San Diego Unseen: An Urban Portrait
Laura Duffy, pictured with fellow U.S. Attorney B. Todd Jones
“Even a hare will bite when it is cornered.” —Chinese proverb
Men’s Health magazine recently dubbed San Diego America’s luckiest city. Tell that to local medical-marijuana patients and their advocates.
Laura Duffy, the U.S. attorney in these here parts, has grabbed national headlines recently for comments she made about plans for-ramped up actions against San Diego’s unregulated medi-pot dispensaries, the landlords who rent to them and possibly the media outlets that run their advertisements. But just how serious are the threats? Spin Cycle talked to two past members of the San Diego City Council-appointed Medical Marijuana Task Force, which spent months tackling the slippery details of balancing the concerns of patients and neighborhoods to come up with a regulatory game plan that the council eventually made more restrictive. Disappointed medi-pot advocates, in turn, shouted “Referendum!” and the council threw up its hands and rescinded its decision, pushing dispensaries back into limbo.
While both task force members—each bright legal minds— agree that the result of Duffy’s attenuated call for dispensary crackdowns will be costly at an economically shaky time, they differ on their vision of what will remain of the medi-pot landscape.
“Unless Laura Duffy wants to shift all of her office’s resources into prosecuting medical-marijuana cases, you won’t be able to make a huge dent in the number of dispensaries, because you’re not able to follow through with the threats,” said Alex Kreit, the Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor who chaired the task force. “I would be surprised if this really changes the landscape.”
Criminal defense lawyer Mark- Robert Bluemel, another task force member, painted a bleaker future for patients unless federal law equating marijuana with heroin and cocaine is changed.
“I advise everyone that’s in a collective, working for one or operating one, to stop, close down the storefronts,” Bluemel said. “I think the party’s over. I believe dispensaries will be gone and everything will be shoved back on the black market. And, unfortunately, the cartels will probably be the biggest beneficiaries.”
Spin Cycle had questions for Duffy, but her office did not respond. And like anything in politics, when questions are left dangling in the wind, the conspiracy theories flourish.
Theories like Duffy is helping her friend, rabid anti-medi-pot District attorney Bonnie Dumanis, eliminate a potentially sticky issue for her 2012 mayoral campaign. Or the move is a big nod to Big Pharma, which is seeking federal approval of a cannabis-type medication called Sativex. Or condone medi-pot, then the hemp industry loses its stigma and Big Oil suddenly faces a significant competitor.
Kreit and Bluemel, however, think the promised crackdown is simply a response to the growing acceptance of marijuana as medicine in American society.
“The federal law-enforcement side see they’re losing public opinion,” Kreit said. “And to the extent this is a political issue, they see their vision of this hard-core war on drugs, zero tolerance, is slipping away from them. This might be their last grasp at trying to stop a trend that’s not going in the direction they want it to go.”
Added Bluemel, “Just imagine if you’ve spent your whole life prosecuting people for marijuana, sending them away to federal prison for major chunks, if not the rest of their lives, and now all of a sudden it’s legal? Wouldn’t you feel guilty that what you’ve been doing is wrong? I would have major conflicts with that.”
So, why have the four U.S. attorneys in California linked arms to wage this battle while other medi-pot states like Colorado—where medi-pot workers just agreed to join a union!—stay relatively mum on the topic? Bluemel thinks the feds are starting the campaign in California, where medical-marijuana began. “The wave started here, so this is where the wave of closures will begin,” he suggested.
Kreit, however, believes that if this crackdown emanated from Washington, D.C., other states would be feeling the federal fist by now. Kreit suggested that local U.S. attorney offices often act without the blessing from superiors simply to test the decisions of political higher-ups. Few could argue that the Obama administration has been clear on this topic.
In June, attorney General Eric Holder promised a clarification of the administration’s position on state medi-pot laws. The subsequent memo came out later that month, but Kreit said that by then—with federal raids on the rise—the second memo “was re ally just announcing what was actually going on. It wasn’t really a change in policy because the first memo wasn’t being followed.”
Kreit said he believes this comes down to old-school lawenforcement people testing the administration’s will. “This is people in local offices testing the waters, to see if doing things that aren’t really consistent with this memo will generate any internal blowback,” he said. “And there hasn’t been any blowback.”
Kreit noted that the previous administration under George W. Bush “vigorously enforced federal drug laws and interfered with California’s medical-marijuana system.” And yet when he left office, dispensaries across the state had blossomed.
“I just remember when the Bush people were threatening to prosecute, there was a Los Angeles dispensary operator holding a press conference to show off his medical-marijuana vending machine,” Kreit recalled. “That’s how seriously they took those threats.”
Duffy and her cohorts, Kreit said, are likely trying a similar tactic to “get some deterrent effect” by scaring patients, operators and presumably newspapers and other media outlets that run dispensary advertising. The latter assault on media, Kreit said, would be the toughest hurdle for Duffy “because of the controversy it would generate and the fact that they would be wading into some very difficult First Amendment legal territory as well.”
Last week, Duffy seemed to backpedal slightly on her threat to go after media outlets, telling KPBS that medi-pot ads “are not the primary focus of our current enforcement activities.”
“To them,” Kreit said, “this is this demon drug, and the hardcore drug warriors don’t want to hear any of the evidence that marijuana has a medicinal benefit. If you look at it as war, it’s whatever the cost. You want to win the war. The question is, what’s the bigger cost of prohibition?”
Got a tip? Send it to johnl@sdcitybeat.com.
