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Chicago Tribune reports on the popularity of medical marijuana delivery in San Francisco:

SAN JOSE, Calif. - -- David Goldman has a chronic headache, but help is on the way. A driver arrives at his apartment, checks Goldman's ID card, then hands over a small bag of marijuana.

"It's really nice to have the convenience of delivery," said Goldman, a retired teacher who orders medicinal marijuana about once a week from The Green Cross, a medical marijuana delivery service. "I trust their product, and their prices are competitive."

As Californians consider legalizing marijuana, The Green Cross in San Francisco is a signal of just how mainstream pot has become. In some ways, the medical marijuana dispensary is just like any other retail business: It takes credit cards, it's reviewed on Yelp and it promises delivery within an hour -- there's even a $10 discount if the pot is late.

The Green Cross switched over to a delivery-based model due to problems finding a suitable location when they were forced to move their dispensary. Even in San Francisco, you can run into a "not in my backyard" mentality from neighbors when it comes to dispensing marijuana from a storefront business.

As Americans grow increasingly skeptical of the war on marijuana, one of the biggest challenges facing reformers is to develop a plan that the public is comfortable with. As silly as it is that you can sell cigarettes and alcohol to adults over the counter, but not marijuana, we have to face the fact that getting people to vote for any legislation allowing "marijuana stores" is going to remain a challenge. Concerns about peripheral crime, underage access, etc. may be unrealistic, but our opposition can still leverage such anxieties against us at the voting booth.

Home delivery has a lot to offer as a means of providing convenient consumer access, while reducing the visibility of activity that makes some people uncomfortable. This is already the model on which New York City's underground marijuana industry thrives, and nobody seems to have a problem with it (the only complaints I've heard are from buyers who say the price is outrageous). The delivery approach reduces exposure for both buyer and seller, while also making it easy for everyone else to ignore them.

In the long term, a low-impact distribution model such as this could go a long way towards increasing public tolerance. It's not exactly what most of us have in mind when we envision legalization, but it's a compromise that could go a long way towards eliminating the harms of the current policy without opening up the floodgates and provoking a backlash.

What do you think?

As if the persecution prosecution of medical marijuana provider Charlie Lynch wasn't sufficiently sickening already, The New Times in San Luis Obispo has some stunning revelations about the involvement of a confidential informant who assisted police in the case.

Apparently, police employed a professional informant who obtained a doctor's recommendation and purchased marijuana at Lynch's dispensary. The guy is a world-class scumbag with a history of impersonating police officers and committing various crimes. His work in San Luis Obispo began when he personally approached police and offered to help generate drug arrests. Lynch's case was one of many, including another marijuana case in which one of the defendants ended up committing suicide.

While this guy probably wasn't a critical factor in making the Lynch case possible, his involvement adds another layer of moral depravity to the Lynch saga. Given that Charlie Lynch scrupulously followed state law, the only actual criminal involved in the case was the police informant!

As alarming and frequent as gratuitous drug war injustices are, they still somehow turn out to be even worse than we thought.

Marijuana Policy Project has launched a TV ad campaign in support of taxing and regulating marijuana in California:



Unfortunately, while the ad will appear on several networks, KABC in Los Angeles and KGO and KNTV in San Francisco actually rejected it:

At KABC in L.A., the ad was rejected for purportedly encouraging marijuana smoking. [MPP's Bruce] Mirken spoke to station manager Arnie Kleiner, who didn't return a call from the Huffington Post. "His feeling wasn't that the ad was promoting a change in the law, but that it was promoting marijuana smoking," said Mirken, adding that Kleiner told him, "I'm not going to advocate the smoking of marijuana. Marijuana is illegal." [Huffington Post]

As anyone viewing the ad can plainly see, it doesn’t endorse marijuana smoking in any way. The ad argues that the existing marijuana industry could be used to generate much-needed revenue for the state, which has nothing to do with whether or not one happens to personally like marijuana or think it's a good thing for people to do. The kneejerk assertion that all efforts to reform marijuana laws are equivalent to an endorsement of drug use is really as intellectually barren an argument as you'll ever find in the marijuana policy debate. It's a desperate cop-out and an instant indicator that you're dealing with someone whose comprehension of the issue is not fully formed.

Similarly, the argument that you can’t talk about changing marijuana laws because "marijuana is illegal" is just a paralyzing absurdity. Even the Governor of California is interested is debating marijuana legalization, so obviously the existence of current marijuana laws does not create an invisible barrier to intelligent discourse about public policy.

Fortunately, the marijuana debate has progressed to a point at which such petty obstructions serve only to embarrass those responsible. A recent poll shows that 56% of Californians support marijuana legalization, thus any public entity that endeavors to conceal or trivialize the argument takes a substantial risk of alienating its own patrons.

Nevertheless, the ad will air on many stations in California and it's thrilling to see the reform argument marketed to the mainstream. The Governor asked for a debate and that's exactly what he's going to get.