(The following is the first draft of an Op-Ed piece I’m submitting to NPR in response to their coverage of the medical marijuana issue in LA. I wrote the piece a month ago and I’ve since rewritten it entirely to reflect the most recent events of February. But I still think this version is worth checking out.)
CALIFORNIA’S EVOLVING MARIJUANA POLICY IS FACING A POTENTIALLY HISTORIC 48 hours next week. Up in Sacramento on Tuesday, the Public Safety Committee of the California Assembly will vote on AB 390, a bill calling for the legalization, taxation and regulation of marijuana. Should the bill win a majority of votes, it would immediately face a vote in the California State Assembly Committee on Health—two huge steps forward in the drive to end cannabis prohibition in California.
The following day, on January 13 down in Southern California, the Los Angeles City Council is scheduled to vote on a proposed ordinance that would force the relocation of nearly all the medical marijuana dispensaries that survived a December 8 council vote calling for a cap on the number of dispensaries at 137. All but five of these survivors would need to find new storefronts if the ordinance passes, thanks to a proposed 500-foot buffer zone from sensitive use areas—including schools, libraries and homes.
As an employee at a reputable, tax-paying Los Angeles dispensary, I’m hoping the politicians do what’s just and sensible next week. But I’ve seen first-hand how the issues have been twisted and contorted, largely by a compliant media that’s been misrepresenting the truth, ignoring salient questions, playing loose with the facts and turning a lazy eye towards the social, political and corporate underpinnings of this story. So you’ll excuse me if I’m skeptical that our elected officials can see through the spin and recognize the economic, not to mention public safety, benefits of a legalized, regulated and taxed marijuana market. I wish I could believe they’ll carry out the will of the people. (A Field Poll last year found 56% of Californians supporting cannabis legalization.)
But six months in a dispensary has opened my eyes.
It didn’t take long to realize that the debate’s been tainted, the deck’s been stacked and the picture I’d been painted by politicians and reporters was nothing like the reality I’d be experiencing day in and day out at the Silverlake dispensary that a good friend of mine and his business partner opened late last June.
Of course, I’d heard about the Mexican drug cartels, the shady characters making obscene profits, the spike in crime and a dispensary clientele comprised mostly of seemingly healthy young male “patients” clamoring for legal pot.
That’s the narrative I’d been sold. And I can tell you with no uncertainty that it bears little resemblance to what I’ve witnessed in my six months working at a dispensary in the heart of one of L.A.’s trendiest neighborhoods.
For starters, many, if not most, of those “seemingly healthy” young men often have conditions that a reporter staked out across the street couldn’t possibly diagnose—ulcers, chronic pain due to skateboard mishaps and car accidents, depression, migraines, insomnia. I get engaged in long conversations with many of our patients and I can tell you, their suffering is quite often very real and should not be so hastily questioned.
But this demographic by no means makes up the vast majority of our business. I’ve also helped many female patients. From Hispanic grandmothers to local career girls to hardworking single mothers. I’ve also met a parade of musicians, painters, writers, teachers, nurses, students, construction workers, you name it—even a patient who played in Super Bowl XXV and uses medical marijuana to alleviate the aches and pains of a long football career. Not to mention all the patients battling cancer and AIDS, a brave, optimistic lot of which there’ve been plenty. I’ve gotten to know many of these people personally and have found them to be some of the most kind-hearted, decent people I’ve ever met.
As far as links to organized crime go, our cannabis has zero connection whatsoever to any Mexican drug cartels. More like licensed Humboldt farmers-turned-patients and our local pot-growing regulars. Oh, and those obscene profits? My friend, Vic, and his partner, Steve, have been losing money every month since we’ve been open. Until not too recently we were lucky to hit $1000 in sales on a single day, hardly the windfall I keep hearing about in every media story.
Then there’s the crime spin. We’ve all heard how dispensaries were being robbed and bringing pot-related crimes to their neighborhoods. Well, the worst thing that’s happened at work—where we’ve yet to hire a security guard—is my car got broken into a quarter mile down the road. And that only occurred because I’d foolishly left it parked on a dark side street with luggage visible in the backseat. Hardly a dispensary-related crime. (More like my own negligence.)
In fact, a quick check of the LAPD website will tell you that crime in our neighborhood—and throughout most of LA—has gone down the last couple years. That’s right. Since a hardship loophole was found in the City Council’s 2007 moratorium banning any new dispensaries beyond the 186 that were already in business—leading to an alleged 600-800 new dispensaries across the city, such as the one I’ve been working at—Los Angeles has actually gotten safer.
How many times have you heard this fact in a news story about the so-called “pot wars?” Where are the stories about the dispensaries that offer suffering cancer patients a safe, comfortable place to get their medicine—at a fraction of the cost they’d be paying from a sketchy dealer in a dark alley? When’s the last time you heard about the honest dispensary owner with a pregnant wife at home, trying to provide for his new family while he can’t cover his overhead at the dispensary from “donations” because he’s not getting enough customers? Despite what you’ve heard, not every dispensary is raking it in.
