DEA To Help LAPD Shut Down Dispensaries In Los Angeles?

Joe | Aug 24, 2012 | Comments 5

On Wednesday Los Angeles City Council member Bernard Parks made a motion for the council to consider working with the DEA on enforcing the new citywide dispensary ban – it passed the council by a 10 to 0 vote. His motion instructs the LAPD to “work with the Federal government, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the District Attorney to create a citywide enforcement strategy to deal with medical marijuana collectives.”

The 420 Times contacted advocacy group American For Safe Access for comment on these recent developments. “The motion to enforce the city’s ban on dispensaries with the help of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is very troubling,” Kris Hermes, their Media Specialist, told us. “This type of collaborative effort between local and federal law enforcement is highly objectionable, but not unprecedented. However, the proposed effort to shut down hundreds of dispensaries at once would be a new and extremely harmful approach.

“Given the success so far of the referendum campaign to overturn the ban, the city would do better to wait before carrying out any enforcement activity. There’s a very good chance the city will be forced, sooner rather than later, to rescind the ban or to put the decision before the voters. Any aggressive raids or legal action would be premature to say the least.

“Notably, the city council motion was passed on the same day the California Supreme Court mooted the Pack v. City of Long Beach case, on which the Los Angeles dispensary ban is predicated. The rug has essentially been pulled out from under the city’s legal foundation it used to ban distribution. In other words, the city no longer has a pretext or a basis for its ban on dispensaries.”

It seems the L.A. City Council is overwhelmed by the prospect of shutting down some 1,000 functioning businesses, and they will obviously find a willing partner in the federal government. Such an incredible amount of resources to be used to destroy thousands of jobs.

The decent into madness continues.

- Joe Klare

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Filed Under: 420 Times Exclusives • Activism • Best Of The Best • Exclusive Web Content • Medical Marijuana News • Politics • The War On Drugs

doc

This city council must be Republicans.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=600151075 Eric R. Johnson

Illegal for LAPD or other california politicians, bureaucrats or police agencies to help or enlist the Federal Government to to its dirty work.

The California Constitution prohibits it, and, as the motion has, as has been noted, lost it’s legal foundations, the only source of ostensible justification to proceed with LAPD/DEA joint ventures would be to appease Federal Bureaucrats and Federal Politicians, like the President, who smoked lots of pot without being caught, but who wants you to be punished for doing what he did with such glee, using the now adjudicated-to-be-platitude, “Federal Law Trumps State Law,” which is not exactly true and not at all true with respect to Medical marijuana in California.

If the Feds want to do their own work in enforcing their own laws with their own manpower, they may.

But they may not be called in by any California politician or bureaucrat or police agency, as that would violate their oath of office they swore to uphold the California Constitution, which was changed by a vote of the people in in 1996 with proposition 215.

The California Constitution says that in the event of conflict between state and federal laws, STATE officials MUST uphiod STATE laws.

Further, although having gone before the US Supreme court twice, the California’s proposition 215 remains standing, having NOT been “struck down,” by the Supreme Court.

That was a long time ago.

In 2009, there was a series of small cases which showed that California officials must hold to the California Constitution, which caused the Attorney General’s office, which had refused to do so, even under the the Attorney General, now Governor Jerry Brown to issue rules and regulations for dispensaries, something that office under 3 Attorneys General had refused to do until then.

It is not Constitutional and thus not legal for the LA City Council, or any other California Governmental Entity, to ask the Federal Government, which would be more than happy to do so (if it has the manpower and the political guts, which it has to critically relied on the states to supply since the beginning of the War on Drugs in 1972 as a decoration by Nixon…. Nixon!), to come in and enforce a new CITY law which will soon be eviscerated a lawsuit.

And in any case, what about all those bars? And the VALLEY? Should the LAPD and the LA county sheriff not be better working on drunk driving, rape, robbery,and murder, rather than harasing the sick and dying?

I wonder also how many of the LA city council have fond memories of their time smoking cannabis? And that was illegal and for fun.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=600151075 Eric R. Johnson

Both Republicans and Democrats are equally responsible for the current problems with drug policy.

For example, California’s US Senators, both Democrats, are staunch prohibitionists opposed to medical (excuse) marijuana, as they call it. These are Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, who are both from Marin County, and Feinstein, once Mayor of San Francisco, have fought tooth and nail against Medical marijuana, until Boxer realized was hurting her, when she simply shut up on the matter.

During the first 2 years of President Obama’s term, the Democrats controlled the Senate with 60 votes, enough to close off debate, and the Speaker of the House was Nancy Pelosi, who moved to San Francisco in 1969, and who represents California’s 8th congressional district covering most of the city and county of San Francisco except for the southwestern parts of the city.

This, my friends is the epicenter of the Medical Marijuana movement, proceeding even prop 215 with the quiet existence of the “buyers club,” which is where sick people went to get cannabis elsewhere than the street.

It’s existence motivated the creation of prop 215.

And when the Democrats could have changed things for the better (and I myself prompted with my call to Harry Reid on the Radio in Reno (Rusty Humphries show, KKOH am780, September 1997, when Reid was Senate Minority Whip saying of medical marijuana, “well have to take a look at that.)

Did any of that leadership and control by Democrats 2009-2011 result in any progress on Medical Marijuana?

No. The Attorney General had to be publicly shamed into issuing the order top lighten up and stop busting dispensaries operating within state laws, only to have Obama himself renege on and repudiate this promise as we neared the election year.

So, Republicans may oppose cannabis and other drugs, but the War on S’me Drugs, or, in reality, it is really a war on Marijuana users, for there are too few users of all other drugs combined to justify the war rhetoric and the war-time armament and war time governmental behavior, inclusive of the set of Supreme Court Rulings known lovingly by attorneys as “the Drug War Exception,” to the Constitution of the USA which we have become used to.

But Democrats are JUST AS RESPONSIBLE in very way, as, if you look at the composition of the congress during every period of Drug War Ram-up, one or both of the Houses of Congress was controlled by the Democrats.

So no Drug War Laws would exist, at the Federal Level at least, without the extreme cooperate of both Parties, Democrat and Republican.

This is by far the most bi-partisan policy ever to exist in the USA, as there are so many jobs contingent upon arresting circa 1 million people per ear on drug charges, 750,000 of them for simple possession of marijuana, which, in New York City, may have been forced by police order to be revealed, changing the crime from a misdemeanor to felony.

350 arrests per day in New York City, the most of any city in the world. New York is not known to be run by Conservative Republicans.
ValleyGirl

The City Council has no business in trying to make it difficult for patients to get their meds. Bottom line.
Spamizbad

I was sitting here, clinging to my bible and guns ..drinking a beer and listening to Rush Limbaughs call to behead all non white people, filling out insurance coverage for my precious tea bags if god forbid the worst happens, and behold, you make me spit my beer out all over my computer, that i bought from taking advantage of some poor person while I got rich on Oil contacts in Iraq.
Our president uses alcohol, therefore he uses drugs..
Prohibition of cannabis is stupid!

DEA To Help LAPD Shut Down Dispensaries In Los Angeles?

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