On Wednesday, the LA City Council passed a resolution that asks Federal law enforcement to mind its own damn business when it comes to medical marijuana.

More accurately, the resolution supports the state in its push to get the Feds to back off. Last August, the Council tried on its own when it passed the an ordinance to regulate and oversee the medical marijuana trade in LA, and politely asked the DEA to stop launching 100-agent raids on lawful clinics. But the DEA blithely ignored the request and kept on raiding the marijuana clinics anyway. “We’re just enforcing the law,” DEA spokeswoman Sara Pullen told me when I reported on the issue last summer for both WLA and the LA Weekly.. (I believe I mentioned to Pullen that I could personally point out a couple of meth-dealer locations, the raiding of which might be a better use of her agency’s time, but she declined to take me up on the offer.)

With Wednesday’s resolution, sponsored by Dennis Zine, Janice Hahn, and Bill Rosendahl, (the lone No vote from Greig Smith) the Council is trying a new strategy by calling for support of California State Senate Joint Resolution 20. The state resolution asks the President and Congress to enact legislation to require the DEA and all Federal agencies and departments to “respect the compassionate use laws of states”. SJR 20 also requests Federal law enforcement to enforce Federal medical marijuana laws in a manner consistent with the laws of the State of California.

California Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, was passed 12 years ago, yet still the DEA continues to raid clinics, and arrest patients, although the charges rarely stick.

As recently as last month, I talked to a med marijuana patient who, in the course of a routine traffic stop, was asked by two LA sheriff’s deputies if he had any drugs or alcohol in his car. The man had just come from purchasing his month’s supply and answered honestly. Yes, he said, he did have a small amount of marijuana, but he had a prescription for the stuff and handed the officers both his just-purchased weed and his official state card. (Yeah, the guy was a real patient with a real medical condition, not a scammer just wanting to smoke out) The cops confiscated the weed and wrote up a misdemeanor citation meaning the guy had to take off work and show up in court. The judge promptly dropped the case as soon as the proper paperwork was produced. “Oh, yeah we get these all the time,” the bailiff told the man, explaining that the judge usually dropped the charges forthwith if the prescription was legit.

Meanwhile we have overcrowded courtrooms and a state, county and city budget crisis. So does this seem like a good use of your tax dollars?
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The California Patients Group, shown above, which had vowed to stay open although it was one of those raided on July 25, announced on Monday, July 31, that it too was closing.

My article on the Los Angeles marijuana wars will officially come out in the print version of the LA Weekly next Thursday, but it went up on the website, as of last night. Some of the material you’ve already seen here at WLA. But there’s assuredly more—including the fact that many of the despensaries that have been around the longest, and are considered the most honest and well regulated….are simply closing up shop due to pressure from the feds. And frankly, the city council is furious at federal interference. Dennis Zine, our Republican ex-cop, law-and-order councilman, is among the angriest of all.

The DEA agents I spoke with, for their part, say they’re just doing their jobs and that they can’t pick and choose which laws to enforce.

On the other hand, I offered to drive DEA agent, Sarah Pullen (who all-in-all seems like very nice, intelligent, reasonable woman, by the way) over to two spots—one in east LA, one on Skid Row— where I know for a fact they’re dealing crack cocaine crystal meth, day in and day out, and I suggested that busting those kinds of places might be a better use of our tax dollars, than taking 100 agents in a full on military operation to harass medical weed collections that the city of LA wants to oversee and regulate anyway. (A raid that, by the way, has resulted in exactly zero criminal charges.) She assured me they were doing the meth and crack kinds of busts too.

Yeah, but resources are finite, and everybody does triage—even the DEA. The bottom line is, those places I spoke of keep on operating, keep on spewing real poison into the surrounding communities. While the marijuana collectives that are legal under state law, are starting to close up shop..

