A medical marijuana collective on Ventura Blvd. still stays open
In 1996, Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, otherwise known as the medical marijuana initiative, passed in the state of California by a healthy 56 percent of the state’s voters. It was the first such law passed in the nation.
Since then, eleven more states have passed their own medical marijuana laws, New Mexico being the most recent. Although these state laws are in conflict with the federal Controlled Substances Act, in the years between 1996 and 2001, with a few exceptions, the feds pretty much stayed out of it.
In 2001, all that changed as, under George W. Bush, the DEA began raiding clinics in California and arresting both users and caregivers. Since that time, the feds have waged an ever more aggressive campaign in California to shut down the collectives that dispense bud, pot, ganja, reefer, grass, herb— or whatever you want to call it—to those holding prescriptions.
(With the exception of a few isolated instances, other med marijuana states such as Montana, Colorado, Alaska and Nevada have not been subject to the same federal pressure.)
This past year, the DEA has ramped up the campaign considerably—particularly in Los Angeles. On January 17, SWAT-clad feds raided eleven L.A. collectives in one day—five in West Hollywood, the other six in Venice, Hollywood, Sherman Oaks and Woodland Hills. It was the largest such raid ever in the nation—and it was notably unsuccessful. No arrests were made and, although three of the collectives closed their doors for good, the other eight reopened in less than a week. And, within a month or so, several new collectives had sprung up, mushroom-like to take the place of the three that closed.
In response, early this month, the feds came up with a brand new strategy:
On July 6, the LA DEA sent letters to 100 plus landlords in Los Angeles County who rent sites to marijuana collectives, pleasantly reminding the 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 snatched.
Predictably, a gaggle of freaked out landlords—and scores of worried user/patients— began calling NORML and other advocates for clarification. And, although several local attorneys have offered their services, including former Assistant US Attorney, Eliot Krieger, as of Friday it was unclear how many landlords would hang in and fight, how many would fold, said Chris Fusco, the LA County field coordinator for Americans for Safe Access (one of the main medical cannabis lobbies).
This week a bill addressing the issue of the raids will likely come up for a vote in the House. The bill, called the Hinchey-Rohrabacher Amendment, is authored by strange bedfellows, New York liberal Democrat, Maurice Hinchey, and ultra-conservative Huntington Beach Republican, Dana Rohrabacher, and proposes to kill all funding used in the feds efforts to arrest medical marijuana users and purveyors in the twelve states where it is legal.
Rohrabacher explained his stand in a recent statement that read in part. “This action by the DEA is an example of the insane use of scarce law enforcement resources. It is especially insulting the way in which these resources are being used to supersede the votes of local people to permit the legal use of medical marijuana.”
Last Thursday, the LA Times agreed in a strong editorial supporting the passage of Hinchey-Rohrabacher, and scolding the DEA for its ongoing campaign to subvert the will of the California voters.
( For you LA Westsiders getting your dialing fingers ready, no need to call Henry Waxman. He’s already a Hinchey-Rohrabacher supporter.)
In the meantime, seven of the eight Democratic presidential candidates have said they’d end the federal raids in states where medical use of marijuana is legal. (Hilary Clinton was the last to express opposition to the raids, making Barak Obama the lone holdout in terms of stating a position.)
Of the Republicans, only Tommy Thompson has said straight out that he’d end the raids. John McCain—who said earlier this year that he thought the issue should be up to the states to decide—went into an hysterical frenzy of bobbing and weaving this month when asked if he stood by his earlier state’s rights position.
Thus far, Romney and Guiliani are fence sitters, Jim Gilmore has mumbled something about state’s rights. But Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, and Duncan Hunter are, to a man, entirely in favor of chasing down and arresting any and all cancer, HIV and lupus patients who use the devil weed.
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Still and all, perhaps the most enlightened and practical response of the year to date came from a usually right-leaning enclave. Last Tuesday—raids be damned—the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted to step in and regulate the sale of medical marijuana by, among other things, issuing identification cards to patients who are entitled to the stuff.
