Pubdate: Fri, 09 Jan 2015
Source: Seattle Times (WA)
Copyright: 2015 The Seattle Times Company
Contact:  http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/409
Author: Jonathan Martin

MEDICAL-MARIJUANA ADVOCATES MAY HOWL, BUT NO FOUL BY HOLMES

City Attorney Pete Holmes has bona fides as the most marijuana 
friendly prosecutor in the United States. So when he says something 
is rotten in pot, there's more than just smoke in air.

This week, Holmes lit a fire in local pot politics by describing the 
existing medical-marijuana industry as essentially a giant felony enterprise.

"I'm holding my breath before I get dubbed Nancy Reagan the Second," 
Holmes told me.

It didn't take long. Advocacy groups howled, and donors to his 
campaigns now say they wouldn't cross the street to spit on him. Even 
Mayor Ed Murray backpedaled, implying that Holmes wanted to "leave 
our patients out in the cold."

Lost in the reaction was this: Holmes is right.

In a 20-page legal analysis released this week, Holmes lays out the law.

Initiative 502, approved by voters in 2012, authorized a strictly 
regulated and taxed seed-to-sale recreational market. 
Medical-marijuana operations, on the other hand, are based on one 
offhand section of a mostly vetoed bill that says nothing about 
storefront dispensaries or warehouse-sized grow farms.

In between those laws lies a vast, unregulated marijuana industry. 
Some of it is run by scrupulous, well-intended providers of medicine 
to very sick people. But much of it is simply a black market that has 
exploited Washington's hot mess of marijuana law.

"People say, 'marijuana is legal,' and no one wants to think past 
that," Holmes said. "No, marijuana that is regulated and taxed is legal."

Holmes' analysis isn't revolutionary, or particularly new. King 
County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg says medical dispensaries live in a 
legal "gray area," and hasn't brought many cases in part because King 
County juries simply won't convict.

Without clarifying new laws from Olympia, and without any enforcement 
in Seattle, the marijuana black market that was supposed to be 
quashed by I-502 remains so big that it looks like a ConAgra factory 
farm next to the gentleman's hobby farm of the fledgling recreational market.

Last month, my colleague Thanh Tan ran a quick test, buying a few 
buds at two "medical" dispensaries without having to prove she was a 
patient (she's not). That makes it simply a black-market sale.

Those two shops, named in a Seattle Times editorial, are still open. 
No consequences. No problem.

"Law enforcement has been confused about what is legal and what's 
not," Holmes said, which is why he wrote the memo. "The black market 
price has been high because it's illegal. Now they're enjoying the 
low prices because of the perception it's legal."

The pressure to quash the black market is finally building because 
voters, via I-502, convinced a bunch of mainstream business types to 
invest in a regulated alternative.

Seattle nightlife mogul David Meinert, who is part of an I-502 
enterprise, points to the ads in Seattle alternative weeklies 
promoting unregulated marijuana home-delivery services, which don't 
have even a fig leaf of legality under any reading of the law.

"Imagine if they were selling cigarettes," said Meinert. "It'd be 
shut down in a minute. There's no question. It's so silly for 
businesses following multiple laws and paying multiple taxes to see 
one type of business to make so much money blatantly illegally."

Why aren't they shut down? Because any hint of enforcement is cast as 
a perpetuation of the drug war and an attack on medical-marijuana patients.

Murray channeled that angst, for a quick political gain. But his 
police and business-regulation departments haven't done much to shut 
down sleazy bad actors operating far outside the law, with the 
exception of a June bust.

Holmes, for the record, isn't demanding some wholesale criminal 
crackdown. He has more credibility than anyone to argue against it. 
He also endorses a solution: merging medical marijuana and I-502 
shops into a single, regulated market.

Instead, Holmes did the city - and the Legislature, which is going to 
take up this issue soon - a favor by finally saying the obvious.

For all of Washington's crowing about being on the vanguard of a new 
approach to marijuana, we're at an "Emperor's New Clothes" moment.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom