It seems yet another California official refuses to recognize that state’s medical marijuana law, and instead wants to deny patients the treatment that’s recommended by their doctors and protected under state law.  Barely a week after the police chief of Redding, California sent a warning to local dispensing collectives about their defiance of federal law, a superior court judge in Fresno County today issued a two-week restraining order that temporarily shuts down all nine medical marijuana collectives that have opened in Fresno this year.

Judge Alan M. Simpson sided with city officials, who since August have been trying to shut down the collectives through a nonsensical zoning ordinance that requires the businesses to obey both state law (under which they’re legal) and federal law (under which they’re not). Such an ordinance is essentially impossible for the collectives to obey as long as medical marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

Lawyers for the collectives say they will argue at an Oct. 22 hearing that because state laws permit medical marijuana, local governments can’t use zoning ordinances to ban the collectives. Until then, medical marijuana patients in Fresno will be unable to safely or legally obtain their recommended treatment within city limits.

“The real winners in that will be the drug dealers and the drug cartels,” said Sean Dwyer, owner of California Herbal Relief Center, one of the closed collectives, which itself caters to 800 patients. “Because rather than being able to get their medication from us legally, they will be forced to buying it illegally off the street.”

When will California officials understand that their job is to enforce California’s laws, not the federal government’s? Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996. Sadly, as attorney William Logan told a local ABC affiliate, “here we are 13 years later, [still] trying to figure out how to get medicine to patients.”

After a 12-hour hearing in which hundreds of medical marijuana advocates testified, the Colorado Board of Health Monday rejected a proposal limiting the number of medical marijuana patients a caregiver can serve to five.

The proposal, which attorneys testified violated the 2000 constitutional amendment passed by voter initiative protecting valid medical marijuana patients from arrest, was designed to hinder legally operating medical marijuana dispensing centers.

Opponents of medical marijuana tried a similar tactic before, and it was ruled unconstitutional by a Colorado court in 2007. Is it too much to hope they might have learned their lesson this time?

Today the New Hampshire Legislature approved a medical marijuana bill custom tailored to addresses the governor’s concerns in hopes of avoiding a veto that would leave the state’s medical marijuana patients vulnerable to arrest, even if they have their doctor’s recommendation.

Gov. John Lynch told lawmakers that he would veto the bill in its original form, which passed both chambers last month, if eight specific concerns of his were not addressed.

A special legislative committee spent the past month revising the bill according to those eight concerns, which you can view here, along with how the revised bill that the Legislature passed today addresses them.

The question now is whether the governor was sincere about finding a workable compromise that meets the needs of medical marijuana patients. In the next couple weeks, we’ll be reminding the governor of the seriously ill who are depending on him to do the right thing by purchasing radio and TV ad time highlighting the patients whose lives hang in the balance.

If you’re a New Hampshire resident, you can let Gov. Lynch know it’s time for him to allow this much-needed reform and stop the prosecution of patients for simply trying to relieve their pain with a proven safe, effective medicine.

In a historic first, Rhode Island legislators today made their state the first ever to expand an existing medical marijuana law to allow for state-licensed compassion centers to grow and distribute marijuana to registered patients. Legislators easily overrode the veto issued by Gov. Donald Carcieri with override votes of 67-0 in the House and 35-3 in the Senate.

This marks the second time the Rhode Island Legislature has expanded the medical marijuana law it established in 2006, which indicates the law’s successfulness as well as its popularity. It also marks the third time they had to override the governor’s veto in order to pass a medical marijuana law.

Are you governors out there paying attention?

Former drug czar John Walters may be out of government, but that doesn’t stop him from taking his anti-marijuana zealotry to the masses.

Yesterday, he appeared on CNN to debate Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron on the merits of ending marijuana prohibition. Dr. Miron had little trouble tearing apart Walters’ arguments, but one statement of Walters caught my attention.

At 6:53 in the clip below, Walters begins a tirade about medical marijuana in California, saying “it has been reported in the news” that there are more medical marijuana dispensaries in San Francisco than there are Starbucks coffee shops.

What Walters says is technically true — that lie has indeed been reported in the news. What he fails to mention is that the source was none other than John Walters. And those news reports were widely dismissive of Walters’ fib. Both Starbucks and the San Francisco Department of Health refuted it.

But by cleverly distancing himself from his own lie and attributing it to “the news,” Walters is free to repeat it as much as he wants without ever being held accountable.

It’s as if I were to assert in this post that John Walters was the inspiration for the movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” and some other blogger picked it up and posted it. That way, I could go on and on about Walters’ reported retarded sexual development and just conveniently fail to mention that I was the one who first reported it.

But of course, that’s ridiculous. John Walters’ offense isn’t sexual immaturity. It’s that he’s a liar.

It’s never easy to know for sure, but this week could be huge for medical marijuana reform if things go just right in state legislatures across the country. The senates in Illinois, Minnesota, and New Hampshire all could vote to pass medical marijuana bills as early as tomorrow. At the same time, the Rhode Island Senate could vote on a bill creating medical marijuana compassion centers, making safe access to qualified patients in the state far less burdensome.

So stay tuned – we’ll let you know as soon as we know.

In what turns out, sadly, to be the last episode of CNN’s “D.L. Hughley Breaks the News,” aired Mar. 28 and 29, D.L. devoted a large block of the show to proposals to make marijuana a legally regulated and taxed product for adult consumption. The first segment included an interview with yours truly, followed by Ronald Brooks of the Narcotic Officers Associations Coalition, who wants to keep arresting and jailing marijuana users.

After MPP passed the medical marijuana ballot initiative in Michigan and the marijuana decriminalization ballot initiative in Massachusetts — both on November 4 — I thought the MPP staff might get a little downtime to regroup for the 2009-2010 election cycle. Not so.

In the last four months, the MPP staff and our allies have been working almost nonstop to respond to — and take advantage of — the many opportunities that have been presenting themselves across the country. I’ve never seen so much evidence of positive change in such a short amount of time … [Read more →]