VOTERS MAY LEGALIZE POT TO HAVE FINAL SAY

If California voters decide to legalize marijuana via ballot measure
next year - or at any point in the future - the state's
law-enforcement leadership will have only itself to blame.

Because through their defiance of the voters' decision to allow
marijuana to be sold for medical purposes, California's political and
legal leaders have changed the conversation about legalizing pot. The
question is no longer whether legalizing marijuana is sound public
policy, but instead what it will take to get elected and hired
government officials to understand they work for us.

San Diego County's refusal to set up clear rules for those who want
to sell medical marijuana under voter-approved Proposition 215 is no
longer even the most egregious example of elected officials thumbing
their noses at the very folks who elected them - not with Los Angeles
County District Attorney Steve Cooley announcing last week that his
office would be prosecuting every single pot dispensary in that county.

Clearly, this is not what voters intended when they voted to allow
the growing and selling of pot for medical use back in 1996. They
wanted to have an organized, lightly regulated way for people whose
doctors feel marijuana would offer relief of their symptoms to be
able to get pot without fearing arrest and prosecution.

And you know what? That's exactly what our elected officials should
be giving us - not foot-dragging, excuses and outright defiance.

Granted, we voters have been a bit inconsistent, straying off-message
in elections since Prop. 215 was approved. For instance, we keep
re-electing San Diego County's board of supervisors, even as they've
voted unanimously and repeatedly to block medical marijuana in the
county (this despite the fact that local voters passed Prop. 215).

It's not even the first time our supposed public servants have told
us to take a long hike off a short pier: When voters passed a ballot
measure to prohibit the use of race in considering admission to
public universities and colleges (also in 1996), University of
California and California State University officials vowed to defy
the new law - and showed far more creativity in crafting end-runs on
the law than they ever had in their other endeavors.

So there's a history of the voters' will being ignored.

But there's also a history of the voters having the final say -
witness three justices of the state Supreme Court being voted out of
office in 1986.

While voters have, in the years since Prop. 215 was passed (years in
which it has been routinely ignored, undermined and attacked by the
folks charged with enforcing our laws), shown little willingness to
punish those who defy our will, there are other ways of exercising
political power.

Things like passing a new law that would leave defiant officials no
legal recourse but to follow the law.