Medical Marijuana: Feds Attack Sick People
July 26, 2007The wars in Iraq and even Afghanistan are not going well. The economy is starting to shrivel up and people are losing their homes. The immigration bill failed badly, the Attorney General doesn’t know if torture is OK, Osama Bin Ladin is still on the loose and the president’s approval rating is at an all-time low.
But there’s one target the Feds can hit: medical marijuana dispensaries in California, where medical marijuana for suffering people has been legal since 1996. Today’s raids came the same day the Los Angeles City Council introduced an ordinance calling on federal authorities to stop targeting clinics allowed under state law.
A DEA spokeswoman described the timing as “purely coincidental.”
LA City Councilman Dennis Zine, who spent over 30 years as a police officer, doesn’t think so. Zine, who wrote a letter to DEA Administrator Karen Tandy asking the agency to stop the raids, called the federal agents “bullies.”
“They’re trying to bully us. Instead of using resources to go after drug dealers ruining neighborhoods and poisoning school kids, they’re going after individuals dying of cancer and suffering from AIDS who need cannabis to have any type of appetite.”