Pubdate: Thu, 21 Mar 2013
Source: Santa Barbara Independent, The (CA)
Copyright: 2013 The Santa Barbara Independent, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.independent.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4348
Author: Ethan Stewart

THE 'GREEN RUSH' IS CRUSHED

Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Closed; Patients Left with Few Options

At this point, it is hard to imagine, but just a handful of years 
ago, Santa Barbara had more medical marijuana storefronts than it did 
Starbucks coffeehouses. Now, after a perfect storm of local 
government regulation and high-profile arrests - coupled with 
multiple rounds of federal raids on South Coast dispensaries and 
threats of property seizures - this county has gone the way of so 
many others in California: It is now a cannabis club free zone. 
Whether you love them, hate them, or simply need one for help with a 
serious medical condition, the fact remains that there are no longer 
any legal dispensaries operating in Santa Barbara.

As senior city planner Danny Kato confirmed last week, "We now have 
zero medical marijuana dispensaries. I don't know for certain about 
illegal ones, but I haven't heard of any enforcement [issues] with 
those, either." Moreover, according to Kato, what was once a healthy 
waiting list of would-be clubs seeking city approval is now nothing 
more than a blank page with no evidence of interest in joining the 
brick-and-mortar ganja game.

The real rub of this new dispensary-less landscape is the impact it's 
had on the estimated 10,000-plus medical marijuana patients who call 
this county home, the men and women who, with a doctor's 
recommendation and according to California state law, are legally 
able to use various cannabis-based medicines to treat a lengthy list 
of ailments like attention deficit disorder, AIDS, multiple 
sclerosis, cancer, and insomnia. Without a storefront to safely and 
consistently secure their medicine, these folks are left with only 
three options: enter the black market and look for relief through an 
illegal drug dealer, grow their own, or seek out a collective to 
join, the latter often a clandestine operation run out of a 
residential neighborhood that doesn't advertise and, by nature, is 
often hard not only to find but also to join.

"Basically, the people who are suffering most right now are exactly 
the types of patients that the voters of California were thinking 
about when they passed Prop. 215 back in 1996," said Dr. David 
Bearman last week of the Compassionate Use Act. A family physician 
based out of Goleta, Bearman, who is widely considered one of the 
nation's foremost authorities on marijuana medicines, continued, "The 
very sick, the elderly, and those with little to no experience with 
recreational use of cannabis have been left to fend for themselves 
[in Santa Barbara]. It is a truly unfortunate and difficult situation."

State lawmakers are working to better define what a legally operating 
dispensary or collective should look like.

Personal Case Study

As fate would have it, I recently found myself living the fallout of 
the very situation Bearman talked about. After a scary run of bad 
health late last year, I ended up in Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital 
and was subsequently diagnosed with a fairly serious and rare 
condition called transverse myelitis. It wreaks havoc on my nervous 
system and messes with my ability to do simple things like walk and 
pee and use my hands, and, best of all, modern medicine has no real 
idea about what causes it or even how to consistently treat it.

Needless to say, my life has changed a fair bit in recent months, and 
those changes include all sorts of doctors' appointments both in town 
and with "experts" in Los Angeles, a gnarly drug regimen, some 
occasionally ass-kicking chronic pain, and a future that looks more 
and more like it will include some sort of diagnosis of an 
auto-immune disease and an accompanying long-term immuno-modifying 
drug therapy. During this nightmarish whirlwind, I have, on more than 
one occasion, had straight-shooting doctors point out to me the 
potential usefulness of medical marijuana.

It seems, for everything from pain relief to helping offset some of 
the wickedness associated with my high-dosage steroid prescription to 
fighting inflammation to the positive effects cannabis is believed to 
have on protecting otherwise deteriorating neurological systems, 
ganja (pardon the pun) is evergreen. The only problem, given the 
current state of affairs in Santa Barbara, is that actually securing 
- - or scoring, if you will - said relief through legal channels has 
been anything but easy. In fact, despite being The Santa Barbara 
Independent's on-again/off-again "pot" reporter for much of the past 
decade, it has, until recently, been virtually impossible. But Rite 
Aid - the place that dishes me the highly addictive pain meds that 
medical marijuana proves to be a marvelous stand-in for - remains 
right around the corner from both my house and my office.

Into the Void

"I would expect that patients who rely on medicinal marijuana are 
finding ways to get it locally. How, exactly, I have no idea," 
speculated Mayor Helene Schneider last week. Explaining that things 
have been "very quiet" in terms of complaints from medical marijuana 
patients (as well as medical marijuana critics) since the 
dispensaries went dark in the wake of the feds' most recent raids 
last May, Schneider said she figured patients are simply using a 
presumed network of collectives to get their medicine, a system that 
she admits the city has no real authority over and thus very little 
knowledge about.

As per 2003's California Senate Bill 420 (a k a the Medical Marijuana 
Program Act), a "collective" is essentially a group of people - with 
doctor permission - who cultivate and combine their own meds. What 
exactly such an outfit looks like or how it works varies greatly, but 
in basic terms, it often features a gathering of patients who share 
the costs of one to three growers who in turn provide medical 
marijuana via informal distribution. As per guidelines issued by then 
attorney general Jerry Brown in 2008, a collective must be a 
nonprofit, include only verifiably legal patients, and never source 
or distribute its medicine outside membership ranks. And so, in order 
to function properly, a collective has no real need for a storefront 
(though dispensaries often claim "collective" status), and thus they 
are often run out of people's homes.

