(The Snitch) Ignoring the advice of anti-pot City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, two Los Angeles City Council committees yesterday rejected a proposed ban on sales of medical marijuana.
Anti-pot zealots within L.A. city government had coordinated an 18-month assault on the dispensaries, with headline-grabbing pronouncements from media hogs Trutanich and Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley dominating coverage of the issue in recent weeks.
Both Trutanich and Cooley have been widely quoted in the press as claiming that most of the dispensaries are operating in violation of state law. Cooley’s recent declaration that “approximately zero” of the dispensaries were operating legally sent chills and outrage through the medical marijuana community, seeming to echo San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis’ statement that there are “no such things” as legal dispensaries.
Council members on both committees wrestled with the idea of ignoring the opinion of the city’s top prosecutor. But after four hours of a contentious and heated hearing, council members had heard more than enough.
A crowd of about 400 people filled the main council chamber for the hearing, with the proceedings often becoming raucous. Most of the speakers were medical marijuana supporters, along with a sprinkling of community activists and conservatives who supported the ban.
Marijuana supporters argued that dispensaries should be regulated, not banned, with a reduction in the number of shops and a crackdown on operations that become a public nuisance.
You cannot stuff this genie back into the bottle, Mr. City Attorney and Mr. District Attorney. The people of Los Angeles like their clean, reliable, diverse selections of cannabis and aren’t going to go back to hiding in shadows and purchasing on a black market. The economy has grown accustomed to the sales taxes and foot traffic the dispensaries generate. Technically legal or not, the dispensaries exist, the people are using them, and they are in many cases improving the neighborhoods where they reside. Instead of tilting at windmills because they don’t personally like cannabis and its users, the city and county should work with medical marijuana activists to come up with sensible regulations that everyone can live with.
That’s great news…unbelievable, almost…common sense wins out over the lunatic rantings of idiotic prohibitionists who should be run out of town on a rail. To where, I dunno…I can’t even think of a pathetic enough place, not wanting to insult that place by suggesting these morons go there.
Now they can begin(!)* to formulate feasible options for dispensary operations to continue to help all of the needy people in LA and surrounds.
*Regulations should’ve been established like around—thirteen years ago. Or whenever it became a “problem”.
[...] Los Angeles committees reject ban on dispensaries [...]