Bad Drug Enforcement Agents! No cookie!
Yesterday morning at around 11 a.m., Los Angeles DEA Agents—-people who could be using their precious work hours (not to mention our precious tax dollars), to go after, say, meth dealers (and there are plenty of meth dealers doing a snappy business in our fair city, trust me)….instead decided it was a way better idea to raid 5 medical marijuana dispensaries.
Oh, yeah, and a doctor’s office.
Specifically, the feds raided three dispensaries in Venice, a fourth in Marina del Rey, and one more in Playa Del Rey. (The doctor’s office was on Lincoln Blvd in the Venice-ish area.)
“These are all low volume shops that serve maybe 20 or 30 patients a day,” veteran medical marijuana activist Brett Stone told me last night. “I mean, there are supermarkets out there that serve 300 to 400 a day. But that’s not who the DEA raided.”
And how many arrests were made from these energetic raids that likely involved a minimum of 50 federal agents?
None. Zero. Zip.
As nearly as anyone’s been able to tell, all the agents reportedly did was to (inexplicably) smash one clinic’s surveillance cameras and some computer hard drives, and then take whatever money the various dispensaries had on hand and empty all the individual pill bottles and small packages of marijuana the feds could locate into big garbage bags.
Way to make good use of the ol’ time and resources, guys.
Again, no arrests were made. And I am told that all the clinics involved will be back open today, if they weren’t yesterday by nightfall.
So the point of the raids was what exactly?
Sara Pullen, the DEA’s LA spokesperson, was not picking up her phone when I called after hours yesterday.
Nevermind. I can predict what she would say. “Possessing or selling marijuana is against federal law, and its our job to enforce the law.”
It’s what she always says.
(Note: To be fair, whenever I have talked to her, Agent Sara Pullen has seemed like a perfectly nice person stuck with a thankless job. It’s my fantasy that she secretly thinks these dispensary raids are stupid too. Then again, I may be making that up.)
The raids in the past were bad enough, but at least we sorta understood because we knew that the priority-challenged Bush administration was rousingly in favor of using federal dollars to pointlessly “clamp down” on California’s legal weed clinics.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, has stated multiple times that the state law should hold sway and that he did not want law enforcement wasting their time raiding dispensaries.
“I think the basic concept of using medical marijuana for the same purposes and with the same controls as other drugs prescribed by doctors (is) entirely appropriate,” Obama told Oregon’s Mail Tribune newspaper in a March interview. “I’m not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue.”
So maybe the LA branch of the DEA might want to recheck its email on this issue. Or as Patt Morrison posted on the LA Times blog, OpinionLA, last night:
Uh, guys — you DEA guys. Didn’t the picture of a different man in the official frame where the President’s picture always goes give you a clue?
Barack Obama is in, George Bush is out — and out, too, it seems, the policy of raiding medical marijuana dispensaries. Or didn’t you hear?
Did I mention that this same irritating DEA group raided a dispensary in Lake Tahoe on January 22, two days after the Inauguration?
Yesterday, agents raided on the same morning that Eric Holder, the new US Attorney General (AKA their new boss), was confirmed.
Do we sense a rebellious trend here?
By the way, on a local level, the City of Los Angeles is continuing to move toward regulating LA’s dispensaries, which everyone agrees is needed in order that the scammers (the creeps who are using the Compassionate Use Act as a front for big bucks dealing) may be….uh….weeded out of the ranks of the rest of the dispensaries, the majority of which operate as legit businesses that serve thousands of people’s medical needs.
Let’s hope the DEA can figure out the difference soon too.
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Photo of a Studio City Dispensary by lavocado via Flickr and LAist
It’s not fair for the police to give out parking tickets until they have stopped the speeders.
I’m loathe to respond to certain commenters, but someone should point out that police officers generally don’t give out parking tickets.
