When my mother walked into the medical marijuana dispensary, her first words were: "I'm here because I have pain. I do not want to get high."
An unassuming woman in her early 60s with perfect skin and ghost-white hair cropped short like a schoolboy's, she had been suffering from peripheral neuropathy. The soles of her feet hurt. There was nothing wrong with them, but something between her brain and the nerves in her feet was getting lost in translation.
She had tried everything: pills, acupuncture, a special diet, rolling around in a wheelchair. She even went to a healer, who diagnosed the problem as trauma from a past life. He waved a few crystals around and sent her home.
The idea came from The New York Times, which reported that cancer patients found significant pain relief when they smoked one or two puffs of cannabis a day. A tenured college professor, my mother hadn't smoked pot for 32 years, but she'd tried everything else.
She asked her pain doctor, who said, "You should try it, but I can't prescribe it for you."
Because the federal government still considers marijuana a Schedule I drug on par with heroin and cocaine, many doctors are loath to recommend it. But a crop of doctors has sprung up in medical marijuana states to fill the need.
And so my mother, Isa Aron, drove down Pico Boulevard to Herbalcure Cooperative, a small, lime-green West Los Angeles storefront just west of the 405. Instead of a window, the brick wall facing the street has a mural depicting what the dispensary looks like inside. She walked around back, through the parking lot, past the hulking security guard and into the small shop, where she stated her purpose plainly.
"I want the kind that doesn't make me high," she said.
"Yeah, we have that kind," the manager said reassuringly. "We have both kinds."
This, of course, is nonsense. Pot is pot. All pot gets you high, and all pot, to a certain extent, has medicinal value.
The manager was trying to make a sale, but there exists within Los Angeles a kind of fantasy about medicinal marijuana: that there is good pot and bad pot, and if only we could separate the two, L.A. wouldn't be in the mess it's in.
For more than 15 years, City Hall has failed to create a workable ordinance regulating medical marijuana. It watched as Oakland, San Francisco, West Hollywood and even Los Angeles County enacted regulations, and then proceeded to dither, fumble, stall, mismanage, misplay — and finally overreact.
Now, City Attorney Carmen Trutanich and City Council District 14 representative Jose Huizar are pushing an ordinance to ban all marijuana dispensaries. The motion has passed the L.A. City Council's Public Safety Committee and the Planning Commission, and could be decided by the full City Council in a matter of weeks — or days.
Word is, several members of the deeply split council are ready to approve a ban.
That it would come to this, in a city as seemingly liberal as Los Angeles, is nothing short of astonishing.
"I think it's absurd, ridiculous and totally wrong," says Westside City Councilman Bill Rosendahl. "They're throwing out the baby with the bathwater."
The fact that the ban even has a chance of being approved is a direct result of the city's strange and often baffling medical marijuana policy, a kaleidoscope of legal speculation and interpretation, which is always in flux.
"It's a horrible mess, and it's the City Council's fault," says Michael Larsen, president of the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council in northeast L.A. and one of the more vocal opponents of marijuana dispensaries. "This problem doesn't exist in other cities. Some have decided to allow dispensaries and create ordinances, and some have decided to ban. But either way, they acted."
Each dispensary owner likes to say that his or her dispensary works hard and plays by the rules. It's those other dispensaries — the supposedly bad ones, the unscrupulous ones, the unwanted neighbors, the fly-by-nighters — that are the problem.
Avedis Ghaghian, co-owner of California Caregivers Alliance in Silver Lake, says of the bad dispensaries of years past, "They put a black shade on us."
To stay within the letter of the law in L.A., such as it is, weed dispensary owners and their employees today are trained by lawyers and consultants on how to operate and how to speak. Customers are patients. Doctors don't prescribe marijuana, they recommend it. Pot is medicine, or meds, or sometimes flowers. Owners might be called consultants, while employees often are volunteers who aren't paid a salary.
Of her bosses at California Caregivers Alliance, dispensary volunteer Stephanie Tirado says, "They can make a donation to us if they see fit." Some dispensaries pay salaries, but at the Silver Lake dispensary Tirado is paid with irregular cash amounts and free pot/medicine.
Most dispensaries close at 8 p.m. and do not allow on-site smoking, in deference to a 2010 city ordinance, which hasn't really been enforced. Customers, most of whom look young and perfectly healthy, move cheerfully in and out of L.A.'s dispensaries as if they were picking up their dry cleaning. And while there may be a Bob Marley poster or a Janis Joplin live album playing, and the medicine may have names like Pineapple Express or Alaskan Thunderfuck, many shops have an antiseptic feel, as if to say this is a serious place, not a bar.
Several miles from Silver Lake along the Miracle Mile, the low beat of hip-hop music echoes off the high ceilings of St. Andrews Green on La Brea Avenue. Natural light seeps in through skylights. Three college kids sit at a small table smoking a hookah. Two other young men stand at the bar near five glass bongs with chunks of ice. An attractive couple sits at another table off to the side playing chess. A massive plasma TV is set to ESPN.
St. Andrews Green is one of the few Los Angeles shops that still lets people toke up on-site. It's open until midnight and offers free Wi-Fi. People watched the Super Bowl here.
Stella Archibald, 28, is the manager. The last dispensary where she worked was more like California Caregivers Alliance in Silver Lake — austere and antiseptic.
"This one's definitely more laid-back," she says. "It definitely leaves room for bad situations, as far as kids hanging out here all day. But good situations as well, as we have patients that need to medicate. There's a guy who comes in all the time — he has cancer, glaucoma and diabetes. He came here last week, he was just so overwhelmed and tired. He couldn't move. So he sat here for an hour and medicated. I gave him some fruit and orange juice and just let him relax."
It would be easy to assess a place like St. Andrews Green as one of the bad ones: It offers happy hour from 2:20 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. and a free joint or edible with any purchase. But patients are getting treated here. Archibald figures that about 40 percent of her customers are healthy, but many sick people don't look sick.
My mother didn't look sick, either.
The funny thing is that Archibald says St. Andrews Green is following the rules, or at least trying. But she's wrong — as are all the city's marijuana dispensary owners.
Because there are no rules.
Confusion permeates every aspect of medical marijuana in L.A. Patients aren't sure if they can smoke in public. Dispensaries seem unsure as to where they can open or what permits they need. Trutanich has publicly accused dispensaries of buying from Mexican drug cartels, but this seems highly unlikely, given the quality of weed most Californians now expect.
No one even knows how many dispensaries there are — 372 filed for tax-registration certificates, but LAPD counted 580 of them last year. One consultant guesses 1,000.
And then there is the ban proposed by Huizar.
As a special assistant city attorney, Jane Usher has spearheaded Los Angeles' approach to medical marijuana, coining the phrase "gentle ban" to describe Huizar's proposal. The ban would make it illegal to exchange money for marijuana.
Usher calls Los Angeles' current ordinance, passed by the City Council in 2010, "unenforceable," thanks to as many as 75 pending lawsuits, as well as a recent and important ruling, Pack v. City of Long Beach, issued by the California Court of Appeal for the Second District in downtown Los Angeles.
The appellate court found in Pack that Long Beach's regulatory law, patterned after L.A., is unconstitutional because it preempts federal law by tacitly legalizing weed dispensaries.
The California Supreme Court intends to rule on whether Pack and other decisions will stand. But that could take two years, leaving Los Angeles in the grip of a pitched debate.
Some L.A. officials — including Usher and Huizar — say that the Pack decision destroys the city's ability to regulate dispensaries in any way. So, they suggest, L.A. has no choice but to ban them.
Recently a guest on KCRW's Which Way L.A., Councilman Huizar declared: "There is no law in the city of Los Angeles today that says what dispensaries can and cannot do. ... What we have is de facto legalization."
Usher assigns great meaning to the fact that the same day the California Supreme Court announced it would take up the Pack decision, it also refused a request from the medical weed industry to stop Long Beach from enacting a ban.
"The message [from the Supreme Court] is loud and clear," says Usher: " 'Clear the decks, because we're going to tell you how to write a lawful ordinance.' And in the meantime, [the justices] are hopeful the status quo bans will be in place."
David Berger, a British-born lawyer who ran against victor Carmen Trutanich and Jack Weiss for city attorney in 2009, is a vocal critic of L.A.'s crackdown and Huizar's ban. He says the city should fight the Pack ruling and calls Usher's legal interpretation "about the most ridiculous excuse I've ever heard!"
Huizar's medical marijuana proposal is less like a gentle ban and more like a prohibition that would put the city in sync with the hard-line approach now being pursued by the Obama administration.
Two years ago, Deputy U.S. Attorney General David Ogden announced that the feds wouldn't go after dispensaries that complied with their own state laws, which set off a profusion of dispensaries opening in Los Angeles. But later, in a major flip-flop, Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole declared that only "seriously ill" patients and their caregivers were safe from arrest. And Cole warned financial institutions that they could face money-laundering charges for handling the proceeds from dispensaries.
