The Obama administration recently announced it would defer to state medical marijuana laws.

Stephen Gutwillig
Special to CNN

This year is a watershed year in pot politics.

The Obama administration recently announced it would defer to state medical marijuana laws and stop federal prosecutions of patients and providers who comply with them.

In California, the tanking economy inspired Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to call for debating marijuana taxation and regulation, a bill was introduced in Sacramento to do just that, and four separate ballot initiatives are circulating to allow voters the chance to decide the issue for themselves.

Schwarzenegger's position was echoed by New York Gov. David Paterson and by Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, who suggested legalizing pot could cripple Mexican and U.S. gangs. The unprecedented momentum to question marijuana prohibition is being fueled by a widely remarked-upon phenomenon - the cultural mainstreaming of marijuana.

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Editor's Note: The Los Angeles City Council has long debated how to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries. A proposed ordinance, drafted by City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, was recently sent to the City Council. The measure would prohibit sales of medical marijuana. Most dispensaries would be forced to close, including 186 that the city allowed to operate according to authorities. Read the full draft measure below.

Carmen A. Trutanich
City Attorney

Honorable Members:

This office has prepared and now transmits for your consideration the attached revised draft ordinance, approved as to form and legality. This draft ordinance would add Article 5.1 to Chapter IV of the Los Angeles Municipal Code (LAMC) regulating the collective cultivation of medical marijuana, pursuant to state law, in the City of Los Angeles. Pursuant to instructions from your Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee, it includes several changes from the last draft ordinance transmitted on September 22, 2009. The changes are summarized below.

When this matter is considered, we will be prepared to discuss the impacts of this ordinance, the case of Los Angeles Collective Association, et a/. v. City of Los Angeles, LASC BC 422215 and any other relevant litigation. If necessary, we will ask that the meeting be recessed into closed session for this purpose, pursuant to Government Code section 54956.9(a) and (b)(1).

Find the full draft ordinance here...

Allison B. Margolin
Criminal Defense Attorney

As the Obama administration attempts to steer federal agents away from prosecuting marijuana dispensaries, the Los Angeles District Attorney and City Attorney’s Office is attempting to undermine that shift by articulating a deceitfully narrow view of the state law.

Despite reports of trillion dollar deficits nationally and a collapsing state economy, District Attorney Steve Cooley says his office is committed to closing down revenue-generating medical marijuana dispensaries and the LA District Attorney’s office continues to take prisoners of war in their fight against safe access to medical marijuana.

In doing so, LA City is threatening to plunge the state’s economy into further collapse by taking potential tax revenues that could be going to the state treasury. Moreover, the City’s position threatens to generate crime by forcing the huge demand for marijuana back to the street. If the free market has allowed for the proliferation of dispensaries, that demand is not going away. The avenue for its fulfillment will simply change and could go from safe to entrenched in the poly-drug trafficking black market economy.

Most alarming, perhaps, is that the District Attorney seeks not only to thwart the proliferation of these establishments but seeks to create a whole new class of felons – medical marijuana operators. And the DA’s view of the state law - that it does not allow for the operation of dispensaries - is not just shocking. It flies in the face of case law handed down by the California courts.

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A federal move could encourage other states to make their own laws allowing medical marijuana use.

Roger Parloff
Fortune Magazine

When Irvin Rosenfeld, 56, picks me up at the Fort Lauderdale airport, his SUV reeks of marijuana. The vice president for sales at a local brokerage firm, Rosenfeld has been smoking 10 to 12 marijuana cigarettes a day for 38 years, he says.

That's probably unusual in itself, but what makes Rosenfeld exceptional is that for the past 27 years, he has been copping his weed directly from the United States government.

Every 25 days Rosenfeld goes to a pharmacy and picks up a tin of 300 federally grown and rolled cigarettes that have been sent there for him by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), acting with approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

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Program Note: For more on the medical marijuana controversy,  tune in to America's High, an AC360° special program, on Friday, July 24 at  11pm ET.

Justin Scheck and Stu Woo
Wall Street Journal

Sellers of marijuana as a medicine here don't fret about raids any more. They've stopped stressing over where to hide their stash or how to move it unseen.

Now their concerns involve the state Board of Equalization, which collects sales tax and requires a retailer ID number. Or city planning offices, which insist that staircases comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Then there is marketing strategy, which can mean paying to be a "featured dispensary" on a Web site for pot smokers.

After years in the shadows, medical marijuana in California is aspiring to crack the commercial mainstream.

"I want to do everything I can to run this as a legitimate business," says Jan Werner, 55 years old, who invested in a pot store in a shopping mall after 36 years as a car salesman.

State voters decreed back in 1996 that Californians had a right to use marijuana for any illness - from cancer to anorexia to any other condition it might help. But supplying "med pot" remained risky. The ballot measure didn't specify who could sell it or how. The state provided few guidelines, leaving local governments to impose a patchwork of restrictions. Above all, because pot possession remained illegal under U.S. law, sellers had to worry about federal raids.

But in February, the Justice Department said it would adhere to President Barack Obama's campaign statement that federal agents no longer would target med-pot dealers who comply with state law. Since then, vendors who had kept a low profile have begun to expand, and entrepreneurs who had avoided cannabis have begun to invest.

