HOW LOS ANGELES BECAME THE "WILD WEST" OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA

On a warm, bright winter day in January, I spent a few hours driving
around two neighborhoods in Los Angeles, looking at marijuana stores.

You know, marijuana stores.

Where you (well, not necessarily you) can walk in and, if you can
prove a doctor has recommended marijuana to you for relief of an
ailment, walk out with a brown bag full of buds, pot brownies, or
cannabis candy bars. Los Angeles has more than 500 of these stores.
My companions on the drives were two citizen activists who didn't
like seeing so many marijuana shops and who regularly let the Los
Angeles City Council know of their unhappiness.

Michael Larsen, a 43-year-old family man, is public safety director
for the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council. He doesn't like to discuss
his day job in the press, saying it has drawn too many hostile
medical marijuana supporters to his work-related websites in the past.

Eagle Rock, a neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles, is visibly aging
but remains dignified and distinct, with commercial areas occupied
mostly by low-slung, pale old buildings housing storefront doctor's
offices, service businesses such as beauty salons and tax preparers,
and independent restaurants and boutiques rather than chain stores.

As we cruise a mile or so up and down Eagle Rock, York, and Colorado
boulevards, Larsen points out more than 10 pot dispensaries. "Eagle
Rock is about being a small community with a small-town feel, and we
want to retain that," he says.

Responding to criticisms he's received from medical marijuana
activists, Larsen insists: "I'm not being uncompassionate. I may be a
NIMBY, but I'm fine with that. Eagle Rock is struggling to maintain
the character of the neighborhood, for my kids or other people and
their kids." Larsen tells me about the healthy-looking young men who
sometimes congregate in parking lots or on streets near dispensaries,
smoking pot or blasting music. He points out one such young man
entering AEC, a dispensary on Colorado Boulevard, while we are in its
parking lot. He tells me about a local woman in her 80s who can't
understand what kind of world she's living in, where marijuana is
sold on her corner.

Larsen also points out some grubby-looking auto repair shops along
his neighborhood's main strip and tells me how the locals managed to
curb their profusion through the city's planning process.

He talks about the auto repair shops in much the same way he
discusses the pot shops.

He does not think either should be completely eliminated, but he
believes they constitute a blight on the neighborhood when they are
too conspicuous.

Larsen and I pass one marijuana dispensary, the Cornerstone
Collective, that I visited the day before.

If you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there.

It has no pot leaf images, no neon signs announcing "Alternative" or
"Herbal," no commercial signage at all. The owner, Michael Backes,
told me with amused pride that a while back, when a runaway car
plowed straight through his wall, a local news crew identified the
place as a "dentist office," which is what it looks like from its
waiting room. Backes is "doing it right," Larsen tells me.

My drive through Studio City, in the southeast San Fernando Valley
just over the mountains from Hollywood, is similar.

Barbara Monahan Burke, a 64-year-old horticulturalist who serves as
the neighborhood council's co-chair for government affairs, doesn't
say anything about increases in crime associated with the marijuana
dispensaries (a connection often asserted by public officials), but
she does complain about occasional pot smoking in front of them,
which can annoy commercial neighbors. "I personally believe in
compassionate use of medical marijuana and voted for it," she says.

Within a couple of miles on Ventura Boulevard, a dozen dispensaries
seem to be open for business on this weekday afternoon. (Burke told
me in mid-February that by then she was only sure that six of them
were still open for business.) "It's about preservation of
communities," she says. "We want this to be a place where families
can live. It's about, what do the people who live here want our
branding to be as Studio City?" That branding, she thinks, should not
be linked to green crosses and billboards for Medicann, a medical
marijuana doctors' consulting service, every couple of blocks on her
neighborhood's major commercial strip.

The Wild West of Weed

Newsweek dubbed Los Angeles "the wild West of weed" in October 2009,
and that phrase often echoed through the city council's chamber as it
haggled over a long-awaited ordinance regulating the dispensaries.
Both the Los Angeles Times and the L.A. Weekly regularly jabbed at
the city council for fiddling while marijuana burned, supplied by
storefront pot dispensaries that were widely (but inaccurately) said
to total 1,000 or more.

