MARIJUANA LAW STILL BEING ABUSED

Another hung jury in a widely watched trial this week in Mendocino
County is frustrating.

The hung jury in the Denoyer horse abuse case has got lots of local
residents shaking their heads, wondering what you have to do to an
animal to be punished for abusing it. A dead horse and a string of
starving, damaged animals, it appears, isn't enough. We hope that DA
Meredith Lintott's office will reshape its prosecution to tighten up
the charges and retry Mr. Denoyer.

In the Parker brothers trial, again, people shake their heads and
wonder, how did we get to a point where a city resident can grow 400
marijuana plants in his back yard and say it's all just medical
marijuana and get away with it? We are encouraged that 10 out of 12
jurors weren't buying it, and again, we think Ms. Lintott ought to go
back to court. Her prosecutors were able to convince the majority of
the jury that Mr. Memo Parker was growing more marijuana than he ought.

While Prop. 215, the medical marijuana law, allows patients to
appoint caregivers to grow their marijuana for them, we believe the
vast majority who voted for Prop. 215 did not mean for it to allow
any local resident to start growing enormous quantities of marijuana
for people in San Francisco. We also believe that anyone who takes
even one thin dime in return, is nothing more than a drug dealer. We
believe medical marijuana caregivers are intended to be construed as
caregivers are in other health care arenas: people who have personal
contact with a patient and who care for them in many ways, not just
by growing marijuana for them at a distance of hundreds of miles and
then selling it to cooperatives. The law does not cite medical
marijuana patients and their appointed "growers." It cites
caregivers. That is something very different which has been twisted
out of all proportion by people who are making big bucks using our
neighborhoods to grow pot under false pretenses.

We think it may be time for a new statewide ballot measure to amend
Prop. 215 to specify exactly - and limit - what a caregiver is, how
many plants can be grown by one person, and provide for local
governments to regulate medical marijuana as they see fit as long as
patients have access to marijuana - which we believe can be provided
through local government growing programs in places like county jail gardens.

It's time to bring Prop. 215 back to the compassionate law it was
intended to be, not the drug dealer's haven it is now.