NO END TO POT FREE-FOR-ALL

Our view: Caught between the feds and marijuana users, local
government just can't win.

There are a couple of stories in Friday's newspaper that provide a
wonderful snapshot of the situation that has afflicted California
since the passage of the incredibly vague Proposition 215 in 1996.

In that election, California voters said if marijuana helps people
who are seriously ill, they ought to have access to it. There are few
who argue with that these days.

But there has never been an organized effort by the state or the
medical community to compile an official list of what diseases it
helps, and what dosage is proper in those cases. There is no
requirement to check to see if the people seeking a medical marijuana
recommendation actually have the disease they claim. There is no
oversight of the doctors issuing the recommendations. There are no
record-keeping requirements, no nothing.

It's a free-for-all. And the state, which should be trying to
straighten out the mess, wants nothing to do with it, probably
because it sees what's happening to the local governments when they
try to get a grip on it.

And that's demonstrated by those two stories in Friday's paper:

Butte County supervisors suffer through hours of abuse in three
separate public hearings to come up with an ordinance that protects
citizens that don't smoke dope from the people who grow it for
themselves and others. A group calling itself Citizens for
Compassionate Use launches a successful referendum, forcing the
supervisors to either rescind the ordinance or put it to a vote.

The city of Chico comes up with a way to provide medical marijuana
patients with their medicine in a way that has some oversight and
control, and the federal government says if that happens, they'll
close down the dispensaries, and arrest any city staffers who process
the permit paperwork and any councilors who approve the permit.

Caught between the users and the feds, local government can't win.
State government won't act.

So we have unregulated co-ops/dispensaries/ stores. Some are
legitimate, some are not, and we have no way to distinguish between
the two. We also have no way to distinguish marijuana grows for
profit from those that are truly to provide medicine for people in
need. And we have no way to distinguish legitimate patients from
people who just want to get high.

But the behavior of the crowd at the Board of Supervisors hearings
makes it clear there are more stoners than true patients. The
Citizens for Compassionate Use probably have their heart in the right
place, but the most of their clientele aren't really sick people
fighting for their medicine. They're 20-somethings in the
south-of-campus neighborhood chortling about their "medicine" as they
pass a joint around after class. Or aging hippies glad after all
these years to have a loophole in the law. Or they're people who love
any drug they can get their hands on. Or they're people raising pot
for a living.

And everyone knows it.

We'll get a call or two after this editorial runs from legitimate
medical marijuana patients, complaining their needs are being
overlooked in the controversy. We always get those calls. They're
very polite and poignant, and the callers are almost apologetic about
complaining. They know too, but they're the victims.

It isn't really the law that's being exploited. The people for whom
the law was written are being exploited. And that's just wrong.