On January 26, after years of dithering and months of debate, the
city council finally passed an ordinance to regulate medical
marijuana shops. In addition to dictating the details of lighting,
record keeping, auditing, bank drops, hours of operation, and
compensation for owners and employees, the ordinance requires a
dramatic reduction in the number of dispensaries. The official limit
is 70, but because of exemptions for some pre-existing dispensaries
the final number could grow as high as 137. The ordinance allocates
the surviving dispensaries among the city's "planning districts" and
requires that they be located more than 1,000 feet from each other
and from "sensitive areas" such as parks, schools, churches, and libraries.

It also requires patients who obtain marijuana from dispensaries to
pick one outlet and stick with it.

As those rules suggest, city officials are not prepared to treat
marijuana like any other medicine, despite a 1996 state ballot
initiative that allows patients with doctor's recommendations to use
it for symptom relief.

It's hard to imagine the city council arbitrarily limiting the number
of pharmacies, insisting that they not do business near competitors,
creating buffer zones between parks and Duane Reade locations, or
demanding that patients obtain their Lipitor from one and only one drugstore.

Such restrictions reflect marijuana's dual identity in California: It
is simultaneously medicine and menace.

At the same time, the regulations do serve to legitimize distribution
of a drug that remains completely prohibited by federal law--a stamp
of approval welcomed by many dispensary operators.

When I asked activists, businessmen, or politicians why L.A.'s
medical marijuana market needed to be regulated, they almost
invariably replied, "It was unregulated." When I delved beyond that
tautology, I found motives little different from those that drive
land use planning generally. The activists who demanded that the city
bring order to the "wild West" of medical marijuana were motivated
not by antipathy to cannabis so much as mundane concerns about
"blight," neighborhood character, and spillover effects.

While responding to these concerns, every member of the city council
voiced support for medical access to marijuana in theory, and none
openly sided with the federal law enforcement officials who view the
trade as nothing more than drug dealing in disguise.

Los Angeles became the medical marijuana capital of America thanks to
a combination of entrepreneurial energy and benign political neglect.

What happened here is instructive for other jurisdictions that
already or may soon let patients use the drug. In the last 14 years,
the voters or legislators of 14 states and the District of Columbia
have legalized marijuana for at least some medical purposes.

Medical marijuana campaigns, via either legislation or ballot
initiative, are active in 13 other states.

National surveys indicate broad public support for such reforms. An
ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted in January found that 81
percent of Americans think patients who can benefit from marijuana
should be able to obtain it legally.

But L.A.'s experience also shows that majority support for medical
marijuana is not necessarily enough.

An October poll of Los Angeles residents commissioned by the
Marijuana Policy Project found that 77 percent supported regulating
dispensaries, while only 14 percent wanted them closed.

But patients and the entrepreneurs who served them still had to
contend with a noisy minority, clustered in political institutions
such as neighborhood councils, the police department, and government
lawyers' offices, who resisted the normalization of marijuana. That
process culminated in an ordinance with onerous restrictions that
could nearly eliminate the current medical pot business and cause
great hardship for tens of thousands of Los Angeles residents who use
marijuana as a medicine.

Still, for those who lived through the ferocious cultural and
political war over pot during the second half of the 20th century,
it's amazing that the strife in pot-saturated Los Angeles has had
more to do with land use regulation than with eradicating an
allegedly evil plant.

Even with pot readily available over the counter at hundreds of
locations to anyone with an easily obtained doctor's letter, the most
common complaints were essentially aesthetic.

The Road to the Corner Pot Shop

When California voters agreed in 1996 to legalize pot for medical
use, the initiative campaign emphasized marijuana's utility in
treating AIDS wasting syndrome, the side effects of cancer
chemotherapy, and other grave conditions. But the initiative, known
as the Compassionate Use Act, also allowed pot to be recommended for
treatment of "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief."
That language strongly influenced how the politics and culture of
medical marijuana evolved in Los Angeles.

The federal government did not yield to the judgment of California's
voters. The Clinton administration threatened to prosecute or revoke
the prescription privileges of doctors who recommended marijuana,
only to be rebuked by a federal appeals court on First Amendment grounds.

