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Previous articles compared two marijuana legalization initiatives filed in California and discussed the California initiative process and the relationship of initiatives to laws passed by the state legislature. One of these initiatives has been amended and a third filed. The newest addition to California’s marijuana legalization initiatives is the Common Sense Act of 2010 by Common Sense California. This initiative, which was filed 4 Aug 09, repeals marijuana prohibition in California, gives the legislature a year to pass laws to regulate and tax marijuana, and calls for California members of Congress to work to remove cannabis from the Federal Schedule of Controlled Substances. On the same day, 4 Aug 09, amendments to the Regulate, Control and Tax Act of 2010 (ROT 2010) were filed with the Attorney General. Section 2, B. Purposes. Item 2 now reads, “Regulate cannabis like we do alcohol; Allow adults to possess and consume small amounts of cannabis.” The phrase “21 years of age and older” has been removed. However, this will probably have no impact as the phrase “21 years of age or older” still appears twice in the document and the phrase “21 years of age” appears seven times. Also under Section 2., B. Purposes; Items 7 and 8 have the following appended, “except as permitted under Health and Safety Section 11362.5 and 11362.7 through 11362.9.” Item 7 prohibits the sales of cannabis in cities that do not enact a tax on it. Item 8 authorizes strict control over the cultivation, distribution and sales in cities that do enact taxes on cannabis. It also authorizes cities to limit how much can be bought and sold. Appending the phrase, “except as permitted under Health and Safety Section 11362.5 and 11362.7 through 11362.9″ to these items explicitly exempts California’s medical marijuana statutes, patients, and providers or caregivers from the provisions of ROT 2010, though it should be noted that California’s Medical Marijuana Program ends with Health & Safety Code §11362.83 and there are no codes between §11362.83 and §11362.9. While this phrase is not repeated in the subsequent Section 3., C. Intent, which explicitly lists the statutes to be affected and those not affected by ROT 2010, it removes much of the concern previously expressed about any potential impact this law could have on medical marijuana patients and/or the Compassionate Use Act of 1996. Most notably, it exempts medical marijuana from the taxing requirements. It is to the credit of Oaksterdam U and Richard Lee that this change was made in a timely manner. However, §11300(c) which prohibits consumption in public and in the presence of children remains unchanged. Current California law has no prohibition on medical consumption of marijuana in the presence of children and criminalizes the medical smoking of cannabis only where smoking cigarettes is prohibited. While medical marijuana patients appear to be explicitly exempted from this prohibition on consumption in the presence of children and/or in public, it could prove problematic in practice. Currently, “lowest priority” ordinances which prohibit recreational consumption in public are being used to harass medical patients. A prohibition on consumption in public by medical patients will have the effect of making them housebound. Many cannot easily go without medicating for the time it takes to visit a doctor, buy groceries, have dinner, or go to a movie. Also, §11304(a) remains unchanged. This section states that nothing in ROT 2010 shall “affect, amend, or limit any statute that … penalizes bringing cannabis to a school enrolling students in any grade kindergarten through 12, inclusive.” This could likewise prove problematic for children and teenagers who are medical marijuana patients, notwithstanding the exemption of current California marijuana statutes previously cited. It should be noted that §11304(c) or ROT 2010 prohibits discrimination for use, consumption, sales, distribution, and cultivation of cannabis. In short, the amendments to ROT 2010 amount to appending the phrase, “except as permitted under Health and Safety Sections 11362.5 and 11362.7 through 11362.9″ to items 7 and 8 under Purposes. Of the three initiatives to legalize marijuana filed with the Attorney General, ROT 2010 is the most likely to acquire the 433,971 valid signatures to qualify for the 2 Nov 10 ballot. The proponents will have a difficult job differentiating their proposals in the minds of the public. Signature validation could prove to be a nightmare. Will most people who support marijuana legalization end up signing the same petition duplicate times through confusion and a desire to see all proposals on the ballot? The Tax, Regulate and Control Cannabis Act of 2010 (THC 2010) is the most far-reaching of the three initiatives as it legalizes marijuana, grants retroactive amnesty to California marijuana prisoners, decriminalizes hemp, and explicitly protects medical marijuana patients including children. Common Sense 2010 is the least far-reaching. While, upon voter approval, it will lift the prohibition of marijuana, it leaves taxing and regulating up to the legislature and gives them one year to do it. THC 2010 prohibits any community from banning sales of marijuana, while ROT 2010 explicitly provides for such bans. THC 2010 levies a $50 per ounce tax on recreational marijuana, while ROT 2010 specifies no amount but encourages taxation and licensing “without limitation”. Of the three, only THC 2010 cannot be amended by the legislature without approval by the voters. ROT 2010 explicitly allows amendment without approval by the people, and this could prove problematic once the pharmaceutical lobby gets to work on California elected officials. While Common Sense 2010 repeals the prohibition of marijuana at the state level, it enacts no law but rather gives the state legislature a year to do so. It now appears that none of the proposed initiatives to legalize marijuana in California can be used to nullify or amend current California medical marijuana law. For more info: Office of The Attorney General, State of California – Initiative Measures Common Sense for California – The Common Sense Act of 2010 Marijuana legalization and California initiatives – Examiner.com | 8 Aug 09 source:http://www.examiner.com/x-14883-Santa-Cruz-County-Drug-Policy-Examiner~y2009m8d10-California-has-three-initiatives-filed-to-legalize-marijuana
