“YES WE CANNABIS!”

Bullshit, you gullible hippie… Dream on.

It must’ve been a particularly fucking slow day yesterday at The Atlantic Wire: how else to explain the popular, much-shared, but curiously devoid of any real news, or worthwhile analysis post with the winning link bait headline: “Is Legalizing Weed Obama’s Secret Weapon?”

(Apologies for my own ironic posing of that same question in the title here. Yes I wanted to draw you in, but at least I’m honest enough put quotation marks around it!)

Elspeth Reeve writes:

In 2004 George W. Bush’s re-election campaign worked to put anti-gay marriage ballot initiatives up for vote in several swing states in order to turn out more hard-core conservatives to the polls. This year the question is whether marijuana legalization measures will turn out young voters for Obama.

WHO is asking such a question? Certainly not many journalists with Google at their disposal, right?

But Reeve valiantly shoves on, nevertheless:

Bush’s plan to use gay marriage bans—in states that did not actually allow gay marriage—as a turnout booster led to signs featuring icky public restroom symbols proliferated and liberal panic that the Christian right had taken over. The press obsessed over “values voters.” One of Bush’s aides, Ken Mehlman, who later came out as gay himself, has apologized for the strategy, two others say it didn’t work.

This year there’s another incumbent president with modest approval ratings who could turn out his base with controversial ballot measures. But this time, the issue features no biblical or scatological imagery. In 2012, voters in swing states will decide whether they’ll allow their fellow citizens to bear joints. Unlike the gay marriage votes, there’s no indication that Obama’s re-election team is behind any of the pot legalization initiatives, but there are Democrats who are hoping that it will boost turnout among weed’s biggest fans: young people.

What?!?! These two things have nothing in common.

This risible nonsense was forwarded by several of my friends and acquaintances yesterday (you know who you are) with their apparent approval, as if all of a sudden Obama and Eric Holder were going to appear smoking blunts on the cover of October’s High Times magazine as they announce a cabinet level “herb czar” post for Woody Harrelson!

The Atlantic Wire post—it should have been obvious to anyone—was a steaming crock of liberal projection of the worst type… and dig the non-logical logic: In 2004, George Bush cynically used the prevailing winds at the time blowing against gay marriage to get himself re-elected. Now Obama can do the same by jumping on the pro-marijuana bandwagon.

What the fuck Atlantic Wire? Child, someone has lied to you.

The Obama administration’s actual real-life history on the medical cannabis front is in diametric opposition to promises made on the campaign trail in 2008 and broken ever since! This is all, of course, a matter of public record, but to be fair to Elspeth Reeve, Google was broken the other day, wasn’t it?

Or maybe she was high?

Today’s Huffington Post features the following headline: “Medical Marijuana Crackdown Leads Feds To Target Landlords Of Pot Businesses.”

In this article, the cynical way the Obama DOJ is going about “softly” dealing with the proliferation of medical cannabis dispensaries in California is laid bare (and it is EXACTLY what Bush’s DOJ was doing. The. Exact.Same.Thing.): The Feds are threatening the landlords who rent to the dispensaries under civil-forfeiture statutes that allow the government to seize real estate used to commit or facilitate drug trafficking. And this is cost effective for the Feds, too: Usually all they have to do is send a letter to the property owner, threaten to take their property away from them and there goes the problem in a puff of smoke.

Or at least this is generally how it works. Landlords with savvier legal advisers simply ignore such letters, while less clued-in building owners usually cave and kick the cannabis clubs to the curb:

Federal prosecutors are targeting medical marijuana shops in California, seeking forfeiture of the properties in which they do business.

The authorities are pressuring landlords to shut down the shops or face possible loss of the real estate through the unconventional and low-key use of a civil statute designed primarily to seize the assets of drug-trafficking organizations.

While some states, including California, have legalized medical marijuana businesses, the federal government does not recognize their authority to do so and has targeted the shops for violations of the 40-year-old Controlled Substances Act.