Keep in mind, I’m a reporter living in all the way over in Topanga Canyon, and don’t exactly make it a point to track drug dealers, and still I know about these various purveyors of meth and rock coke, so why doesn’t the DEA? And if they know, why haven’t they raided them? instead of these poor pot collectives??

The nice DEA people can protest all they like, but clearly there’s an agenda at work here somewhere. And, as nearly as I can tell, it’s not an agenda that is serving the best interests of either the residents of Los Angeles or of the US taxpayers..

Okay, here are some of the clips from the Weekly article:

THE DEA AND THE CITY OF LOS ANGELES are at war over medical marijuana. On one side of the fight is the Drug Enforcement Administration, which seems to be doing all within its power to shut down the 180 or so medical-marijuana collectives (as dispensaries are called) in Los Angeles County.

On the other side is the Los Angeles City Council — which voted on Wednesday, August 1, in a 10–2 vote, to officially regulate the medical-marijuana business, so that scam artists can be rooted out and those who depend on cannabis for health reasons can get the stuff safely from licensed purveyors without threat of arrest and criminal prosecution. Within the next 10 days, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is expected to sign what is officially known as the Medical Marijuana Dispensary Interim Control Ordinance.

So far, neither side shows signs of bending, and July was a month full of skirmishes. On July 6, the Los Angeles branch of the DEA sent letters to nearly 150 of the landlords in Los Angeles County who rent sites to marijuana collectives, pleasantly reminding property owners that selling cannabis is a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in the federal pen, and that even peripheral involvement could trigger the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000 — meaning that the property owners’ land could be confiscated by the U.S. government.

“This letter shall serve notice that, after a thorough investigation, the DEA has determined that a marijuana dispensary is operating on the above described property,” concluded the feds’ cheery missive.

The letter triggered a rash of freak-outs among targeted landlords, causing scores of them to phone the DEA office — and their personal attorneys. “I’d say about 80 percent of the people we sent letters to called us,” says DEA spokesperson Sarah Pullen. She says many believed that California state law trumps the federal statute, when, in fact, the opposite is true.

Attorney William Kroeger, who represents some collectives who rent space in L.A., says that if he represented targeted landlords, “I’d tell them, ‘You should be in court five minutes from now filing eviction papers.’ ”

For its part, the DEA claims it simply sent the letters out as a courtesy, “to inform property owners about the law.” Nobody in city government, or among the medical-marijuana activists, really bought it. “That’s like me saying, ‘I’m just informing you, I’m going to punch you in the face,’ ” says one unhappy collective owner.

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This morning, City Councilman and former cop, Dennis Zine held a press conference prior to Wednesday’s Los Angeles City Council meeting calling for DEA Administrator Karen Tandy to stop her newest tactic of threatening property owners who rent to medical cannabis dispensaries, and to allow the City of LA to proceed with regulations of med weed distribution without federal interference.

SO WHAT DID THE DEA DO IN RESPONSE? It raided five six TEN clinics. The raids are going on as I type. The largest raid is taking place at the medical marijuana collective known as CPG—or the California Patient’s Group—located at 6208 Santa Monica Blvd. (Santa Monica and Vine). An estimated 200 people are protesting in front of the collective and the LAPD is on site, but the Hollywood Division officers have only been called out to handle “perimeter control.” They aren’t involved in the raid.

Coincidentally the raids also come on the day when Congress is expected to vote on the Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment, which would cut off funds for just this kind of out-of-proportion DEA action that, while legal under Federal law, thumbs its nose in the face of California state law.

Several staff and patients are reportedly being held inside the dispensary.

UPDATE: When I talked to Councilman Dennis Zine a few minutes ago, he said the raids were anything but a coincidence. “They knew about our resolution and our plans for regulation, so now they’re flexing their muscles, trying to show us who’s boss. Frankly I’m outraged that the DEA would stoop to this.”

CPG collective hours after the raid; although the front door was unlocked, DEA agents broke it down.

Not closed for long.

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