(LA Times) Two medical marijuana groups are threatening to sue the city of Los Angeles if the City Council passes an ordinance that bans the sale of medical marijuana. Two council committees are meeting today to try to finish drafting an ordinance that contains the controversial provision.

Dispensary operators have consistently said they are uncertain they could stay open with such a restriction. Most collectives, which are required to be not-for-profit, sell marijuana to their members, but they consider it a donation to reimburse their costs.

The prohibition on sales was written by the city attorney’s office. In a lengthy analysis of state law and court decisions, City Atty. Carmen Trutanich concluded that over-the-counter sales of medical marijuana are not allowed. Instead, he said, collectives are shielded from prosecution only when they are growing it.

Both medical marijuana organizations, the Union of Medical Marijuana Patients and Americans for Safe Access, take issue with Trutanich’s view, saying he has misinterpreted the law and the court decisions.

In other news, City Attorney Trutanich and the City Council have announced plans to close the barn door after the horse has bolted.  Creating some regulations that clearly spelled out the rights and responsibilities of collectives in Los Angeles County is a great plan for 2006 or 2007.  But it is almost 2010 and there are almost 1000 retail outlets selling marijuana in the city.  What do you expect the backlash will be when tens of thousands of Los Angelenos can no longer browse and pick up their marijuana is a safe, indoor, controlled retail outlet, and instead must return to the back alleys and city parks of the black market marijuana dealer?  What will happen when customers accustomed to convenience and quality have to return to waiting for a call-back from “their guy” for a bag of questionable quality and light weight?

For one thing, most of the successful dispensaries will go semi-underground and become delivery services.  The rest will go back to the way things used to run, dealing in the street and through clandestine networks.  The prices will increase, access will decrease, and truly sick and disabled patients will suffer needlessly.

The proliferation of dispensaries in Los Angeles and the unseemly nature of a few of them is not the fault of the entrepreneurs who want to run a legitimate and lawful business and help satisfy a community need.  It is the fault of cowardly and moralistic politicians who refused to take action to implement the will of the people as expressed in Prop 215.

I can’t do any better than MPP’s Bruce Mirken on this one:

(LA Times) Bruce Mirken, spokesman for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy Project, ridiculed the effort. “Let me guess, they set a record number of plant seizures and marijuana has now been eradicated from California?” he quipped.

Mirken said the campaign has caused growers to move from private lands into wilderness areas. “This is an annual exercise in futility. Not only does it not do anything meaningful, it actually makes the problem worse,” he said.

It’s all part of California’s CAMP – Campaign Against Marijuana Planting – which over 27 years has been funding law enforcement to take helicopters into the hills so police can get paid triple time to pull weeds and then fly them all over the wilderness blowing their seeds across the land so the cops can go weeding again next year.  According to the report:

Los Angeles County, which has seen a whirlwind expansion in medical marijuana dispensaries this year, has notched another marijuana milestone. The county has moved to No. 5 for the amount seized in the state’s annual eradication campaign, with 340,187 pot plants uprooted — more than a fourfold increase.

Statewide, the 27-year-old effort, known as the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, found and destroyed almost 4.5 million plants in 41 counties, up from 2.9 million seized in each of the two prior years’ growing season. The amount has climbed steadily since 1996, when California voters approved the nation’s first medical marijuana law.

State officials put the wholesale value of this year’s eradicated marijuana at $17.8 billion.

Let’s see, the standard California sales tax, minus any county or local taxes, is 8.25%, so that eradication represents about $1.46 billion dollars in tax revenues.  Obviously marijuana has not been completely eradicated by CAMP and I think even the cops will tell you they’re only scratching the surface.  Let’s be generous and suppose they’re pulling up 10% of California’s outdoor crop.  That would be $14.6 billion in taxes going uncollected.  It’s even more money if we include indoor grows and figure they’re catching much less than 10% of the crops.

Barneys New York in Beverly Hills is celebrating the Woodstock spirit by selling $78 “Hashish” candles in Jonathan Adler pots with bas-relief marijuana leaves; Hickey offers $75 linen pocket squares or $120 custom polo shirts bearing the five-part leaf; and French designer Lucien Pellat-Finet is serving up white-gold and diamond custom pot-leaf-emblazoned wristwatches for $49,000 and belt buckles for $56,000.

After decades of bubbling up around the edges of so-called civilized society, marijuana seems to be marching mainstream at a fairly rapid pace. At least in urban areas such as Los Angeles, cannabis culture is coming out of the closet.

Public sentiment is more than anecdotal; earlier this year, a California Field Poll found that 56% of California voters supported legalizing and taxing marijuana. Last month, voters in Oakland overwhelmingly approved a tax increase on medical marijuana sales, the first of its kind in the country, and Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn has proposed something similar for the City of Angels. “In this current economic crisis, we need to get creative about how we raise funds,” Hahn said in a statement.

