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 Editorials | Issues | June 2008 
California Pulling Back on Medical Marijuana
 Jesse McKinley - International Herald Tribune
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| | This man says he makes $25,000 every three months selling marijuana grown in a bedroom in his rented house in Arcata, California. (Jim Wilson/The New York Times) | | |
Ukiah, California - There is probably no marijuana-friendlier place in the country than here in Mendocino County, where plants can grow more than 15 feet, or 4½ meters, high, where medical marijuana clubs adopt stretches of highway, and the sticky, sweet aroma of cannabis fills this city's streets during the autumn harvest.
Lately, however, residents of Mendocino County, like those in other parts of California, are wondering if the state's embrace of marijuana for medicinal purposes has gone too far.
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.
"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."
The outcome of the ballot measure is not known, as votes are still being counted, but such community push-back is increasingly common across the state, even in the most liberal communities. In recent years, dozens of local governments have banned or restricted clubs and dispensaries, which both provide medical marijuana to patients, in the face of public safety issues involved in its sale and cultivation, including crime and environmental damage.
"If folks had to get their dope, sorry, they would just have to get it somewhere else," said Sheriff Mark Pazin of Merced County, east of San Francisco, one of the many jurisdictions to impose new restrictions.
Under the 1996 law, known as Proposition 215, patients need a prescription to acquire medicinal marijuana, but the law gave little guidance as to how people were to acquire it. That gave rise to some patients with marijuana prescriptions growing their own in limited quantities, the opening of clubs or dispensaries to make it available and growers going large-scale to keep those outlets supplied.
In turn, that led to the kind of worries that have bubbled up in Arcata, home of Humboldt State University, where town elders say roughly one in five homes are "indoor grows," with rooms or even entire structures converted into marijuana greenhouses.
That shift in cultivation, caused in part by record-breaking seizures by drug agents of plants grown outdoors, has been blamed for a housing shortage for Humboldt students, residential fires and the powerful - and distracting - smell of the plant in some neighborhoods during harvest.
"I naïvely thought it was a skunk," said Jeff Knapp, an Arcata resident who has a neighbor who is a grower.
In May, Arcata declared a moratorium on clubs to allow the city council time to address the problem. Los Angeles, which has more than 180 registered marijuana clubs, the most of any city, also declared a moratorium last year.
"There were a handful initially, and then all the sudden, they started to sprout up all over," said Dennis Zine, a member of the Los Angeles City Council. "We had marijuana facilities next to high schools, and there were high school kids going over there, and there was a lot of abuse taking place."
But while even advocates of medical marijuana say they recognize that the dispensary system has problems, they question the bans.
"I think there's no doubt there's been abuse, but there's probably no system created by human beings that hasn't been abused," said Bruce Mirken, the director of communications for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, which promotes the drug's legalization. "But the answer to that is not the wholesale throwing out the baby with the bathwater."
All told, about 80 California cities have adopted moratoriums on the dispensaries with more than 60 others banning them outright, according to Americans for Safe Access, which advocates for medical marijuana research and treatment. Eleven counties have also adopted some sort of ban or moratorium.
Kris Hermes, legal campaign director for Americans for Safe Access, said that despite the bans, eight counties and about 30 cities had also established regulations meant to legitimize the dispensaries.
Zine said the moratorium on new clubs in Los Angeles would allow city officials time to develop regulations and zoning, something advocates for medical marijuana say they welcome.
"There's tons of human behavior that you and I might not want to have anything to do with," said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.
"But if they are legal, there ought to a legal means to purchase the commodity and do business."
Such regulations were passed in 2005 in San Francisco, which has a 10-page application for a dispensary permit.
Kevin Reed, owner of the Green Cross, was the first owner to get a permit in January. But he said some of the city's other two dozen dispensaries were struggling to get their paperwork. The city's board just extended the permit deadline until next year.
New regulations are also in the offing for local and state law enforcement, which has often found itself confused by the overlapping - and sometimes contradictory - federal, state and local laws. Under a state law that took effect in 2004 - SB 420 - counties can set their own limits on the amount of medical marijuana; in Mendocino, for example, growers are allowed 25 mature plants, while most counties allow six.
Jerry Brown, the state attorney general, plans to release guidelines this summer to clarify the differences.
"These dispensaries aren't supposed to be big profit centers," Brown said. "This is supposed to be for individual use."
The SB 420 law also recognized the right of patients and caregivers to cultivate marijuana as a group, something law enforcement officials say has been abused.
"You'll find these places where they've got 500 plants and 20 215 letters tacked to the fence," said Bob Nishiyama, the major crimes task force commander in Mendocino County. "And technically that's legal because people can have 25 plants."
By any measure, medical marijuana in California is a moneymaker. In March, a group of California dispensary owners testified in front of the state Board of Equalization that their industry had pumped some $100 million in sales tax into state coffers, representing more than $1 billion in sales.
Like many law enforcement officials, Nishiyama says he does not have a problem with medical marijuana, just with those who exploit it. "If you're growing six plants and smoking it in your own house, I could care less," he said.
Most states that have passed subsequent medical marijuana laws have been more precise than California. New Mexico, for example, allows only patients with seven medical conditions, including cancer, AIDS and epilepsy, to receive medical marijuana.
"California is an aberration, because it does not designate specific disease types, it does not designate weights or plant source, and it has what might be the most fungible or elastic definition of caregiver," said St. Pierre, of Norml. "Every proposition post-215 has been narrower and narrower and more restrictive in scope."
Also complicating law enforcement's job is the problem of marijuana still being illegal in the eyes of the federal government, which has been increasingly aggressive about prosecuting owners of dispensaries they feel have crossed the line into commercial drug dealing.
In 2007, the Drug Enforcement Agency threatened to seize buildings from landlords who rented space to dispensaries, resulting in some closings across the state.
Officials in San Francisco and Los Angeles, among other cities, have protested the federal government's tactics, as have members of Congress.
"They're shooting themselves in the foot every time they raid one of these co-ops, or break into some cancer patient's home," said Bill Piper, the director for national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, which opposes the raids. "All they do is make themselves look cruel and stupid."
Jigar Mehta and Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting. |
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