Maine took an important step toward enhancing patient access to medical marijuana on Friday, when officials awarded the state’s first operating licenses to six nonprofit dispensaries that will open across the state. Regulated dispensaries were added to Maine’s law in November, after nearly 60% of state voters approved an MPP-drafted initiative that made Maine the third medical marijuana state to allow dispensary licenses, and the first to do so through the ballot.

In related news, New Mexico, which was the first state to license dispensaries, just approved six more medical marijuana producers—bringing the state’s total number of licensed, nonprofit dispensaries to 11.

These establishments—when properly regulated—provide patients in need with safe, reliable and orderly access to their medicine, saving them the effort of growing their own while also sparing them from having to resort to the often dangerous and unpredictable black market.

Elsewhere, Rhode Island has been holding hearings on applicants for dispensary licenses there, while New Jersey and Washington, D.C. are considering similar plans. In Oregon, it seems increasingly likely that state voters will consider adding dispensaries to that state’s law this November.

Could marijuana ballot initiatives be the key to Democratic electoral victories? Joshua Green at The Atlantic seems to think so.

Acting on a tip from an Obama official, I found a few Democratic consultants who have become convinced that ballot initiatives legalizing marijuana, like the one Californians will vote on in November, actually help Democrats in the same way that gay marriage bans were supposed to have helped Republicans.

Scott Morgan at StoptheDrugWar sums it up nicely:

When political pundits begin speculating about our ability to bring out voters, that sends a message to politicians in a language they understand. For decades, the Democratic Party has remained shamefully silent on marijuana policy -- despite overwhelming support for reform within its base – all because party leaders persist in clinging foolishly to the 1980's mentality that any departure from the "tough on drugs" doctrine is political suicide. What now?

Colorado medical marijuana advocates and a group of local veterans filed a petition with the state health department yesterday that would add post-traumatic stress disorder to the list of qualifying conditions for medical marijuana in Colorado.

The petition was formally filed by Army veteran and double amputee Kevin Grimsinger, who lost parts of both legs and suffered other injuries after stepping on a landmine in Afghanistan in 2001. That episode has also left him stricken with PTSD. From Denver Post columnist Susan Greene:

That means flashbacks. It means struggling to sleep and thinking about suicide more often than he cares to admit. His nightmares are constant, he says. "They're bloody, they're noisy and they're gory."

After two years in hospitals, Grimsinger was released addicted "to every pain medication known to man," he tells me. It wasn't until turning to therapeutic cannabis, along with other prescriptions, that he says he has been able to function. Medical marijuana doesn't take away his trauma. But it gives him a break long enough to sleep.

We’ve written previously about studies showing how marijuana can alleviate the symptoms of PTSD, how New Mexico has already added it to that state’s list of qualifying conditions, and how some Colorado officials and even the Department of Veterans Affairs have thus far opposed efforts to make medical marijuana available to PTSD patients and other veterans in need.

As Sensible Colorado’s Brian Vicente, who helped file the petition, told Denver’s Westword: “We've been hearing from veterans for years who have been injured in the line of duty protecting our country and have PTSD related to that. And they're concerned about the lack of veteran access for medical marijuana for PTSD. Currently, veterans face criminal prosecution for possessing or using medical marijuana to alleviate any sort of medical condition, and we just think that's unconscionable. People who have served our country deserve the best access to health care possible, and we want to make sure Kevin and folks like him have that access.”

Bruce Ross at the Redding Record Searchlight takes issue with my post about a recent Wall Street Journal article, which showed once again how marijuana eradication efforts are counterproductive, but that law enforcement engage in them still because the federal government pays them to. I’ll reserve further comment, and let readers reach their own conclusions. You can read our back-and-forth exchange below:

Bruce Ross: “It’s not about the money.”

Mike Meno of the Marijuana Policy Project reads this weekend's Wall St. Journal story about how Shasta County is continuing -- using federal money -- its campaign against marijuana growing to mean that the county is only doing it for the money, arguing that it's a minor problem and a law the sheriff wouldn't even be enforcing but for the federal dollars.

Well, he gets paid to argue for the legalization of marijuana, so of course he'd think that. But if he knew a bit of the history that any attentive county resident would have picked up over the past decade, he'd know that illegal marijuana growing has mushroomed beyond all previous records in recent years. I vividly recall how in 2005, the Colorado-based environmental magazine High Country News ran a cover article about remote public forests being exploited by growers -- Ground Zero for the trend? Shasta County.

That year, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting uprooted more than million plants statewide, doubling its haul from the previous year, and about three-quarters of that was on public lands, including national parks. Shasta County was the No. 1 county for seizures of illegal pot, with more than 200,000 plants found.

That was '05. And in 2009? The haul was more than 600,000 plants. And growers are still planting mega-gardens.