Because, by nature, they are more tight-knit than, say, a standard 
dispensary, collectives rarely seek new members publicly, let alone 
openly advertise their existence. Add to this the fact that doctors 
making medical marijuana recommendations are legally prevented from 
advising their patients where they can purchase their healing herb or 
how they might join an established collective, and you have an end 
result that is anything but user-friendly for patients, especially new ones.

"At this point, you better hope you know somebody already in a 
collective, have a connection to one, or know how to navigate the 
Internet pretty well to find a delivery service," said Bearman of 
what it now takes to get medical marijuana in the Santa Barbara area. 
"It's that, or you wind up on the black market."

Interestingly enough, even the delivery services referenced by 
Bearman - of which there are roughly a half-dozen between Summerland 
and Solvang - are anything but legally clear. Falling under the 
"collective" classification, these door-to-door services, using the 
Internet and telephone as their primary contact, approve patients' 
picks from an online menu before emailing or phoning in their orders. 
Then, generally within 24 to 36 hours, a driver brings the meds to 
doorsteps. And while these services run the gamut from mom-and-pop 
operations to more sophisticated affairs that offer delivery 
throughout Southern California, most of them are little more than 
reimagined versions of now-shuttered dispensaries, albeit with lower 
profiles and overhead costs.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity earlier this month, a grower 
for one such group who used to make a living growing for dispensaries 
said: "Not much has really changed in terms of how we go about our 
actual business - same strains of weed, lots of the same patients, 
basically the same prices. We have just had to crawl back under a 
rock, so to speak."

Smoked Out

The delivery model - not technically part of the city's medical 
marijuana ordinance - is ripe for breaking both state and federal 
law, said Santa Barbara City Attorney Stephen Wiley. Noting that SB 
420 clears no definitive legal space for transporting marijuana in a 
car, Wiley said last week, "I think that someone who merely delivers 
medical marijuana to your door for money and a tip would have a hard 
time proving that he or she qualifies as a 'primary caregiver' to a 
'qualified patient.'" He went on to add, "Most municipal lawyers (and 
a few private lawyers) that I know are advising their clients that a 
medical marijuana delivery service remains a possible (even probable) 
criminal violation of the state Health and Safety Code."

Santa Barbara City Attorney Stephen Wiley said recently: "I think 
that someone who merely delivers medical marijuana to your door for 
money and a tip would have a hard time proving that he or she 
qualifies as a 'primary caregiver' to a 'qualified patient.'"

Santa Barbara police spokesperson Sergeant Riley Harwood said this 
week that little has changed for his department since the closure of 
the clubs and the advent of the delivery/neighborhood collective era. 
Echoing the mayor's assessment, Harwood said the police department 
receives roughly one complaint a month about delivery operations, a 
number not very different from a few years ago, and that often, after 
the Narcotics Section investigates, it finds there are no actual 
crimes being committed.

"We just don't get many complaints about that sort of stuff," said 
Harwood. Trouble arises, he said, when outfits get too large and push 
the limits of SB 420 and the spirit of the attorney general's 
guidelines. "Collectives aren't new to the landscape for us. We did 
our homework on them at the same time that we were investigating 
dispensaries," Harwood explained. "What we have found again and again 
is that when they are small - we are talking just a handful of people 
- - they are generally operating as they are supposed to. However, none 
of the larger operators have we found to be lawful. They either 
couldn't make it work once their numbers grew, or they had no 
intention of following the rules from the start."

Now What?

It turns out Santa Barbara's medical marijuana patients aren't alone 
in their limited ways to get medicine. According to Kris Hermes from 
Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana advocacy group based 
in Oakland, more than 500 clubs have shut down since the Department 
of Justice started its crackdown on California dispensaries in 
October 2011. These efforts, light on arrests and prosecutions but 
heavy on raids and threats of seizures, have been so effective that - 
despite the 50 city and county ordinances on the books throughout 
California (including the City and County of Santa Barbara) that 
define what it takes to legally run a dispensary in a particular 
municipality - there are no longer any operating storefront 
dispensaries between Los Angeles County and Oakland.

And while he admitted with a chuckle, "It certainly hasn't been good 
times lately," Hermes remains confident that better days are ahead, 
buoyed by local ordinances and recent efforts by government officials 
in San Diego and Oakland and Mendocino to push back against federal 
tactics. "Just as it was with the Bush administration, this very 
aggressive attempt to undermine California's state law by the Obama 
administration will prove to be temporary," said a defiant Hermes.

At the state level, lawmakers continue to better define what a 
legally operating dispensary or collective should look like, which, 
if ever achieved, would go a long way toward remedying what plagues 
regulators and operators alike. Right now, San Francisco's State 
Assemblymember Tom Ammiano is once again working on a bill, as are 
State Senators Mark Leno and Darrell Steinberg. And, while both 
efforts are in the early stages, they provide hope for a problematic 
situation that is long overdue for a solution.

As Santa Barbara's State Assemblymember Das Williams recently put it: 
"No matter your viewpoint, be it in support of or against medical 
marijuana, the current state of affairs is disastrous disarray in the 
State of California."

In the meantime, for us here in Santa Barbara (myself included), it 
seems that a road trip to L.A. or Oakland, growing your own medical 
marijuana, or finding a delivery-based collective to join are your 
only legal options for finding relief - growing necessitating a 
certain skill set and the luxury of time, and finding a collective 
requiring you to scour the Internet and then open your home to 
whomever you find.

Such is life in a town where, as Dr. Bearman put it: "We don't really 
mind that people are using medicinal marijuana. We just don't want to see it."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom