(New York Times) SEATTLE — A shooting and a beating death linked to medical marijuana have prompted new calls by law enforcement officials and marijuana advocates for Washington State to change how it regulates the drug and protects those who grow and use it.
The crimes are the most violent that advocates and law enforcement officials said they could recall involving medical marijuana in Washington. In both cases, they said, the victims appear to have been chosen because they were known to have relatively large amounts of marijuana in their homes. They say the crimes underscore conflicts in state policy that have become evident since Washington legalized medical marijuana in 1998.
Though the recent violence has drawn new attention to the issue, robberies have become more common in Washington over the years. Marijuana advocates complain that robberies are underreported because law enforcement officials focus more on confiscating marijuana from the growers than on arresting the thieves. The authorities, in turn, have noted that some growers are exceeding limits on how much of the drug they can possess, and say the circumstances of some robberies are murky.
Mark my words: that “change how it regulates the drug and protects those who grow and use it” is going to mean “that medical marijuana is so dangerous we can’t let you grow your own at home”.
We’ve already seen New Jersey institute the first no-home-grow medical marijuana law. Pennsylvania and New York are moving in the same direction. Arizonans are working on an MPP-sponsored initiative that forbids home growing if you live within a 25-mile “halo” of a dispensary (read: every urban area).
They will tell us that dispensaries provide the safe access patients need, with strong security regulations, so that no patient should ever have to fear an invasion robbery for the plants heshe* is growing at home. (Pay no attention to the $300-$500 per ounce price versus the $30-$50 per ounce it costs you to grow at home. That’s the price of your security.)
Oh, sure, they could just legalize cannabis for all adults and remove most of the threat of invasion robberies altogether. But that would be entirely too logical.
I’m just warning my fellow Pacific Northwesterners, where we’re allowed to grow fifteen (Washington) or twenty-four (Oregon) marijuana plants, that the next changes you’re going to see floated in the legislature will be the establishment of dispensaries in lieu of allowing home growing. I don’t mind the former, so long as we’re allowed to keep the latter, but that’s not the way it is going to be spun by law enforcement. They will say:
“We have the utmost of compassion for the truly sick and disabled who can be helped by medical marijuana… but we cannot let our compassion blind us to the need for public safety. Medical marijuana activists have always asked that marijuana be treated like other medicines, yet we don’t allow patients to manufacture their own Vicodin, Oxycontin, or Percocet in home laboratories, do we?
“These violent home invasions robberies don’t just threaten the patient, but the patient’s family and the patient’s entire neighborhood are at risk from home indoor marijuana farming. This new dispensary system we are proposing will allow us to act on our compassion for the sick while taking the sensible measure of creating safeguards around its manufacture and distribution like we do for all powerful medications.”
(I can just hear people now saying, “Dude, don’t give them any ideas!” Trust me, they’ve already gotten this idea in their minds, though they may not be as clever as me in using our buzzwords “compassion” and “sensible” against us.)
This is why I have long been saying that medical marijuana was a good opening salvo in the war to end marijuana prohibition, but continuing to stick with the medical path is going to lead to pharmaceuticalization of cannabis, with punishments for healthy people’s use of cannabis akin to being caught with prescription pills you don’t have a prescription for. The violence, fraud, and corruption inherent in prohibition will infect the limited medical use frame and rather than properly ascribing that to the prohibition for healthy people, the negatives will be ascribed to the lack of controls in the medical marijuana laws.
If we don’t change the frame of cannabis from “powerful effective medicine” to “safe effective relaxant” soon, we’ll have legal marijuana in all fifty states all right… as legal for your doctor to prescribe to you as cocaine and anabolic steroids, and just as illegal to use without that prescription.
*”heshe” (pronounced “heesh”) is “he or she”, like “himer” is “him or her” and “hiser” is “his or her”. I’m trying to create gender-neutral third person pronouns.
[...] for some time that the Achilles heel of medical marijuana is that it forces all cannabis use into a frame of “medical” vs. “criminal” and the line between the two will be pushed by the latter toward the [...]
OK so I just looked it up again and it’s not cock, It’s fuck
My bad.
Shit, piss, cock cunt, cocksucker, mothrefucker and tits
I remember the album, but never had it. My brother and I got ‘Occupation: Fool’, the live album, for Christmas instead.
I don’t think I’d ever actually say a lot of the things I write. Don’t take offence, but I don’t think I’d ever say ‘heshe’ or “s/he’. What we find in Europe, and I’d assume it’s the same in the States, is plural pronouns taking the place of gender specific ones.
Couldn’t agree with you more on commas or quotations.
Do you apply any reason to the uses for single (‘) and double (“) quotation marks?
What’s OCD?
Do you remember the words you can’t say on television? (George Carlin) He had a significant impact on the development of my language, as well.
Hey Russ, do you remember the “Toledo Window Box” album/routine from George Carlin or wast too far before your time?
Like I said…I find it very fishy these just happen to have occurred after we started pushing for full legalization.
I would not doubt if LE is backing the original home invasions in order to put a spin on everything to suit them. I’d like to know if the people invading were also informants, etc.. I hope someone digs deeper into this. My gut is very rarely wrong on such things.
Because when you say it, it is indistinguishable from “she”, thereby replacing a male pronoun masquerading as gender neutral with a female pronoun. I like heshe, because it is visually and sonically truly gender neutral.
I know, it’s an odd peeve of mine. I’m weird about language. I disagree with standard rules on commas and quotations for what I believe are eminently logical reasons. For example:
It’s “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” for me, not the supposedly proper “sex, drugs and rock and roll”. It’s also the period outside the quotations for me because we were not discussing “rock and roll.”, we were discussing “rock and roll”.
It’s my own form of OCD. I blame listening to George Carlin at a very impressionable age.
Let me think When was the last time armed robbers broke into my home to steal the green beans I just picked out of the garden Uh never Prohibition creates the crime and corrupts the law we depend on They know it’s safe and beneficial and even shrinks cancer cells What sane and caring person would prohibit it They care only about control and their dreams of slave empires People dieing and they worry about counting plants The law is corrupt We will win probably state by state Totally legal no controls is the only way
By doing what you are doing, you are in the top 1% of cannabis users who are doing anything to earn their own liberation. Rather than the vague “start a chapter”, ask people to get involved with a specific action, like doing a city petition calling for study of marijuana policy. Baby steps. This gives people something tangible and small to rally around, as opposed to something as Herculean as “ending prohibition”. As a new chapter most people can’t envision what that means, but they can envision going door to door talking to people about signing a petition.
As an individual you can file the petition. You can then call for folks to help you with it. As you get to know them, you can find the dedicated ones who would like to continue the fight long term and form a chapter.
What’s wrong with ‘s/he’?
TIME TO LEGALIZE IT CHECK OUT THE TAX AND REGULATE COMPAIGN IN CALIFORNIA WEBSITE they need to raise more money by November
http://www.TaxCannabis.com
Amen Russ. Maybe on the show today you can help those of us like me, who are having a tough time trying to figure out what we can do to turn the attention in the right direction. I wear my NORML gear constantly and talk to people about organizations like NORML, LEAP, and DPA, but I feel like I’m making such a small impact. I’ve tried to find others to start a local chapter here but I can’t seem to find people that are willing to speak out with me. I advertise on my clothes, my truck, my home and with anyone that will listen. I write and call my representatives. I’ve written letters to the editor of my local papers…. HELP!
If your going to take away home growing and make people use dispensaries then I would think the prices at dispensaries needs to be capped. No more than $75 per ounce or something. $300 – $500 is way too much.