San Francisco has begun issuing medical marijuana dispensary licenses again, following a recent state Supreme court decision that will allow local pot dispensaries to do business — for now. The city’s Medical Cannabis Act permitting process had been on hold for several months, following a state appeals court ruling in Pack vs. Long Beach, Chris Roberts reports in The Snitch blog for S.F. Weekly. The ruling said that city or county laws regulating medical marijuana violated federal law; the decision led cities and counties throughout the state to suspend, reconsider, or repeal their regulatory schemes. [...]
San Francisco, the hotbed of marijuana law reform, has frozen medical cannabis dispensary permitting this winter as the City — and dozens of others across the state — nervously await a decision by the California Supreme Court on the very legality of such permits. Nine groups that are seeking permits to open new San Francisco clubs — mostly in the Mission — have been caught in limbo, the Department of Public Health told Legalization Nation blogger David Downs in the East Bay Express. San Francisco currently has 26 permitted dispensaries. However, an October decision by [...]
The federal Department of Justice’s crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries in California has meant the loss of thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue, according to cannabis advocates and government statistics. An estimated 2,500 people statewide have lost their jobs since late September, when California’s four U.S. attorneys sent letters that threatened jail sentences for dispensary owners and the possible seizure of buildings that house the pot clubs, said Dan Rush, director of the United Food and Commercial Workers’ national medical cannabis division. The union began organizing medical marijuana workers in May [...]
Medical marijuana advocates have filed lawsuits in California’s four federal judicial districts aimed at quickly winning court orders to halt the U.S. attorneys from closing dispensaries. The lawsuits are the second legal challenge to the stepped-up enforcement efforts that the four prosecutors announced last month at a high-profile joint news conference in Sacramento, John Hoeffel reports in the Los Angeles Times. Matt Kumin, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuits, said that Tuesday the plaintiffs plan to ask the judges assigned to the cases for temporary restraining orders halting the crackdown. “The government has [...]
Pot suppliers went to federal court Monday to try to halt the Obama administration’s campaign to close down their dispensaries, saying the survival of California’s medical marijuana law is at stake. In lawsuits filed in each of the state’s four federal districts, medical marijuana cooperatives, joined by patients and property owners, accused the Justice Department of violating an agreement to leave them alone if they complied with state law, Bob Egelko reports in the San Francisco Chronicle. The department had pledged to the courts, and to patients and their suppliers, that “those who possess, grow [...]
Americans for Safe Access (ASA), the country's largest medical marijuana advocacy organization, filed suit in federal court today challenging the Obama Administration's attempt to subvert local and state medical marijuana laws in California. ASA argues in its lawsuit that the Obama Justice Department (DOJ) has "instituted a policy to dismantle the medical marijuana laws of the State of California and to coerce its municipalities to pass bans on medical marijuana dispensaries." The DOJ policy has involved aggressive SWAT-style raids, criminal prosecutions of medical marijuana patients and providers and threats to local officials for merely implementing [...]
In light of a recent federal crackdown on medical marijuana, seven San Francisco supervisors urged the feds to reverse course. “I believe it’s important for us … to be very clear that we support the right of patients to have access to medicine,” said Supervisor David Campos, chief sponsor of the nonbinding resolution. His co-sponsors are Supervisors Eric Mar, John Avalos, David Chiu, Ross Mirkarimi, Jane Kim and Scott Wiener. It’s not the first time the supervisors have weighed in, Rachel Gordon reports in the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2001, the Board of Supervisors declared [...]
Medical marijuana advocates, decrying a federal government crackdown on dispensaries and a failure of state lawmakers to act, said Tuesday that they are drafting a 2012 ballot initiative to impose statewide oversight of California’s burgeoning medicinal cannabis trade. The ballot push, announced at a San Francisco news conference, is being readied by groups that include the architects of 2010′s unsuccessful Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana for recreational use, Peter Hecht reports in the Sacramento Bee. Dale Sky Jones, chancellor of Oakland’s Oaksterdam University, the cannabis trade school that became the nerve center for [...]
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 local, state and federal laws regulating medical marijuana in California grew even hazier with the Obama administration’s recent memo that threatened to prosecute anyone in the business of growing or supplying pot to patients. The memo represented a significant departure from its sensible October 2009 guidelines that essentially assured dispensaries and patients that the federal government was not interested in going after operations that complied with state law. Now the clinics are put in the untenable position of wondering whether the next knock on the door might be from federal agents, the San Francisco [...]
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