One City’s Insane Fight Against Obama’s Sane New Pot Policy
The way law-enforcement officials read the new Obama policy, nonprofit Los Angeles pot dispensaries like this one should turn into farming collectives that can’t accept cash. “We are in the fight for our lives,” one prominent shop owner tells Esquire.com.
Taken from http://www.esquire.com/the-side/richardson-report/obama-medical-marijuana-laws-102709
The administration has officially put a stop to crackdowns on the medical-marijuana business, but to hear the dispensers tell it, nothing’s stopping Los Angeles from finding every last ridiculous loophole
By John H. Richardson
Two years ago, in the throes of a Bush administration that disregarded states’ rights whenever it felt like getting high on itself, there were fewer than two hundred medical-marijuana outlets in Los Angeles. Today, even the most conservative estimates say that number has quadrupled. On one stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard alone, four thriving pot shops estimate their tax payments at $4 million a year. Got an emergency radiation treatment and can’t find the nearest store? There’s an iPhone app for that.
With patient demand pushing dispensaries in several of the fourteen states that allow medical marijuana to expand their business, the Obama administration last week ordered the Justice Department to respect state laws and stop harassing them.
You would think, after our new president’s ups and downs on what is ultimately the road to wholesale legalization, that calling off the pot bullies would be, by all accounts, A Good Thing. Hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of Americans have used the approved stuff, after all, whether as therapeutic medicine or therapeutic something else.
Trouble is, all this common sense seems to have fried the brains of the law-enforcement leaders in the City of Los Angeles. They’ve suddenly come up with a bizarre new interpretation of the law — that the requirement for pot dispensaries to be “nonprofit” actually means that they can’t accept cash.
Yes, you read that right. This is how Deputy City Attorney David Berger put it: “We can still use state law to enforce, and we still believe that the only legal way to do that is to enforce against the selling of marijuana, as opposed to giving it away as a collective.”
This has to be the first time in American history that the government is ordering its citizens to start collectivizing our farms.
The backwards logic was codified in the fourth version of a draft ordinance that City Attorney Carmen Trutanich submitted last Tuesday to the Los Angeles city council. Apparently a hard-core member of the Marxist-Leninist wing of the Republican party, Trutanich even argued that dispensary owners shouldn’t use cash to pay for labor or fertilizer — that the voters of California actually intended for marijuana to be produced and dispensed, unlike all other drugs in the known universe, on a pure barter system. (This from the man who made Michael Jackson’s funeral look like it switched from the Staples Center to Tammany Hall.)
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Tags: Cannabis, Debate, Legalization, Medicinal Marijuana, Politics, United States