[420 Girl]

For the past two years I have spent three days every week distributing marijuana, legally. The place I volunteer at represents one of the nearly 200 facilities given permits by the city of Los Angeles before a moratorium on all new dispensaries was extended in June.

Last month a Los Angeles Superior Court judge ruled the Los Angeles moratorium on new pot dispensaries invalid. What this did was pave the way for a rapid proliferation of loosely structured collectives while blurring the lines between what I do, and what many of the estimated 1,000 dispensaries now popping up everywhere in Los Angeles do.

It is a discredit to stipulate that all of the facilities should be held in the same light. All around Los Angeles there are rugged and shady operations built for profit, that take advantage of the city's inability to properly regulate what Californians have already voted in favor of. There is no doubt that it is currently out of control, but the answer is not the abolition of medical marijuana dispensaries as we have come to know them. The answer is Los Angeles drafting specified collective guidelines that make sense.

The strict and irrational guidelines proposed by the likes of District Attorney Steve Cooley and City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, which attempt to implement draconian regulations like limiting the use of the substance to what each patient can grow themselves, are far from where true medical marijuana advocates and deserving patients would like to see the system end up.

Cooley has been quoted as saying that he feels 100 percent of dispensaries in operation are run illegally, and not in accord with the 1996 voter initiative that made this all possible.

He is 100 percent wrong. There are exceptions to the recent explosion of legally questionable operations. There are collectives that actually act as collectives-operations structured for no other purpose than the distribution of a substance legally condoned for medical use, places with armed guards, security cameras, and someone at the door checking for I.D and proper documentation.

These places are not there to serve the underground, or to amass profit. They are there to deliver a needed service. People who suffer from anxiety or depression, people who are tired of the way pharmaceuticals make them feel, all with problems that are similar to each other in one important way: they have a strong conviction about the right to use a substance they themselves deem helpful, and that a legal physician finds beneficial.

The ruling against the moratorium has narrowed the ability for those who are doing this thing the right way to distinguish themselves from the ones who most obviously are not.

The future of medical marijuana in Los Angeles is up in the air.

Hopefully the city and its legal dilettantes like Cooley and Trutanich can move past their politically driven convictions against dispensaries and move toward a more rational attempt at responsible regulation.

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