DOPE DISPENSARIES? NOT HERE, PLEASE

The best way to deal with weeds is to whack them before they go to
seed. Prosecutors are doing pretty much that to marijuana dispensaries
that have taken root in Spokane, of all places.

The Spokane County prosecutor's office is pressing drug-dealing felony
charges against a man busted last year with five pounds of marijuana
in his home. Darren J. McCrea, 41, is the founder of SpoCannabis, a
group that sells the drug to patients certified by doctors as eligible
for medical marijuana.

Washington voters approved the medicinal use of cannabis in 1998 - but
under tight restrictions.

California was already becoming notorious for effectively legalizing
recreational dope-smoking through its extremely lax medical marijuana
law. Washingtonians were offered their own loophole-riddled marijuana
initiative in 1997, and they resoundingly rejected it.

The one they did pass the next year, Initiative 692, was explicitly
designed to forbid the California-style dispensaries that operate like
commercial marijuana shops. Its sponsors touted its safeguards,
including a provision that let a "primary caregiver" provide limited
amounts of marijuana to a patient under conditions that precluded
drug-dealing.

The key language required a caregiver to "possess no more marijuana
that is necessary for the patient's personal, medical use" and "be the
primary caregiver to only one patient at any one time."

The meaning seems crystal clear: No multi-customer operations. But
McCrea and other dispensary advocates have seized on those last four
words. In their view, it sounds like, "any one time" means any time a
buyer walks through the door.

Accept that logic, and Washington takes a long step toward the
wide-open drug-dealing now rampant in California, where some compliant
doctors hang out their shingles near dispensaries and pass out
marijuana cards to anyone with a vaguely plausible physical complaint.

But the Spokane prosecutors take the law at face value. So do state
officials. So, we hope, will the courts.

As California's experience has shown, dispensaries can be Trojan
horses of de facto marijuana legalization. Americans have been
debating whether to decriminalize the drug for at least 40 years.

Advocates of the idea make some interesting libertarian arguments. But
let's have that debate out in the open. Decriminalization of marijuana
should be decided on its own terms, not smuggled through the back door
under the guise of medicine.