From the late 1990s into the first year of the Obama administration,
the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raided medical marijuana
growers and suppliers, without regard to whether they were following
California law. Last November, the Justice Department instructed U.S.
attorneys that they "should not focus federal resources" on
"individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance
with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana."
Yet as of February, the DEA was still raiding medical marijuana shops
in the L.A. area.

Ambiguity is built into the Justice Department's new policy, thanks
to uncertainty over what exactly it means to comply with state law.
The Compassionate Use Act allowed patients or their "primary
caregivers" to grow marijuana for medical use. The Medical Marijuana
Program Act, a law passed by the state legislature that took effect
in 2004, imposed limits on how much marijuana patients or their
caregivers could possess, while allowing local jurisdictions to
establish higher ceilings.

In January the California Supreme Court rejected those limits, saying
patients should be allowed to have whatever amount is "reasonable"
for their medical needs.

Most important in understanding what happened in Los Angeles, the
2004 law said patients may join together to "collectively or
cooperatively" grow marijuana and distribute it to each other.

The law did not define collectives or cooperatives, but guidelines
issued by Attorney General Jerry Brown in 2008 said they should be
deemed legitimate as long as they were operated by patients, served
only members of the collective, and did not take in more revenue than
was necessary to cover their operating expenses.

Ostensibly, the storefront dispensaries that opened in cities such as
Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and Oakland were collectives
operated by and for patients, providing them with their medicine as
permitted by state law. But given the ease of obtaining a doctor's
recommendation and becoming a collective member, critics viewed the
dispensaries as thinly disguised pot shops that sold marijuana to the
general public for recreational as well as medical purposes.

As you are frequently reminded by people in Los Angeles who are angry
about the way the dispensary system developed, Californians who voted
for the Compassionate Use Act had in mind patients with cancer, AIDS,
or other serious conditions, people who needed marijuana to relieve
agonizing pain, fight debilitating nausea, or restore their appetites
so they could take in enough nutrition to stay alive.

Voters who supported the initiative did not have in mind milder,
vaguer, and less verifiable complaints of the sort that seem to be
far more common among people with doctor's recommendations. Austin
Elguindy, a partner in an L.A. medical pot recommendation practice
called Consulting and Care for Wellness, tells me his top three
reasons for recommending marijuana are lower back pain, insomnia, and anxiety.

Regulation of the dispensaries was left to local jurisdictions. Some,
such as the politically liberal cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and
West Hollywood, experienced an early proliferation that was quickly
curbed. San Francisco set a limit of 23 dispensaries, while Oakland
and West Hollywood each settled on four. About 120 cities banned pot
storefronts entirely (although a lawsuit that is before a state
appeals court challenges their authority to do so). Los Angeles, by
contrast, declined to address pot dispensaries at all. Medical
marijuana entrepreneurs began moving into L.A. in 2003. In May 2005,
when City Councilman Dennis Zine (a former cop) first asked the
police to look into the dispensaries and asked the city attorney's
office to help the council draft regulations for them, just a handful
were around.

By the end of 2006 there were nearly 100.

Zine blames the delayed reaction on resistance from then-City
Attorney Rocky Delgadillo. Don Duncan, a leading medical marijuana
activist and operator of a West Hollywood dispensary that opened in
2004, also blames the city attorney's office.

He says Delgadillo and his successor, Carmen Trutanich, did not want
to legitimize an industry they viewed as illegal. Both took the
position, contrary to Attorney General Brown's guidelines, that state
law does not allow the exchange of medical marijuana for money, no
matter how the distributor is organized or labeled. In a January
ruling on a civil nuisance case brought by the city attorney's office
against a dispensary called Hemp Factory V, a Superior Court judge
agreed with this narrow reading of the law. Joe Elford, a lawyer for
the medical marijuana activist group Americans for Safe Access, says
this contradicts state appellate decisions that acknowledge the
legality of not-for-profit sales.

The complaints that prompted Zine to consider regulating the
dispensaries were not terribly alarming.

Citizens were annoyed by pot smokers congregating outside
dispensaries. Some parents didn't like the message they believed the
dispensaries communicated to their kids: that marijuana was an
ordinary commodity that could be sold openly without fear of legal
repercussions. They also worried that kids might obtain marijuana
from patients, which local journalists have found happens
occasionally. Mostly, marijuana just kind of freaks some people out.