In other words, there's a very large problem. Overwhelmed federal land managers and local authorities lobbied their bosses and Rep. Wally Herger to supply more federal resources to fight the problem. The facts made persuasive arguments. That is why the federal government is devoting substantial money to fighting marijuana in Shasta County. And they're not using that money to hassle individual smokers or those growing and using under Prop. 215's medicinal guidelines.

Would this problem largely disappear if marijuana could be grown legally? Probably so, and I've written as much a few times.

But the implication that it's not a real problem in our woods today, and that Tom Bosenko's crews are mercenaries who are only chasing pot growers for the federal cash, is ignorant and dishonest.

And here was my response:

Bruce,

Of course I agree that illegal marijuana grows are “a very large problem,” but even the least astute observer would realize it’s a problem law enforcement cannot—and more importantly, have failed to—solve through eradication. The figures you cite prove my point. Each year officers go into the woods to find and dig up more marijuana, and each year criminals are simply encouraged to grow more, thereby worsening the problem. Repeating an action again and again while expecting different results, the maxim goes, is the very definition of insanity. This is why it’s so outrageous that the federal government continues to throw money at such counterproductive efforts. As you (correctly) pointed out, the only true solution is to regulate marijuana and eliminate the need for illegal grows altogether.

It’s also interesting that you leveled the charge of being “ignorant and dishonest” at someone who simply blogged about the story, rather than at the story’s actual author—a writer at the esteemed Wall Street Journal—whose excellent reporting left no doubt whatsoever that police continually engage in this Quixotic quest simply to obtain federal funds that help them keep their departments afloat. Just take the story’s first two paragraphs:

IGO, Calif.—Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, his budget under pressure in a weak economy, has laid off staff, reduced patrols and even released jail inmates. But there's one mission on which he's spending more than in recent years: pot busts.

The reason is simple: If he steps up his pursuit of marijuana growers, his department is eligible for roughly half a million dollars a year in federal anti-drug funding, helping save some jobs. The majority of the funding would have to be used to fight pot. Marijuana may not be the county's most pressing crime problem, the sheriff says, but "it's where the money is."

Seriously, did you even bother to read the article before writing your post? Sheriff Bosenko himself says the eradication funds are "$340,000 I could use somewhere else in my organization … That could fund three officers' salaries and benefits, and we could have them out on our streets doing patrol." Instead he’s obligated to spend those funds on an objective he knows is unreachable and that he himself says is not as important as the many other issues he needs to focus on. Let that sink in: The sheriff himself (not me) is saying he’d like to focus on other problems and—in direct contradiction to what you wrote—the only reason he’s “chasing pot growers” is for the money. Is the sheriff being “ignorant and dishonest” as well?

Your beef is not with me, Bruce. It’s with the wasteful and irrational policies that allow these illegal grows to continue.

And then his response to my response:

Mr. Meno,

Pardon my ill temper. I've never met you. I have no reason to think you're anything but an honest guy.

But you also don't know what you're talking about if you think the feds just showed up one day offering money if local sheriffs wanted to chase pot growers out in the woods. The pressure was very much from the ground -- and not just from law enforcement but even more so from the local heads of federal land-management agencies who saw a long-standing problem spread beyond their abilities to control.

To which I say (once again), let's finally put an end to that longstanding problem, and regulate marijuana.

Yesterday, we discussed on this blog how there is a definite financial incentive for law enforcement to target marijuana growers and distributors, even ones that have been following state and local law.

Earlier today, as I was sifting through news articles, I was struck by the similarity between these two events:

Five Gunmen Storm Marijuana Dispensary

SAN DIEGO - Five gunmen stormed a medical marijuana dispensary in Normal Heights Tuesday and made off with a large amount of cash and marijuana.

The owner says the gunmen threatened to kill him if he didn't cooperate.

Pretty scary, right? The following story went like this:

Clearing Away the Pot Stores, One Raid at a Time

LOS ANGELES - As dusk settled on busy Colorado Boulevard, a squad of minivans and SUVs pulled to the curb outside a drab stucco rental that houses one of Eagle Rock's medical marijuana dispensaries.

Plainclothes narcotics officers fanned out. One disarmed a startled security guard, another covered the door through the sights of a rifle and a third phoned the shop to announce the raid. A second guard, three employees and a dozen grim-faced customers filed out, hands in the air.

By the end of the operation, the officers had arrested the Colorado Collective's owner and an employee and hauled away 40 pounds of marijuana and $17,000 in cash in large evidence bags.

Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

But if you need some help drawing a conclusion, consider this excerpt from an article about marijuana eradication efforts in Alabama:

The eradication effort began in 1982 and is funded through Drug Enforcement Administration grants using money seized in drug forfeitures.

Seize money with one hand and get paid with the other...

People often wonder why local law enforcement agencies will spend so many resources cracking down on marijuana. As this weekend’s superbly reported front-page piece in the Wall Street Journal explains, it really all comes down to money.

