Author: Griffin Mead
While local dispensaries and medical marijuana users have decried recent federal investigations of California’s medical marijuana dispensaries as an unwarranted crackdown and a reversal of President Obama’s 2009 marijuana policy, they have the story wrong. To say that the government is cracking down on potentially illegal medical marijuana stores is a problematic description of a routine and legally warranted IRS audit to which any other non-profit or commercial business is subject.
This victimized interpretation of events is ludicrous and displays a remarkable degree of willful ignorance on Obama’s medical marijuana policy, which clearly states a federal tolerance for non-profit dispensaries. One need only look back at recent history to learn that the Administration’s policy is hardly a deviation from its original stated intent.
Medical marijuana use was legalized under the California’s Compassionate Use Act, an 1996 act with the benevolent intention to provide a legal means for suffering patients to access a drug that could prove useful. Since the California Senate passed Bill 420 in 2003, which officially established the state’s medical marijuana program, for-profit dispensaries have blossomed throughout the state.
The resulting convenience store model of marijuana sales has serious problems, not least of which is the fact that local, state and federal laws consider most dispensaries illegal. According to Andre Birotte, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, “While California law permits collective cultivation of marijuana in limited circumstances, it does not allow commercial distribution through the store-front model we see across California.”
This doesn’t mean dispensaries can’t legally exist; it merely stipulates that they can’t turn a profit. Those that choose to skirt the law should expect any scrutiny they receive. Unsurprisingly, there have been reports of medical marijuana dispensaries purposely altering their books, violating federal law by hiding illegitimate profits. The New Age Healing company in San Jose, California was raided in May of 2011, after investigators unearthed two ledgers, one with a loss of $100,000 and another with a profit of $200,000. As this case suggests, federal investigators are not prosecuting just any medical marijuana provider but rather those collectives and distributors who take advantage of marijuana laws to generate a profit.
Even if those facts were not so clear, dispensaries and users need only look close to home to see that the federal government’s stance on medical marijuana is hardly a departure from California’s marijuana policy. In a Department of Justice memo authored by Deputy Attorney General David Ogden, the government states that “pursuit of (drug control priorities) should not focus federal resources . . . on individuals whose actions are in clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana.” However, when there is “. . . evidence of money laundering activities and/or financial gains or excessive amounts of cash inconsistent with purported compliance with state or local laws,” the federal government is fully permitted to step in.
Clearly, $200,000 in cash should be considered excessive. The Obama administration has stated from the get-go that they will not tolerate what Mr. Birotte calls the “Costco-Wal-Mart” style of marijuana distribution. If the federal government discovers that the collective has been abiding by state laws and operating as a non-profit organization, the federal government will not do a thing.
If the books turn up otherwise, though, then it’s a whole different story. At that point, all the dispensaries can claim in protest is that they have “only” engaged in a drug running operation that created easy accessibility to a level one narcotic.
All this is to say that the purported crackdown on Southern California dispensaries of late is nothing more than the Obama administration living up to its promise to crack down on dispensaries operating contrary to existing law and not on legitimate individual users. The President’s stance on the issue of medical marijuana, as detailed in 2009, clearly states that the Department of Justice will continue to investigate and prosecute for-profit providers, while looking past caretaker-patient dealings.
The uproar from dispensary owners and advocacy groups over “the Fed crackdown on medical marijuana,” which is really only the federal government investigating and closing shadily-operated and murkily-financed dispensaries, is misleading in nature. Dispensaries operating as the law has always dictated should expect no no threat of investigation, state or federal. When dispensaries start living up to their promise of helping (or presuming to help) patients without financial gain, the Obama administration will leave such operations in peace.
Griffin Mead is an undeclared sophomore. He can be reached at gmead@oxy.edu.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