Then, on Oct. 5, 2011, the Obama administration really brought down the hammer. The IRS ruled that Harborside Health Center, a major weed dispensary in Oakland, owed $2.5 million in taxes because businesses engaged in crime can't declare a standard tax deduction.
Two days later, the four U.S. attorneys in California, including Andre Birotte Jr. in L.A., announced that landlords who lease stores or land to the pot industry had 45 days to close down or face seizure.
In some parts of the city, L.A. has taken just as hard a line. To hear officials talk, Angelenos live in some lawless dystopia, where cops are powerless to stop teeming hordes of potheads and dealers.
Capt. Bill Hart of LAPD's Gangs and Narcotics Division says, "The state of law in the city of Los Angeles is, quite frankly, in limbo, because of Pack. We are not enforcing our city ordinance right now."
This is technically true. But there are two ways to not enforce the ordinance — by letting all the dispensaries stay open, or by closing them all down.
Los Angeles is doing both.
On Monday, Jan. 30, LAPD narcotics officers from the Devonshire Division raided Herbal Medicine Care in Chatsworth, arresting three people and seizing $6,000 in cash and 50 pounds of marijuana. It was the last marijuana dispensary operating in Devonshire's jurisdiction, which covers the huge northwest corner of the San Fernando Valley, and the culmination of a three-year program (one dispensary owner called it a "pogrom") terminating, with extreme prejudice, one weed shop per month.
"There's a lot of people who do not understand a very simple concept: You cannot sell marijuana," says Detective Robert Holcomb. LAPD has shut down 37 locations, seizing $1.2 million and more than a ton of weed.
The seizures themselves are highly controversial. To get your money back from LAPD, you must file a claim in Los Angeles Superior Court and endure a civil jury trial. If the government wins, the arresting agency —LAPD — gets to keep more than half the cash it seizes.
The system gives cops like Holcomb and Hart a financial incentive. The potentially millions of dollars in seizure money goes to equipment but not to salaries or overtime pay, according to Holcomb.
Holcomb is helping to lead LAPD's approach, developing an "investigating protocol" to shut down dispensaries, which involves not only arrests and seizures but also interrogating the surprised, and almost certainly displeased, customers who stop by.
"Once we take over the store," Holcomb says, "we let several customers come in. It's pretty comical. They all know to say, 'I'm part of a co-op and a collective.' 'What do you do?' 'I come here and give them money for marijuana.' " He laughs.
Dozens of dispensaries in the Devonshire Division have closed of their own volition. "Word is spreading on the marijuana blogs that Devonshire is very proactive," Holcomb says. "They call us every name in the book, but the bottom line is, don't open a store north of Roscoe Boulevard."
According to Assistant City Attorney Asha Greenberg, medical marijuana dispensaries are not listed in the zoning code, and thus constitute a local land-use violation and a state law violation by exchanging weed for cash.
"Our interpretation is that state law does not immunize storefront dispensaries," Greenberg says. "There is obviously disagreement on the issue."
Why is Chatsworth the only part of L.A. where this interpretation applies? "We basically move against the ones we have complaints about. So we prioritize, and take action as resources allow," Greenberg says.
Greenberg is implying that Devonshire Division has resources the rest of LAPD doesn't.
That is clearly not the full story.
Surely, the political decision to institute a full prohibition on medical pot in and around Chatsworth, alone among the major communities in L.A., wasn't made by LAPD.
It strains credibility to imagine this scorched-earth move unfolded without the involvement of Trutanich, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and City Council District 12 Councilman Mitchell Englander, an LAPD reserve officer who represents the area.
Englander, not normally media-shy, declined to comment for this article. An aide to Villaraigosa said the Mayor's Office was not involved in the decision and declined to comment further.
The jarring swings in L.A.'s medical marijuana industry arise not just from the severe flip-flops by politicians in City Hall and Washington, D.C., but from California state law. In 1996, California voters passed the Compassionate Use Act, known as Proposition 215.
"[Proposition] 215 is exactly like the Bible," says Yamileth Bolanos, an excitable long-ago immigrant from Costa Rica, who operates the Pure Life Alternative Wellness Center dispensary on La Cienega Boulevard and serves as president of the Greater Los Angeles Collective Alliance (GLACA). "Whoever the fuck is reading it — that's what the meaning is."
Proposition 215 was designed not to legalize medicinal pot but to exempt from punishment anyone "seriously ill" who smokes it and any physician who recommends it. It was approved by 55 percent of California voters, and it underlies the current chaos. How ill is seriously ill? Just who can grow all this pot? Can it be sold for profit? Can it be sold for profit in a store?
