Editorial: With medical pot, rationality goes up in smoke

Editorial: With medical pot, rationality goes up in smoke

Garden Grove latest city to ban medical marijuana outlets based on tortured
reasoning

An Orange County Register editorial

For some reason, the simple issue of medical marijuana brings out the worst
convoluted thinking and even ignorance from those elected officials we rely
upon to make fair-minded and constitutional decisions. Garden Grove is the
latest Orange County city – joining Buena Park, Fullerton, Mission Viejo,
Santa Ana, Tustin, Huntington Beach and Placentia – to ban marijuana
dispensaries in the city. Only Laguna Woods has voted to allow them. The
rationales by council members should be called "irrationales," given how
strained their anti-dispensary arguments seem to be.

In 1996, Californians approved Proposition 215 with a solid 56 percent of
the vote. The initiative was designed to "ensure that seriously ill
Californians have the right to obtain and use marijuana for medical purposes
where that medical use is deemed appropriate and has been recommended by a
physician who has determined that the person's health would benefit from the
use of marijuana in the treatment of cancer, anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain,
spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis, migraine or any other illness for which
marijuana provides relief."

Subsequent state legislation has called for counties to provide ID cards to
people with a justified medical need for marijuana – something the Orange
County Board of Supervisors passed by a 4-1 vote in January. Medical
marijuana is viewed by many in the medical community as having useful
effects for sick people, yet opponents (such as Orange County District
Attorney Tony Rackauckas) try to depict medical-marijuana users as people
who simply want an excuse to use drugs.

But it's not our purpose here to debate the usefulness of this or any other
medicine. We don't typically see politicians angrily insisting that one
narcotic or another dispensed by the local pharmacy works or doesn't work
for any given condition. Those debates should be left to a patient and her
doctor.

The Register reported that, during the Garden Grove debate, Councilwoman
Dina Nguyen argued that the city should not allow medical marijuana
dispensaries because the Police Department is short-staffed. That's an
absurd argument, given that there's no evidence that legal dispensaries
increase crime. And, besides, individual rights are not dependent on the
amount of police resources.

Garden Grove Mayor Bill Dalton said he just didn't like the way marijuana is
dispensed. That's a subjective way to make law. Councilman Steve Jones noted
that the federal government still disputes its legality in California. But
city councils are subdivisions of the state government. And state law is
clear in Prop. 215, even if the feds, thanks to the ongoing drug-war
mentality, have decided to put the Constitution through a shredder.

That's the problem these days. Council members know no limits on their
power. If they don't like something, they want to ban it. Local governments
are, generally, better than the federal government, given that local
officials are closer to the people. But local government can be petty,
hostile to the ideas of limited government and freedom, and amazingly
irrational.