Fogel Ain't Smokin' Feds' Pot Raid Argument

Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose handed medical marijuana advocates a big victory today, denying a government motion to dismiss part of a suit brought by the city and county of Santa Cruz that accuses the government of trying to undermine California’s Compassionate Use Act.

Fogel refused (.pdf) to scrap the suit over the government’s argument that its targeted raids against marijuana dispensaries did not amount to a wholesale assault on the state’s entire medical pot policy.

The plaintiffs allege that the feds have “pursued a policy of threatening and utilizing arrests, forfeitures, criminal prosecutions and other punitive means, all with the purpose of rendering California’s medical marijuana laws impossible to implement and with the intent of coercing California and its political subdivisions to enact legislation recriminalizing medical marijuana.”

Landlords who rent to marijuana dispensaries in the Bay Area and elsewhere in the state have received letters from the Drug Enforcement Administration threatening them with the forfeiture of their property. That tactic has led them to evict many of their erstwhile lawful pot-distributing tenants.

Fogel denied the government’s motion to dismiss one of the plaintiffs’ claims, in which they cite the Tenth Amendment’s guarantee of states’ rights. He cited an opinion by Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, who wrote in a 2002 case that the government had indeed been undermining California with its policies, and that “preventing the state from repealing an existing law is no different from forcing it to pass a new one; in either case the state is being forced to regulate conduct that it prefers unregulated.”

Graham Boyd, an ACLU lawyer working with the plaintiffs, was quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle as saying that, “for the first time, a court has recognized that a calculated plan by the federal government to undercut state medical marijuana laws is patently unconstitutional.”

—  Evan Hill

Comments

[Children Anxiety Disorder]

Victory!!!!!!

“pursued a policy of threatening and utilizing arrests, forfeitures, criminal prosecutions and other punitive means, all with the purpose of rendering California’s medical marijuana laws impossible to implement and with the intent of coercing California and its political subdivisions to enact legislation recriminalizing medical marijuana.”

so damn truth