Today's New York Times has a long article about the collateral consequences of medical marijuana laws in California. Specifically, the law is creating space of ol' fashioned dealers to operate more freely:
Medical marijuana was legalized under state law by California voters in 1996, and since then 11 other states have followed, even though federal law still bans the sale of any marijuana. But some frustrated residents and law enforcement officials say the California law has increasingly and unintentionally provided legal cover for large-scale marijuana growers — and the problems such big-money operations can attract.I think there are two points worth mentioning in response to this backlash.
'It’s a clear shield for commercial operations,' said Mike Sweeney, 60, a supporter of both medical marijuana and a local ballot measure on June 3 that called for new limits on the drug in Mendocino. 'And we don’t want those here.'
First, as one medical marijuana proponent in the article points out, any system is going to have its abusers and the key is not to those abusers destroy the entire system.
Second, as is evident from the article and elsewhere, marijuana is a plant that can be grown damn near anywhere by damn near anybody. Converting it to a final usable product is a whole lot simpler than, say, cocaine and a whole lot safer than, say, methamphetamine. Given the ease of production, it's foolish to think that law enforcement will ever be able to effectively deal with it.
Legalize. Regulate. Tax. That's the solution.
2 comments:
A note from Dale Gieringer from CAL NORML:
The article above from the NY Times misleadingly implies that Mendocino County is leading a retreat from medical marijuana. So far, it is not at all clear whether the voters of Mendocino county have even voted to approve Measure B, which would cut back cultivation limits for medical marijuana. The election turned out far closer than expected when this article was being researched, and the votes are still being counted.
More importantly, neither Mendocino nor California has retreated from their commitment to medical marijuana. Rather, the issue that has arisen concerns how to regulate medical marijuana appropriately.
The federal government's failure to allow a legalized production system as called for under Prop 215 has left distribution in the hands of semi-legal gray market, with many of the attendant problems
of prohibition. Both sides in Mendocino county are agreed that
federal prohibition is the fundamental problem that must be addressed.
It is interesting to be informed that Attorney General Brown has
decided to issue a policy declaration on medical marijuana. Unlike
his predecessor, Bill Lockyer, Jerry Brown has spurned efforts to
communicate with the public or the medical cannabis community. His
recent comments about appealing the Kelly decision on cultivation limits indicate considerable confusion about the nature of Prop 215 and SB 420, and on the problem of marijuana production in general - unlike the more enlightened task force that wrote SB 420, which was appointed by his predecessor.
- D. Gieringer, Cal NORML
Thanks for the update/clarification, Dale.
You're absolutely right that the state/fed split on medical marijuana has led to some problems in the gray market. Let's hope that the next administration in DC figure out that it would be a better use of its prosecutoral discretion to use those resources elsewhere.
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