Trying to clear things up, in 2003, the California Legislature passed SB 420 (the number apparently a joke by state senators), which created some limits and regulations. A year later, Oakland passed an ordinance requiring licenses for dispensaries and limiting the city to four licenses. Today there are four booming dispensaries, although the Oakland City Council is considering doubling the limit.
"The Oakland ordinance has never been challenged because Oakland was on the ball — they were ahead of it," says Berger, the attorney and L.A. ban opponent. In fact, more than 50 California cities and other localities created regulations that have never been challenged in court.
But the Los Angeles City Council fiddled. In 2005, there were a handful of dispensaries, and people were afraid to invest money in a business the DEA could raid.
The City Council "didn't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole," says Jessica Gelay of the Drug Policy Alliance, "as if it wasn't already a law, and they didn't need to do anything about it."
Bolanos opened Pure Life in 2005, partly because she felt like all the other dispensaries looked like drug dens — she remembers strobe lights, loud music and employees with tattooed faces. Avedis Ghaghian opened the California Caregivers Alliance in 2006, the same year Matt Cohen opened the Natural Way L.A.
"I felt like a total scumball," Cohen says, "because there were already 35 before me." At the first GLACA meeting he attended, he sensed other dispensary owners looking at him as if to say, "What, another one?" He adds: "A year later there were 300."
By then, dispensary owners and activists were begging City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo for an ordinance to regulate their industry. They wanted assurances that LAPD wasn't about to shutter them, and some wanted to discourage scads of new dispensaries from diluting their market.
"I've screamed and yelled for regulations since before I opened the door here," Bolanos says. In one tense exchange with Delgadillo, she says, he "told me to my face that there would not be an ordinance in Los Angeles because it was federally illegal."
In 2007, the City Council finally passed something — an interim control ordinance, which placed a temporary moratorium on new dispensaries and required existing ones to register with the City Clerk. There were 183 that did.
But the moratorium didn't work, instead fueling a surge of new dispensaries that used a loophole in the language. Two years later in 2009, KCET series SoCal Connected coined a now-famous factoid: L.A. had more marijuana dispensaries than Starbucks stores. They opened in clumps — as many as three or four to a block, installing bulletproof glass and security guards in the same neighborhoods as schools, churches and quiet restaurants. Some Neighborhood Council activists were apoplectic, and a backlash grew.
Americans for Safe Access, GLACA and other nonprofits lobbied City Hall to create a better road map for dispensaries. Patients made for a particularly sympathetic constituency, and when Carmen Trutanich ran for city attorney in 2009, he actively courted the medical marijuana vote.
"Carmen didn't come to us. Missy-thing did," says Bolanos, referring to Trutanich aide Jane Usher, whom Bolanos holds in such contempt for betraying the movement that she can't bear to say Usher's name.
"She said, 'We need your support.' We knew Jack Weiss was against [the dispensaries]. So she came and romanced us, and she told us that [Trutanich] would be fair. And [Trutanich] invited us to the victory party."
"And then he turned around," adds the Drug Policy Alliance's Gelay, "and stabbed them in the back."
From the moment he took office, Trutanich signaled his preference for prohibition. Just three months into his tenure, he helped organize a "training luncheon" in Montebello, hosted by the California Narcotics Officers' Association. The topic: "The eradication of medical marijuana dispensaries in the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County."
"The issue is ... you can't sell it," Trutanich said in 2010. "You have to be a primary health giver or a group of users growing your own and sharing the cost. And that's not what's happening. You have the retail model going on, and people are getting rich."
SB 420 includes the provision, "Nor shall anything in this section authorize any individual or group to cultivate or distribute marijuana for profit."
According to the bill's author, retired legislator John Vasconcellos, the provision was purposely vague and didn't actually ban profiteering. Even so, it's now widely accepted by dispensary owners and lawmakers that pot shops must be nonprofit.
But making a profit has always been a term of art. If you open a dispensary, make half a million dollars and then pay half a million dollars in salaries, has your business turned a profit?
"I find it ridiculous that we're trying to tiptoe around this," says attorney Berger. "The idea that we have to somehow take this out of commerce — it's frankly disingenuous. It's a concept in every aspect of health care."
Huizar's proposed ban would force patients or their primary caregivers to grow their own marijuana, a comically impractical solution.
Marijuana takes at least three months to grow if you have expertise and state-of-the-art technology. It takes an amateur perhaps nine months. To a patient suffering from nausea or chronic pain, nine months is forever.
