Pubdate: Sat, 30 Jan 2016
Source: Orange County Register, The (CA)
Copyright: 2016 The Orange County Register
Contact:  http://www.ocregister.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/321
Author: William B. Bingham

MEDICINAL MARIJUANA A SMOKESCREEN

Your Editorial Board can't seem to get it. Yes, voters approved 
medical marijuana measure Proposition 215 because they believed that 
only medicinal uses would be legalized.

Since then, many municipalities have discovered that this is just a 
smokescreen to legalize marijuana for all purposes. It's obvious that 
your editors haven't lived in a neighborhood where dispensaries 
result in stoned teenagers roaming the neighborhood late at night. If 
you truly believed that marijuana had medicinal value, you would make 
efforts to legalize it through prescription pharmaceutical channels.

You have criticized city councils in Huntington Beach and Fountain 
Valley for not bowing to your marijuana god. I am grateful they held 
their ground, and I hope Garden Grove does the same.

Frankly, I see a lot of hypocrisy in the movement to legalize 
marijuana. Please, just admit that you really want to legalize it for 
all purposes. If you live in a commune where impressionable kids 
don't live, then what you do is your business and that should not be 
regulated. Laguna Woods comes to mind. But if you live in a community 
where a parent's greatest fear is a child's addiction to 
mind-altering drugs, you would see it differently.

William B. Bingham

Fountain Valley
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom