Marijuana

Christian Youth Theater needs a new home soon, thanks partly to the state’s new pot laws. The theater company must move out of the Spokane Valley building that contains its offices, classrooms and rehearsal area as a recreational marijuana growing operation is making plans to move into the building next door.

Washington state’s permissive marijuana laws have been on a collision course with the federal government’s total ban for years. That collision could occur this summer in a Spokane courtroom as the federal government seeks convictions and stiff mandatory prison terms against the members of an Eastern Washington medical marijuana cooperative being called the Kettle Falls 5.

Some of the most popular locations for Eastern Washington’s new pot entrepreneurs are close to the Idaho border. Three Spokane County applicants receiving the green light by the Washington Liquor Control Board to finish the licensing process plan to open a store at the same East Trent Avenue location in Newman Lake, just a mile and a half from the border.

Do you know what marijuana smells like? How about bull manure?

Spokane Valley is home to the largest marijuana-growing facility licensed by the state so far. Now city leaders, despite their near-unanimous dislike of legalized pot, are poised to open more industrial areas to potential cannabis production.

A 58-year-old Spokane man said Thursday that he also was pulled over by the Idaho State Police and accused of carrying marijuana in his car, simply because he has Washington license plates and drives with his windows down. Paul Dungan’s account of license-plate profiling, in which he claims he was detained by the ISP on Interstate 84, is similar to that of a Colorado man who has sued the agency after being stopped, detained and searched at the same rest area where I-84 crosses into Idaho from Oregon en route to Boise because of his license plates. The Idaho State Police released video of that traffic stop this week.