With a ruling on Pack v. Long Beach two years away, Huizar, who is rumored to covet Trutanich's job, has warned, "If we do nothing, by the time the state Supreme Court decides, we would have a number of disruptions in the community."
"Make no bones," retorts Kris Hermes, spokesman for Americans for Safe Access, "L.A. is digging its heels in. If it wanted to, today it could amend its ordinance to satisfy the litigants in these cases. But it chooses not to. It would rather ban the dispensaries altogether than comply with demands."
If the City Council surprises its critics in the next several weeks by rejecting prohibition and trying, again, to adopt regulations, there are several successful examples the 15 council members could copy: Oakland (hard cap allowing four dispensaries), San Francisco (no cap but very strict zoning laws) and, perhaps most intriguingly, Colorado.
Starting in 2010, Colorado began enacting the most comprehensive medical marijuana regulations in the country, if not the world. Its regulations go on for hundreds of pages and cover an astonishing array of topics: how many community meetings to have before opening a dispensary, how many megapixels the security cameras should have, what fonts to use on edibles' labels, and on and on.
Colorado is the only state in the U.S. that allows dispensaries to make a profit. Although Denver has more dispensaries per capita than Los Angeles, it hasn't seen anywhere near the level of controversy and outrage.
L.A. city officials dismiss the Denver prototype. "There was pressure on us to copy what had been upheld in other jurisdictions," Usher says, "but we felt it didn't appropriately represent what is in this city."
It's an explanation often given at L.A. City Hall when unique schemes by the City Council go bad, as they frequently do.
My mom smoked pot for about five months, a toke or two before going to bed, enough to dull the pain and get to sleep. She bought a vaporizer so she could smoke in the house. She took some pot with her to New York, making her an interstate drug trafficker.
It made for a funny story — but then, she was far from the only one of her friends smoking pot. In the end, it was a prescription drug that brought her permanent pain relief, an antidepressant called Cymbalta.
Others aren't so lucky. Matt Cohen, operator of the Natural Way L.A., is also a patient.
His belly hangs far below his waistline like a laundry bag — a disturbing physical symptom of what he calls "the most horrendous ventral hernia condition that Cedars [-Sinai] has ever seen."
For Cohen, the fact is, "I wouldn't be out of bed if it weren't for pot."
One female dispensary employee says, by contrast, "I look normal, I look pretty and I look young on the outside, but I've had psychotic episodes and had to be locked up in mental hospitals. I've taken Xanax, Zoloft, Prozac, every antidepressant under the sun. Nothing works. Cannabis does."
But the duality of medical marijuana keeps popping up, giving ammunition to the prohibition side. The same dispensary worker posted the following Facebook message on a friend's wall: "yyoooo you me and a blunt when I'm off work."
People all over the world use marijuana both ways — medicinally and recreationally. Separating the two will always be a pipe dream.
Reach the writer at hillelaron@mac.com.
We should never have destroyed the aristocracy: we should rather have made everyone a member. An aristocrat wouldn't dream of interfering in another aristo's pleasure or medicine, so long as the horses remained unfrightened.
Let's all live hedonistic lives on the back of peasants---that is to say, machinery---and treat each other with the liberality of spirit such people can (at their best) obtain.
L.A is the home of crooked cops which runs all the way to the politician.Jose Huizar is getting paid by the cartel. The 701 riches man in the world just thanked the past 4 presidents for not ending prohibition and making him a billionaire. L.A is suppose to be the trend setters of America. It's always sunny in Southern California and so on and so on. Bull shyt it's all a fantasy and people like Jose Huizar should not be sitting on the city counsel,he is not listening to the people who elected him.So there for he is not for the people he is for the cartel bosses who will keep getting richer and taking lives.
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I don't know why people feel compelled to over-justify their use/choice of med marijuana. People list their illnesses and it sounds like an obituary... The stigma remains...A left over 1972 stereotyping - that any association with marijuana makes you lazy and unwashed.Any organic substance that provides excellent anti-inflammatory, vassal dilation, appetite stimulation, migraine relief, sleep aid, anxiety aid all in one....needs no further explanation or justification! Relax and leave the pills on the pharmacy shelf...Stop apologizing! So..There happens to be a little buzz that comes along with it…
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My late sister Somayah Kambui pointed out that SB 420 was unconstitutional on its face for one very important reason - "420" changed Prop 215 without going through the initiative process. Virtually every effort by LA and other municipalities have used to constrict the application of Prop 215 without submitting their proposals to a STATEWIDE INITIATIVE process is illegal on their face because they are changing 215 indirectly. That is unconstitutional. That which you cannot do directly you cannopt do indirectly. Its very simple. Also If you as a law enforcement official refuse to enforce a voted state law by interpreting the law on your own you can be impeached. Every elected and sworn employee of the state of California is obligated to uphold state law over federal law. If they invoke the Federal shield you can ask for their badge because they would have violated their OATH which they swore to at the time they became a public employee in this state. This applies to Judges, commissioners, Law Enforcement, Elected Officials and their Aides and other Civil Servants; including the DWP ant its employees as well.