In August 2007, the city council rushed through an "interim control
ordinance" (ICO) that declared a moratorium on new pot shops.

The ordinance also required existing dispensaries to submit paperwork
proving they had seller's permits from the state Board of
Equalization (which expected them to collect taxes on marijuana
sales), a tax registration certificate from the city, and a
legitimate commercial lease or property deed. One hundred
eighty-three dispensaries filed their paperwork before the November
2007 deadline, of which 137 were still operating when the council
passed its new regulations in 2010.

By the time the ICO was passed, many dispensaries had been forced to
close by the DEA's tactic of sending threatening letters to landlords
who rented space to pot shops.

Worried that their property would be seized by the federal
government, dozens of landlords evicted marijuana dispensaries. Many
of these sellers sought to reopen by applying for a "hardship
exemption" under the interim control ordinance.

The city let the applications pile up without examining them, and
dispensary operators who were not in business prior to the moratorium
filed the same forms, hoping they could slip by. Many others, known
as "rogues" in the medical marijuana community, opened without
bothering to file any paperwork.

By mid-2009 hundreds of what came to be known as "post-ICO" pot shops
had opened.

Local and national media outlets began to notice.

In July a Wall Street Journal story looked askance at the "unchecked
growth" of pot shops in L.A. In October, the same month Newsweek
dubbed L.A. "the wild West of weed," a New York Times story
tut-tutted that there were "more marijuana stores here than public
schools." The city council could no longer avoid the issue.

Making a Hash of an Ordinance

According to dispensary critic Michael Larsen, Los Angeles was "a
national laughingstock" because of the proliferating pot shops.

Based on a combination of hysterical hearsay and applications for
exemptions that never turned into functioning storefronts,
politicians, journalists, and perturbed neighbors were regularly
claiming the city had something like 1,000 dispensaries--more than
the number of Starbucks locations.

The L.A. Weekly--an alternative paper that might have been expected
to side with the dispensaries, especially given how many of their ads
fill the paper--helped lead the negative coverage, as part of a
general crusade against what it sees as the city government's
fecklessness. The paper in November tried to get an accurate count of
the dispensaries and found that 540 or so were operating when the
council began reconsidering the issue.

To a politician who didn't have to worry about where he could obtain
a medicine that helped make his life livable, that must have seemed
like an awful lot.

Even though the city council had been considering the issue, on and
off, for nearly five years, the ordinance it produced after a
contentious back and forth between the council and the city
attorney's office seemed half-baked in many respects.

It imposed draconian restrictions with little thought to how they
might affect patients who had come to rely on marijuana to relieve
their symptoms.

Some of the provisions are mild and largely supported by the medical
pot community, which was begging for bearable regulations that would
legitimize the dispensaries. The relatively uncontroversial
requirements include demands for twice-daily bank runs, no plants
visible from the street, and unarmed security guards patrolling a
two-block radius around each dispensary.

Other provisions seem difficult to enforce and/or comply with, such
as the rule that each patient can be a member of no more than one
collective (meaning he can obtain marijuana from just one location),
a demand that all the pot distributed go through "an independent and
certified laboratory" to be checked for pesticides (dispensary
operators insist that no such lab exists in Los Angeles), and a
requirement that dispensaries store what could amount to tens of
thousands of pieces of paper with patient and transaction information
in fireproof vaults on site. Most ominously for the future of the
medical marijuana business in L.A., the ordinance creates 1,000-foot
"buffers" between the dispensaries and a list of "sensitive uses":
schools, churches, libraries, parks, youth centers, substance abuse
centers, and other pot dispensaries. A last-minute addition to the
bill also bans dispensaries from land "abutting" residential property
and specifies that "no collective shall be located on a lot...across
the street or alley from...a residentially zoned lot or a lot
improved with residential use."

If the ordinance survives legal challenges and goes into effect, that
last provision will force nearly all of the existing dispensaries to
move, and they will have few places to go. Almost all of L.A.'s
standard commercial space is separated from homes or apartments
merely by an alley behind them. In the weeks after the ordinance
passed, various sources in the medical marijuana community told me
landlords lucky enough to have space that complies with the new rules
have tripled their rents and started demanding five-figure "signing
fees" from dispensaries scrambling to find new locations.

