Record South Whidbey
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2012 | Vol. 88, No. 14 | www.SOUTHWHIDBEYRECORD.com | 75¢
INSIDE: Whidbey Island Almanac
Motorcycle rider recalls crash with deer BY Ben watanabe South Whidbey Record
LANGLEY — Talk about a deer in the headlights. In a winter full of white-knuckled driver-versus-deer accidents, Edouard Stringer’s head-on crash with an adult doe still has people talking on the South End. Stringer, who worked for 20 years in construction, was commuting to Edmonds Community College where he was taking computer networking courses. On his way home at about 6 p.m., Stringer was southbound on Maxwelton Road near Drummuir Road. Just before the road curved, he saw a deer step onto the street. Stringer tried to slow down from 45 mph, but the deer was too close for his anti-lock brakes to stop the 600-pound BMW motorcycle. “Out of the corner of my eye — it was dark — this deer stepped in front of me and I hit it straight in the stomach,” he said. The bike went down, with Stringer underneath as it slid on the street. His bike’s gear boxes, hard plastic containers on the sides, propped him from the ground just enough that the full weight of the 1200 cc motorbike didn’t grind his right leg and arm into the pavement. “My instincts kicked in to save the situation,” said Stringer, who had driven the motorcycle for eight years. See Deer, A3
Edouard Stringer photo
Deer fur pokes out of the handlebar of Edouard Stringer’s motorcycle after he crashed into a doe on Maxwelton Road.
Brian Kelly / The Record
Lucas Jushinski presents the details of his plan to start a medical marijuana business in Langley to city officials during a packed special city council meeting Wednesday.
City officials voice initial support for medical marijuana business in Langley BY Brian Kelly South Whidbey Record
LANGLEY — The plans for a medical marijuana “access point” in the Village by the Sea got a warm but wary welcome from city officials at a special council workshop this week. Lucas Jushinski, a 35-yearold Freeland resident, Iraq War veteran and combat medic, has applied for a business license with hopes to set up Island Alternative Medicine behind the All Washed-Up Laundromat on Second Street. The nonprofit would provide medical marijuana to patients who are legally authorized to use the drug in a low-key, professional manner, he said. Jushinski plans to be the middleman between patients who need medical marijuana and those growing the drug in state-legal “collective gardens.” “I’m bringing people together,” Jushinski told the
city council. “I’m bringing legal growers together and I’m creating a space where they can bring their medicine, and patients with terminal or debilitating medical conditions can access it,” he said. “Right now, patients from Whidbey Island — including myself — have to drive to Seattle … Mukilteo, or Bellingham or somewhere offisland. Somebody with cancer or somebody with a terminal illness — that’s hard for them to do.” Jushinski’s idea brought others together, too. A crowd of about 80 packed the midday meeting Wednesday at Langley United Methodist Church. City officials acknowledged early on that they supported state laws that govern the use of medical marijuana, murky as they may be. And they repeatedly tried to highlight just how limited Langley’s role
might be. “We’re not here to talk about legalization of marijuana,” Mayor Larry Kwarsick told the audience at the start. “We’re not here to talk about whether or not we should have a medical marijuana law in the state of Washington. We have a medical marijuana law,” he said. The mayor added that he supported Gov. Chris Gregoire’s petition to have marijuana knocked down a peg on the federal list of controlled substances — such a downgrade would put marijuana at the same level as cocaine, he noted — and said the federal government “remains seemingly entrenched” that marijuana has no medical benefit. Kwarsick also decried the legal limbo created by the governor’s veto of nearly three dozen sections of the medical marijuana law passed by the
Legislature and said too much regulatory responsibility was pushed off onto local governments. “I think it would have gone a long way in establishing a very meaningful way of providing qualified patients access to medical cannabis,” Kwarsick said of the original law. “I certainly support the concept of a designated provider and collective gardens, and I think that it’s very important that people who are qualifying patients have access to medical cannabis,” he added. Jushinski said his nonprofit would set high standards, from the outside in. At the street level, visitors would see the sign with the business name and its logo, a Buddha hand. “There would be no images of bud leafs, no people smoking marijuana out of a bong,” See Marijuana, A7