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they are making a mockery of this law,this is not so hard.we need a new law.and you going to have con artist anyway you have it.but medical marijuana can work.
So since the self serving, self righteous, GLACA and ASA couldn't manipulate city council to put the other pot shops out of business, they figure they'd manipulate the voters instead. They didn't realize that when you lie down with politicians you get exactly what you ask for, screwed. Now it is time to ask for harsher penalties on everyone but themselves. This is sickening.
I don't see the sky falling in Los Angeles from all the pot shops. In fact, I see a lower violent crime rate in our city even though we are in a recession. So what is the problem?
I can tell you, a certain group of people have been trying to influence this from the inside for years and years. They have spent big money trying to draft a favorable policy(for themselves) over the last 5-7 years. Now they are just they same as the guy who opened up today. The city admits it, they screwed this one up, there is no ordinance which they can enforce. So they have to do something to get the new dispensaries shut down that they have been trying to shut down for the last couple of years.
They claim this bill as a good thing, yet it will impose penalties for anyone doing the same actions as they will be doing. Where is the equal protection in that? Where is the freedom of commerce with this? This is sad.
Yeah...I look healthy, but like that one dispensary worker, have had a litany of psychiatric problems nearly my entire life (unlike her, however, I don't go around talking about smoking anywhere. This is my medicine - I never bragged about having to pop an Ativan or said it was time to take my Prozac.). I've been on so many different pills that barely worked and made me completely complacent as my life repeatedly fell apart around me - no matter how hard I tried, I could never be stable more than a few years and would usually end up spiraling out of control - the last time, I wound up in a mental hospital for nearly a month.
I never smoked pot before 2008 - ever (really). It wasn't until I met my boyfriend who suggested I try it for my migraines. Not only did it help me manage my migraines - I found that, unlike the pills, if I went a few days without smoking, I didn't have a massive episode. On top of that - some of my other problems - nightmares and such went away. Marijuana literally saved my life and yet I'm not a slave to it like I was the pills. At the time I started smoking, I was taking somewhere around 7 pills a day and even more when I had migraines. Today, I'm completely off all the pills - except for Excederin. Nothing makes me angrier than seeing shady collectives and 'patients' exploit the system. But it also angers me that these elected officials have such a hardline stance. They need to look at other places for help and answers rather than just banning all collectives because they're too lazy to do any actual work.
Always vote for the underdog, the poorest candidate, the independent. breaf those damn parties.
How many times are you going to mention patients "don't look sick"? Are you a doctor? If not, you're hardly qualified to judge who's sick and who's healthy, certainly not on the basis of their appearance.
why r we told to vote to make a difference?? cause when we do, olf farts shut us down. The people voted for this. and the city people and government shut it down. what a joke. i hate our Mayor, and i hate the government!!!!!!
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Let's face it, they just can't figure out how to hide and distribute all the money among themselves yet. Give them some time. When they figure it all out they will legalize it in a matter of minutes. They just need someone to come up with the plan. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm?
Carmen Trutanich - a man who is clearly not a friend to the community which helped to elect him - summed it up by saying, "You have the retail model going on, and people are getting rich." God Forbid !
Every industry in this country is allowed Free Enterprise - isn't that the American way?! It's amazing how much effort is being put forth to prevent dispensary owners from entering a higher tax bracket - which of course is reserved for the CEOs of corporations which manufacture, distribute and sell pharmaceuticals, alcohol, tobacco - with Politicians being among the biggest profiteers.
So now, the dispensaries that provide safe access to patients in need of medicine, employment to those who may otherwise need financial assistance from the government and tax dollars to a City and State which have proven to be greedy, deceitful and opportunistic.
The California voter initiative Regulate Marijuana Like Wine solves this problem, legalizes marijuana and ends federal interference in state law.
So since the self serving, self righteous, GLACA and ASA couldn't manipulate city council to put the other pot shops out of business, they figure they'd manipulate the voters instead. They didn't realize that when you lie down with politicians you get exactly what you ask for, screwed. Now it is time to ask for harsher penalties on everyone but themselves. This is sickening.
