Blowing A Cloud of Smoke

I don’t know about you, but I suspect many, like myself, have mixed feelings about the medical marijuana movement. Perhaps it’s generational. I entered college a good 10 years after the height of the 1960s counterculture of flower children, free love and tabs of acid handed out like candy. But a few things stuck. The floor of my dorm building in college made Los Angeles air seem like a crisp morning in the mountains. It was in a perpetual brown pot haze. I once read that marijuana use may have reached its height in the late 1970s – just before cocaine reared its ugly head and dominated the go-go ’80s. Well, that was before the medical marijuana movement took hold in the last two decades. Since then, based on sketchy research but believable anecdotal evidence, pot has come to be seen by many as a back-to-nature cure-all that’s at worst harmless. Our own L.A. Councilman Bill Rosendahl credited medical marijuana with helping him to put his urethral cancer in remission by allowing him six hours of uninterrupted pain-free sleep every night while he underwent radiation treatment and chemotherapy. I don’t doubt him one bit. He’s just one of countless patients who have offered similar testimonials about the drug’s palliative effects. But the whole medical marijuana movement is mixed up in the “don’t trust big drug companies, be wary of prescription medication” way of thinking. It’s the same thought process that says anything labeled organic or a “supplement” can’t be bad for you, and could even hold miraculous medicinal properties. I can’t blame people for thinking that way. I don’t want to tell you the number of supplements atop my chest of drawers. And I avoid prescription medication if at all possible. Greedy pharmaceutical companies are much to blame for this, spending ungodly sums to market medications that – after being ingested by millions of people – we often discover are really dangerous. But who says marijuana is all that safe too? I’ve heard so many young people equate getting high every day with going home and having a beer or a Scotch. I’m sorry, but there is clear clinical evidence that having a drink or two daily can improve circulatory health. Of course, many can’t stop at that, and any benefits are lost once people drink to excess. On the other hand, there is growing evidence that regular, chronic use of pot over years literally kills brain cells and shrinks the brain. Do a quick Google search. Peruse the diagnostic imaging. It’s frightening. But does that really surprise anyone? How many potheads do you know that distinguish themselves for their crystal-clear thinking? Some maybe, but just give them time. And that’s not to mention the smoke. But that isn’t to say that patients suffering from cancer shouldn’t have their nausea and other symptoms relieved by a few tokes. If they say it works, I’ll believe them. I don’t want to have to find out myself. But we know, too, that the medical marijuana movement has been hijacked by the recreational “pot-is-harmless” crowd. Colorado legalized recreational pot use in the last election and it could be the first of several states to do so. In Los Angeles, Proposition 215, the 1996 law that legalized medical marijuana use, has also been hijacked by unscrupulous operators serving that crowd. And it hasn’t been pretty. No one even has an accurate count of the number of pot shops in Los Angeles. I’ve heard 800. I’ve heard 1,500. Whatever the number, it seems too many. There have been shootings. Owners of shops have been convicted in federal court of running retail pot operations. Neighbors complain. Which brings us to the propositions on the May 21 ballot that would tighten regulations on pot shops. The dispensaries seem to be behind Proposition F, which would tighten regulations on pot shops but allow the vast majority to stay in business. The City Council put Proposition D on the ballot, which would limit the shops to 135 under the notion that fewer can be better regulated. I am not going to tell anyone how to vote, and it’s quite likely that none of the propositions will reach the 50 percent threshold for passage, but I will say this: Medical marijuana and the proliferation of pot shops shouldn’t pave the way for California to go the way of Colorado. Regulate the shops, let patients have their pot, but don’t inhale all the movement is selling.