Smoking pot used to be the kind of personal conduct that could sink a U.S. Supreme Court nomination (Douglas H. Ginsburg in 1987) and embarrass a presidential candidate (Bill Clinton in 1992). Today, it seems to be a non-issue for the current inhabitant of the Oval Office; Barack Obama issued his marijuana mea culpa in a 1995 memoir.

Richard Laermer, a media and pop culture trend watcher and author of several books, including “2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade,” points to Bill Maher as a bellwether of change. “Ten years ago, he would have been taken off the air.” (”Real Time With Bill Maher” airs on HBO.) Now, he’s “a totally mainstream comic who consistently talks about how much pot he smokes.”

On the heels of my examination of the big networks‘ (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) willingness to profit from marijuana minstrel shows and refusal to air the truth about cannabis and its users, we get this example today of the little guys – independent stations – that fear airing paid programming about marijuana legalization in a state where 56% of the people support it.

(LA Times) After one week on the air, a series about “the merits of the cannabis plant” has departed KDOC-TV Channel 56 in Orange County after the producer said station executives told him they weren’t comfortable with the content.

“Cannabis Planet” producer Brad Lane said Wednesday that after agreeing to run the paid programming, KDOC executives declined to list it in their program lineup and wouldn’t accept ads to promote the show for fear of alienating existing advertisers. The first 30-minute episode ran in late-night slots last Friday and Saturday.

KDOC officials did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment.

Lane said he had purchased time for “Cannabis Planet,” intended as a weekly series about the medical, agricultural and industrial benefits of the marijuana plant, to run on KJLA-TV Channel 57 on Thursdays and Saturdays at 11:30 p.m., beginning Aug. 13.

And who do you suppose those alienated advertisers would be?  I don’t get Los Angeles television, but I’m willing to bet KDOC runs many beer and pharmaceutical ads.

I suggest that anyone in the LA area who is sick and tired of mainstream media suppressing the truth about cannabis to contact KDOC and let them know you will no longer watch their channel.  Then make a second call to KJLA and let them know you’ll be watching “Cannabis Planet” and will support their advertisers.

KDOC-TV 625 N Grand Ave. Santa Ana, CA 92701 (949) 442-9800 (949) 261-5956 Fax info@kdoc.tv

KJLA TV 2323 Corinth Ave West Los Angeles, CA 90064 (310) 943-5288 (310) 943-5299 Fax info1@kjla.com

By the way, supreme fan of irony that I am, I enjoyed seeing that on Monday, August 17, KDOC will be showing The Who’s rock opera, “Tommy”, the story of the deaf, dumb, and blind pinball wizard who is taken to “The Acid Queen” (Tina Turner) for treatment, a movie chock full of drug references.  Apparently the executives aren’t uncomfortable with that content and advertisers aren’t alienated by the lyrics “My work is done now look at him / He’s never been more alive. / His head it shakes his fingers clutch. / Watch his body writhe / I’m the Gypsy – the acid queen.”

I suppose as long as Tommy sticks to pinball, drops acid, and doesn’t talk about legalization of marijuana, he’s OK by KDOC.

(LA Times Blog) The Los Angeles City Council has denied applications from 28 medical marijuana dispensaries that wanted permission to operate despite a moratorium, clearing the way for the city to shut down any that have opened.

Since the council started to consider applications last month, it has denied every one, ruling against 43, including the 28 on Tuesday.

The council is struggling to assert control over the sale of medical marijuana in the city after its moratorium on new dispensaries proved toothless. Hundreds have opened despite the 2007 ban.

The city has stopped accepting applications for exemptions, but 883 were filed before the council closed the loophole. Until it adopts a permanent ordinance to control dispensaries, a task that has confounded the council for years, it intends to plow through the applications.

I am a supporter of dispensary access to medical marijuana (as long as the right to grow your own is maintained) even despite the same-as-street-dealer prices, because I understand that the reason the legit dispensary market must be so expensive is because of the illegitimate black market.  A dispensary can’t sell a legit $50 ounce only to have someone turn it into a black market $300 ounce, and they have to pay the growers’ inflated wholesale price lest the grower just sell it on the black market.  I get that.

The problem is that the gold mine of profitability that this black market pricing scheme entails attracts all manner of “entrepreneurs” from all over the country looking to cash in.  While most dispensaries are well run, clean, have the patients’ best interests at heart, are run by patients and caregivers, and some even offer other services that truly reveal their effort to engage in holistic caregiving, a few of these dispensaries don’t make much effort to distinguish themselves from being just a pot dealer with a dingy, hole-in-the-wall storefront.

I worry about the image of the California dispensaries and how it plays on legalization politics across the country and I don’t want to see the bad apples spoil the bunch.  Richard Lee’s Oaksterdam, the Farmacy, and other well-run, professional dispensaries make for fantastic public relations, but when the media can point to LA County and say, “there are more dispensaries than McDonald’s”, no matter how well-run they are, the shock factor makes legislators want to tighten new medical marijuana laws to the point where nobody can grow at home and dispensaries are a tightly-run limited state non-profit monopoly (MN, NH, NY, NJ, and AZ, for examples).

I hope Los Angeles does come up with reasonable zoning and business standards, and I would hope they would consult with people like Richard, Debbie Goldsberry, and others with experience in the matter

The Los Angeles Times has been presenting a series of investigative stories on the death and corruption in Mexico’s drug war.  This latest piece asks various experts from Mexico, Latin America, and the US what they would do to help end the violence of the Mexican drug cartels:

Terry Nelson - Federal agent for 30 years with the U.S. Border Patrol, the Customs Service and the Department of Homeland Security

Despite the obvious failure of our drug control strategy, the public discourse surrounding this issue has focused primarily on continuing to wage the “drug war.”

We won’t be able to expand treatment and prevention efforts until we stop spending so much money enforcing ineffective penalties, building new prisons and buying fancy cars and helicopters for law enforcement agencies. As we begin to treat problematic drug use as a public health issue, it will become much easier to prevent the death, disease and addiction that have expanded under the criminal justice mentality of prohibition.

My years of experience as a federal agent tell me that legalizing and effectively regulating drugs will stop drug market crime and violence by putting major cartels and gangs out of business.

If what we’ve been doing worked at all, we wouldn’t be battling Mexican drug dealers in our own cities or anywhere else. There’s one surefire way to bankrupt them, but when will our leaders talk about it?

Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu – Mexican film director (”Babel,” “21 Grams” and “Amores Perros”)

I have always thought that the only possible way to eradicate this plague is to legalize drugs. While the United States keeps consuming these amounts of drugs and selling guns the way it does, there’s no way our country will win this war.

Once the tons of drugs cross the border into the U.S., there has to be a huge web of people involved in distributing and selling all these drugs. Where are these people? Who are they? Where are these “American cartels” and their leaders?

Fernando Rospigliosi – Former interior minister of Peru

The narco-trafficking problem in Peru has gotten worse in all aspects: the production of cocaine, violence and the corruption that comes from that. One of the aggravating factors was the launching of the [U.S.-financed] Plan Colombia, which started to work in the last decade and that has unleashed greater demand for Peruvian coca and cocaine. In addition, you have the increasingly strong entrance of Mexican cartels into Peru, and they have brought a kind of violence never before seen here.

Sergio Fajardo – Former mayor of Medellin, Colombia

The doors into the drug world are very wide for the unemployed and the youth living in the poor barrios. You have to close or reduce the size of that doorway. How do you do that? With opportunities, creating jobs in those barrios with education and by establishing the state’s presence in each community. We learned that many who entered criminality because they had no opportunity will return to society if they can go to work.

(click for larger image)

NORML Daily Audio Stash
“We heard some noise outside, and then the door literally burst in, and the DEA came in in full combat gear, told everybody to get on the floor and put their hands behind their heads,” Carey said. “It was like, literally, an episode of “24,” when they bust in on a terrorist cell.”

That’s the description of the Culver City DEA dispensary raid I blogged about last Friday.  Who knew that the “terrorist cell” description would have another frightening parallel.  That agent unloading DEA evidence is wearing a Blackwater t-shirt.

Blackwater is the private “security firm” with millions of dollars in no-bid US government contracts in Iraq.

This is a photo published by the LA Times as part of its photo slideshow online accompanying the news story about the raid.

Or, it was published.  If you click that photo slideshow link above, you’ll find that the seven picture slideshow has now been reduced to six.  The Blackwater man is no longer there.

As of this writing, the photo is still online at the Times, but it’s an orphan (you won’t find links to it), along with the caption:

DEA agents remove evidence from Organica Collective after the business was raided by federal agents. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Now, maybe the LA Times took the photo down because the caption was inaccurate.  If he’s working for Blackwater, he’s not part of “DEA agents”.  But then why not just fix the caption?

Maybe he is a DEA agent and he just got the Blackwater shirt as swag at some convention, and the LA Times took the picture down to protect the identity of the hip young pony-tailed goatee-sportin’ undercover narc with a Robocop-sized gun on his hip.

It would be nice to know whether or not our federal Drug Employment Administration is outsourcing federal police duties to private mercenary armies like Blackwater.  After all, they’ve done such a bang-up job with domestic policing in Iraq, like shooting up 17 unarmed civilians without provocation.  The Iraqi government revoked their license and kicked Blackwater out of the country, but, of course, they’re still there.

The Iraqi government has learned what the California government has learned – when it is engaged in a war on nouns like “drugs” or “terror”, the US government will do whatever it damn well pleases.