Lack of Access to Medical Pot Is the Poor's Greatest Problem Ever!

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer with AlterNet.

Because dumb people* also enjoy access to the information super-highway, I get comments like this one in response to my piece on today's front page:

Goddamn if you think the biggest problem with the working poor in California is a lack of access to marijuana, you are seriously stoned out of your mind.

To which I can only respond by happily announcing that nobody's even suggested it makes the top ten.

But having cleared up that messy controversy, I do want to flesh out the argument a bit.

I think the issue I raised is just another of the hundreds of burdens on the working poor -- arguably modest individually, but profoundly painful in aggregate -- that Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about in Nickel and Dimed. The sub-head on my piece, "Different Rules Apply for Rich and Poor Pot Smokers," wasn't meant to be read literally. We're not talking about Jim Crow laws -- it's a matter of access. If you work a minimum wage job in a community where there isn't ready access to medical marijuana dispensaries, you can, legally speaking, spend a couple of weeks of salary getting a pot card and schlep an hour or two on the bus to get to a pot-club in the next county over. But in the real world, you won't -- access matters.

Another commenter suggested I had it all wrong because the column only showed that legal marijuana ends up costing more than on the black market, and there are all sorts of things poor people can't afford. But that's not true. Like the dozens of small, largely unappreciated charges Ehrenreich found she had to pay when working those dead-end McJobs for her book, the irony is that those who can't afford to pay the up-front costs of getting medical marijuana end up paying a lot more for their weed than those who can. 3.5 grams of very high-grade weed goes for $25 at a pot club in Culver City; you'll be lucky to pay twice that for the same amount on the street (believe it or not, while I know several people with medical marijuana cards, this isn't based on personal experience).

In the first chapter of Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich says that even as a liberal who'd given quite a bit of thought to the realities faced by the working poor, she'd been surprised to learn about these little "poverty taxes" when she actually joined their ranks for a while. It's exceedingly difficult, she argued, for people safely ensconced in the middle class -- even the lower end of the middle class -- to appreciate those costs, the burden of all these little access issues.

And I think it's the same thing here. While it can cost upwards of $500 to get a medical marijuana card in some California counties, it can also run you as little as a $100 or less. People in my own demographic tend to have a hard time putting themselves in the shoes of someone who can't come up with $99 and still pay their rent. But they exist in pretty significant numbers.

Similarly, I brought up the ID requirements -- another defacto barrier to access. Again, that can be hard to relate to; within my own demographic, unless you've lost your wallet and haven't had a chance to replace it, you have a state-issued photo ID.

We take these things for granted, just as we don't fully appreciate the vagaries with which the law tends to be applied in the real world. I originally submitted that piece with the tag-line: "A San Francisco hipster can hit the vaporizer without fear of arrest, but a poor black kid smoking a blunt in downtown Oakland isn't so lucky." But my editors -- good, smart liberal thinkers, but members of the white middle-class -- thought that was a bad example because the Oakland police department issued a directive making arrests for simple possession of marijuana the department's absolute lowest priority.

But that only means that it's a matter of a police officer's discretion, which only reinforces the point I was making. Yes, the Oakland cops have little interest in busting a Berkeley student smoking a doobie -- they don't prioritize marijuana busts. But, just to point to an obvious example, they do prioritize gang-control. And if a black kid in baggie pants smokes that same joint on that same Oakland street, and the police want to stop him, put him in hand-cuffs, and search and photograph him, they can decide that at that moment marijuana is still very much illegal, and use that joint as probable cause.