Feds Keep Fooling Around With Medical Marijuana:
Full Cannabis Legalization or Bust!
It's
getting ugly and NORML
needs your help now more than ever to stand
up for the rights of responsible adults cannabis
consumers. The Administration that
promised to base drug policy on science and
respect state marijuana laws is ignoring medical
facts, the needs of patients, and the economic
benefits that regulated dispensaries bring to
medical cannabis-friendly states.
There is no way to sugar coat the terrible
past two weeks we've had at the hands of
Prohibition-loving federal and state
governments.
Yesterday, the four U.S. Attorneys from
California--along with their respective
counterparts here in Washington D.C. from the
DEA and IRS--declared that a statewide crackdown
against large-scale medical cannabis cultivators
and sellers with national implications is
currently underway.
Question: Will U.S. Attorneys in the other
fifteen states and D.C. with medical cannabis
laws pursue similarly aggressive enforcement?
But wait! There's more. Much more.
- Earlier this week, the Internal Revenue
Service (IRS) issued a long-awaited $2.5
million ruling against a major medical
cannabis dispensary in California. Citing an
obscure part of the US tax code meant to
target drug cartels, the federal agency is
barring dispensaries, even those licensed
under state law, from taking any
business-related tax deductions and is
seeking millions in dollars in back taxes.
This adverse ruling has the very
real potential to stop the regulated sale of
cannabis currently underway in California,
Colorado, Maine and New Mexico; and planned
in Arizona, Montana, Delaware, New Jersey,
and Washington, D.C
- The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (ATF) issued a heavy-handed
one-page memo to every gun and ammunition
dealer nationwide informing them that they
must, by law, deny sales to lawful patients
who possess a physician's recommendation to
use medical cannabis--many of whom posses
state-issues medical cannabis ID
cards--effectively denying their Second
Amendment rights to have a gun to hunt or
for personal safety.
- Federal regulators cracked down on banks
in Colorado, California and Michigan that
had previously conduct business with medical
cannabis dispensaries, forbidding these
financial institutions from allowing cash
deposits or processing credit/debit cards
from state or locally approved canna-businesses.
- U.S. Attorneys in California sent
warnings to local dispensaries in San
Francisco, San Diego, and elsewhere warning
that locally compliant facilities still may
be subject to federal prosecution for
violating federal 'drug free school zones'
legislation -- leaving these facilities with
no choice but to either move or close.
- Also, federal attorneys in California
have sent hundreds of legal warnings to the
landlords of properties that rent to medical
cannabis businesses (retail, delivery,
cultivation and testing) warning that their
properties and assets are subject to swift
civil forfeiture proceedings, and that they
themselves may be subject to decades in
prison. Is it likely that federal attorneys
do the same in Colorado, New Mexico and
Maine; and to the numerous gray area
dispensaries in Oregon and Washington?
- Rhode Island's governor Lincoln Chafee
pulled the plug on the state's nascent
medical cannabis dispensary program, despite
it having been previously approved 102 - 3
by the state legislature. Why?
Governor Chafee cites recent memos from the
Department of Justice threatening to
federally prosecute employees involved in
the state-licensed production or
distribution of cannabis.
- Michigan courts, the legislature and the
state's Attorney General are steadily
dissembling the state's medical cannabis
program, despite the law having passed with
63 percent public approval.
* * * *
There are only two things to
say after reading such an alarming list of
recent setbacks to ending Cannabis Prohibition:
- Rather than pour millions of dollars and
human energy into creating a legally and
politically contentious policy that allows
some cannabis consumers who can obtain a
physician's recommendation to be immune from
state (but not federal) prosecution during a
time of general Cannabis Prohibition,
all cannabis consumers,
patients, cultivators and sellers and their
families should focus their full
attention and resources to once and for all
legalizing cannabis for all
responsible adult consumers.
- Make a
donation to NORML now, join a local
NORML chapter (there are nearly 200 of
them nationwide!) today or purchase a
NORML-related product and show the
country that you support ending Cannabis
Prohibition in our lifetime.
Everyone at NORML has known that 2012 was
going to be the busiest year in our 40-year
civil rights efforts to legalize marijuana.
...However, with the Obama Administration's
new and aggressive assertion of federal primacy
over states and cities that have crafted
superior, public-endorsed, free market-oriented
public policies, we're now assured long and
difficult political and legal battles in the
coming year with a federal government that still
does not 'get it' regarding the public's desire
to retire the 74-year-old Cannabis Prohibition
right next to the last 'great social
experiment', Alcohol Prohibition.
Anticipating yesterday's federal actions in
California, members of the
NORML Legal Committee (NLC), a nationwide
network of over 600 lawyers, is already
organizing and poised to challenge federal and
state governments who seek to kill patients'
access to medical cannabis and to defend
citizens egregiously charged by their own
government for law violations.
If you watched the three-part PBS series this
week on Alcohol Prohibition, it is impossible
not to draw similarities to the absurdity of
alcohol's prohibition to that of the ongoing,
heavy-handed criminalization of cannabis, and
that ultimately only politically organized
citizens came to end the federal government's
folly by putting sufficient legal and political
pressure on their elected policymakers.
Our generation must do the same to end our
nation's long-suffering Cannabis Prohibition.
Get (More) Active.
Donate now. Be NORML. Every contribution
helps.
Thanks for caring and sharing,
Allen St. Pierre
Executive Director
NORML
Washington, DC
director@norml.org
