Marijuana Only for the Sick? A Farce, Some Angelenos Say

 One year after federal law enforcement officials began cracking down on California’s medical marijuana industry with a series of high-profile arrests around the state, they finally moved into Los Angeles last month, giving 71 dispensaries until Tuesday to shut down. 

At the same time, because of a well-organized push by a new coalition of medical marijuana supporters, the City Council last week repealed a ban on the dispensaries that it had passed only a couple of months earlier. 

Vague state laws governing medical marijuana have allowed recreational users of the drug to take advantage of the dispensaries, say supporters of the Los Angeles ban and the federal crackdown. Here on the boardwalk of Venice Beach, pitchmen dressed all in marijuana green approach passers-by with offers of a $35, 10-minute evaluation for a medical marijuana recommendation for everything from cancer to appetite loss.
Nearly 180 cities across the state have banned dispensaries, and lawsuits challenging the bans have reached the State Supreme Court. In more liberal areas, some 50 municipalities have passed medical marijuana ordinances, but most have suspended the regulation of dispensaries because of the federal offensive, according to Americans for Safe Access, a group that promotes access to medical marijuana. San Francisco and Oakland, the fiercest defenders of medical marijuana, have continued to issue permits to new dispensaries.
Despite years of trying fruitlessly to regulate medical marijuana, California again finds itself in a marijuana-laced chaos over a booming and divisive industry.
Nobody even knows how many medical marijuana dispensaries are in Los Angeles. Estimates range from 500 to more than 1,000. The only certainty, supporters and opponents agree, is that they far outnumber Starbucks.


“Medical marijuana dispensaries are very much like what they distribute: they’re weeds,” he said. “You cut them down, you leave, and then they sprout back up.

Unlikely, and Large, Marijuana Crop Is Found in a Chicago Industrial Park

Teresa Crawford/Associated Press

The police in Chicago bulldozed a patch of marijuana about the size of two football fields on the far South Side on Wednesday.

By MONICA DAVEY

Published: October 4, 2012

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CHICAGO — Of all the remote hillsides where a patch of marijuanamight grow unnoticed, just off a major highway in the nation’s third most populous city hardly seems the place. Yet that was precisely where the authorities this week uncovered a virtual farm of marijuana — plants up to 10 feet tall in perfect rows across a stretch of land the size of two football fields, and all of it within Chicago’s city limits, not far from the Bishop Ford Freeway.

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“My partner and I were just saying, now every plant looks like dope to us,” Officer Graney said, after his usual helicopter patrol on Thursday.

Still, if the discovery appeared to be some modern twist on the city’s 19th-century motto, “Urbs in horto” (Latin for “City in a garden”), no one here seemed particularly concerned that a rash of outdoor marijuana operations was now conceivable in Chicago.

“Frankly, there’s just not many wide open places,” Chief Roti said.