Pubdate: Thu, 20 Sep 2012
Source: Tucson Weekly (AZ)
Copyright: 2012 Tucson Weekly
Contact:  http://www.tucsonweekly.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/462
Author: J.M. Smith

BREAKING DOWN THE BUST WHAT WILL THE BIG SHOP 420 RAIDS MEAN TO 
TUCSON'S LEGIT MMJ COMMUNITY?

In the dead of night, they came.

Strapped with threatening gear, locked and loaded for extreme 
prejudice, they swooped in SWAT-style on Wednesday, Sept. 12, after a 
month of planning to rid our city of yet another horrible scourge-to 
protect children, frail elderly ladies and nosy neighbors from ... pot.

They are officers on the Counter Narcotics Alliance, a drug-busting 
task force with officers from 14 Southern Arizona law-enforcement 
agencies. Their perceived scourge was a group of certification 
clinics and collectives operating under the name Shop 420. Officers 
crashed into five Shop 420 locations-four in Tucson, and one in Casa 
Grande-and took 14 pounds of meds, 10 hostages and a gun. The 
hostages were later released, after they were charged with 
money-laundering, conspiracy, planning to sell pot and possessing pot 
paraphernalia.

All of this sucks quite a bit, especially for the hostages, but also 
for the medical-marijuana community at large.

But before you flap your arms and offer a hue and cry about patients 
being abused, and rights being forestalled, and doctor-patient 
relations being violated, put down the vaporizer tube, and step away 
from the Volcano. Please allow me to point out a couple of things 
that are probably more likely to piss you off than put your mind at ease.

You do not have the right to smoke, grow, eat, sell, trade, carry, 
store, infuse, cook or otherwise possess or distribute or give away 
marijuana. Period. Many of us think that because we voted for it in 
Arizona, we suddenly have the right to roll smoke. In a guest post on 
Forbes.com, Seattle lawyer Wendy S. Goffe recently said that until 
federal laws change, state regulation remains "lipstick on a pig."

Of course, the Shop 420 case involves local jurisdictions, so federal 
law isn't at play. But it seems like the Shop 420 folks were flying a 
little too close even to the state-law sun. If you try to soar at 
that altitude, the SWAT team will burn your wings into painful, 
seared stumps. You will not fly again soon. Just ask the folks at 
Green Halo Caregiver Collective, where a similar raid happened in July.

The narco-alliance folks reported that the Shop 420 raids turned up 
fake MMJ cards and equipment to make them. If that's true, I have 
little sympathy for the people at Shop 420. None, in fact. Although 
it is a completely separate issue, those fake cards will now be 
inextricably linked to MMJ in the eyes of the gen pop, painting a 
picture in their minds that will be hard to overcome. Ouch.

I support Shop 420 in spirit, but taken as a whole, I think the way 
they were doing business gives MMJ a bad name. They were operating 
near at least one school and a church, which isn't inherently bad, 
but isn't allowed under the city's dispensary rules. Couldn't they 
have at least tried to be, or even appear to be, legit by putting 
their storefronts a little more in line with city pot rules? Yes, 
they could have.

Ultimately, it's a bad idea to open a collective in Arizona right 
now. It's a murky area of the law. Interestingly, no one in any 
Tucson raid has been charged with selling marijuana-the stated reason 
for the raids. I am not a lawyer, but it seems likely that 
prosecutors would have a hard time proving anyone sold marijuana at 
these places, because exchanges between patients and caregivers are 
allowed. Conspiracy to sell might offer an easier route to prosecution.

Time will tell.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom