WITH MEDICAL POT, RATIONALITY GOES UP IN SMOKE

Garden Grove Latest City to Ban Medical Marijuana Outlets Based on
Tortured Reasoning

For some reason, the simple issue of medical marijuana brings out the
worst convoluted thinking and even ignorance from those elected
officials we rely upon to make fair-minded and constitutional
decisions. Garden Grove is the latest Orange County city joining
Buena Park, Fullerton, Mission Viejo, Santa Ana, Tustin, Huntington
Beach and Placentia - to ban marijuana dispensaries in the city. Only
Laguna Woods has voted to allow them. The rationales by council
members should be called "irrationales," given how strained their
anti-dispensary arguments seem to be.

In 1996, Californians approved Proposition 215 with a solid 56
percent of the vote. The initiative was designed to "ensure that
seriously ill Californians have the right to obtain and use marijuana
for medical purposes where that medical use is deemed appropriate and
has been recommended by a physician who has determined that the
person's health would benefit from the use of marijuana in the
treatment of cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity,
glaucoma, arthritis, migraine or any other illness for which
marijuana provides relief."

Subsequent state legislation has called for counties to provide ID
cards to people with a justified medical need for marijuana something
the Orange County Board of Supervisors passed by a 4-1 vote in
January. Medical marijuana is viewed by many in the medical community
as having useful effects for sick people, yet opponents (such as
Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas) try to depict
medical-marijuana users as people who simply want an excuse to use drugs.

But it's not our purpose here to debate the usefulness of this or any
other medicine. We don't typically see politicians angrily insisting
that one narcotic or another dispensed by the local pharmacy works or
doesn't work for any given condition. Those debates should be left to
a patient and her doctor.

The Register reported that, during the Garden Grove debate,
Councilwoman Dina Nguyen argued that the city should not allow
medical marijuana dispensaries because the Police Department is
short-staffed. That's an absurd argument, given that there's no
evidence that legal dispensaries increase crime. And, besides,
individual rights are not dependent on the amount of police resources.

Garden Grove Mayor Bill Dalton said he just didn't like the way
marijuana is dispensed. That's a subjective way to make law.
Councilman Steve Jones noted that the federal government still
disputes its legality in California. But city councils are
subdivisions of the state government. And state law is clear in Prop.
215, even if the feds, thanks to the ongoing drug-war mentality, have
decided to put the Constitution through a shredder.

That's the problem these days. Council members know no limits on
their power. If they don't like something, they want to ban it. Local
governments are, generally, better than the federal government, given
that local officials are closer to the people. But local government
can be petty, hostile to the ideas of limited government and freedom,
and amazingly irrational.