Drug War Issues
Politics & Advocacy
After nearly 20 years of wrangling over what is and is not legal under California's 1996 Proposition 215 medical marijuana law, the state legislature has passed a set of bills designed to bring order to the chaos.
If, as expected, Gov. Brown signs the bills into law, the medical marijuana status quo, rife with ambiguities, contradictions, and gray areas, will be transformed into a robust, strictly regulated medical marijuana industry. It won't always be painless, and there will be winners and losers.
For starters, the bills will once and for all clarify to law enforcement that licensed medical marijuana producers and their activities "are not unlawful under state law and shall not be an offense subject to arrest, prosecution, or sanction under state law, or be subject to a civil fine or be a basis for seizure or forfeiture of assets under state law."
The bills also clarify that medical marijuana can be a profit-making and -taking industry. Some local law enforcement and prosecutors have used making a profit as a basis for charging medical marijuana operators. Now, no more.
Patients and caregivers maintain their Prop 215 rights to possess and grow their own medicine, but collectives will be phased out, and anyone who wants to grow more than a personal amount will need a license. The bills provide for 12 different types of licenses, for "specialty," small, and medium indoor, outdoor, and mixed-light commercial grows; manufacturers, testers, transporters, distributors, and dispensaries."
Patients and providers who reside in localities hostile to medical marijuana may still be out of luck, though. The bills allow cities and counties to continue to ban such activities (although not deliveries).
There remains work to be done. Potency and purity standards haven't been set yet, the dual licensing structure with both state and local permits hasn't been settled, and lots of issues remain to be hashed out by state officials charged with writing regulations to implement the bills.
But California's billion dollar medical marijuana industry is about to come in from the cold.
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Comments
Regulating Extinction
Oh, wonderful...
The revenue-raising predatory bureaucrats and "drug war dinoswhores", who know nothing about Cannabis, have joined forces with medical-marijuana-industrial profiteers, to perpetuate fraudulent Schedule One status, in "regulating" a God-given "herb bearing seed." The safest, most broadly effective and potentially least expensive, most available herbal therapeutic known to man (which also provides complete nutrition, sustainable biofuels, atmospheric aerosol monoterpenes, regenerates damaged soils, etc...) continues to be suppressed, limited and made more expensive than it needs to be, rather than allowed to flourish into the economics of abundance.
Even as toxic fluoride contaminates our dwindling reserves of water; "vaccines" (i.e. drugs) are forced into our kids' veins; 1 in 68 children has been diagnosed with autism; and Monsanto is given free-reign to poisons us with unlabeled GMOs; we are being misled into systemic collapse; we continue to follow the obviously manipulative, criminally misanthropic misleadership posing as the U.S. government.
It is sad, and disgusting, to witness the obvious political degeneration of our species, in cruel pursuit of our own extinction.
California medical marijuana
The state officials now need to stand up to the feds and declare that cannabis has medical use in California and by law has medical use in the United States as California is in the United States and therefor does not meet the federal I definition of no medical use in the United States and demand the feds take it out of federal schedule I immediately.
In reply to California medical marijuana by Jeff Brown (not verified)
LOL ... you're a funny guy.
LOL ... you're a funny guy.
The most useful plant on the planet
Cannabis is the most useful plant on the planet, food, clothing, shelter, energy, medicine, insight, re-creation. Any law against it is a crime against humanity.
By the time ..........
California and the (12) state agencies that will be involved in this get their sheet together .............. it'll be 2020.
Hopefully by then, Recreational will have passed in this State (certainly not a given considering the same dopes at ReformCA that failed to do this previously are trying to lead the charge again). What that brings to the table is anyone's guess.
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