Medical Marijuana

Angel Raich flicks a butane lighter at the bowl of a small glass pipe, inhales deeply, then, in deference to a guest, blows the pungent smoke out the window of the sitting room in her three-story Oakland home. "Without cannabis, I would not survive," she says. The room is pale blue and filled with ceramic angels. Beside the lavender couch on which Raich sits, a table holds 11 small glass jars of medical-quality marijuana--strains that growers have named Juicy Fruit and Haze.

Former Upland Mayor John Pomierski faces up to 10 years in federal prison after pleading guilty Thursday to bribery and admitting to accepting $5,000 to help a business obtain a permit. Pomierski, 58, became the third person to be convicted in the bribery scheme, in which he allegedly demanded about $70,000 in payments from the separate owners of a sports bar and a medical marijuana cooperative to help them obtain permits and eliminate other requirements beginning in 2007, according to federal prosecutors.

Joanne Clarke, a legal secretary in her late 50s, leads the way down a pale green hallway in her modest Costa Mesa home, past a small guest room on the right and a blue tiled bathroom on the left. At the end of the hall, she opens a door, pushes aside a thick black curtain and ducks inside. "Isn't this wild?" she says, gesturing to the high-tech marijuana grow room she and her husband recently installed. "This used to be my daughter's bedroom. " Wild is one word for it. Bright is another.

Dude! Today is a day of special significance and the appointed hour is 4:20 p.m. What it all means is on the tip of the tongue. Literally. Welcome to April 20, a day that has come to mean a celebration of marijuana and a protest against the fact that its use, sale and possession are crimes. From the narrow streets of New York's Greenwich Village to the open expanse of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, users will congregate to do their thing. Perhaps the most notorious gathering will be at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where last year 10,000 people smoked at the same time.

Want to buy organic carrots? No problem. Organic strawberries? Widely available. Organic honey? Try your local grocery store. But organic medical marijuana? Doesn't exist — at least not in an official sense. Organic crops and products are certified by private agencies through the U.S. Department of Agriculture — a program developed after decades of advocacy by organic farmers and their allies. Pot — medicinal or otherwise — need not apply. "What the USDA doesn't recognize as a legal crop, we can't certify because we're certifying to their standards," said Jane Wade, development specialist at Santa Cruz-based California Certified Organic Farmers, the largest organic certification agency in the country.

Federal prosecutors are threatening to shut down medical marijuana dispensaries throughout California, sending letters that warn landlords to stop sales of the drug within 45 days or face the possibility that their property will be seized and they will be charged with a crime. The stepped-up enforcement escalates the Obama administration's efforts to rein in the spread of pot stores, which accelerated after the attorney general announced in 2009 that federal prosecutors would not target people using medical marijuana in states that allow it. "It's coming out of left field as far as we're concerned," said Joe Elford, the chief counsel for Americans for Safe Access, which advocates for medical marijuana use. "I really don't know what inspired this.

OAKLAND — Federal agents struck at the heart of California's medical marijuana movement, raiding the nation's first pot trade school and a popular dispensary, both run by one of the state's most prominent and provocative activists, Richard Lee. The raids in Oakland by the Internal Revenue Service and Drug Enforcement Administration sent a shudder through the medical cannabis trade and angered the plant's devotees, who believe the federal government...

Marcy Duda, a former home health aide with four children and two granddaughters, never dreamed she'd be publicly touting the medical benefits of pot. But marijuana, says the 48-year-old Ware, Mass., resident, is the only thing that even begins to control the migraine headaches that plague her nine days a month, which she describes as feeling like "hot, hot ice picks in the left side of my head." Duda has always had migraines.

The City Council's vote Tuesday to shut hundreds of so-called medical marijuana dispensaries across Los Angeles 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.

The state's largest doctor group is calling for legalization of marijuana, even as it pronounces cannabis to be of questionable medical value. Trustees of the California Medical Assn., which represents more than 35,000 physicians statewide, adopted the position at their annual meeting in Anaheim late Friday. It is the first major medical association in the nation to urge legalization of the drug, according to a group spokeswoman, who said the larger membership was notified Saturday.

