END THE WAR ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

It Is Time for Cities to Alleviate the Suffering and Stop Fighting
the Compassionate Use Act

It is amazing that this is still an issue anywhere in California 13
years after voters approved the Compassionate Use Act, permitting
patients with a recommendation from a licensed physician to use
marijuana to treat or alleviate various medical conditions. But it
appears that the West County Patient Collective Association, a medical
marijuana dispensary in Sunset Beach, will face the possibility of
being forced to close if either Seal Beach or Huntington Beach annexes
the currently unincorporated town.

Both Seal Beach and Huntington Beach ban such dispensaries within
their city limits, for reasons we are unable to fathom. Neither city
has made a decision yet on the West County group.

Although a few hard-core drug warriors continue to be in denial, the
medicinal properties of marijuana have been affirmed both by the
anecdotal experience of patients and scientific testing.

The federal government's Institute of Medicine, in a 1999 report
triggered by California's passage of its medical marijuana law in
1996, reviewed every scientific test in existence at the time. It
confirmed that marijuana has been proven to alleviate suffering over a
range of ailments, from preventing nausea associated with chemotherapy
to wide-spectrum pain relief to multiple sclerosis to migraine headaches.

The federal government, despite the scientific evidence, continues to
keep marijuana on Schedule I under the Controlled Substances Act,
meaning any possession, production or use is illegal under federal
law. But numerous court tests have confirmed that the exceptions
carved out in California and 12 other states are valid in those
states, and that the responsibility of state and local officials is to
honor California law and leave federal law to the feds.

Yet resistance continues.

Although the Sunset Beach Community Association has received about a
dozen complaints about the very existence of the dispensary, none
allege specific complaints about the way it is operated. There is no
evidence of additional crime, loitering or dispensing to people not
qualified as patients.

Whether Seal Beach or Huntington Beach annexes Sunset Beach, the West
County Patient Collective should be "grandfathered" in as an existing
legitimate business whose closing would be unjustified and
unnecessarily cruel to the 500 patients who rely on it for their medicine.