I don't see the sky falling in Los Angeles from all the pot shops. In fact, I see a lower violent crime rate in our city even though we are in a recession. So what is the problem?
I can tell you, a certain group of people have been trying to influence this from the inside for years and years. They have spent big money trying to draft a favorable policy(for themselves) over the last 5-7 years. Now they are just they same as the guy who opened up today. The city admits it, they screwed this one up, there is no ordinance which they can enforce. So they have to do something to get the new dispensaries shut down that they have been trying to shut down for the last couple of years.
They claim this bill as a good thing, yet it will impose penalties for anyone doing the same actions as they will be doing. Where is the equal protection in that? Where is the freedom of commerce with this? This is sad.
PS, California need not forget how many millions are being paid to the State for those RETAIL sales! If it weren't for Marijuana, Cali would be totally screwed financially! It's ridiculous to think that everyone's going to trade pot for work and not be paid in cash. Then what are they going to do? sell it on the street so they can pay their rent, which can't be paid in pot?! That's just insane!
California has to get it together for the rest of the Country that continues to use California as a role model and inspiration. And, the feds have to back off. The State's that have considered mmj laws are hesitant now, seeing what's happening in California. The feds make the situation worse of course because of the pressure they're causing currently. Other State's are afraid to stir up such trouble with the Federal Government. The only way to fix the situation is to NOT differentiate Marijuana as Medicine vs. Recreation, both need to be ok and the federal government needs to DECRIMINALIZE or LEGALIZE Marijuana AND HEMP! It's insane that the fights continue over the pettiness of who needs it who doesn't. We have a right to medicate however we wish. Odd that the woman in the article felt better about taking Cymbalta over marijuana! The rest of us are watching, many of us suffering in great pain on daily pain medications that are literally killing us!! Get it together folks!
Regulate Marijuana Like Wine ends all of this and deals with the feds. We can fully protect medical while also making it legal for all and sold like wine.
OR
We can watch our dispensaries and collectives close systematically and lose medical marijuana forever. Anyone here remember what it was like in Los Angeles before prop 215? Anyone remember AIDS and cancer patients routinely getting poisoned by dope OUR GOVERNMENT sprayed with paraquat?
Why do you keep quoting Michael Larsen from Eagle Rock? This guy is a liar and doesn't represent anybody in Eagle Rock but himself and a few rabid prohibition crusaders. Mr. Larsen garnered only 50 votes to be president of the neighborhood council and now he thinks he speaks for all 35,000 Eagle Rockers. Like all prohibitionists he makes up stuff in order to scare the residents into being afraid of these harmless dispensaries. He keeps saying there are over 30 dispensaries in Eagle Rock when actually there are only 5 or 6. He says they bring in all sorts of crime but even our Lead police officer says there is no crime at all around the collectives. 99% of Eagle Rockers are unaffected by the collectives and have no problem with them at all . Why doesn't the Weekly at least get an honest opinion from another Eagle Rocker who is unbiased and doesn't lie through his teeth.
Good point "T", the Weekly should have quoted Eagle Rock's own Pot Shop Apologist, Tim "T" Ryder, to get a truly fair and balance account of the situation. Mr. Ryder is an expert in the goings-on of the pot shops and has set up an organization to lobby and advocate for them (donations accepted). His biggest problem is that he doesn't understand the basic fact of pot shops in LA, which is
DISPENSARIES = BLACK MARKET
The black market is a market which is UNREGULATED AND UNSANCTIONED, and that is exactly what the shops in LA are.
DISPENSARIES = BLACK MARKET
No one knows where this pot is coming from, what is on it, who is selling it.
DISPENSARIES = BLACK MARKET
There is not one license or permit to operate a dispensary in LA. They are all operating illegally. (check with the City if you doubt this)
DISPENSARIES = BLACK MARKET
Devonshire has succeeded in closing down all the shops in their area because
DISPENSARIES = BLACK MARKET
We could have had a workable ordinance with 100 sanctioned operators here in LA, but the shops themselves and groups like Mr. Ryder's blocked the ordinance, ensuring that
DISPENSARIES = BLACK MARKET
Now check your facts Mr. Ryder, and check your teeth - you've got a little something in there.
