[420 Girl]

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.

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