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CNN

Program Note: Tune in tonight to for our special coverage of the debate around the legalization of marijuana, 'America's High: The case for and against pot,' on AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

Allison Margolin
Criminal Defense Attorney

Charles Lynch, a dispensary operator from Morro Bay, California, who was indicted and convicted in federal court for activities related to selling marijuana to medical patients, received a sentence last Thursday of a year and a day.

John Littrell, Lynch’s attorney, indicated that Lynch received what is known as the “safety valve.” This is a federal statute that allows for a defendant who is otherwise subject to mandatory minimum sentences to have a reprieve and be sentenced outside of them. In order to qualify for the so-called 'safety valve,' the defendant cannot be the “leader” of the organization. Littrell indicated the judge would issue a written order amidst objection by the U.S. Attorney to the safety valve in part on that basis.

He also indicated that Lynch was sentenced to 366 days in order to qualify for good time credits that would reduce Lynch’s sentence to around 10 months.

It is refreshing and fabulous that Judge Wu has liberally interpreted the safety valve to help reduce the prison exposure of a defendant who would have a medical defense in state court. Although the attorneys were precluded from mentioning the medical defense during Lynch’s jury trial, it is clear that his medical defense, though not technically available, motivated the court to sentence the defendant far below the 10-year-mandatory minimum that would otherwise apply to his convictions.

I believe that defense attorneys should use this case as well as USA v. Landa, 281 F. Supp. 2d 1139 (2003) , in which the district court contemplated compliance with state law as a basis for a downward departure in the guidelines (although that case lacked evidence of state law compliance), to argue that state law has a place in contemplating punishment when the state and federal law differ and the state gives more rights than the federal government.

I drafted a motion like this for Stephanie Landa on her appeal. For anyone interested, the argument is that the 10th Amendment is violated by the federal enforcement of marijuana’s Schedule I status in the medical states.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published an article, “Obama’s Judicial Philosophy Analyzed,” by Charlie Savage, about what the author perceived to be Obama’s judicial philosophy and the one he believed Supreme Court justices appointed by Obama would follow.

The article suggested that Obama is interested in a court who articulates rights that many states (maybe a super-minority) have recognized, and pushes the other states along. That is why the recent legalization of medical marijuana in Rhode Island should be celebrated as a victory and replicated in more states.

Then we can use federal marijuana cases as a vehicle to go back to the U.S. Supreme Court and ask that the use of marijuana for medical purposes be recognized as a right that is held superior to the ban of the conduct by the Controlled Substances Act, the statute that regulates controlled substances and places marijuana in a category that has no medical use, Schedule I.

Editor's Note: Harvard-educated Lawyer Allison B. Margolin is now a practicing criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles. She is often referred to as 'L.A.'s 'dopest' attorney.

In Juarez, Mexico, 1,600 people were killed in 2008, three times more than the most murderous city in the U.S.

Rusty Fleming
Documentary Filmmaker and Author
www.drugwarsthemovie.com

It was a little after midnight when I crossed over the bridge from Laredo, Texas into the sister city of Nuevo Laredo Mexico. After having my car searched I was cleared through the Mexican Customs check point where the military was staged and drove towards my destination.

I had a source of mine, a local reporter, call me four hours earlier to tell me to meet him at a specific restaurant at 1am because he had some photographs and information for me. I was investigating a specific series of brutal murders that had taken place in the Laredo corridor. This meeting with a contact wasn’t all that unusual—most of the investigative journalists in Mexico work under intense circumstances as they often fall upon information relating to the drug cartels that they either can not, or will not, report on because it would be a death sentence for them.Therefore, they give the information to someone like me who will get it aired or published in a way that does not connect them.

I arrived early to the restaurant and since the weather was pleasant, I decided to take a seat on the patio and have a glass of tea. I sat for a few minutes when my source arrived and sat down, ordered a drink and handed me a large white envelope. He told me this was everything I had been asking his editor about the day before and that I should be careful how I use it. I thanked him, (by paying him), and we talked for about 20 minutes after which he asked if I could give him a ride home.

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Legalizing marijuana is off the table, the White House says.

Eliza Browning
AC360° Associate Producer

All week we've been reporting on the debate surrounding the legalization of marijuana. We've examined the use of marijuana for medical purposes, shown you legal marijuana dispensaries and illegal marijuana 'gardens.' Tonight we'll continue to examine whether or not there is a case for legalization. We've spoken to doctors, policymakers and experts on the subject. They all have their own opinions. What do you think? Do you think marijuana should be legalized in the United States?

Program Note: Watch Randi Kaye’s full report tonight on AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

Randi Kaye kneels beside a marijuana plant on her visit to a 'marijuana garden' with a team of sheriff's deputies and officials who destroy the plants.

Randi Kaye | Bio
AC360° Correspondent

The helicopter waiting for us was bright blue and yellow. That was our ride into the Los Padres National Forest in California. We were about two hours north of Los Angeles. After the dirt and sand swirling around us settled down, we climbed aboard.

Our pilot flew during Vietnam so I wasn't too worried when he took us into the canyon of the forest and hovered there while our photographer shot video of the "marijuana garden" below us.

Hovering in a canyon in a chopper is not for the faint of heart. We came to do a story for AC360° on the "marijuana gardens" that exist on public land - like national parks and U.S. forests. About 80 percent of marijuana grown outdoors is grown in those areas.

We came to the right spot here. As we hovered we could see the plants below us as well as the irrigation system the growers illegally installed in the forest. The system diverts the rain water to these “gardens,” so the rest of the forest is deprived of water while the marijuana plants thrive.

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