IGO, Calif.—Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko, his budget under pressure in a weak economy, has laid off staff, reduced patrols and even released jail inmates. But there's one mission on which he's spending more than in recent years: pot busts.

The reason is simple: If he steps up his pursuit of marijuana growers, his department is eligible for roughly half a million dollars a year in federal anti-drug funding, helping save some jobs. The majority of the funding would have to be used to fight pot. Marijuana may not be the county's most pressing crime problem, the sheriff says, but "it's where the money is."

[…] To make sure his office gets the federal funds, Sheriff Bosenko since last year has spent about $340,000 of his department's shrinking resources, more than in past years, on a team that tramps through the woods looking for pot farms.

As we've stated many times before, marijuana eradication programs are not only horribly ineffective at reducing the supply of marijuana, but even worse, they force law enforcement to commit massive amounts of resources and manpower to marijuana offenses at the expense of much more serious crimes. That’s why it’s so insane for the federal government to encourage and reward this type of misallocation. As the Journal article points out, California police departments are expected to lose $100 million in state funding this year, presumably leading even more departments to take up the eradication cause.

But if officials want to end illegal grows and see more money in state coffers at the same time, they need stop the madness and tax and regulate marijuana the same way we do alcohol, allowing the state to reap untold millions, possibly billions in new tax revenue while providing law enforcement with sufficient funding and sensible priorities that will allow them to focus on more serious crimes.

Now why can’t the federal government offer incentives with those kinds of results?

On the same day that the California NAACP endorsed that state’s ballot initiative to end marijuana prohibition (now officially named Proposition 19), our allies at the Drug Policy Alliance released a new study that shines a light on the systemic racial bias behind marijuana arrests taking place all across California.

Among the report’s findings:

• “In every one of the 25 largest counties in California, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at higher rates than whites, typically at double, triple or even quadruple the rate of whites,” even though “U.S. government studies consistently find that young blacks use marijuana at lower rates than young whites.”
• “In Los Angeles County, with nearly ten million residents and over a quarter of California’s population, blacks are arrested at over triple the rate of whites. Blacks are less than 10 percent of L.A. County’s population, but they are 30 percent of the people arrested for marijuana possession.”
• “Police in other California counties, even those with relatively few blacks or relatively low rates of marijuana arrests, still arrest blacks at much higher rates than whites. African Americans are arrested for marijuana possession at nearly three times the rate of whites in Solano County, and at three to four times the rate of whites in Sonoma, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco counties.”

The report, written by Prof. Harry Levine of Queens College, finds this overwhelming racial bias to be a “system-wide phenomenon” and not just the result of a handful of racist cops. That’s because most narcotics officers are assigned to patrol so-called “high-crime” neighborhoods that are disproportionately low-income and minority. In those neighborhoods—as in nearly all neighborhoods—the most likely, or easiest arrest an officer can make is for marijuana possession. If we want to end this racial bias, we need to end the laws that allow it to occur. Come November, California voters will have an opportunity to do just that.

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart on behalf of Joseph Casias, the 30-year-old former Associate of the Year who was wrongfully fired by a Battle Creek, Michigan Wal-Mart for his legal use of medical marijuana.

Casias, who is married with two children, suffers from sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor, for which he is a registered medical marijuana patient under state law. But in March, Wal-Mart, in violation of Michigan’s medical marijuana law, fired him anyway after he tested positive for marijuana on a routine drug screen—even for a time denying Casias unemployment benefits. Soon after, MPP called for a national boycott of the corporation.

Today’s announcement by the ACLU brings new hope for justice for Casias, who remains unemployed since his firing. Even more importantly, it represents an opportunity to protect the rights of medical marijuana patients in states across the country who continue to face discrimination for taking the medicine that works best for them. From the ACLU:

Joseph is exactly the kind of patient Michigan voters had in mind when they passed the [Michigan Medical Marihuana Act]. Today, we're asking the court to not allow Wal-Mart to punish Joseph for merely taking refuge from his pain, and using marijuana as allowed by state law. Corporations should never be allowed to force patients to choose between their health care and their job.

In another example of marijuana policy reform’s growing approval by the mainstream political establishment, this week two major state-level political organizations gave their backing to local initiatives to end marijuana prohibition.

Citing inherent racism in the government’s war on marijuana, the California state chapter of the NAACP announced its support for the Tax Cannabis initiative, which will appear on the California ballot this November.

Meanwhile, the Washington state Democratic Party voted by an overwhelming 314-185 margin to endorse a proposed legalization initiative by Sensible Washington, which has not yet qualified for the ballot.

As more and more influential political forces oppose the doomed philosophy of prohibition and embrace the sensible path of reform, the potential for major electoral victories in 2010 and 2012 seems more promising than ever before.