It’s been a rough week for the medical marijuana industry in California.
As Mint Press News previously reported, the California Supreme Court ruled on Monday that individual cities and towns had the the legal right to ban medical marijuana dispensaries. Now protests have broken out in Berkeley, Calif., after the Justice Department announced plans to shut down one of California’s oldest medical marijuana dispensaries.
Berkeley Patients Group (BPG) was served a lawsuit last Friday from U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag that attempts to seize the property and ultimately shut down the business. This is not the first time BPG has been targeted. In 2012, BPG received a lawsuit from Haag that claimed the dispensaries location was within 1,000 feet of a school, which was a violation of state law.
Under the Compassionate Use Act, medical marijuana cannot be smoked within 1,000 feet of a school, recreation center or youth center, unless the use occurs within a residence, but the law only requires a distance of 600 feet for dispensaries.
After receiving the letter in 2012, the dispensary owners agreed “to cease all cannabis-related activities and remove all cannabis-related property from the premises by May 1, 2012.” The owners vacated the dispensary’s original location and opened up a new shop.
Why the dispensary was singled-out back in 2012 and now again is not known. Though BPG was located around the corner from two schools — private French-American elementary and middle school the Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley and the Center for Early Intervention on Deafness — local media reported in 2012 that neither school complained about the location of the dispensary.
According to Ecole Bilingue spokesperson Jennifer Monahan, the school was not particularly concerned with the dispensary’s proximity. Reportedly the only concern the school had was in 2010 when the dispensary owners considered moving to a much closer location.
This most recent lawsuit, however, doesn’t mention a violation of the dispensary’s proximity to schools or a violation of any other state law.
War on weed
Steph Sherer is the executive director of Americans for Safe Access. She addressed a crowd of protesters in Berkeley on Wednesday, who displayed their disapproval for the federal action taken against dispensaries in the area. She said that “the Obama administration’s ongoing war against patients is despicable and has to stop.”
“This is a mean, vindictive move aimed at shutting down one of the oldest and well-respected dispensaries in the country,» she said.
And it’s not just medical marijuana activists who are outraged about this latest crackdown on marijuana in California. Since the legalization of medical marijuana in 1996, the industry has flourished and generates upward of $100 million in annual tax revenue.
Darryl Moore is a Berkeley City Council member who is publicly opposed to the lawsuit against BPG, which he says has “served as a national model of the not-for-profit, services-based medical cannabis dispensary.
«They have improved the lives and assisted the end-of-life transitions of thousands of patients; been significant donors to dozens of other organizations in our city [and] shaped local, state and national policies around medical cannabis.»
The politics of legalization
During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would respect states that had legalized marijuana, but in 2011 his administration launched an aggressive crackdown on the medical marijuana industry. California has taken the brunt of the federal government’s enforcement of federal marijuana law.
In addition to threats against BPG, San Francisco-based Hemp Center and seven other pot shops in San Jose, Calif., have received letters warning of property seizures and prison sentences if the shops did not shut down. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reportedly has also been investigating other dispensaries in San Francisco as well.
Tom Angell is a drug policy reform activist and founder of Marijuana Majority. He said the most recent threat letters to dispensaries from U.S. attorneys is part of the federal government’s effort to intimidate the legal marijuana industry out of existence.
«Whoever is coordinating these attacks in the federal law enforcement apparatus is clearly terrified about what the increasing acceptance of a legal and regulated marijuana trade means for the drug war bureaucracy that employs them,» Angell said.
A poll earlier this year found that a majority of Americans support legalizing recreational use of marijuana if it would be regulated and taxed in a manner similar to alcohol. California voters have attempted to legalize recreational marijuana for years, but those measures have failed at the polls.
Since Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana use in November, marijuana advocates in California say they think a measure legalizing recreational use may have a chance in 2016.
«It seems clear that California is on pace to legalize marijuana for adult use,» Angell said. «Hopefully more politicians will soon sense which way the wind is blowing and get in front of this issue before voters leave them behind.»