Oh, so then we can ignore parking tickets, like we can ignore law enforcement officers who went up and down our street citing businesses for having signs out of compliance? Well, in areas with which I’m familiar, police are authorized to uphold all laws and DO issue parking tickets–which is another revenue source in times of slow goverment collections. Ignore them, and someone with a badge and a gun will show up at your door. You’re an idiot, reg and also pompous for thinking that you were correcting me.
I guess police have nothing to do with issuing citations based upon cameras, too. So, ignore them.
Of course, though, in your arrogance, you completely missed the point of my first comment. Idiot.
Cuckoo*Cuckoo*Cuckoo.
I should keep my New Years Resolutionis – but…
“I guess police have nothing to do with issuing citations based upon cameras, too.”
No they don’t.
Celeste’s post was about DEA officers and raised a totally valid question. The imbecilic comment suggesting that police officers spend as much time on parking tickets as they do speeders and other higher priority offenders only bolsters her point. If cities want to push enforcement of minor drug infractions – like medical marijuana – they can do so. Putting the feds on the case, when there are “speeders” and other more dangerous drug offenders, even assuming one thinks current drug laws make some sort of sense, is “imbecilic.”
Who’s the imbecile ? Same guy as always.
This is the end of my interaction on this issue with this attention-grabbbing, narcissistic little troll.
Aside from the fact that the Feds are in conflict with state law…
One more footnote – I love “conservatives” who are against government except when it does totally stupid, counterproductive shit that is in synch with their petty prejudices and/or crypto-fascist psychology.
Good, albeit depressing, report CF.
Glad you noted that the city is trying to regulate the dispensaries. Not trying to conflate the problem to other issues, but the scammers who obtain pot are probably feeding the DEA’s motivation to continue these raids which turns out to be akin to collective punishment.
Good that the Los Angeles is earnestly trying to make Medical Marijuana work for the true patients that need help.
reg, you are more of an idiot than I thought, and the police must have different duties in Oakland than in other parts of the country. You STILL didn’t get my point, as I was being sarcastic. You are such an elitist fool.
I agree with this take in general, BUT at the same time, some residents in generally liberal and too-hip SilverLake were in the Times day or two ago for opposing so many (a dozen within a couple of blocks) pot dispensaries in their hood. Said it attracts a dubious element, people who get sham Rx’s and even smoke the pot right outside soon as they get out of the shops.
So the issue seems to be better regulation, something the city’s been wanting to get a handle on for a while but doesn’t seem to have it right yet. And yes, I agree that in the meantime, the DEA should stay out of it — issue alerts and advisories/ promptings to the city about problem spots, but give the city the year it said it needs to sort things out.
Thanks for the update, Celeste. WBC, notably enough, the people complaining (was it Silver Lake or TOLUCA Lake, I’m too lazy to look it up) weren’t even AWARE of the number of shops in their neighborhood until they looked, & nobody said people were smoking their purchases in front of the stores. They were just AFRAID they would. As for the Feds’ raids, this is the same “legal” gangsterism they & select local officers have been practicing for some time — invading a local business, often without a warrant, on some specious excuse, commandeering as much cash as they can find, & breaking whatever’s breakable. Not to mention in at least one case last year forcing an entire staff of young men — & women — showing no resistance to lay down on their bellies at the point of AK47s while having their wrists bound with plastic handcuffs. This is “cop culture” at its worst, & it will take a real effort by the Obama administration to curb their actions, as opposed to some happy talk in an interview or two. Let’s hope it’s coming!
FYI: The proposed ordinance floated by the LA City Attorney’s office, which is still being tinkered with and will be coming up for committee work in City Council the next couple of weeks, addresses—among other things—-issues like dispensary density and regulates activity in and around the dispensaries. (No smoking out in the parking lot and so on.)
I looked at the draft ordinance last night and some of it still a little nutso and based on paranoia that has no demonstrable basis, it’s getting there.
