Go After Drug Cartels, Not Legal Patients!
I am so tired of hearing police claim that medical marijuana is a front for the Mexican Drug Cartel, this is false and the police and DEA would find better use of it’s time fighting the actual Mexican Drug Cartels instead of putting out public campaigns against medical marijuana.
As the east Oregonian reports: “Eleven years after Oregonians voted to allow the cultivation and use of marijuana by prescription, the Justice Department finally has conceded the obvious: Drug agents have more important things to do than fight medicinal pot.”
The decision amounts to switching on a grow light for states to cultivate medical marijuana laws without interference from the federal government. Where all this ultimately leads is unclear, but it seems likely that one or more states - perhaps including Oregon - may vote in the next year or two on even broader legalization of marijuana.
Besides Oregon, there are 13 states that have already legalized medical marijuana. But the new Justice Department guidelines are aimed primarily at California, which allows dispensaries that sell marijuana and advertise their services. Since June 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the government could enforce federal marijuana laws even in states permitted medical marijuana, federal agents have conducted more than 200 raids in California alone.
The people not only want access to medical marijuana, but as stepping up for their rights to do so legally and signing up for the program in record numbers.
Unlike California, Oregon doesn’t allow dispensaries or any over-the-counter sales of marijuana. The Oregon Medical Marijuana Act, which was approved in 1998, two years after California’s law, permits the cultivation, possession and use of small amounts of marijuana by prescription by patients with certain medical conditions.
As of Oct. 1, according to the Department of Human Services, which administers the law, 23,873 Oregonians held medical marijuana cards issued by the state. The permits allow them to possess six mature cannabis plants, 18 seedlings and 24 ounces of usable marijuana. About 7,000 of the permit holders reported suffering from muscle-spasm disorders such as multiple sclerosis. More than 1,000 have cancer. About 4,000 suffer from nausea.
After all these years, the scientific debate over the medicinal qualities of marijuana is beside the point. There are tens of thousands of people in nearly a third of the U.S. states now using marijuana because they believe it relieves the symptoms of their illnesses.
Although patients should be allowed to grow more than six plants, this is step in right direction for now.
If there’s a drug war to be fought and won, it’s not with these people suffering from cancer or multiple sclerosis. It’s with the violent Mexican drug cartels which are using the enormous profits from their marijuana and methamphetamine sales in the United States to support other criminal enterprises.
But the police and DEA need to go after Mexican Drug Cartels and leave us American citizens alone.
You know how much better our country would be if they stopped filling the jails with pot smokers and started going after the killers and rapists on the streets? A huge amount of our police force is used up every day chasing people for a joint in their pocket instead of cops going after real killers and criminals.