Myths About High Times in America By Ryan Grim Americans have historical amnesia of a general variety, but the blackout is particularly acute when it comes to what our grandparents, and their grandparents, did to get high. Forty years after Woodstock, the nation is taking a fresh look at its twisted relationship with drugs and insobriety. But we’re doing so without drawing lessons from the centuries of experience we have with inebriation and the effort to control it. Five widespread myths must be dispensed with if America ever plans on sobering up and making rational drug policy. 1. America’s drug problem began in the late 1960s. Drugs (other than booze) first went mainstream in the early to mid-19th century. The father of the opium boom — or, more accurately, the mother — was the temperance movement. Pressured by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Saloon League, religious leaders and other advocates, Americans put down the bottle, and drinking plummeted by a half to three-quarters. With drinking taboo, our ancestors got high instead. An 1872 look at the opium boom by the Massachusetts State Board of Health noted that “between 1840 and 1850, soon after teetotalism had become a fixed fact . . . our own importations of opium swelled.” When opium started causing problems, in came morphine, marketed as a nonaddictive alternative. When that proved patently false, Bayer’s heroin was sold as a nonaddictive substitute for morphine. Sears, Roebuck and Co. was slinging cocaine kits, complete with powder and syringe. In 1885, Parke-Davis promised, quite rightly, that its cocaine could “supply the place of food, make the coward brave, the silent eloquent.” 2. Nixon is to blame for the war on drugs. Nixon’s declaration was nothing new. Americans have been waging war against their love of inebriation since before they were Americans. In 1619, Virginia got it going by banning “playing dice, cards, drunkenness, idleness, and excess in apparel.” Founding Father Benjamin Rush typified the contradictions of the American war against getting high; the physician’s famous anti-liquor treatise in 1785 contained kind words for beer and wine: “generally innocent, and often have a friendly influence upon health and life.” The nation’s first uprising revolved around sobriety, when George Washington put down the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion. When the next wave of the temperance movement crested, Rush was lifted again as a hero, but his kudos to beer and wine were left on the shore. Temperance movements, led by women, left men unsure that they wanted to share the franchise. “I am not sure how I will vote, but think I will vote against suffrage,” Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio said in 1916, according to a contemporaneous article in the Nation magazine. “I don’t see how I can vote for suffrage and against prohibition.” He voted for prohibition anyway and, as president during the dry spell, held regular whiskey and poker nights. 3. Legalization will increase teen drug use. But the children! Californians fretted loudly in 1996 that the state’s new medical marijuana law would lead to an increase in teen pot-smoking, so the state studied it closely. The attorney general’s first look a year later found no effect. The office looked again a decade later. Teen use had collapsed. Among seventh- and 11th-graders, the number of kids saying they’d smoked in the last month fell by a quarter; among ninth-graders, it fell by 47 percent. Bigger declines were found in weekly and annual use. In almost every other state that passed a medical marijuana law, pot-smoking among children declined faster than in states that didn’t. 4. In foreign countries, legalization has been disastrous. First, no country has ever completely legalized drugs, not since global treaties were signed a century ago ushering in prohibition. In Holland, drug laws are still on the books, but a social pact between the government and the people keeps shops from getting busted. Portugal became the first European country to abolish drug laws when it repealed criminal penalties for pot, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine in 2001. The world freaked: The United Nations suggested that the new law could be a treaty violation and would lead to crime, a spike in addiction and a rise in “drug tourism.” But the country didn’t fully legalize. People caught with drugs still had to go to a magistrate and face a small penalty. But they wouldn’t go to jail. Now the United Nations is lauding Portugal. In its most recent World Drug Report, it says, “These conditions keep drugs out of the hands of those who would avoid them under a system of full prohibition, while encouraging treatment, rather than incarceration, for users.” The report also noted that the policy had not led to an increase in drug tourism and that “a number of drug-related problems have decreased.” 