Medical Cannabis in Los Angeles

(taken from the Los Angeles Magazine April 2007 issue)

Here are some of my selected highlights of the article:

" 'Prop 215 was written by anarchists,' says Allen St. Pierre, executive director for the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws or NORML. He says that one of the initiatives authors, Dennis Peron, has famously declared that all marijuana use is medical. 'It is literally written to be chaotic and now there is no wherewithal to restrict it.' " (page_)

" ...dispensaries occupy another gray area of the medical marijuana industry. 'We're primarily supplied by growers who are for the most part also our patients,' says a Los Angeles dispensary owner who I will call Stan. 'Technically it's not a real financial transaction that happens. Vendors make a donation of their medicine and in return we give them a cash donation. Kind of like a church.' " (page_)

"For patients, obtaining pot is pretty straightforward. But feeding the beast is not easy. Marijuana is fragrant, voluminous, and a felony in the eyes of DEA agents and the federal government. There is no infrastructure and state-sanctioned farm dedicated to growing marijuana for medical use. For the most part, marijuana sold in the dispensaries comes either from the same growers who supply the illicit market or from patients who cultivate their own marijuana. The stipulation in Prop. 215 that allows individuals to grow their own pot also permits patients to grow it for others in medical need. Individuals collect referrals from any number of card-carrying patients and produce marijuana for the collective on a much larger scale. They then sell the medicine to the dispensaries, who sell it to the members of the collective." (page_)