America's Schizoid Pot Culture -- 4 in 10 Have Smoked It, and Millions Are Still Getting Busted

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted April 28, 2009.

Fully 80 percent of Americans approve of the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes, and fewer than one in five favor locking up non-violent adults who use pot in general. But since the inception of the disastrous “War on Drugs,” politicians from across the political spectrum have found that being a dedicated drug warrior is an easy way to appear “tough on crime” without much political risk.  

The result of that divide is a truly schizoid patchwork of laws regulating the use of cannabis. Several states have decriminalized the possession of small amounts of weed -- most recently Massachusetts this year -- and 13 states have legalized medical marijuana. Yet each and every year we continue to lock up three-quarters of a million Americans for possession of marijuana and waste an estimated $14 billion on our misguided prohibition of a cash crop that’s worth more than wheat and corn combined. 

The Obama administration has sent markedly mixed signals about whether it would continue the most regressive element of the “Drug War” -- Bush’s policy of going after medical marijuana providers in the states that have legalized the industry.  

Bush turned federal law-enforcement into a de facto White House veto over state-level drug laws (and, often, over the will of the people -- 8 of the 13 states that permit the use of medical marijuana got there through a referendum process).  It’s clichéd to describe the more labyrinthine corridors of our legal system as “Kafkaesque,” but the way Bush did it would draw a knowing sigh from old Franz.  

Officially, in states where they’re legal, the federal government only goes after medical marijuana operations when they violate both federal and state law. Officially. But after the DEA raids these shops, their owners are prosecuted in federal courts, and they need only be charged under federal laws. And here’s where it goes from bad policy to simple insanity: thanks to a 2005 Supreme Court decision in Gonzalez v. Raich, defendants are prohibited from entering evidence at trial that they were in compliance with local and state laws when they were busted.  

Then, if convicted, these operators of businesses that are legal in their respective states face harsh mandatory drug sentences in the federal justice system -- long minimums that Congress required in the 1980s ostensibly to deter “drug king-pins.” 

That’s the situation Charles Lynch is looking at. Lynch is facing up to 20 years in prison after being convicted under federal law for running a medical marijuana clinic in Morro Bay, California. Before DEA agents busted him, Lynch had been in business for 11 months.  According to the Los Angeles Times, the clinic had “the blessing of the city's mayor and other public officials” -- including the city’s Chamber of Commerce. Morro Bay City Attorney Rob Schultz said that he had received only one complaint about Lynch’s operation in that time -- and that was from someone griping about the quality of the pot Lynch sold. The town’s mayor, Janice Peters, described Lynch as “polite, compassionate,” and at an April 23 sentencing hearing Steven Beck, the father of a 17 year-old suffering from bone cancer who, following the advice of his oncologist, had bought marijuana from Lynch’s clinic to treat the side-effects of chemo-therapy, told the court that Lynch had often given the boy pot for free. After describing how the teen “could not eat. He could not sleep. His personality became dark and angry," Beck added, "I never felt as though Charlie was there for the money." 

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Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

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