ISLETON REVEALS WHY POT LAW NEEDS UPDATE

Hapless Isleton.

Once again this perennially struggling Delta hamlet finds itself under
scrutiny. This time the county grand jury, at the behest of Sacramento
County District Attorney Jan Scully, has issued subpoenas to Isleton
City Council members. Scully wants to question them about a deal they
struck with Delta Allied Growers, an industrial grade medicinal
marijuana grower that has set up operations inside city limits.

A very irritated Isleton City Manager Bruce Pope says the district
attorney told him the city's development deal violated the state's
medical marijuana law but refuses to tell him exactly how.

Scully isn't talking publicly, but in a letter she sent to city
officials last month she references the U.S. attorney for the Northern
District of California, Melinda Haag, who told city officials in
Oakland who were considering an ordinance similar to the one Isleton
approved that "individuals who elect to operate industrial cannabis
cultivation and manufacturing facilities will be doing so in violation
of federal law."

Scully goes on to say that Isleton's "agreement and conditional use
permit appears to be exactly the type of operation" that Haag has said
violates federal law. In a separate letter she goes further, warning
Isleton officials that they could face prosecution.

Legal or not, a deal like the one Isleton has struck with marijuana
growers was bound to crop up somewhere. It's the perfect marriage of
convenience. A municipality near bankruptcy with land use permitting
authority hooks up with an extraordinarily profitable but legally
questionable drug enterprise in search of a land use permit.

The controversy underscores the gray world in which medical marijuana
exists in this state.

Counties and cities across the state are struggling to enforce
Proposition 215, the 1996 initiative that legalized medicinal
marijuana in California. Under federal law the drug remains illegal.
Nonetheless, pot dispensaries and cultivation operations are
proliferating.

Whatever happens in Isleton, the state's medicinal marijuana law needs
to be clarified and clear rules issued for the benefit of users,
dispensers, growers, local governments, law enforcement officials and
the public.