Pubdate: Sun, 09 Sep 2012
Source: News Tribune, The (Tacoma, WA)
Copyright: 2012 Tacoma News, Inc.
Contact: http://blog.thenewstribune.com/letters/submit/
Website: http://www.thenewstribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/442

I-502 HAS FLUSHED OUT THE MEDICAL CANNABIS INDUSTRY

Strangers to marijuana politics might assume that the drug's 
champions would be cheering a ballot measure designed to legalize 
marijuana in Washington.

Follow the White Rabbit into Wonderland, though, and it turns out 
that the most ferocious opposition to Initiative 502 is coming from 
marijuana advocates - especially "medical" marijuana advocates.

They include people who run dispensaries and pot-friendly 
practitioners who keep the cannabis shops in business by churning out 
so-called green cards for drug-seekers.

Both groups are pocketing immense amounts of money from an illegal 
and incestuous industry.

The pot docs - most of whom don't seem to be actual medical doctors - 
commonly promise users their money back if they don't walk away with 
a license to smoke.

Sometimes the customers have to walk only a few feet, to the counter 
of the dispensary that helped arranged the consultation. Imagine a 
pharmacy that sells only Xanax in partnership with a quack who mostly 
sells Xanax prescriptions. Writ large, that's pretty much the 
relationship between docs and dispensaries on a statewide scale.

They have every incentive to manufacture large numbers of "patients," 
who these days are mostly common recreational users. They have every 
incentive to guard their hold on these customers.

Now comes I-502, which would demolish that monopoly by permitting 
marijuana sales in stores licensed by the state Liquor Control Board.

The initiative has its flaws, but it is unmistakably the work of 
grownups. Like grownups, it insists on limits.

Marijuana zealots don't like those limits. Some don't like the 
restrictions on how much pot a customer can buy at one time, for 
example. Some don't like the requirement that sellers be fingerprinted.

The dispensary industry has seized on the measure's rules against 
drugged driving, claiming they will keep patients off the roads.

One complaint is that I-502 would forbid people under 21 from driving 
with marijuana in their systems. Yes, the public is supposed to be 
alarmed about that.

Another complaint is that the law would presume intoxication if 
drivers exceeded a 5 nanogram limit of THC - the drug's potent 
psychoactive agent - in their blood.

The science of driving-while-high is in its infancy, but evidence 
suggests that people who'd fail that test are typically more than one 
toke over the line. In any case, the law should err on the side of 
protecting other drivers.

The real agenda here isn't about nanograms - it's about money. It's 
about the loss of monopoly. The dispensary-quackery complex, which 
has turned medical marijuana into a money-grubbing sham over the last 
three years, no longer bothers to hide its priorities.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom