TERM LIMITS LIKELY TO BE VOTERS' RESPONSE TO POT LAWSUIT

The county Board of Supervisors declared war on the voters; now the
voters are firing back, and the five individual supervisors are
unlikely to enjoy the ultimate outcome.

Directing county staff to file a lawsuit seeking to overturn the
voter-approved medical marijuana law was an act of political warfare:
The same voters who put Bill Horn, Pam Slater-Price, Dianne Jacob,
Greg Cox and Ron Roberts into office also approved Prop. 215 a decade
ago.

The responses to the county's lawsuit have ranged from the banally
predictable (the ACLU is threatening to ... yawn ... take legal action
of its own) to the truly imaginative - particularly an announcement
last week that a petition is being circulated to put a ballot measure
before voters that would institute term limits for the Board of
Supervisors.

Given that voters have rarely met a term limits measure they didn't
like, it makes you wonder why the supervisors would have taken such a
confrontational position, one so very likely to provoke voters into
action.

Further confounding things is the question of why the supervisors
would pick such an inconsequential issue on which to take such a risky
stand. Marijuana is hardly some deadly scourge threatening our
community. Nobody's ever died of a marijuana overdose, nor does
smoking pot turn its users into maniacally violent sociopaths. The
health risks of smoking pot are long-term and accumulative, much as
those associated with alcohol and tobacco.

So why the outrage on the part of the Board of Supervisors toward
medical marijuana? Why the push to try to overrule the voters?

Look, I don't know if marijuana really has medicinal benefits or not -
there doesn't seem to be much, if any, in the way of legitimate
medical research into the effects of marijuana on various symptoms.
Most of the arguments put forth in favor of it are anecdotal: "My
poor, dying father found that smoking pot was the only way to ease the
pain of ..." While not long in the scientific department, these
arguments have the political advantage of being virtually
unassailable. How do you counter that without coming off as a
cold-hearted monster?

So those of us with doubts about the medicinal benefits of marijuana
find it easier to keep them to ourselves - particularly as there isn't
any real evidence that it doesn't work, either.

Still, with alcohol and tobacco both being just as dangerous as pot,
it's pretty tough to figure out the Board of Supervisors' angle on all
this. We have kids dying from heroin, ecstasy and crack - and our
county leaders are worried about pot?

It would be easy to dismiss this whole thing as a cheap bit of
political theater, nothing more than grandstanding - but that
unavoidably brings us right back to the least explicable part of this
morass:

Who are the supervisors trying to impress with their attack against
the voters?

We may never know - for the voters are unlikely to wait for that
explanation before sending the supervisors packing courtesy of term
limits.