A perfect example of the media fudging the facts, ignoring important questions and shaping the debate occurred last month on NPR’s story, “Los Angeles Aims To Close Some Pot Dispensaries.” Even Robert Siegel’s two line introduction commits the sort of unexamined errors that have plagued this issue. On December 14 Mr. Siegel introduced Mandalit Del Barco’s story about “the thriving drug business in Los Angeles,” pointing out that so many pot clinics have opened in L.A. “they now outnumber Starbucks and McDonald’s combined.”
Can you really call the city’s medical marijuana world a “thriving drug business” when a low-cost dispensary on high-profile Sunset Blvd. only sees five to 15 patients a day? (Never mind the fact that many would argue marijuana is a plant, not a drug.) Clearly there are more than a few dispensaries doing a booming business and hopefully they are contributing their fair share to the city’s tax coffers.
Then again, there are also countless dispensaries struggling to stay afloat due to mismanagement and market oversaturation. Not every dispensary is a golden goose. Of the nearly 800 hardship requests the city has granted since 2007, less than half of those dispensaries—roughly 370 as of late November—are still in business. And many speculators wanting in on the “California Green Rush” received permits for dispensaries they never opened. A simple check of the public record and a few phone calls would have revealed this.
Which brings me to my second beef with Mr. Siegel’s intro, which closes by perpetuating the oft-repeated fallacy that dispensaries “now outnumber Starbucks and McDonald’s combined” in Los Angeles. This is simply not true. According to their web sites, there are 477 Starbucks and 354 McDonald’s locations in L.A. County. And are there more than 831 dispensaries in Los Angeles?
Absolutely not.
The truth is, no one knows exactly how many exist. Ms. Del Barco goes on to say that Los Angeles now has nearly 1000 pot clinics, a number that’s been repeated so many times in the media by politicians and reporters—particularly by the anti-cannabis crowd—that it’s simply assumed to be the truth. Or close enough.
And just where did that wildly inaccurate number come from?
Most likely from some simple math. If there were 186 dispensaries before the city granted close to 800 hardship exemption permits beginning in 2007, there must be close to a thousand dispensaries, right? What nobody except L.A. Weekly has bothered to do is pound the streets and hit the phones to create a comprehensive dispensary data base. After traveling close to a 1000 miles and making close to 1,400 phone calls, the Weekly discovered that nearly 400 of those permits were for dispensaries that are no longer—or never were—in business. We’d trust the paper’s final head count of 545 if not for their questionable math skills. (The Weekly counted our dispensary three times, due to the fact that three different permit applications were filed for the same address.)
So why quibble with the math? Whether the number is 500 or 1000, does it make a difference?
Absolutely. It’s a matter of perception and the erosion of trust. Local politicians have helped whip up an atmosphere of fear, throwing out dubious numbers and opinions begging examination. A perfect example: Ms. Del Barco gives us a sound byte of Los Angeles City Attorney Carmen Trutanich stating “the last thing that we want to do here in the city is deprive those people that truly need it as medicine from getting it.”
But that’s exactly what he’d be doing if Trutanich and his closesty ally, Los Angeles County DA Steve Cooley, get their way. Against the wishes of the City Council and 77% of the public in Los Angeles—who want to regulate, not shut down and prosecute, the city’s dispensaries—the pair is pushing for a major crackdown on the entire medical marijuana community. Cooley told NPR “about 100 percent of dispensaries in Los Angeles County and the city are operating illegally.”
Ms. Del Barco fails to give voice to anyone who disagrees with Cooley—and they are many. Missing too is any mention of how other cities have managed their dispensary situation. How is that politicians in cities like San Francisco, Oakland and West Hollywood can interpret the law completely differently than Cooley and Trutanich?
Another glaring omission from last month’s NPR piece is a thorough analysis of what impact shutting down most of the dispensaries would bring. A lone dispensary advocate predicts a nightmare scenario of runaway black market sales and a host of new drug dealers. But what about the lost rents? The lost jobs? The lost tax revenue? Los Angeles and California are both in the midst of a financial crisis. Does it really make sense to scale back on a policy that could add billions to strapped city and state governments?
Rarer still in the media coverage—and nowhere to be seen in NPR’s piece last month—is the elephant in the room: the fact that marijuana has been proven in countless studies to be far less dangerous than alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals. The biggest danger in consuming marijuana is its illegality. Then there’s marijuana’s history in America. How many Americans realize that cannabis only became illegal in 1937 due to propaganda, racism and the greed of William Randolph Hearst and the Dupont family? Understanding our history with marijuana is crucial to comprehending how we got here and how we can overcome 70 years of government-backed lies.
The reasons for not legalizing, regulating and taxing cannabis are inconsistent and contradictory—yet they seem to get the most airtime. How often does the debate include the crucial area of hemp production and its potential to transform our economy in many key areas like logging, nutrition, energy and eco-friendly farming?
And what about the hypocrisy running through the anti-dispensary circles? Many of the people offended by dispensaries in their neighborhoods are strangely silent when it comes to their local liquor and drug stores, which surely have done as much, if not far more, harm to their communities.
“I don’t see why they don’t just allow all the dispensaries to stay open,” a patient was telling me a few weeks ago. “Lay down some regulations, make sure they’re adhered to, collect the tax revenues and let the market decide who makes it and who doesn’t.”
Hopefully the politicians in Sacramento and Los Angeles will be able to see clearly through the media’s mist of misinformation and do the right thing next week.
But I’m not betting on it.
Bob the Budtender 