The goal of the Justice Department’s effort, part of a crackdown announced last October, is to fight the medical marijuana industry, estimated at $1.7 billion annually, without confronting it head-on with costly and potentially embarrassing criminal prosecutions, industry sources and legal experts said.

This indirect strategy is reminiscent of the department’s attempts, which have met with only limited success, to sever the medical pot industry’s access to banking services. Many businesses have found ways around those restrictions, experts said.

“Filing asset-forfeiture lawsuits against these commercial properties is a very clever way to handle an otherwise horribly difficult and controversial situation,” said Greg Baldwin, a partner at the Miami law firm Holland & Knight and a former federal prosecutor.

“If you bring criminal charges against these medical marijuana businesses, the federal government gets pilloried in the press for attacking California law and sick people.”

The idea that the Obama administration is going to all of a sudden turn on a dime and become pro-pot is a pipe-dream. Last week in Los Angeles the Feds brought asset-forfeiture lawsuits against several buildings housing marijuana stores and sent the so-called “warning letters” to dozens of property owners threatening similar legal action. The letters gave property owners just two weeks to comply. Although the odds of the Feds actually carrying through with the threat seem rather low, how would you feel if you owned rental property and you got a letter from the Feds like that? What if they are serious this time?

You see how that might wear on you. It’s not worth it, so bye-bye law-abiding, 100% legal as per the voters of the great state of California pot dispensaries. Even the dispensary owners who own the buildings they operate out of would have to have nerves of steel (and deep pockets) to stare down that kind of threat.

In the same way that I hate it when conservative know-nothings nod in idiot approval at fantasy and emotional projection onto “leaders,” it’s no less grating on the nerves when it is progressives who are the ones who are being the lazy, brainless idiots when they hero worship a guy who clearly doesn’t deserve it…

Below, Bill Maher, Mos Def, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens discuss what Obama actually said about marijuana legalization:
 

In what has to be one of the most short-sighted (and cravenly politically opportunistic) moves in some time, L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley and City Atty. Carmen Trutanich have decided that the way medical marijuana dispensaries distribute cannabis to their patients is illegal and violates state laws.

But what no one is pointing out is how this is simply a bid for Cooley and Trutanich to cynically further their political ambitions. You can’t expect to run for, let’s say, State Attorney General without the support of the police and correctional officers unions, both which are—no surprise here—extremely opposed to legal marijuana sales DESPITE WHAT THE VOTERS OF CALIFORNIA WANT, for the simple reason that it would increase law enforcement budgets if marijuana sales are prohibited.

Furthermore, since medical cannabis sales are taxed—and there is, of course, discussion in the California Legislature to further raise those taxes with special levies—why in the world, in the middle of the Great Recession, would anyone think it’s SMART to leave the tax receipts from California’s biggest cash crop on the table??

Trutanich and Cooley know fully well that the vast majority of the over 800 medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles county are reputable businesses who go out of their way to get along with and respect their neighbors. These establishments don’t harm anyone and they help a lot of people. The attorneys say they’re going after the “greedy” dispensaries, but why?

Just tax them you idiots!

From the Los Angeles Times:

At hundreds of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles, cash is changing hands, typically about $45 for an eighth of an ounce.

The dispensary owners call it a donation because state law requires their stores to operate as nonprofit collectives. But their critics—police, the district attorney and the newly elected city attorney—insist that it’s a sale and that marijuana sales remain illegal under state law.

The debate turns largely on the interpretation of one sentence in the law, but it touches on one of the biggest concerns about dispensaries in Los Angeles: that the rapid proliferation of stores is being driven by people who are hoping to profit from the so-called Green Rush and who are buying rather than growing much of their cannabis.

“The people who are simply trying to make a profit are the ones messing it up for those people that need it and those legitimate distributors who are trying to help people,” said L.A. City Councilman Dennis Zine.

Some officials challenge legality of over-the-counter medical marijuana sales

Grow Room photograph by Taryn Simon