According to the Times story on the vote, advocates said their pitch to the all-Republican OC board focused on “fiscal soundness — that issuing the IDs would eliminate wasted court costs and prosecution time on medical possession cases.”
Compassion meets fiscal responsibility.
And now wouldn’t it be nice if so-called liberal Los Angeles—city and/or county—would gather the necessary courage to follow the OC’s lead.
Our drug laws, and the strategy we use to enforce them, are crazy.
Apparently, the nerves in my mouth don’t follow the map specified in most medical school textbooks. Any trip to the dentist generally entails about 10 shots of novacaine to deaden one tooth. By the time the dentist is done, the whole side of my head where the affected tooth sits is numb. Bring on the body piercings. I wouldn’t feel a thing in my ears, eyebrows, or tongue.
The poor dentist is shooting the stuff almost randomly because the nerve he needs to hit isn’t where it’s supposed to be. And, since I’m needle phobic to begin with, and novacaine in the roof of the mouth isn’t a great feeling anyway, my appointments generally begin with valium. My dentist did part of his training in the UK. He laments that he can’t just douse the tooth in cocaine, like he could when in the UK. Apparently, cocaine is particularly effective and entirely legal for that application.
Given my experience, no way am I inclined to deny marijuana to those whose medical symptoms could be alleviated by its use. It’s crazy not to put it in a drugstore where all of the normal safeguards are in effect, as exists for all other controlled substances. Why the controls for marijuana need to be more restrictive than for OxyContin baffles me.
An amusing story, I think. The DEA routinely flies over cornfields around here. It appears that enterprising marijuana growers will sometimes insert marijuana plants in an amongst the corn rows. It gets ample water (irrigation), and sun. The ground has been well prepared for cultivation by the farmer. And, since the corn crop is well tended, so are the marijuana plants. The farmer doesn’t know it’s there, of course. The corn plants grow lush and thick, you can’t easily walk between them, and the since marijuana plant doesn’t grow as high as the corn plants adjacent to them, you wouldn’t know they were there. But, apparently, the marijuana plants can be distinguished from the air. The erstwhile growers go in under cover of darkness and harvest the plants, unless the DEA spots them first. I suppose there are a few plants that are forgotten, and are harvested by the farmer right along with the stalks for silage. Gives the notion of ‘happy cows’ a whole new meaning.
Oooooh, Listener. Bad news dentist story. Made my teeth ache just empathizing.
The happy cows are amusing, however.
$100 per Pill
At age 35 my wife was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. After much research into all forms of treatment, we choose the conventional route authorized by the FDA which included surgery, chemotherapy and radiation.
The main side effect from the Chemotherapy aside from loosing all your hair is nausea. The procedure starts with several IV bags of chemotherapy/poison put into your blood stream via a special matrix like tap in your arm or chest. After that you are sent home to deal with the extreme nausea over then next 24/48 hours with a prescription for anti-nausea drugs.
I was shocked when I went to the pharmacy and found my 20% co-pay was Two Hundred Dollars out of the full cost of One Thousand Dollars for 10 little pills. Of course we had multiple sessions of Chemo to deal with and each one seemed to be worse than the previous.
This experience brings one a keen understanding of the medical marijuana issue and understanding of the need for this medication which seems to work better than all the expensive pills prescribed by doctors.
We did not try using marijuana for the nausea, but when you are in that state, believe me any thing that helps is a greatly appreciated.
Ah, Pokey. It takes real courage to go through chemo. The state of cancer treatment; burn (radiation), slash (surgery), or poison (chemo). You’d think we’d figure out a rational way to alleviate the suffering that attends the treatment. I’ve had my fair share of scares… but so far, fright has been the worst of it. A medal to your wife for taking it head on, and to you for supporting her through it!
Celeste has become a states’ righter! Wait until Mississippi starts ignoring federal laws in favor of its own.
(My temporary absence brought to you courtesy of lightning running up the internet cable.)
