[Below is Mr. David M. Agrela letter, “Addicted to medical marijuana dispensaries,” which ran Dec. 13 in the Orange County Register, and my reply to this sad little commentary. To date, the Register hasn’t printed my response.]
December 13, 2009
Addicted to medical marijuana dispensaries
By David M. Agrela
Medical marijuana supporters aren’t telling the truth. Under a smokescreen of rhetoric about easing suffering from chronic conditions, many – if not most – medical marijuana dispensaries quietly make tons of profit from customers who, in many cases, do not have legitimate doctor’s prescriptions.
It’s easy to get a scrip for pot. Dispensaries offer referrals to pot-friendly physicians who will write a prescription for pot under dubious diagnoses for symptoms ranging from vaguely painful arthritis to phantom cancer – for a cash fee.
An Indica dominant Romulan hybrid of medical marijuana is weighed and dispensed at God’s Green Earth Compassionate Outreach collective in Foothill Ranch Monday. marijuana Oct. 19, 2009.
All one has to do is walk in and say you’re suffering from (fill in the blank) and pay a fee for the visit and you can walk out with a paper entitling you to buy the formerly illegal drug, which is still illegal, according to the federal government but OK for “compassionate use,” according to California after it was voted in by a slim majority of voters last decade.
But the dirty little secret of medical marijuana is that many people who are nothing but criminal potheads have been using the medical marijuana statute to obtain their drug of choice under the pseudolegal aegis of the current laws.
The truth? Many of the people buying weed at dispensaries are simple potheads.
California didn’t legalize the drug. The voters mandated that pot should be a legitimate option for patients for whom other, legal medicines were ineffective. We didn’t vote to open the market to profiteers wanting to sell pot without fear of law enforcement. But that’s what we have today.
Proposition 215 has opened the floodgates for legalized sales of an illegal drug to people who prefer to pay a vendor at an O.C. storefront instead of buying it the old-fashioned way – in alleys behind convenience stores near school campuses, where the dregs of society prey on the young and suburban outlaws.
Originally, the statute provided for home-grown pot cultivation and “collectives” through which medicinal users could obtain enough of the drug to ease suffering from chronic illnesses (small amounts).
Wholesaling of marijuana was never part of the bargain. But that’s what it’s come to.
If California had wanted to legalize pot, we’ve had plenty of opportunities. Pro-marijuana groups have been lobbying for all-out legalization for 40 years. But the people of this state have rejected it over and over again.
We don’t want pot legalized. It’s still a dangerous, “gateway” drug that promotes deepening involvement in even more dangerous and illegal drugs.
Do many pot users limit themselves to marijuana? Sure they do. But the recreational use of marijuana is still illegal in California, and there’s no glimmer that our collective attitudes about it are changing, even if marijuana use is limited to people who are older than 18, using in their homes.
No one ever intended for marijuana sales to become a legitimate industry in our state, except for a few who want unfettered access to it. Medical marijuana sales through dispensaries have become little more than a loophole through which illegal users have crossed.
The simple truth: if you suffer chronic illness, you have many legal options for medication through legitimate medical doctors. Marijuana doesn’t offer anything that a myriad of medicines doesn’t. If you think pot is a legitimate option, you haven’t been consulting your doctor enough.
Meanwhile, drug users have been exploiting a loophole in the law that was left open through the vague language of a statute that should never have been passed in the first place.
**
My reply:
Dec. 13, 2009
By David Burton
Mr. David M. Agrela’s letter (“Addicted to medical marijuana dispensaries,” Dec. 13) is exactly the kind of rhetoric we’ve come to expect from the anti-medical cannabis crowd – misinformation wrapped in false logic and served on a platter of moral superiority.
The letter’s assertion that “many, if not most” medical-marijuana patients don’t have “legitimate doctor’s prescriptions” is just ill-informed. No one has a doctor’s prescription for medical pot. California’s Medical Marijuana Program simply allows physicians to write cannabis recommendations to patients, who then use these referrals to obtain their medicine. The notion — promulgated by folks like Mr. Agrela — that the hills ring with the scribbling of fraudulent pot “scrips” is a falsehood, and folks like Mr. Agrela should know that.
But Mr. Agrela spends the lion’s share of his letter pushing the two favorite canards of the anti-medical cannabis crowd – that cannabis users are bad people, and that Proposition 215 was only intended to provide relief to seriously ill people.
As best as I can tell, Mr. Agrela reasons that “many, if not most” people who avail themselves of medical marijuana are perfectly healthy – he knows this because…well, he just knows this. He feels it in his bones. He apparently also just knows that any non-desperately ill person who smokes medical cannabis is both a criminal and a pothead, because pot is bad. Unless, of course, you suffer from a chronic illness, in which case you can use pot and not be bad.
Therefore, the reasoning continues, many if not most of California’s estimated 202,400 registered medical-marijuana patients are criminals, or what Mr. Agrela describes as “criminal potheads” or “simple potheads.” By extension, we can also assume that many if not most of the estimated 578,000 registered cannabis patients in the whole of the U.S. are also criminal potheads, not to mention the 41 million Americans who say they’ve smoked pot in their lifetimes.
You begin to understand why Mr. Agrela is so upset these days – he’s up to his eyeballs in criminal potheads.
Perhaps it would ease his concerns to know that Proposition 215 wasn’t written to apply solely to those with serious illnesses. The language of the law is clear: It applies to any Californian for who a physician has determined “would benefit from the use of marijuana in the treatment of cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis, migraine, or any other illness [emphasis mine] for which marijuana provides relief.” That’s what voters were presented with in 1996, and that’s what they approved by what Mr. Agrela describes as “a slim majority” – if 56 percent of the vote can be called slim.
It also might help Mr. Agrela to know that, despite his insistence to the contrary, “our collective attitudes” about wholesale marijuana legalization are in fact changing. Recent polls show that 56 percent of Californians surveyed want cannabis to be legalized and taxed, and that 53 percent of those surveyed nationwide believe cannabis prohibition should be lifted. Support for legalizing pot has never been greater, perhaps due to a growing awareness that some 120 million Americans now live in states where medical cannabis is legal and the world somehow has not ended.
Access to medical marijuana is a public-policy issue, and public policy should be debated with the facts – not high rhetoric, mischaracterizations or factual inaccuracies. Based on the facts, Mr. Agrela’s argument against medical-marijuana dispensaries is just a lot of smoke without substance.
DAVID BURTON
Editor
CULTURE Magazine