Pot Civil War

The regulatory debate divided the medical marijuana community,
pitting older dispensaries against new competitors, those seeking
legitimacy against the open outlaws, those happy with the medical-use
status quo against those who want complete legalization. Pot sellers
who were in business before the 2007 moratorium--which a state court
overturned on technical legal grounds in October--believe, probably
correctly, that the industry could have continued to thrive under the
media and political radar if not for the hundreds of
Johnny-come-latelies. "Pre-ICO" and "post-ICO" dispensaries are the
Sharks and Jets of the L.A. pot world.

Bill Leahy is general manager of a three-location chain of
dispensaries known as the Farmacy, which began operating in West
Hollywood in 2004. He meets me at the West Hollywood branch, which
features cheery attendants, warm wood, mystical art, and one of the
metropolitan area's widest arrays of cannabis-enhanced tinctures,
sprays, drinks, packaged foods, and gelatos.

Leahy, a 63-year-old former print shop operator with the air of a
steel-hard but gallant Western sheriff, is understandably proud of
his comfortable shopping environment with doors open wide to the
cool, sunny L.A. winter.

The Farmacy does not have the unsettling mantrap quality of many
dispensaries, where you are locked into enclosed space after enclosed
space between you and whoever hands you the goods (after examining
and confirming your doctor's recommendation and asking you to fill
out forms to join the collective, assuming the dispensary is trying
to be legit). Leahy makes sure I notice a rival shop across Santa
Monica Boulevard, which opened in 2005. He gently chides its garish
signage and unfriendly layout, which includes one of those
off-putting enclosed entry areas.

Leahy is on the steering committee of the Greater Los Angeles
Collective Alliance, a trade association dominated by the pre-ICO shops.

Don Duncan, a prominent activist in the association, represents
Americans for Safe Access as well as his own West Hollywood
dispensary. An overwrought November L.A. Weekly story painted Duncan
as the drug kingpin guiding council members such as Dennis Zine and
Ed Reyes to let legalized pot dealing ruin their city, describing
Duncan as "the most important man in City Hall regarding medical
marijuana policy" with "tremendous influence." The article
suggestively noted that Duncan "wasn't vetted to determine whether
his pot sources and profits are illicit or legitimate," though it
presented no evidence that he fails to comply with state law.

Since March 2009, Dan Halbert has run the Rainforest Collective, a
pot shop on Venice Boulevard in West Los Angeles with a bright and
airy front room, floors covered in Astroturf, and walls painted with
murals that suggest you are sitting in a vaguely Greek temple
situated in a jungle. Halbert is president of the Green Alliance of
Patients and Providers (GAPP), a trade group representing post-ICO
dispensaries. The organization raised the ire of the city council
gadfly John Walsh, a perpetually angry, perpetually arm-pumping
shouter who was the most consistent and loudest anti-dispensary voice
at city council meetings. At a January city council meeting, an
appalled Walsh pointed the council's attention to a line in a GAPP
pamphlet that said the dispensaries wanted to craft and pass, via
city referendum, regulations "for the industry by the industry."
Walsh bridled at the word industry. Wasn't medical marijuana supposed
to be about medicine and compassion?

Halbert understands that the pre-ICO pot entrepreneurs paved the way
for people like him, braving the risk of federal arrests.

An entrepreneur from Arizona, he says he did not feel safe moving
into the market until he believed the Obama administration wouldn't
come after him. He can see how old hands such as Leahy and Duncan
would resent the new competition. Still, Halbert says, "We brought
the prices down. When there were only 186 [dispensaries], things were
expensive, and [the shops] were making a lot of money, which is
against the whole intent of this."

Halbert's jab at the profits of his older competitors seems somewhat
at odds with his group's description of medical marijuana
distribution as an "industry." But it fits with the anti-commercial
mentality reflected in the attorney general's guidelines, which say
collectives should not turn a profit (although they are not required
to incorporate as nonprofit organizations). That same attitude led to
the half-baked wage controls in the new ordinance, which bans bonuses
and says operators and workers must receive "compensation
commensurate with reasonable wages and benefits paid to employees of
IRS-qualified non-profit organizations" with similar qualifications and duties.

