The Great Los Angeles Marijuana Wars

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.

And here’s a link to the rest.