5. Americans aren’t ready for legalization. While pot-smoking peaked in the late ’70s, legalization never came close to being a majority position. This country has fewer pot smokers today — a University of Michigan study found that marijuana use among 18- to 20-year-olds dropped by nearly half from the late ’70s to today — but polls show support at about 50 percent for taxing and regulating marijuana as we do alcohol. But Americans have a dim view of their neighbors’ enlightenment, an appraisal that shines through in research by Zogby in Rhode Island and Vermont. The survey, paid for by the Marijuana Policy Project (my onetime employer), interviewed 501 likely voters in Rhode Island and 502 in Vermont. It found 69 and 71 percent support for medical marijuana, respectively. No surprise. But Zogby asked one last question: Regardless of your own opinion, do you think a majority in your state support or oppose medical marijuana? In Vermont, 38 percent of people thought a majority backed it; a quarter of Rhode Islanders guessed their fellow citizens supported medical pot. Americans are ready. They just don’t know it yet. Ryan Grim, a congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post, is the author of “This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.” source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/07/AR2009080702159.html
By SABRINA SHANKMAN LOS ANGELES — Daniel Halbert moved here from Phoenix this year to invest his life savings in what he hoped was a golden opportunity: the medical-marijuana business. But on Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council told him to shut down his dispensary, part of a broad crackdown against a growing and unregulated marijuana industry. More than 600 dispensaries have taken advantage of a loophole in city regulations to open shop here in the past two years. The unchecked growth has alarmed some city leaders. “They were like a rash,” said City Councilman Ed Reyes, who is leading the effort to shut down many of the dispensaries. He said a colleague told him that at one dispensary near a high school, the student crowds outside made the pot store look “like an ice cream shop from the 1950s.” The planning committee has begun hearings to close the loophole used by dispensaries to set up shop with scarcely any paperwork or permits. At the committee’s first hearings last week, it told 28 dispensaries to close or face a fine. California legalized marijuana consumption for medicinal use in 1996. In 2003, the state established legal protections for medical-marijuana users who were issued a doctor’s prescription. The law also created more solid legal footing for the cooperatives that distribute marijuana for medical purposes. Dispensaries, which had numbered just a handful until 2003, began to grow statewide. By 2007, Los Angeles had 183 dispensaries.  That same year, the city attorney’s office issued a moratorium intended to block new establishments until the City Council created regulations, such as a ban on operating near schools. But the City Council never got around to setting any rules on the dispensaries. Meantime, word begin to spread that dispensary owners could open new outlets, despite the moratorium, by filing paperwork claiming a so-called hardship exemption. Some applications cited the raids by federal authorities targeting marijuana dispensaries as hardships. In other hardship applications, owners simply claimed they weren’t aware they needed permits. The hardship applications went unchallenged by the City Council, and the number of dispensaries soared to its current level of about 800. San Francisco, by comparison, has about 30 dispensaries. Mr. Halbert joined the rush in March. He was running a dating service in Phoenix when a friend pointed out an ad on Craigslist from Marc Kent, a former attorney, offering to help people apply for the hardship exemption for a $3,500 fee. He said he has helped people open up more than 100 dispensaries. “It was pretty much a turn-key operation,” said Mr. Kent. Mr. Halbert made three trips to Los Angeles and toured several facilities that had opened under the hardship clause. “I did my due diligence,” he said. He settled on a storefront on Venice Boulevard in West Los Angeles. He registered the business as Best Buds, but later changed the outlet’s name to Rainforest Collective. He placed a clapboard sign out front and advertised his services with a flashing neon sign in the window. He decorated his shop with rainforest-themed murals. Clients could select from an assortment of marijuana strains for smoking, as well as “edibles” — pretzels and cookies with the marijuana baked inside. Total investment: close to $100,000, he said. Mr. Halbert encourages customers to consume their marijuana on the premises and lures them with such offers as movie nights. “We don’t want them to just come here and get their medicine,” he said. “We want them to come here and maybe make some friends, have some fellowship.” He said he now has about 1,000 customers, but declined to discuss how much the shop makes. Mr. Halbert said he might try to fight the city order to close and planned to stay open as long as possible. In his hearing before the planning committee Tuesday, Mr. Halbert produced letters of support from residents and local businesses. Other neighborhood activists, however, have campaigned to shut down the dispensaries. Cindy Cleghorn, a member of a neighborhood council in a another part of the city, complained her area is overrun. “It’s out of control,” she said. Ms. Cleghorn said the new dispensaries violate neighborhood-improvement guidelines and operate in storefronts that are zoned for other uses. “It’s not about the marijuana, it’s about the land-use issues,” says Ms. Cleghorn, who brought her complaints to the City Council. But because so many dispensaries had opened up without resistance from the city, Mr. Halbert said, “Any business person would assume that the city’s fine” with them. Write to Sabrina Shankman at Sabrina.Shankman@wsj.com |
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