Richard Lee has been one of the state's most visible activists for liberalized marijuana laws, having spent $1.5 million of his own money supporting an ill-fated ballot initiative in 2010 to decriminalize recreational use. But Lee is also an entrepreneur in the legally cloudy arena of medical marijuana, and on Monday the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration raided his home and his hemp-related ventures, including Oaksterdam University,...

Crackdown on pot Re "Raid on pot college stuns activists," April 3 Oaksterdam University founder Richard Lee's disability notwithstanding, the reason I can't get on board with the indignation everyone else has about the raid on the pot trade school in Oakland is because the medical marijuana debate has been co-opted by just plain old potheads who want to get high and, in a lot of cases, make some money. Instead of getting happy about finding a "doctor" so you can get your card for (pick one)

Not one but two federal agencies raided the Oakland medical marijuana businesses run by Richard Lee, one of California's leading advocates of legalization, on Monday. A judge has sealed the affadavits behind the raids of Lee's apartment, dispensary, marijuana museum and medical marijuana trade school, so there's no way of telling yet what led the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration to target him. But Lee was unabashedly pushing the edge of the legal envelope in at least one respect: He argued that dispensaries could be run as for-profit businesses, not simply collectives that members joined to share the weed they grew.

OAKLAND — Federal agents struck at the heart of California's medical marijuana movement, raiding the nation's first pot trade school and a popular dispensary, both run by one of the state's most prominent and provocative activists, Richard Lee. The raids in Oakland by the Internal Revenue Service and Drug Enforcement Administration sent a shudder through the medical cannabis trade and angered the plant's devotees, who believe the federal government...

With the fate of the city's medical marijuana industry in question, workers at more than a dozen Los Angeles pot shops have formed a labor union in part to help ward off a proposed citywide ban on dispensaries. The employees joined the ranks of grocery workers, healthcare providers and pharmacists at the United Food and Commercial Workers, Local 770. At a news conference Thursday, the president of the union vowed to leverage the "full force" of its 35,000 members to keep dispensaries open.

California cities may not ban medical marijuana dispensaries, but the operations may sell only weed that is grown on site, an appeals court ruled in an Orange County case. The unanimous decision by a three-judge Court of Appeal panel in Santa Ana was the first in the state to prohibit cities from enacting zoning restrictions that effectively ban all marijuana dispensaries. The court was also the first to rule that dispensaries must grow the marijuana they sell, a requirement that would force most of them out of business.

To hear Robert "Buddha" Juan tell it, Lost Paradise Land Corp. was a modern-day hippie's last chance at the California dream. Spread over 1,000 acres of mountainous Humboldt County backcountry, it was a place where counterculture settlers could buy land for minimal cash and dispense with banks, credit checks, brokers, permits or lawyers. For the roughly 40 people who, beginning in 2004, bought a stake in the corporation, "Buddhaville" — as it came to be known — was an off-the-grid homestead.

U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said Wednesday that the Justice Department has no plans to prosecute pot dispensaries that are operating legally under state laws in California and a dozen other states -- a development that medical marijuana advocates and civil libertarians hailed as a sweeping change in federal drug policy.

Forget years of conflicting rules, hazy regulations, hard lines and soft bans. An LAPD narcotics squad has made an end-run around the city's fumbling efforts to regulate medical marijuana, shutting down every dispensary in its San Fernando Valley division in a three-year campaign whose success just might signal the end of legal pot sales in Los Angeles. The closure this week of Herbal Medicine Care in Chatsworth ended a string of Devonshire Division busts that netted 30 guns, $2 million in cash and nine kilos of cocaine, in addition to a ton of marijuana.

The California Supreme Court has decided to review whether cities and counties may ban medical marijuana stores. Meeting in closed session, the court Wednesday agreed to assess rulings by lower courts on how much oversight local governments may exert on medical marijuana operations. A ruling is probably at least a year or two away. The court's decision to review the appeals court decisions means they cannot be enforced pending a ruling by the state high court. Joe Elford, chief counsel of Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana advocacy group, said the lower court decisions had been "very problematic for patients.