This editorial will appear in Wednesday’s print edition.

Medical marijuana advocates made a deal with the voters in 1998 with Initiative 692: no sales, no shops, no dispensaries, no co-ops, nothing that would even vaguely resemble a legalized dope industry.

The year before, Washingtonians had rejected a loophole-riddled initiative that would have abetted the loosey-goosey quasi-commercialization already seen in California. I-692 included a crucial safeguard: authorized patients could use marijuana, but they had to grow their own supply or have it provided by a caregiver. No money was to change hands.

One patient per caregiver: The law explicitly says the caregiver must “possess no more marijuana than is necessary for the patient’s personal medical use.” And he or she must “be the primary caregiver to only one patient at one time.” That language would not be in there had the law envisioned shops with scores or hundreds of paying customers. Read more »

As in California, marijuana activists in Washington are trying to legalize the drug. Another argument against it:

By Skip Miller
for the Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles City Council’s vote Tuesday to shut hundreds of so-called medical marijuana dispensaries was a welcome move, but the larger battle over pot has just begun.

Across the country, lawmakers and residents of cash-strapped states are edging ever closer to legalizing — and taxing — marijuana. In California, the first state in the nation to pass a medical marijuana law, backers of an initiative to legalize the drug expect to gather enough signatures to qualify the measure for the November ballot. And a Field Poll last year showed more than half of California voters would support such a move.

Two beliefs drive this push to make pot legal: that new tax revenue will stave off deeper budget cuts and that marijuana is a relatively benign drug. Neither is true.

Legalization almost certainly would bring with it additional substance abuse in the state, and the long-term public costs associated with that would vastly exceed the relatively modest amount of new revenue legal weed might bring in. Baby boomers who hazily recall their own experimentation with marijuana often are stunned to learn that the amount of tetrahydrocannabinol — or THC, marijuana’s primary psychoactive substance — in domestic sinsemilla has quadrupled since the late 1970s.
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I will confess to being out of touch with the drug culture. I knew next to nothing about “skunk” until I read a scary piece (excerpt below) last week in The New York Times Book Review.

Was Browning engaging in hype when she describes the mental illnesses being linked to this hyper-potent form of marijuana? It turns out that doctors are seeing the same thing.

The people who want to legalize marijuana (on the basis of its supposed harmlessness) need to do a lot more talking about the more vicious breeds of cannabis. I don’t see any way to legalize dope with 3 percent THC without legalizing the 18 percent-plus stuff.

Dominique Browning, Aug. 27 review of “The Lost Child: A Mother’s Story,” by Julie Myerson:

I had never heard of skunk either, but a quick search online led me to a souk of seeds for the home farmer, advertising up to a toxic 22 percent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) content in some strains. Read more »

The best way to deal with weeds is to whack them before they go to seed. Prosecutors are doing pretty much that to marijuana dispensaries that have taken root in Spokane, of all places.

The Spokane County prosecutor’s office is pressing drug-dealing felony charges against a man busted last year with five pounds of marijuana in his home. Darren J. McCrea, 41, is the founder of SpoCannabis, a group that sells the drug to patients certified by doctors as eligible for medical marijuana.

Washington voters approved the medicinal use of cannabis in 1998 – but under tight restrictions.

California was already becoming notorious for effectively legalizing recreational dope-smoking through its extremely lax medical marijuana law. Washingtonians were offered their own loophole-riddled marijuana initiative in 1997, and they resoundingly rejected it. Read more »

Here’s what we’ve got coming for the long weekend:

• Reforming Medicare, which now rewards volume and political clout, is key to getting a handle on the staggering growth of health care costs.

• Poll voting’s time is up. Pierce County has gone to heroic measures to keep tradition alive, but the once-proud civic custom is but a shadow of its former self – and an expensive one at that.

• Controversial as R-71 is, this isn’t the time for a court to be changing the ground rules for gathering petition signatures.

• Accept the contorted legal argument for marijuana …

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