Esquire's online political columnist, John Richardson, turns his sharp eye this week to California's medical marijuana misadventures — specifically on the efforts hijinx of the LAPD to resist the state's medicinal pot law and the Obama administration's federal directive to respect such laws. Our own Dan Levine recently chronicled the Ninth Circuit's slapdown to the cops after they raided a pot club, failed to make a case out of it, but still refused to return hundreds of thousands of dollars seized in the pointless invasion. (Hm. You bust into someone's place of business, you take all their money, and you refuse to give it back. Maybe some lawyer in the audience can help me remember the legal term for that ...)
The LAPD's current tactic, even as the City Council prepares to ram through draconian zoning regulations, is to insist that a "nonprofit" organization (as permitted under the state's medicinal pot statute) can't sell anything. The pot clubs can give away their marijuana, but they can't take money for it. Jerry Brown's office is on the record saying that this novel misunderstanding of "nonprofit" won't stand, but it's good enough for the LAPD's purposes of intimidation and disruption.
Richardson's link-tastic overview of the situation is here.
— Brian McDonough
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