Last week was one of the the darkest for the medical marijuana movement, with the federal Justice Department picking two
of San Francisco’s best-known and best-behaving licensed medical
cannabis dispensaries for closure. This came mere weeks after U.S.
Attorney Melinda Haag moved to close Harborside Health Center — the nation’s biggest pot club and Oakland’s second-biggest taxpayer.
Could things get much worse? Well, sure — Haag could close all of
San Francisco’s dispensaries, as she is rumored to be considering to do
by Christmas, according to sources.
Enter Congresswoman Barbara Lee, the Oakland Democrat who is mad as
hell. She introduced legislation in Washington that would halt Haag and
her three California counterparts in their tracks.
Lee on Thursday introduced a bill that would prohibit the Justice
Department from using asset forfeiture laws against the landlords of
state-legal medical marijuana clubs, according to Americans for Safe
Access.
The bill would remove from Haag’s arsenal her most reliable weapon —
shutting down clubs with nothing more than a letter sent via certified
mail. It would also force her to escalate or abandon the war on those
pot patients who suffer from AIDS, cancer, or chronic pain.
The forfeiture laws employed by Haag and her counterparts in
Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Diego were crafted in the 1980s to
punish narcotics traffickers, but have been handy tools in the statewide
crackdown on medical marijuana,which began last fall.
About a dozen dispensaries have been shut down in the Bay Area since
Oct. 7, 2011, and "hundreds" more across the state have moved
voluntarily or been evicted by landlords, according to ASA.
In very limited public comments made since the crackdown began,
Haag has said that clubs are being targeted for vague and inconsistent
reasons: They’re too close to kids, they’re violating some unspecified
part of state law, or, in, Harborside’s case, they’re simply too big.
Lee’s bill, H.R. 6335, is called the Medical Marijuana Property
Rights Protection Act. It would prohibit the feds from using asset
forfeiture proceedings to threaten, intimidate, or otherwise close
state-legal cannabis dispensaries, and "begin to align federal law to
states’ laws that allow for safe access to medical marijuana," she said
in a statement.
Will it be too little, too late? Or will it even make it out of
committee? In any case, Lee’s is the first direct reaction by a member
of the federal government to the Justice Department’s arbitrary
crackdowns.
