Letters to the Editor
September 19, 2018

To the Editor:
This is an example of why we should not let marijuana businesses of any kind in Fillmore. People who legitimately need medical marijuana know where and how to obtain it legally. Once one type of marijuana business is allowed in Fillmore, others will follow, and our lovely community will be irreparably damaged by the ripple effect marijuana businesses have on a small community. Below is the referred to titled “Money Can’t Buy Everything in Compton or Fillmore”.
- Joan Archer, Concerned Resident
CALIFORNIA CITY NEWS STRAIGHT OUTTA WEED: COMPTON BANS MARIJUANA SALES
Monday, 02/12/2018
Compton, which has produced weed-loving musical artists from DJ Quik to Dr. Dre, has been called the "birthplace of hip hop and weed culture." Now its residents are trying to shed that image.
Compton voters defeated two measures that would have allowed recreational and medical marijuana within city limits last month. If you want marijuana in Compton, you'll have to get it on the city's always sizable black market.
"Drugs have pillaged black and brown communities," 61-year-old James Hays Jr., told the Los Angeles Times. "It has taken all of our talent away from us. It makes our neighborhoods bad neighborhoods to live in.”
"The voters in Compton decided this decision was the healthiest and most forward-looking for our community," explained Councilwoman Emma Sharif. "I don't believe bringing marijuana into the community would've been good for the community.”
After years of sky-high crime rates and government corruption, Compton residents are finally getting a taste of normalcy. Crime is down, there's new leadership, home prices are rising, and big developers are coming to the city. The risk of opening the doors to the nearly all-cash legal cannabis industry is just too high, residents wager. The city also estimates it would have cost $6 million in added enforcement and processing of license requests.
It's a shame, said Dermot Givens, an attorney who specializes in marijuana licensing. He thinks the city could have made a "fortune" by capitalizing on its history as the birthplace of "the Chronic."
But money can't buy everything.

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To the Editor:
It Isn’t Your Town—It’s You – Vote NO on Measure T
Poem expressing the sentiment of Fillmore residents taken from the 1920 May Day Festival bulletin.
“If you want to live in the sort of a town, like the sort of a town you’d like, you don’t have to slip your clothes in a grip and start on a long, long, hike.
For you’ll only find what you’ve left behind, there’s nothing that’s really new, it’s a knock at yourself when you knock your town; It isn’t your town—it’s you.
Real towns are not made by men afraid lest somebody else gets ahead, where everyone works and nobody shirks, you can raise a town from the dead.
And if while you make your personal stake, your neighbor can make one, too; Then Fillmore will be what you want to see—It isn’t your town—it’s YOU.
By William Thaw Deniston.
Protect your children and family’s safety, health and virtue as well as Fillmore. Vote NO on Measure T.
Courtesy Safeguard Fillmore