Why Is L.A.'s District Attorney Aiding and Abetting Mexican Drug Cartels?

By Bruce Mirken, Daily News. Posted October 15, 2009.

Last week, Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley announced a sweeping new plan to boost the profits of Mexican drug cartels, a plan almost certain to increase the slaughter these vicious gangs are perpetrating on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Of course, Cooley didn't call it that. He claimed, on dubious legal grounds, that all medical marijuana dispensaries in the county are illegal and announced plans to crack down on them. While no one denies that L.A.'s attempts - or, more accurately, nonattempts - to regulate these operations have been a mess, Cooley's crackdown is guaranteed to make a bad situation worse.

While state law is not as precise as it might be in setting legal parameters for dispensing medical marijuana, guidelines issued last year by state Attorney General Jerry Brown make clear that dispensing collectives are legal and can include storefront operations.

"It is the opinion of this Office that a properly organized and operated collective or cooperative that dispenses medical marijuana through a storefront may be lawful under California law," the guidelines state, so long as other requirements are met.

It may well be that some are operating outside these guidelines, but until and unless Cooley closely inspects their operations, he is simply making things up. That's not how law enforcement should operate.

But even if Cooley were right on legal grounds, as policy his stand borders on the insane.

California law unmistakably gives patients the right to use and possess marijuana for medical purposes when recommended by their physician. And a flood of medical research over the last several years - much of it conducted by the University of California - has confirmed that marijuana can indeed provide safe, effective relief for a number of conditions, including certain hard-to-treat types of excruciating nerve pain.

So the question facing local leaders is not whether patients can have medical marijuana, but how they will obtain it. Will it be from licensed businesses operating under appropriate rules and regulations, or from drug dealers on the streets? Does Cooley really believe it's better for either patients or communities to have the state's medical marijuana patients - who number more than 200,000 by most estimates - getting their medicine from street dealers?

              

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Bruce Mirken is communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project.

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