(My temporary absence brought to you courtesy of lightning running up the internet cable.)
Dang it, Woody! [Time out while I clean off my keyboard.]
Wondered where you were. Hope the experience wasn’t totally electrifying, and your surge protectors were up to the task. Course I don’t know what kind of surge protection you’d have to have to defy a direct hit.
I work for an organization, MAPS, that recently won a landmark lawsuit against the DEA. We are urging that the DEA accept the recommendation by their own Administrative Law Judge to grant a license to grow marijuana for FDA trials to determine whether or not it has medicinal value. In an effort to put pressure on the DEA, Reps. John Olver (D-MA) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) are co-sponsoring a Congressional Sign-On Letter urging the DEA to accept the Recommended Ruling.
This legal struggle has taken years. If the DEA rules against granting the license, there’s no telling how many more years will go by before marijuana is evaluated in FDA trials. For decades, the federal government has excluded marijuana from highly-demanded drug development research. Now is a unique window of opportunity to change this!
To learn more about MAPS, please visit our web site at http://www.maps.org — For background on the case and to contact your Representative, see MAPS’ DEA Lawsuit page or supportive editorials from The Economist and LA Times .
Have to agree that marijuana should be available at pharmacies like any other drug w/ a physician’s RX. By keeping in a few dispensaries, the way it is now, we are inadvertently setting up centers that have become cool in some circles for the wrong reason. On the hip show “Entourage,” one of the characters is so determined to get a hat only given to patrons of a certain hip dispensary, that he finagles an Rx from a physician known to give out dubious Rx’s. If it were available at your local RiteAid or CVS, pot would lose its “cool” factor, become one med among many and be less likely to be misused. (Hope your wife has recovered, Pokey; I understand there are other alternatives to that sort of kill- everything- and hope the bad cells are destroyed too, kind of chemo these days…)
Great comments everybody. Terri I will definitely look further into MAPS, the legal decision and all you’ve mentioned.
Pokey, thanks so much for telling that personal story. I watched a very good friend go through chemo for breast cancer. I was the one who picked her kids up from school during that period, because she was so flat out sick. (Her friends parceled out small tasks to do for her, and that was mine.) And I remember marijuana was about the only thing that allowed her to get a little food down. I hope I’m never in the situation where I need the stuff. But if I do, I hope it’s still available by legal means.
LotS: My dentist did part of his training in the UK.
I didn’t know that they had dentists in the UK.
“other alternatives to that sort of kill- everything”
It has been eight years now since my wife had cancer, but I am not convinced that any cure will make it to the market unless huge amounts of money can be made from selling the drug. Natural cures are not approved by the FDA and most doctors will not even discuss. http://www.cancerfightingstrategies.com/
I suspect there are cures available today for cancer, but we will be the last to know about them in the United States. Cancer is 10% of the healthcare budget of the USA.
http://www.healingcancernaturally.com/on-cancer-business-industry.html
I dunno, Woody. What do you suppose they call the folks who practice dentistry in the UK? I’m quite sure folks in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh have their teeth extracted, crowns placed, veneers done, and oral surgeries performed by some licensed individual, in some setting conducive tho the practice. The fact that there appears to be a British Dental Association seems to support the notion such a profession exists in that part of the world.
LotS: The fact that there appears to be a British Dental Association seems to support the notion such a profession exists in (the U.K.)
You’d never know it from their teeth.
Back to the subject: Marijuana and states’ rights.
I planted a bush next to my mom’s patio that resembles a butterfly bush but is actually a Vitex, whose leaves resemble those of marijuana. Mix some of your select plants in with that and corn stalks and no one will ever know. We’re still worried about bootleggers where I live.
Regarding the raids, it’s a little bit like immigration. If there is a law, it should be enforced rather than ignored. If the law should be changed, then work towards that. I go nuts over government officials who are supposed to enforce our laws but don’t, rather than taking the proper steps to make changes.
Being the only person in this group (as far as I know, and I don’t know everything in spite of what Woody tells me) who has actually experienced on an up close and personal the effects of Chemo-Therapy I thought I’d pitch in a word or two. As of today, I’m one year, five months and 18 days cancer free and I intend to stay that way. Now, having said that the nausea of chemo therapy (weekly treatments leaving you weak, bald (and I mean no hair anywhere – no eyelashes, no eyebrows, no nose hair)and wondering how one is to pay for all the treatment. If I was poor, medicaid or medicare would take care of it, if I was rich, no problem at all, but being middle class and a working therapist I have to make concessions and the anti nausea drugs are horrendously expensive (pokey is right, those pills cost almost $100.00 each before insurance and weigh maybe 50 milligrams. Thus, one pound of the damn things would cost $4,400 or their abouts. But guess what, the literature is full of anti-nausea preperations and Ginger tops the list. So, after buying some of the pills, I used them very sparingly, and eat food fixed with fresh ginger, take ginger capsules and drink gingerale by the gallon and I survived.
The active ingredient in marijuana is Delta-9 tetra-hydrocannibanol or THC and is just as effective in pill form as in a joint, it just takes a little longer to get into the system, but even so, getting THC pills is almost impossible because of the drug laws (and most of the really draconian drug laws were passed in a democratic congress and signed by a republican president (nixon) and no one has thought fit to say “mmmm, I wonder if this is such a good idea). Likewise, physicians are afraid to prescribe sufficient pain killing drugs for the very real possibility of running afoul of the DEA. So, we are cought in a quandry. There are effective drugs and preperations out there, but either people don’t know about them, people are afraid to demand from their congress a fresh look and people are just plain old too damn stupid to think of how dibilitating some of these diseases are. My late brother in law died of AIDS and his weekly medications (which he called “Shake and Bake” because of their effects on him) were alleviated only by smoking weed because the anti-nausea pills weren’t available way back then, THC couldn’t be obtained easily and many docs refused to prescribe it and medical science is stupid in many ways.
Do you know that no study has been done on the effacacy of THC in substantial doses to treat nausea or pain or some of the other problems associated with dibilitating illness.
When I teach “Family and Disability” at the University I always ask students to do research on the topic, then when they come up fairly empty, I suggest they write their congressman (and down here the congress folk are democrats and the two senators are Republicans) and to date, nothing has been done. Congresscritters are afraid to pass laws that may be usefull because some asshole somewhere will say they are being “soft” on druggies.
Now, having said all the above, and ranted well beyond my welcome here, if you want to read about my journey through cancer treatments I’ve blogged it here and you’ll have to scroll to the bottom to get the first entry. Cheers and Celeste, please forgive me for ranting so long.
“Do you know that no study has been done on the efficacy of THC in substantial doses to treat nausea or pain or some of the other problems associated with debilitating illness…?”
This is, in the truest sense of the word, criminal.
Great post. Thank you, GM, for putting it up.
I believe there are a number of ‘drugs’ the full parameters of which have never been explored because they fall into that gray area where they might have recreational rather than medicinal histories. Nicotine is one. Somewhere, IIRC, I read that empirical studies have documented the beneficial effects of nicotine on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
Hemp, which has an indistrial use, and the starving farmers in North Dakota would love to grow it, has a cultural link to marijuana (even though its THC content is very low) – ergo, it is illegal to grow hemp in the US. One of the industrial uses for hemp is paper. We could, perhaps, save a few trees if we could get past our legislative absolutes with respect to categories of chemical substances, their use, and their distribution.
We cannot study that which we categorically declare out-of-bounds. There ought to be a way to separate the constructive use of some substances from their destructive applications. You’d think we’d be smart enough to figure out a way to do that. Or, at least to sort out the benefits of said same to weigh against our imputed costs.
LotS, if something makes sense from a dollar and cents standpoint, business will usually find a way to do it.
It is a shame that we still live in a so unenlightened society, which promotes the use of alchohol and so many other bad substances, but will not allow the harmless use of the holy Ganja plant.