There you go, Mr. Larsen, spreading around false statements as usual. But you are wrong again. I started my little organization, Cannabis Clubs United With the Community, with the primary mission to expose your lies about the medical marijuana collectives in Eagle Rock. I advocate for the community and these collectives are a part of our community, whether you like it or not. Unless you have any evidence to prove otherwise, we see the collectives as a great benefit to the community. All the fear-mongering lies you and your lapdog Councilman ($179,000) Huizar spit out have not had any effect on the intelligent people of Eagle Rock. If the LA Weekly would have done a more thorough job of investigating this story they would have called Sergeant Orange (213-793-0759), our Senior Lead Officer in Eagle Rock, and found out there is absolutely no crime around the collectives. The LA Weekly can also call Jose Huizar's office (213-254-5295) and discover that Huizar is lying when he says in his shutdown motion that he gets complaints daily about the collectives. I also challenge the LA Weekly to call Mr. Larsen (323-254-0500) and ask him for any nuisance reports that prove that collectives are a threat to the community. Get over it, Mr. Larsen, your failed Prohibition on cannabis is over. This is a free country and we Americans have a right to put into our body what we wish and grow any plant on God's green earth. Go on over to communist China if you want the federal government in your private life but leave us alone.
Hey Michael Larsen, I got a better one for you.
NO DISPENSARIES = A MASSIVE BLACK MARKET
NO DISPENSARIES = SICK PATIENTS GETTING ROBBED = VIOLENT CRIME
NO DISPENSARIES = THE CARTELS DREAM
NO DISPENSARIES = NOTHING FOR YOU TO COMPLAIN ABOUT
Michael Larsen = Unregistered Lobbyist
Michael Larsen = Nose up Huizar's Butt
Michael Larsen = New sales of reefer madenss
Michael Larsen = Fear production not harm reduction
Michael Larsen = Pious pauper
Michael Larsen = Served Properly
Patrick Duff, what dispensary do you work for/own?
DISPENSARIES = MASSIVE BLACK MARKET
DISPENSARIES = SICK PATIENTS GETTING ROBBED + POISONED
DISPENSARIES = CARTEL'S DREAM
DISPENSARIES = PATRICK DUFF'S $$$$
DISPENSARIES = BLACK MARKET
(I've got plenty to complain about)
Trutanich is worse than being lazy. There is no law against making a profit from selling marijuana. It is one of those lies, which has been repeated a 1,000 times by Trutanich and MS-13 and White Fence, that people believe it to be true. The statute merely says that it takes no position on whether one may make a profit selling medical marijuana.
As everyone who has basic education (which disqualifies most graduates from LAUSD) knows, immoral, amoral and corrupt politicians who want to be District Attorney tend to promote some Morality Campaign. Trutanich is basing his run for DA on the false claims that law enforcement associations have endorsed him and the equally bogus claim that the medical marijuana law outlaws making a profit.
Why would any counciilmember force ill people, some who are dying of cancer, to go out onto the streets to buy their Pot from MS-13 or White Fence or someone other nacro-drug trafficker?
Who knows? With Citizens United, we will never know how much loot MS-13 and White Fence will be dumping into council races, and oh, let's speculate, into Garcetti's campaign to be mayor. Of course, if the council actually followed the law and ceased to attack medical marijuana, then we would know that they are not taking bribes from narco-drug gangs.
Trutanich made a mess of regulating medical marijuana in LA because he chickened out of taking a progressive and permissive approach that contemplated an independent commission to supervise dispensaries (like liquor stores), in favor of his typical scorched-earth restrictive ordinances that have been struck down. Oakland doesn't have the problems that LA has because their City Attorney worked with the medical marijuana community, instead of working against it - the Trutanich approach.
It is significant that some of the harshest criticism for Trutanich comes from his former chief lieutenant, David Berger, who resigned from Trutanich's regime as soon as it became clear that Trutanich had misled voters about regulating medical marijuana, as well as almost everything else that Trutanich promised. It is a pity that you did not include a link to the 'Town Hall' forum that Trutanich held in CIty Hall where he screamed at a woman who had cancer and used marijuana. Trutanich told her to 'feed her kids lead toys' when she dared to question his voodoo science about insecticide in marijuana. He told her to 'sit down and shut up.' That spoke volumes about what Trutanich is really all about; he is a bully and a thug, and his attitude towards cancer patients like Kathryn is deplorable. Just Google "Trutanich screams at cancer patient" to see for yourself how disrespectful and abusive Trutanich became when a woman dared to challenge him. Perhaps then you will see why the problem in LA isn't the medical marijuana community, it is our neanderthal City Attorney who should be recalled.
The bottom line is there is no way to be legitimate in the medical marijuana industry
BECAUSE the law is not enforced
Politicians create havoc and chaos and try to blame it on the Mj industry all the while leaving no means for genuine legitimacy
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