Pubdate: Mon, 08 Oct 2012
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2012 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Norimitsu Onishi

MARIJUANA ONLY FOR THE SICK? A FARCE, SOME IN LOS ANGELES SAY

LOS ANGELES - One year after federal law enforcement officials began 
cracking down on California's medical marijuana industry with a 
series of high-profile arrests around the state, they finally moved 
into Los Angeles last month, giving 71 dispensaries until Tuesday to 
shut down. At the same time, because of a well-organized push by a 
new coalition of medical marijuana supporters, the City Council last 
week repealed a ban on the dispensaries that it had passed only a 
couple of months earlier.

Despite years of trying fruitlessly to regulate medical marijuana, 
California again finds itself in a marijuana-laced chaos over a 
booming and divisive industry.

Nobody even knows how many medical marijuana dispensaries are in Los 
Angeles. Estimates range from 500 to more than 1,000. The only 
certainty, supporters and opponents agree, is that they far outnumber 
Starbucks.

"That's the ongoing, 'Alice in Wonderland' circus of L.A.," said 
Michael Larsen, president of the Neighborhood Council in Eagle Rock, 
a middle-class community that has 15 dispensaries within a 
one-and-a-half-mile radius of the main commercial area, many of them 
near houses. "People here are desperate, and there's nothing they can do."

Though the neighborhood's dispensaries were among those ordered to 
close by Tuesday, many are still operating. As he looked at a young 
man who bounded out of the Together for Change dispensary on Thursday 
morning, Mr. Larsen said, "I'm going to go out on a limb, but that's 
not a cancer patient."

In the biggest push against medical marijuana since California 
legalized it in 1996, the federal authorities have shut at least 600 
dispensaries statewide since last October. California's four United 
States attorneys said the dispensaries violated not only federal law, 
which considers all possession and distribution of marijuana to be 
illegal, but state law, which requires operators to be nonprofit 
primary caregivers to their patients and to distribute marijuana 
strictly for medical purposes.

While announcing the actions against the 71 dispensaries, Andre 
Birotte Jr., the United States attorney for the Central District of 
California, indicated that it was only the beginning of his campaign 
in Los Angeles. Prosecutors filed asset forfeiture lawsuits against 
three dispensaries and sent letters warning of criminal charges to 
the operators and landlords of 68 others, a strategy that has closed 
nearly 97 percent of the targeted dispensaries elsewhere in the 
district, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the United States attorney.

Vague state laws governing medical marijuana have allowed 
recreational users of the drug to take advantage of the dispensaries, 
say supporters of the Los Angeles ban and the federal crackdown. Here 
on the boardwalk of Venice Beach, pitchmen dressed all in marijuana 
green approach passers-by with offers of a $35, 10-minute evaluation 
for a medical marijuana recommendation for everything from cancer to 
appetite loss.

Nearly 180 cities across the state have banned dispensaries, and 
lawsuits challenging the bans have reached the State Supreme Court. 
In more liberal areas, some 50 municipalities have passed medical 
marijuana ordinances, but most have suspended the regulation of 
dispensaries because of the federal offensive, according to Americans 
for Safe Access, a group that promotes access to medical marijuana. 
San Francisco and Oakland, the fiercest defenders of medical 
marijuana, have continued to issue permits to new dispensaries.

In 2004, shortly after the state effectively allowed the opening of 
storefront dispensaries, there were only three or four in Los 
Angeles, experts said. The number soon swelled into the hundreds 
before the city imposed a moratorium. But dispensaries continued to 
proliferate by exploiting a loophole in the moratorium even as 
lawsuits restricted the city's ability to pass an ordinance. Over the 
summer, the City Council voted to ban dispensaries.

Anticipating the ban, the medical marijuana industry "that 
historically had not worked together very well" began organizing a 
counterattack, said Dan Rush, an official with the United Food and 
Commercial Workers Union, which formed a coalition with Americans for 
Safe Access and the Greater Los Angeles Collective Alliance, a group 
of dispensary owners. The coalition raised $250,000, mostly from 
dispensaries, to gather the signatures necessary to place a 
referendum to overturn the ban on the ballot next March, said Don 
Duncan, California director for Americans for Safe Access.

Instead of allowing the referendum to proceed in March, when 
elections for mayor and City Council seats will also be held, the 
council on Tuesday voted to simply rescind the ban. Jose Huizar, one 
of only two council members to vote against the repeal, and the 
strongest backer of the ban, said the city was not in a position to 
fight an increasingly well-organized industry.

Mr. Huizar said California's medical marijuana laws, considered the 
nation's weakest, must be changed to better control the production 
and distribution of marijuana, as well as limit access to only real patients.

"Unless that happens, local cities are going to continue to play the 
cat-and-mouse game with the dispensaries," he said, adding that the 
industry had fought attempts here to regulate it. "These are folks 
who are just out to protect their profits, and they do that by having 
as little regulation or oversight as possible by the City of Los Angeles."

But coalition officials say they favor stricter regulations here.Rigo 
Valdez, director of organizing for the local union, which represents 
500 dispensary workers in Los Angeles, said he would support an 
ordinance restricting the number of dispensaries to about 125 and 
keeping them away from schools and one another.

"We would be able to respect communities by staying away from 
sensitive-use areas while providing safe access for medical marijuana 
patients," he said.

Such an ordinance would shut down many dispensaries catering to 
recreational users, said Yamileth Bolanos, president of the Greater 
Los Angeles Collective Alliance and owner of a dispensary, the 
PureLife Alternative Wellness Center. "I felt we needed a medical 
situation with respect, not with all kinds of music going, tattoos 
and piercings in the face," she said. "We're normal people. Normal 
patients can come and acquire medicine."

But the hundreds of dispensaries that would be put out of business 
will fight the federal crackdown, as some are already doing.

In downtown Los Angeles, where most of the dispensaries were included 
in the order to close, workers were renovating the storefront of the 
Downtown Collective. Inside, house music was being played in a lobby 
decorated to conjure "Scarface," a poster of which hung on a wall.

"We don't worry about this," the manager said of the federal 
offensive, declining to give his name. "It's between the lawyers."

David Welch, a lawyer who is representing 15 of the 71 dispensaries 
and who is involved in a lawsuit challenging a ban at the State 
Supreme Court, said the federal clampdown would fail.

"Medical marijuana dispensaries are very much like what they 
distribute: they're weeds," he said. "You cut them down, you leave, 
and then they sprout back up."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom