San Jose’s new ordinance to regulate medical marijuana clubs has run into a buzz saw of challenges, not the least of which is a referendum qualified for the June ballot to repeal the regulations. Rather than take on that fight, the City Council should suspend the ordinance, as Mayor Chuck Reed has proposed, and hope that the courts, the Legislature or both will clarify what cities can do to regulate dispensaries. Pot clubs need to move back to the spirit of Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act voters passed in 1996, the Mercury News editorial [...]
City Councilman Jose Huizar is asking his colleagues to ban medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles. It’s a great idea. Or rather, it would have been a great idea three or four years ago — before the city purported to regulate the storefront cannabis-selling shops. The idea would not be to ban dispensaries forever but to track court rulings, determine what regulations are and are not allowable, and then construct a smart and enforceable ordinance. But it’s too late for that now, this Los Angeles Times editorial concludes. L.A. city government took its seat on [...]
SANTA CRUZ — A soft drink laced with the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, a tsunami that swept through the Santa Cruz Small Craft Harbor and a woman arrested on suspicion of throwing a duck were just a few of the stories that captured online readers’ attention in 2011. The Santa Cruz Sentinel website averages more than 400,000 unique visitors each month, and the top story of the year about Canna Cola was viewed more than 150,000 times since it appeared in January 2011, Stephen Baxter reports. Canna Cola, a soft drink aimed at medical marijuana [...]
From the early moments of the groundbreaking reality TV show, “Weed Wars,” it’s clear that longtime pot reform activist Steve DeAngelo is ready for his close-up. After a snappy title track by Snoop Dogg, the opening episode quickly cuts to scenes of a pony-tailed DeAngelo cruising the streets of Oakland and extolling the virtues of medical marijuana. “I have a very close, personal relationship with the cannabis plant,” says the loquacious founder of Harborside Health Center, the state’s largest medical marijuana dispensary. “It was love at first sight.” Cable television in recent years has introduced [...]
In 2009, as Los Angeles’ booming medical marijuana economy inspired an emerald city of weed, Vanessa Sahagun found a business opportunity as “Chacha Vavoom,” maven of the 420 Nurses. Chacha and her “nurses” became a pot culture phenomenon. They savored bong hits on YouTube, modeled skimpy outfits to promote marijuana dispensaries – and stirred young men at medical pot shows teeming with sexual imagery. “I was proud I was opening up a market creating ‘green jobs’ for these ladies,” said Sahagun, 25. But now, the sexual marketing of medical marijuana – with racy promotions that [...]
Even if the city of Redding orders its many medical-marijuana “co-ops” to close their doors by the end of the month, and they comply, does anyone think fewer users will be buying marijuana under the protections of Proposition 215? That’s the question asked in this insightful Redding Record Searchlight editorial. Whether you sympathize with patients suffering severe health problems who find cannabis eases their pain or think that pot smokers are just scamming the system to avoid criminal prosecution, it’s hard to see the business going away. Not so long as state law grants near-total [...]
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? That ancient philosophical – or would it be biological? – question has a political counterpart in California, Dan Walters observes in his McClatchy Newspapers column. To wit: Did California’s Legislature become dysfunctional because voters adopted too many contradictory ballot measures, or were those ballot measures merely responding to the chronic inability or unwillingness of the Legislature to deal with substantial issues? Countless academic conferences, newspaper op-ed essays and even books have been devoted to answering, or attempting to answer, the question ever since ballot measures became the [...]
It’s a good thing that some legislators are willing to take on California’s medical marijuana morass. Attorney General Kamala Harris just tossed it in their laps. It’s perhaps a safer course to stay out of the fray and issue a carefully crafted, completely inoffensive statement, as she did Thursday, that supports the “compassionate use” of medical marijuana for the ill, expresses concern about criminal enterprises exploiting the law and urges federal authorities to focus enforcement on significant traffickers. But for the state’s top law enforcement officer, that’s just not good enough, says this Sacramento Bee [...]
As the Obama administration escalates its threats to crack down on California’s medical marijuana dispensaries, two voices have been conspicuously silent: state Attorney General Kamala Harris and Gov. Jerry Brown, her predecessor. Is she going to vigorously defend the dispensaries if the feds attempt to shut them down?, this San Francisco Chronicle editorial asks. Does she agree with the U.S. attorneys that some of them are not only in violation of federal law but also are criminal enterprises that break even the state’s lax guidelines – and, if so, why hasn’t the state’s top prosecutor [...]
The traditionally conservative doctors attending the California Medical Association’s annual meeting Friday weren’t high on the state’s No. 1 cash crop when they called for the legalization and regulation of marijuana. They were simply acknowledging the obvious: Our current laws and the resulting war on drugs aren’t working. The consequences of pushing pot underground, CMA docs argue, are worse than the potential problems of legal pot shops. This bold pronouncement moves the legalization debate further into the mainstream, and that is where it belongs, this San Jose Mercury News editorial declares. The professionals who run [...]
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