Clearing the Air

Attorney General Kamala Harris wants state lawmakers to clarify California’s MMJ regulations

If California Attorney Gen. Kamala Harris seems confused by the state’s medical marijuana laws—to the point that she recently sent letters to state legislators asking them clarify what Proposition 215 and Senate Bill 420 actually mean—she can be forgiven.

Law enforcers have long expressed befuddlement over the concept of medical marijuana in general and 215 and 420—the two acts that opened the door to the state’s $1.4 billion medical marijuana industry—in particular. It’s all so puzzling to the cops that two different police agencies can read the medical marijuana laws on the books and reach diametrically opposed conclusions.

For Harris, California’s go-to official whenever the meaning of state legislation becomes a matter of debate, the clamor over how to enforce medical marijuana law was already enough to give her a constant migraine before the feds got involved. Now, with DEA agents kicking in doors all across her state as if they owned the place, the noise has reached a pitch well past intolerable.

“We cannot protect the will of the voters, or the ability of seriously ill patients to access their medicine, until statutory changes are made that define the scope of the group cultivation right, whether dispensaries and edible marijuana products are permissible and how marijuana grown for medical use may lawfully be transported,” Harris wrote in a Dec. 21 letter to “partners and colleagues”—meaning the state legislature.

If Harris needed evidence supporting the importance of answering such questions, she needed only to consider the sad case in Long Beach, where collective operators and activists Joe Grumbine and Joe Byron were convicted of 13 felony counts related to their medical cannabis operation.

The pair was accused of selling a small amount of medical marijuana to qualified medical marijuana patients holding genuine medical marijuana recommendations written by actual referring physicians. Unfortunately for Grumbine and Byron, the patients also happened to be undercover officers. It didn’t help that the two Joes had kept meticulous records on all their transactions in an apparent effort to stay within state and federal law, which demands such records be kept. After the guilty verdicts, a juror in the case said it was the records that sealed Grumbine’s and Byron’s fates.

The spectacle of citizens being jailed for following what they believed to be the letter of the law is one of the reasons why Harris wants clarification on medical marijuana laws. A liberal Democrat, Harris campaigned partly on promises of a more progressive stance toward compassionate use. Another reason had to do with house-keeping: Harris’s predecessor, now-governor Jerry Brown, left behind a huge mess with his confounding 2008 medical marijuana guidelines.

If marijuana activists had hoped Harris would clear the waters on these matters, they were in for a letdown. In her letter to state legislators, she announced she was essentially giving up on the rewrite and tossing the matter to Sacramento, saying in the letter, “[I] am urging the California Legislature to amend the law to establish clear rules governing access to medical marijuana.”

Exactly what kind of clarification Harris hopes to get out of the legislature—whether in the form of a relaxing or toughening of enforcement policy—is unclear: A call to Harris for comment was routed to a press spokesperson, who said, “The attorney general feels the letter speaks for itself.” Nor do we know what the lawmakers are likely to give her—none of the legislators we contacted responded, either.

From Bad to Worse

Drafted for the stated purpose of clearing up any confusion on how the medical marijuana community should conduct itself, the guidelines then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s issued in 2008 proved only to muddy the waters further. He made no mention of how medical cannabis should be grown, transported or distributed, leaving it to police and prosecutors to try to puzzle it all out. Worse, he turned mud into quicksand by declaring for-profit sales of medical cannabis illegal under the law—a stipulation found nowhere in Proposition 215.