By and large, by the way, dispensaries do their best NOT to draw attention, rather than the reverse. When I reported on the issue for the Weekly I noticed that, if anything, they’re hard to find as their signage, if they have any, is so subtle.
Based on my observation, most of the stuff in that LA Times article about the worried “not-in-my-neighborhood” people, was based on paranoia and projected imaginings, not actual fact.
A SIDE NOTE:
Several school quarters ago, one of my UCI students did a story about a landlord who had a space in his building that had been vacant for some time, and he had to do decide whether or not to rent the space to some dispensary people, who turned up and were interested. My student detailed all the hassle he went through because of perception of the problems that the dispensary might bring, rather than the fact of it. It was intriguing. In the end, the landlord said no because he didn’t want to deal with the bad blood from the neighbors, not because of any real trouble that he determined the dispensary would bring.
Perhaps if the left was a stronger supporter of states’ rights over federal encroachment, the DEA wouldn’t be enforcing local laws.
But then isn’t if funny how liberals only want the feds defer to the state laws when it suits them.
“Elitist!”
Ouch…
“Perhaps if the left was a stronger supporter of states’ rights over federal encroachment…” we could have segregated medical marijuana facilities.
Reg, the 14th Amendment was passed specifically to protect against practices such as segregation, and even today most states rights supporters support that interpretation.
The drug enforcement powers come from obscene extensions of the Commerce Clause, which were championed by the liberals of the New Deal because they allowed many New Deal programs that otherwise would have required Constitutional Amendments.
Which year of FDR’s presidency was the Harrison act, which effectively outlawed heroin and cocaine at the federal level passed ? I forget ….
Well, you’re right. That great progressive Wilson was able to get through a law violating states rights way back then.
Where in the Constitution does it give the Federal government the power to regulate drugs or anything else that doesn’t cross state lines?
The New Dealers did run into states rights issues because I guess the courts were less friendly to economic violations of the Constitution than to those affecting personal liberty.
Yeah, Wilson was so progressive and an enemy of states rights he is alleged to have outlawed heroin but utterly failed to enforce the 14th Amendment. He rather famously hosted a screening of Birth of a Nation at the White House and was close friends with the novelist who wrote the source material. So I don’t think Wilson, unfortunately, was anything other than a racist hack when it came to the historically encoded and reality-based version of “states rights.”
Also, drugs have a nasty habit of crossing state lines – even being imported from abroad, so while I’m not a fan of drug laws the federal interest, certainly in volume sales, is well-established and undoubtedly constitutional. Even chocolate chip cookies are subject to federal regulation and inter-state commerce laws when they enter the retail market (despite the fact that it’s common for Ma to whip up a batch in her kitchen – something she’d better not try with methamphetamine or distilled alcohol.) I don’t think state medical marijuana laws can do much more than shift the debate and try to re-shape the focus of enforcement, future federal law-making and constitutional interpretation. “States Rights” don’t exist as some Platonic ideal (vis. the history of the 14th Amendment) but in a real world of ideological contention, cultural bias, empiricism/pragmatism and political conflict.
Reg,
The over-extension of the interstate commerce clause is demonstrated by your examples. For the government to regulate (or outlaw) something because it might have or might cross state lines is an over-reach, and goes well beyond the wording of the constitution and intent of the founders.
“States rights” are part of the founding of our country and are explicitly written into the constitution:
Many of us (usually conservatives) believe that the Constitution should be applied as written and intended, because it has an amendment process to keep it current.
Unfortunately, many others (usually on the left) prefer the “living Constitution” view, preferring the fiats of judges to the wisdom of the people (via the amendment process) to “modernize” the application of the Constitution.
Of course, too many on both sides let their goal of drug prohibition blind them to the unconstitutionality of many of the laws enacted in that cause.
………
As for the “real world” argument… principles exist as principles. The application and political strength of those principles is of course subject to the political process. The purpose of the Constitution was to greatly and strictly limit the powers of the Federal Government. That purpose has been long ignored as inconvenient.