On Monday morning federal agents raided Oaksterdam University, the internationally famous school that Richard Lee established to train entrepreneurs in the marijuana industry. Lee is probably the state's most well-known proponent of legalization and regulation of marijuana, and supporter of medical cannabis. On Tuesday, medical marijuana advocates held a noisy rally in San Francisco to demand that the Obama administration end its crackdown on the medicine. Since last fall, five San Francisco dispensaries have closed due to the aggressive stance of four U.S. attorneys in California, including Melinda Haag, U.S. attorney for the northern district of California. She and her counterparts expressed concern about the clubs and vowed to aggressively prosecute medical marijuana dispensaries as profit-making criminal enterprises. This included sending letters to the clubs' landlords, threatening them with legal action if they didn't evict their tenants. The attorneys also suggested that newspapers publishing medical cannabis ads could also be targets.
President Barack Obama must rein in his Justice Department. When he was a presidential candidate in 2007, he said, "I would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It's just not a good use of our resources." After he became president, his attorney general, Eric Holder, said at a news conference that the administration would not be raiding medical cannabis dispensaries. "What he said during the campaign is now policy," Holder said, referring to the president.
Unfortunately, that turned out to be true for only a couple of years, as Haag and the other U.S. attorneys began their intimidation campaign, ostensibly because some of the dispensaries are too close to schools.
Since the passage of the Compassionate Use Act in 1996, San Francisco has developed a comprehensive system for issuing medical cannabis ID cards and regulating dispensaries. Oakland also followed suit, after voters there approved a measure a few years ago to tax the dispensaries in an effort to bolster city coffers. The dispensaries themselves supported the tax.
Obama was right in 2007: the resources spent by the Justice Department raiding medical cannabis clubs could be better used elsewhere. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson made the same argument Tuesday, writing that while Oakland could certainly use federal assistance to reduce violent crime, it "doesn't need the kind of help federal authorities are giving us now." He went on to recount Monday's raid, noting that the feds searched Lee's apartment in addition to Oaksterdam University. Lee, who uses a wheelchair, "certainly qualifies as Public Enemy No. 1 in our town," Johnson wrote sarcastically.
Americans for Safe Access has also been fighting the medical cannabis raids, noting that closing the clubs will push patients into the illicit market without consequence. ASA has the support of legislators Assemblyman Tom Ammiano and state Senator Mark Leno. Ammiano met with Haag late last year.
While the federal government does not recognize cannabis as a medicine, state voters felt differently when they passed Prop 215. Certainly, the federal government has more important things to do.
The Justice Department's expenditures of funds for the medical cannabis raids are a misuse of tax dollars. Given that the future of health care reform is hanging in the balance at the U.S. Supreme Court, one would think that allowing people access to their medicine �" even cannabis, which some consider alternative �" is more important than raiding dispensaries, harassing patients, and dragging a wheelchair-bound advocate out of his home.