solution than paying a uniformed officer to stand in the computer lab to glare at them.

How is this fair to put onto a librarian, by the way? I have no training in drug addiction or mental health assessment or treatment, yet far too many patrons and library managers consider that a library staffer's job. Nope: a world of nope. Seeing this is another reason I'm headed towards Academic Libraries for my future. The homeless are the mentally ill, and I don't have training for that. Not my job, thanks very much.

The squatters and growers also use library books to learn how to turn low quality dope into honey (hash) oil using butane and an open flame, a process which often causes serious oil fires, the kind that burn down buildings and spread beyond. Why does the library have books about this? Honey oil production has been directly tied by arson investigations into the initial start of incredibly large fires like the Valley Fire in Lake County, burning down 500 homes. Honey oil was also tied to the Lowell Fire near Alta north of I-80 last year, also tied to dope growers. Friends of mine had to evacuate their home because the fire was surging towards them. There have been a number of house and apartment fires tied to honey oil production. The Buttes Fire was tied to a dope grower arsonist. Dope growers are a threat to the public health and assisting them violates a number of laws. It is also an ethical consideration. If you help a criminal commit a crime, you are an accessory to that crime. So is the book you hand them on making honey oil making you an accessory to arson as well as narcotics? Please think about that. This is an ethical consideration.

Where do we fit between the ethical choice of freedom of information or obeying the law to protect yourself and your library from retaliation by state and federal agencies enforcing the law to shut down illegal dope growing? The local library has already had its budget cut when the housing bubble busted. They were declined a bigger budget after spending lots of money buying computers through a Federal program that provided no funds to maintain them or babysit them after the fact, a point that is costing the library around $160K a year in staff, and those computers are mostly used by squatters and dope growers, not tax payers, since the locals have their own computers and smartphones. The smart answer to this waste is to close down the computer center and save the $160K, shifting that back into reopening the Reference Desk (currently closed for the computer center staffing costs).

Assisting dope growers and failing to spend the budget on appropriate books for the public good is a bad move, and likely to generate anger and further cuts to the library, possibly resulting in the firing of the current county librarian. Dope proponents are aiding illegal activities that harm the community directly. Should these librarians be punished or do they think helping this squatter community is helping the community at large, and themselves indirectly since the squatters walk in the door, thus are "counted" as visitors to justify open hours for the library? Isn't that morally wrong? Where is the ethical answer? Where is the financial answer? How do you defend the library in these circumstances? This is an ethical conundrum that has been itching at me for the last two years.

There's a downside to this, beyond the fires. Read the history of Kashmir and see the next step and what it did to them. "Frightening" is the word. When dope prices fell in Kashmir after a road allowed trucks through their pass, they started growing opium for a higher value crop. This brought in terrorists and they enslaved the population. That could happen here, thanks to lax border controls and the influence of the Mexican drug cartels in domestic drug trafficking. Full legalization of Marijuana would crash the price, and production shifted to less expensive regions with cheaper water, such as the lowlands and rice fields near Marysville and Yuba City, or the highlands on the Modoc Plateau, now getting their water again since the drought ended. The social consequences locally would be terrible. The small gardens cling to poor soil in remote locations that are expensive to look after and have low yield per acre. They can't make it work economically if they try to compete with mechanization and huge fields. They would have to switch crops to something that pays more. Desperate people do desperate things, and poppies grow here quite well. I worry that the locals will switch to that if Jefferson state becomes real.

Jefferson state is another tricky situation with local political consequences impacting the libraries. Northern state counties feel unsupported during the years of the drought. They've got a major drug problem with methamphetamine, and associated violence and unwanted teen pregnancy as well as serious unemployment. Many of their local drug growers want full legalization, and have signed the petitions to support Jefferson State for that specific reason. 

Jefferson State fantasy map, with counties on
both sides of the California-Oregon border.

These are rural counties, dependent on transportation and agriculture for most of their jobs. The drought killed off most of the agriculture, the coast was banned harvesting redwood trees and their salmon were killed by the California Aqueduct, salmon fishing being the foremost paying job along the northern California coast from SF north to the Columbia River. North of the Oregon border there are still salmon, but South of it salmon fry come from the Sacramento river delta. These were mostly killed off by the water pump near Tracy which pumps drinking water out of the river system and over to the South Bay Area and also to the San Joaquin valley and Los Angeles via the California aqueduct system. The cause and effect have been known since 1981, but LA needs the water and does not care about the lives of people far away. Jefferson state wants to charge for the water to pay for investment LA will not allow via the state legislature in Sacramento, thus the flag "double crossed by Sacramento". 

All politics are local and recruiters for the Jefferson state have clipboards at the local grocery store parking lots. They ambush people loading up groceries and try to get them to sign the petitions to divide California. They have support from boards of supervisors from Yuba and Sutter Counties, and some support from Placer and El Dorado and Yolo, stranding Sacramento County in the middle, along with Nevada County where I live, since most of the population here is retired conservatives, many of them Air Force veterans from the nearby Beale Air Force Base. They don't have support here. That there is no legal mechanism for a write-in campaign to divide the state doesn't seem to matter to these determined and ambitious men with big plans. Either they plan to charge too much for the water in the two huge reservoirs (Shasta and Oroville) or they haven't done the math on what it costs to run a modern state economy and public services. 

Shasta Dam and reservoir contains nearly half the state's water supply.

Understanding your patrons means you get to ponder these active political issues and worry about the ethical considerations, direct consequences of which can be actual disaster or crime. As public employees, what we do at our libraries matters in a very real way.