“Medical marijuana was, from the start, a back door to legalization, and now it’s swung wide open. If we really believed cannabis was a normative medical remedy, it would be sold in pharmacies like everything else your doctor prescribes. Instead, the (Los Angeles city) council is trying to regulate it in just the way we control bars or liquor stores or any other vendor of recreational intoxicants, while paying lip service to the really rather limited medicinal necessities.”
So writes Tim Rutten in this clever and entertaining opinion column, which also takes L.A. City Attorney Carmen Trutanich and L.A. County District Attorney Steve Cooley to task for declaring the council’s draft ordinance null and void before it even gets out the gate.
Rutten wonders aloud just how much medical marijuana is truly medicinal, and he’s hardly alone in that regard. Only a bonehead would argue that the Compassionate Use Act didn’t give license for stoners to light up for each and every ailment known to humanity, and I don’t recall that being on the bumper stickers when I voted for the measure some 14 years ago. The Act is the new poster child for the Law of Unintended Consequences, and now we’re being asked to legalize pot at the ballot box with the same lack of thoughtful consideration.
But that’s my beef, not Rutten’s. He suggests the city council ignore the Cooleys of the world, much as the DA is ignoring the will of the people in pledging to prosecute medipot dispensaries. That will set up some interesting legal challenges, to be sure, but we’ve grown accustomed to such things.
Rutten writes: “The real reason the City Council is having such a hellish time coming to grips with this issue is that this is one of those areas where social attitudes and thinking simply have moved beyond conventional legal thinking or, for that matter, the permissible language of politics.” On that topic, he’s dead on. It’s time for the cops, the DAs and the politicos to wake up and smell the wake-and-bake bong hits, and learn to practice social (and someday, legal) tolerance whatever their personal views.
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