The marijuana measures

[bemildred]

The regulation of medical marijuana in Los Angeles is a mess and has been ever since Proposition 215 was approved by California voters in November 1996.

Repeated state and city efforts to bring the chaotic situation under control have had little effect. A move by the City Council in 2007 to register medical marijuana dispensaries, for instance, led instead to an unexpected proliferation. An attempt to limit them in 2010 drew 66 lawsuits and a court-ordered injunction. An ordinance to ban them outright in 2012 was quickly repealed after marijuana businesses gathered enough signatures for a referendum to overturn the measure. Court decisions designed to clarify the murky laws have instead contradicted one another.

Today, there are an estimated 850 dispensaries — or maybe it's 1,000 or 1,600 (no one seems sure) — operating in Los Angeles despite the city's position that they're illegal. Everyone knows that medical marijuana can be easily obtained by recreational users who aren't truly sick. The "medicine" is not monitored by the government for potential health or safety problems; the dispensaries, by many accounts, are not nonprofit "collectives," as state law requires (although it's not really clear what a nonprofit collective is or isn't). Residents in some neighborhoods complain that they are being overrun by dispensaries, and that many pot shops serve as hubs for crime.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/endorsements/la-ed-end-marijuana-measure-d-e-f-20130510,0,448078.story

[msongs]

1. let people grow their own and medical pot dispensaries will disappear along with the feds

welfare police industry

[kestrel91316]

2. Not everybody has a green thumb, and not everybody has the space to grow it. I have a balcony now

that barely suffices, but I might not in the future. What then??? Growing indoors can get costly what with the equipment and the stealth grow box to hide your grow ops from your landlord.

[IcyPeas]

3. thank you for this article.

[olddots]

4. Agoura Hills Ca. is trying to criminalize medical pot use

the country is in a liberties war where greed is the elemental right .

[bemildred]

5. And their high schools are most likely awash in drugs.

No better place for drug "enterpreneurs" to graze than the high schools of pretentious new money communities like that one.

[flamingdem]

6. I've recently learned about Blue Dream and 4/20 chocolate bars

my lord half of LA is HIGH!