Last week, the illustrious Bruce Mirken told us about how opponents of Michigan’s “Proposal 1” are lying to voters by saying that there are “pot-smoking clubs” in every neighborhood in California.

Now the marijuana-obsessed Drug Czar’s Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is spewing more hogwash about California’s medical marijuana situation.

The ONDCP’s blog is claiming that there are more medical marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco than Starbucks coffee shops. Their “analysis” concludes that “in downtown San Francisco alone, there are 98 marijuana dispensaries, compared to 71 Starbucks Coffee shops.”

Surprise! Contrary to their own stated policy of “maximizing the quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” the ONDCP is lying to us.

There are only 25 medical marijuana dispensaries in the entire city of San Francisco. This figure was reported in a San Francisco Chronicle article just last month.

San Francisco’s dispenaries are tightly regulated by local land-use ordinances and, contrary to the ONDCP’s claims, there is no evidence that they cause an inordinate amount of crime.

Most patients in San Francisco actually want to see more points of access to medical marijuana in their city. After all, there are almost 60 Walgreens pharmacies successfully dispensing Oxycontin, morphine, and a number of other potentially dangerous medications within city limits.

A staggering $15.2 billion budget deficit in California didn’t stop Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger from sending thousands of state-legal medical marijuana patients into unemployment. Last night, the “Governator” vetoed A.B. 2279, which would have made it illegal for employers to fire or deny employment to state-legal medical marijuana patients for testing positive for marijuana.

A.B. 2279 included provisions that exempted safety-sensitive positions and didn’t force employers to violate federal law. But you wouldn’t know it by listening to the bill’s opponents.

Schwarzenegger’s veto message states that he couldn’t support the bill because “Employment protection was not a goal of the initiative as passed by voters.” Apparently the governor thinks that voters want to force medical marijuana patients into unemployment rather than allow them to work and pay taxes like those who use physician-prescribed Oxycontin do.

California’s medical marijuana law still enjoys overwhelming support from voters and it clearly demands that seriously ill patients not be subject to sanction for their use of medical marijuana.

Schwarzenegger, who freely admits his past use of marijuana and says he did it because he “always knew how to enjoy [himself],” just declared that if you use it as part of a physician-approved treatment, you don’t deserve to be employed.

California’s medical marijuana state ID cards protect qualified patients and caregivers from arrest, and each of the state’s 58 counties is required to make them available to their residents. However, in a crusade against the voter-approved medical marijuana law, some counties have refused to implement the program.

Fortunately, most counties are respecting the rule of law – even in traditionally conservative, rural and agricultural communities. Just yesterday, the Board of Supervisors in Kings County unanimously voted to implement the ID card program and the cards will be available to local patients very soon. The decision comes only two weeks after another San Joaquin Valley county, Fresno, also moved to implement the program. These developments are significant because San Joaquin Valley voters rejected Proposition 215 twelve years ago and the region has been painfully slow in implementing the state law ever since.

Have these agricultural, Republican-dominated communities been suddenly overrun by drug legalizers? Hardly. Instead, local policymakers across California – in red and blue counties alike – are acknowledging that the state’s medical marijuana law is here to stay. It’s unfortunate that counties like San Diego and San Bernardino are continuing to ignore state law, but these scofflaws are increasingly looking less credible and more like isolated, rogue elements every day.