These "Stoners Against Legalization" Fools Should Have Opposed Steve Cooley, Not Prop 19

On November 2nd, I was walking through Oaksterdam with Steve Silverman, when we happened across a group of misguided young pot-grower types clad in "No on 19" t-shirts flyering the neighborhood with anti-legalization propaganda. "Are you seriously out here defending marijuana prohibition?" Steve asked, to which their spokesman replied, "I like things the way they are now." I suggested that if he really cares about medical marijuana, maybe he should stop worrying about Prop 19 and put his time and energy into defeating Steve Cooley. His response was classic: "Who the hell is Steve Cooley?"

These idiots were so consumed by their paranoid opposition to Prop 19 that they literally didn't have a clue about the anti-pot prosecutor poised to become California's next attorney general. Unlike Prop 19, which explicitly left medical marijuana laws intact, Steve Cooley has made no secret of his intent to prosecute dispensaries in California. He's also holding a slight lead as the ballot counting continues more than a week later. If Steve Cooley becomes California's top law enforcement official, it could quickly become clear that Prop 19 was by no means the foremost threat to medical marijuana on the ballot last week.

The great tragedy here is that the attorney general race was so unbelievably close that the pro-pot anti-legalization crowd could have potentially affected the outcome by targeting Cooley instead of spending the last several months espousing tortured misinterpretations of Prop 19. Of course, we all could have done more to get the word out about Cooley, but it's particularly ironic that the people who worried the loudest about the fate of medical marijuana in California following this election somehow missed the only real threat that existed.