11:45am | Perhaps you heard about the guy who got busted a couple of weeks ago for selling some dispensary-acquired medpot brownies to a high-schooler, who in turn sold them to classmates.
No matter what you think about medpot in Long Beach, you should find such actions troubling.
As I’ve written many times, I feel cannabis should be legal not only for medicinal use, but for therapeutic or even just casual use. By adults. I’ll go further and say that in some cases cannabis has proven the best medicinal option for minors.
But this is not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about some guy who bought brownies from a dispensary and flipped them to a kid to make a buck. And even were cannabis completely legal, this guy deserves to be busted.
All dispensaries explicitly say the cannabis they dispense is for use only by the patients to whom it was dispensed. I, for one, am not going to pretend it’s a matter of any importance whether a medpot patient shares a joint with an adult friend; but the practice of re-selling medicine is a generally harmful to the cause, if for no other reason than it plays into the hands of the anti-medpot establishment. If you’re re-selling, it means you’re obtaining more medicine than you need — which, like it or not, is not the intent of the Compassionate Use Act — and thus provides ammunition for those who assault the medpot community with charges of dispensaries being nothing more than a link in the supply-and-demand chain of street-dealing.
But “patients” selling on the street to minors makes the question much more serious. It’s not that there isn’t already plenty of marijuana in our high schools (we all know there was long before coinage of the term “medical marijuana”). It’s not that cannabis is a particularly dangerous substance (as a DEA administrative law judge once pointed out, cannabis is less toxic than potatoes). But there are unbiased scientific studies pointing to marijuana use as negatively impacting adolescent brain development.
Even were none of this true, selling medpot brownies to high-schoolers would still be an act worthy of arrest and prosecution. As long as we as a society agree that there are members of our populace (viz., “minors”) that we recognize as not yet able to take full responsibility for their actions, it is perfectly logical to proscribe their usage of mind-altering substances. That is a choice for adults.
Under the leadership of Chief Jim McDonnell, the Long Beach Police Department (which is not to say every officer) has displayed a bias against the medpot community and continues to waste its over-stretched resources on marijuana-related issues. And even though alcohol is far more damaging to — and far more widely used by — adolescents than marijuana, you’re not likely to find the LBPD issuing press releases about arrests related to teen alcohol use.
Nonetheless, this is a case where the LBPD did just what it ought to have done. Whether you’re part of an institutional bias against the use of cannabis or an advocate for its complete legalization, we should all agree that selling pot to kids is bad news.