The debate over medical marijuana clinics in Claremont may be over, but the fight goes on across the state:
The Daily Bulletin had an opinion piece by registered nurse Lanny Swerdlow of the THCF Medical Clinic in Riverside. Swerdlow was responding to another opinion piece in the Bulletin and the San Bernardino Sun (one of the Bulletin's sister papers) by a Kevin Sabet:
The underlying fear that medical marijuana is the camel's nose under the tent of marijuana legalization permeates every word of Sabet's article. This is graphically demonstrated by his red herring that some people might abuse the medical access of marijuana. There is no demand for the prohibition of prescription pharmaceuticals even though people die from their abuse.
No one has ever died from using marijuana.
Sabet objects to the text of Proposition 215 which allows marijuana to be used for "any illness for which marijuana provides relief." He believes patients should take Vicodin or Percocet for pain with their debilitating side effects of constipation, respiratory distress, arrhythmias and liver toxicity rather than marijuana which has none of these life-threatening consequences. If a medicine works, it should be up to a doctor to decide if a patient should use it and not a government bureaucrat.
Showcasing Sabet's paranoid fear of legalization was his claim that "The Sun was scammed by the pro-legalization movement." Give The Sun some credit for being scam savvy. The real scam is being perpetuated by Sabet's organization, the Inland Valley Drug Free Community Coalition, which is so preoccupied with medical marijuana that it all but ignores the actually serious health threats to the community of methamphetamines, heroin, tobacco, alcohol and prescription drug abuse.
There do seem to be some notable problems with implementing Prop. 215, the 1996 California ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana in the state. One is the law is unclear on the matter of growing cannabis. Consequently, large-scale growers who supply to medical marijuana clinics still have to worry about getting arrested. Also, there seems to be a conflict between federal and California law on the clinics, which is why the federal Drug Enforcement Agency keeps raiding clinics. In addition, the interpretation of the Prop. 215 varies greatly depending on the locality.
Medical marijuana was also the subject of an article by David Samuels in the July 28th New Yorker titled "Dr. Kush: How Medical Marijuana is Transforming the Pot Industry." Samuel's article explored some of these issues. The article seemed to take the position that medical marijuana may just be a back-door for legalization of pot, as Samuels wrote:....As long as they had a California state I.D., those who received recommendations for marijuana could buy some immediately from the dispensary’s stock. Cindy told me that when she opened her shop, in 2007, she needed the same licenses that she would have needed to open a newsstand on the Santa Monica Pier: a commercial lease, a seller’s permit, a federal tax I.D. number, and a tobacco license (for selling rolling papers and pipes). She estimated that forty per cent of her clients suffer from serious illnesses such as cancer, AIDS, glaucoma, epilepsy, and M.S. The rest have ailments like anxiety, sleeplessness, A.D.D., and assorted pains.
Like many other dispensary owners I spoke with, Cindy derives particular satisfaction from providing medication to people who suffer from chronic diseases. Although she suspects that there is nothing seriously wrong with many of the young men who come in to buy an eighth of L.A. Confidential, she doesn’t regard marijuana as a harmful drug when compared with Xanax, Valium, Prozac, and other pills that are commonly prescribed by physicians to treat vague complaints of anxiety or dysphoria....
Coincidentally, the Samuels interviewed Los Angeles attorney Allison Margolin for his New Yorker piece. Margolin represented marijuana dispensary owner Darrell Kruse in his unsuccessful suit against the city of Claremont.
...I paid a visit to Allison Margolin, who calls herself “L.A.’s dopest attorney.” Her trade is a sort of family business—her father, the lawyer Bruce Margolin, is the author of the Margolin Guide, which enumerates the legal penalties for the sale and possession of pot in each of the fifty states. She works in a black-glass office tower on Wilshire Boulevard owned by Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler. On the walls in her office, a Harvard Law School degree is juxtaposed with a pictorial layout from the magazine Skunk, featuring her in a low-cut leopard-print dress. Margolin’s sexpot image is an advantage with clients, who, more often than not, are socially isolated men. Margolin has a reputation for getting cases dismissed, and for retrieving marijuana plants that have been seized by the police.
“The truth is, it’s very rare to get plants back,” Margolin said. Her long auburn hair was in a tidy French bun, but a few strands had been allowed to slip loose. Like many of her clients, she adopted a tone of adolescent vulnerability and outraged innocence when talking about the mean grownups who don’t like pot. “People are talking about how it’s being over-recommended and abused,” she said. “I mean, big fucking deal. It’s not toxic!” I asked her if she had a doctor’s letter, and she nodded vigorously, explaining that she suffers from an anxiety disorder.
She said that courts are sometimes sympathetic to her arguments about the relative safety of pot, but most judges and prosecutors seem to have only a glancing acquaintance with the case law since the passage of Proposition 215. “I’ve gone to court, like, several times where the judge has read only the first half of the case, which talks about how dispensaries are not legal according to Proposition 215,” she said. “I think it’s just intellectual and physical laziness.”
Apparently, the Pomona Courthouse, where the Kruse lawsuit was heard, has some of these lazy judges.
Both Samuels and Margolin were on KPCC 89.3FM's "Air Talk" last week and were interviewed by host Larry Mantle on the July 30th show. You can hear the interview here. In both the article and the interview, Samuels describes the medical marijuana movement as creating a market demand for higher quality, decently priced varieties of marijuana that can be purchased without having to go to a street drug dealer.
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