California Medical Marijuana Regulatory Wrangling
The intense and necessary debate over how to regulate the distribution of medical marijuana in California continues. In Santa Cruz, long at the vanguard of medical marijuana cultivation, use, and activism, the city council has voted to create the Office of Compassionate Use, a city department that would be charged with dispensing medical marijuana.
This is a major landmark in the struggle to establish a regulatory structure for medical marijuana distribution. Polling shows that over 70% of Americans now support allowing the use of medical marijuana. Those forward-thinking states and localities that have voted to allowed their sick and dying citizens access to medical marijuana are now going through some growing pains with their distribution systems. Undoubtedly there will be good and bad models, but they will all be better than the black market. It is analogous to the development of the Dutch coffee shop system after The Netherlands decriminalized marijuana in the ’70s. Will Santa Cruz’s model be the best? We’ll see.
Posted by Clovis Thorn.