'That Other Thing'

We've been talking about the politics of medical marijuana, a more or
less civilized activity in which business people and activists on
both sides lobby politicians, who consider their input, along with
public comments and negative press coverage, when they formulate policy.

That's one thing.

But as drug lord Avon Barksdale told his lieutenant Stringer Bell in
the HBO series The Wire, there's also "that other thing."

Barksdale says this in the context of Bell's attempts to turn the
drug trade into a rational business--much as Don Duncan and Dan
Halbert, in a more aboveboard way, are doing in Los Angeles. "That
other thing" is the part of the drug trade Barksdale is more
comfortable with: the part with guns and threats, intimidation and violence.

That other thing also plays a role in L.A.'s medical marijuana
market, but how big a role is unclear.

Although the text of the new ordinance alleges an "increase in and
escalation of violent crime" associated with dispensaries, the city's
crime rates were dropping in almost every category while the shops
proliferated. In a January interview with the Los Angeles Daily News,
L.A. Police Chief Charlie Beck admitted there was no evidence the
dispensaries had contributed to criminality. "I have tried to verify
that because that, of course, is the mantra," Beck told the paper.
"It doesn't really bear out."

One guard was murdered by robbers at a Pico Boulevard dispensary in
October 2008, the sort of tragedy that can be expected in a big-city
business that deals mostly in cash because its transactions are
prohibited by federal law. City Attorney Carmen Trutanich says about
200 L.A. dispensaries have been robbed.

Patrick Duff, proprietor of three L.A.-area marijuana dispensaries
that have been raided by the police for various reasons, thinks the
actual number of robberies is much higher because dispensary
operators are often reluctant to call cops they believe are corrupt.

Police and politicians often claim dispensaries get their pot from
Mexican drug cartels. (To comply with state law, everything a pot
dispensary sells is supposed to be provided by its own
patient-members, and all the dispensary operators I talked to or who
stood up for themselves at city council meetings insist that's how
they do it. The council briefly considered requiring the dispensaries
to do all their growing on site, the kind of demand that would have
been seen as obviously absurd if applied to any other market or
pharmacy.) Capt. Kevin McCarthy, the Los Angeles Police Department's
commanding officer for gangs and narcotics, tells me that getting to
the bottom of such connections, if they exist, would be "labor
intensive to do, and we don't have resources to do it." McCarthy
notes that the city claims to have found pesticides used only in
Mexico on pot seized in at least one dispensary raid.

One old-fashioned grower from Mendocino County who was accustomed to
dealing with pot-savvy dispensary operators in the pre-ICO days
laments that he is now supplying "Boris with the gold chains," who
cares only about price points and doesn't understand the product.
(There is no legal reason growers from up north can't be
patient-members of a dispensary in L.A.) Some anti-dispensary
activists worry that they may be interfering with the interests of
people who are not afraid to use violence when crossed, but there is
no hard evidence to support that fear.

When it comes to intimidation and violence in the medical marijuana
scene, the leading offender, however, is clearly the government: the
DEA, plus local police and sheriff's departments. They send small
armies of heavily armed, Kevlar-clad, dark-helmeted men into the
stores and homes of dispensary operators and medical marijuana
growers, terrorizing their children, shooting their dogs, digging up
their yards, roughing them up, and taking their money.

As of early February, Americans for Safe Access has counted nearly 70
medical marijuana raids in the Los Angeles area since 2006. Federal
raids usually do not result in criminal charges; the DEA typically
settles for shutting down dispensaries and seizing their assets.

State and local authorities are slightly more inclined to prosecute.

Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, like City Attorney
Trutanich, maintains that all pot sales are illegal.

Still, most cases end in plea agreements, which means defendants'
claims to be operating within the law are never considered by a jury.
Meital Manzuri, a Sherman Oaks defense attorney who represents
dispensary operators, says it's generally in the interests of both
the state and the defendants to stop medical marijuana cases before
they go to trial: Trials are expensive and, when a medical defense is
involved, risky for both sides.

One dispensary operator who is likely going to trial on state charges
is the 60-year-old accountant Clay Tepel, a veteran of L.A.'s
counterculture as a former business manager at the original Los
Angeles alternative weekly, the L.A. Free Press. In August local
police arrested Tepel for possession with intent to sell at Kush
Korner, his pot shop in a strip mall on Ventura Boulevard in Tarzana.
His sign still hangs between "I Sold it on EBay" and "Kids Hair Shop"
in front of the strip mall, and the wrecked storefront stands empty
next to a Domino's Pizza outlet. Tepel still has the lease and keys,
and we chat in the front room of the former dispensary, where natural
light seeps into the electricity-deprived space.

The possession with intent to sell charge darkly amuses him: Why else
would he have a seller's permit from the state Board of Equalization?
Tepel's lawyer, Allison Margolin, says that the case may result in
her challenging the legality of the state's demand that dispensaries
have to operate not-for-profit.

Tepel's store was a family operation.

One of his teenaged daughters and his wife helped run the shop, which
he insists was not only not making a profit but was in fact sucking
money from his accounting income.

Both of his teenaged daughters were around when a squad of heavily
armed cops burst into his house at the same time the store was raided.

Tepel tells me he and his family are negotiating with a major TV
network to produce a reality show about his "Brady Bunch with bongs"
once his legal troubles are behind him. Tepel says he has no idea why
he was raided or why he is one of the unlucky few with a court date.
He says the lead cop on the raid told him they were "coming to get
all of them."

In mid-February, after the new ordinance passed but before it took
effect, local officials started to deliver on that threat.

On February 18, the city attorney's office sued three L.A.
dispensaries, seeking to shut them down as public nuisances.

The operator of one dispensary named in the lawsuit, Organica in West
L.A., was arrested on state charges of selling marijuana in a raid
that involved the DEA. On the same day, 18 other dispensaries
received letters from the city attorney, threatening them with
eviction for selling marijuana.

Assistant City Attorney Asha Greenberg told the L.A. Weekly that all
the shops were targeted for selling pot to undercover cops who
presented doctor's recommendations. The city attorney's office
continues to insist that exchanging medical marijuana for money is
illegal in all circumstances, even though the city council just
passed an ordinance that explicitly allows nonprofit sales.

The Lie of Medical Marijuana

California's medical marijuana law created a special category of
people who are allowed to do something that others would be arrested
for doing, and it gave a guild of licensed professionals the nearly
unlimited power to define this category.

Although physicians who issue recommendations for nonmedical reasons
theoretically can be disciplined by the state medical board, that has
happened only 12 times since 1996, and only one doctor lost his
license as a result.

The discretion permitted by the law is so broad that proving
misconduct is very difficult.

That broad discretion helps patients who might be denied their
medicine under a stricter regime, and at the same time it helps
people who want pot for recreational purposes.

Medical marijuana activists often say that all marijuana use is
essentially medical, if that category is understood to include
quotidian psychological and emotional problems that the drug
alleviates. If physicians can prescribe pharmaceuticals to treat
stress, anxiety, shyness, and depression, the activists say, why
can't they recommend marijuana for the same reasons?

Stephen Gutwillig, California state director of the Drug Policy
Alliance, offers a partly tongue-in-cheek take on the question: Given
how bad for your health it is to get caught up in the criminal
justice system because you have marijuana, he says, removing that
threat is a form of preventive medicine.

Politically, though, the malleability of the medical category is a
problem. Anyone who locates a sympathetic, trusting, or simply greedy
doctor can obtain the legal right to possess pot in California. That
fact, plus the hundreds of outlets that sprang up in Los Angeles to
supply those patients, fostered a fairly accurate public perception
that during the last few years anyone willing to put in a little
effort could travel a short distance and buy pot over the counter.

The medical model attaches great importance to motive and state of
mind, which is why dispensary operators often say, when justifying
themselves to politicians or the press, that they're in the business
"for the right reasons," unlike some of their competitors. Combined
with the federal ban on marijuana, medicalization leads to a world
where customers can shop at only one store; where the cash they pay
for a product is not the price but a "contribution to the
collective"; where businesses are expected to avoid turning a profit;
where a medicine is subject to sales tax, unlike other
pharmaceuticals, and isn't regulated like any other pharmaceutical;
where you are complying with the law if what you possess is
"reasonable" related to some need that may have been invented by a
doctor to begin with; where it's legal for you to have pot but you
are still apt to be arrested for growing or transporting it.

The medical model also fosters a weirdly contradictory attitude
toward pot use, one that seemed to animate the L.A. Weekly's
surprisingly negative coverage of the issue: Even people who don't
care about pot smoking in general get upset when they think stoners
are gaming a system that is supposed to serve patients with
doctor-certified needs.

The L.A. Weekly angrily reported in November that 70 percent of the
people its reporters saw entering dispensaries were "young
men--corroborating D.A. Cooley's claim that the real market for all
this activity is everyday users, not people suffering serious
disease." (Medical activists tend to respond to that sort of talk
with the riposte that all sorts of maladies for which pot provides
relief aren't diagnosable by strangers watching from yards away.)

In Los Angeles, such outrage over pot being used for the "wrong"
reasons led to a bad and unsustainable ordinance.

In March, Americans for Safe Access challenged the new regulations in
state court.

Its lawyer Joe Elford said in a press release that "The requirement
to find a new location within 7 days [if the old one is zoned out of
compliance] is completely unreasonable and undermines the due process
of otherwise legal medical marijuana dispensaries." The suit seeks to
have the ordinance declared "unlawful and unconstitutional."

The ordinance also faces a challenge in the form of a citizen
referendum spearheaded by Dan Halbert, who needs 27,000 signatures to
get it on the next available L.A. ballot in 2010. But as long as
medical use is the only marijuana use officially permitted,
dispensaries will remain hamstrung by stupid and unworkable
restrictions. Full legalization, an idea long avoided by many medical
marijuana activists, may be the only way to make sure all patients
who can benefit from the drug have access to it without creating the
sort of situation that gave rise to the crackdown in L.A.

While the latest ordinance may or may not succeed in shutting down
hundreds of functioning storefronts, the freewheeling culture of
quasi-legal pot will be harder to crush.

L.A. is home to at least four ad-filled magazines serving the pot
community, a branch of "Oaksterdam University" where potrepreneurs
and patients learn medical marijuana science and law, an endless
series of cannabis-related expositions and conventions, and websites
such as Weedtracker (featuring discussions of dispensary quality and
local politics) and weedmaps.com (which finds the dispensary nearest
you). The Medical Cannabis Safety Council meets at Oaksterdam on
occasional Saturday nights to discuss, among other things, the molds
that can bedevil growers and self-regulation as a way of fending off
heavy-handed government interference.

Is America ready for a world in which pot is as culturally and
physically prevalent as it has become in L.A.? In a national Zogby
poll conducted in April 2009, 52 percent of respondents supported
treating marijuana more or less like alcohol, while other recent
polls put the percentage in the 40s. Support for legalization is
higher in California: A Field Poll of California voters taken the
same month as the Zogby survey put support for legalization at 56
percent statewide and 60 percent in Los Angeles County. This fall we
will see whether those opinions translate into voter support for a
California ballot initiative that would, at long last, legalize and
tax adult possession of marijuana.

Don Duncan, as dean of L.A.'s medical marijuana suppliers and
activists, doesn't want to opine about full legalization. But his
take on why all sides have fought so ferociously over the city's
medical pot ordinance applies to the legalization debate as well.
"The normalization of medical marijuana--certain elements in law
enforcement and other civic leaders see it as a threat," he says. "If
L.A. is in fact a medical marijuana town with safe access regulated,
then that ends the debate for California....Once the state's largest
and most populated community has sensible regulations, foes of
medical cannabis in law enforcement know they've lost the battle in
California. They see it as a line in the sand, so ideologically they
can't give up L.A. By the same token, that's why ideologically we
can't either."

The fight to define what happened in L.A. during the "wild West" days
of what amounted to legal over-the-counter pot is the same sort of
battle. If the complaints that led to the regulatory crackdown are
understood as arising from anti-pot prejudice, NIMBYism, and the
occasional sighting of "undesirables," rather than real threats to
public order and safety, it will seem pretty silly to continue
spending billions of dollars and millions of man-hours each year to
stop people from exchanging money for pot. The accidental result of a
city attorney who didn't want to legitimize marijuana and a city
council that didn't want to think about it could be the realization
that it's better to allow a pot free-for-all than to continue to wage
war on marijuana.