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If you’ve been following the L.A. dispensary closures in The 420 Times, then you know the deadline has passed, and over 400 medical marijuana dispensaries have been ordered to close down. Now the Los Angeles Police Department is making sure the dispensaries are complying.

“This is a high priority for the City Council and a high priority for the city attorney, so it’s a high priority for us,” said Capt. Kevin McCarthy, head of the Gang and Narcotics Division.

Shouldn’t a high priority for the Gangs Division be…gangs? Don’t gangs kill people? How many people to medical marijuana dispensaries kill?

Asha Greenberg, an assistant city attorney who was overseeing the enforcement efforts, said she believed that  20 to 30 stores still might be defying the ordinance. “It’s also somewhat of a moving target,” she said, because shops “open up and then close, we hear about places that have cut down on their hours and some places that have now turned into delivery services, so it runs the gamut of these places trying to get around the ordinance.”

I’ll be the first to admit that the police in any town or city should enforce city ordinances, no matter who disagrees with them. But there is such a thing as priorities. My town has an ordinance that says if your dog poops outside your yard, you have to pick it up. Yet I’ve never a police officer approach someone to write them a ticket, nor is there a division of our police department that handles poop duty.

I have to think the Gang and Narcotics Division of the LAPD has a lot on their plate. Warring gangs, cocaine and heroin shipments, and crime associated with the war on drugs in general. Why are medical marijuana dispensaries “a priority?”

- Joe Klare