(excepts from CBS “60 minutes” show Morley Safer Reports on Proposition 215 originally broadcasted on Sept 23, 2007 and updated at www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/09/20/60minutes/main3281715.shtml on Dec 30,2007)
It’s just another day at a dispensary (medical marijuana clinic), as they call them, in San Francisco. There, with a note from a doctor, you can buy marijuana for anything you claim ails you, in just about any form, including cookies, pies and chocolate milk.
In many dispensaries (medical marijuana clinic) up and down the state, there’s a tasting corner, where you can sample the wares, and where you’ll find any number of satisfied customers. There are hundreds of such stores (medical marijuana clinic) in the state, and as many as 400 in southern California alone. The people who run them are members of the state’s latest entrepreneurial class, calling themselves “caregivers.” The feds call them something else. Case in point is a young man of many faces named Luke Scarmazzo. He has been described as a businessman, a hip hop artist, and, by the government, as a drug dealer. Many businesses calling themselves dispensaries (medical marijuana clinic) or cannabis clubs advertise in alternative papers, as do doctors around the state who will give you a quick once-over and, for a price, a permit to buy.
There are a growing number of local laws limiting the number of dispensary (medical marijuana clinic) in a given area and the hours they operate. But American ingenuity will always find a way.
Kevin Reed was forced to shut down his San Francisco medical marijuana clinic because of complaints from neighbors. So he simply went into the delivery business. Reed is up every morning, turning out a new batch of cookies laced with pot, part of a delivery menu that includes marijuana strains for every taste. His couriers fan out across the city, delivering their wares.
In theory, all the medical marijuana sold in California is grown by the patients themselves. But ” Most of these cannabis centers (medical marijuana clinics) are buying their marijuana off the black market. They’re dumping millions of dollars into the criminal black market.” says Scott Imler, a minister in the United Methodist Church who has long been active in promoting medical marijuana.
“What happened when we were writing it was, as you can imagine, every patient group in the state and they all have their lobbies. You know, the kidney patients and the heart patient. Every patient group wanted to be included in the list,” Imler recalls. “And so we didn’t wanna get in the position of deciding what it could be used for and what it couldn’t be used for. We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists. We weren’t researchers. We were just patients with a problem.”
Imler says they were forced to make the proposition vague.
So the law voters passed mentioned not only cancer and AIDS but “…any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.” A decade later, if you’ve got a note from a doctor, you can buy medical pot for just about any imaginable condition.
“There’s bound to be abuse in the system. You know, our pharmacies are abused by people who want to abuse prescription drugs. And so it’s reasonable to assume that our medical cannabis facilities are abused as well. What we really need right now are regulations that address those issues,” Duncan says. Don Duncan is something of an elder statesman in the world of medical marijuana, running three California dispensaries (medical marijuana clinics), including one in Hollywood. He concedes that compliant doctors are a problem.
“We just wanna serve our patients and be discreet. Obviously federal law is still a challenge for us. Because until federal law changes, we’re at risk from the DEA raiding our facility, confiscating our medicine, even arresting people,” Duncan says.
Duncan acknowledges they, the Feds, know where he is and that they could on a whim bust him.
They could, and they did. Not long after this interview, the DEA raided one of Duncan’s dispensaries (medical marijuana clinics), arresting no one but confiscating the marijuana. Don Duncan got there in time to watch with pro-pot protesters outside.
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