J
JackTheGrower
Looks like an interesting weekend coming up..
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Happy Birthday ICMag! Been 20 years since Gypsy Nirvana created the forum! We are celebrating with a 4/20 Giveaway and by launching a new Patreon tier called "420club". You can read more here.
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Important notice: ICMag's T.O.U. has been updated. Please review it here. For your convenience, it is also available in the main forum menu, under 'Quick Links"!
J
JackTheGrower
This an important distinction friends.
What we have is a small group of people in power trying to be the lightening rod of the anti-medical-cannabis people.
This is one of the main issues in the State, the main issues and the players in play.
It's this sort of subversion of power that keeps the people from health care on the principle that someone who doesn't need cannabis must be defended from seeing it smelling it or have "That kind of people in their part of America.
It's a major medical Cannabis Don't ask Don't sell.
I'm thinking it's been over 10 years and every major legal challenge has been seen through and most found to be wrong policy or unconstitutional.
As of late the public lying was still going on with the comments on our Attorney General (AG).
These propagandists are representatives important people that represent the core haters. those who maybe have prayed this issue would go away.. It has to be hard to try now and pull the public's , that believes in their authority, head out of the medical cannabis sand.
Honesty and leadership is the answer.. WeHo may offer a good model.
What we have is a small group of people in power trying to be the lightening rod of the anti-medical-cannabis people.
This is one of the main issues in the State, the main issues and the players in play.
It's this sort of subversion of power that keeps the people from health care on the principle that someone who doesn't need cannabis must be defended from seeing it smelling it or have "That kind of people in their part of America.
It's a major medical Cannabis Don't ask Don't sell.
I'm thinking it's been over 10 years and every major legal challenge has been seen through and most found to be wrong policy or unconstitutional.
As of late the public lying was still going on with the comments on our Attorney General (AG).
These propagandists are representatives important people that represent the core haters. those who maybe have prayed this issue would go away.. It has to be hard to try now and pull the public's , that believes in their authority, head out of the medical cannabis sand.
Honesty and leadership is the answer.. WeHo may offer a good model.
J
JackTheGrower
Dupe message..
Last edited:
Let us look at what the AG had to say in his guidelines below. I will emphasize the relevant portions.
A. Business Forms: Any group that is collectively or cooperatively cultivating and
distributing marijuana for medical purposes should be organized and operated in a manner
that ensures the security of the crop and safeguards against diversion for non-medical
purposes. The following are guidelines to help cooperatives and collectives operate within
the law, and to help law enforcement determine whether they are doing so.
1. Statutory Cooperatives: A cooperative must file articles of incorporation
with the state and conduct its business for the mutual benefit of its members.
(Corp. Code, § 12201, 12300.) No business may call itself a “cooperative” (or “coop”)
unless it is properly organized and registered as such a corporation under the
Corporations or Food and Agricultural Code. (Id. at § 12311(b).) Cooperative
corporations are “democratically controlled and are not organized to make a profit
for themselves, as such, or for their members, as such, but primarily for their
members as patrons.” (Id. at § 12201.) The earnings and savings of the business
must be used for the general welfare of its members or equitably distributed to
members in the form of cash, property, credits, or services. (Ibid.) Cooperatives
must follow strict rules on organization, articles, elections, and distribution of
earnings, and must report individual transactions from individual members each
year. (See id. at § 12200, et seq.) Agricultural cooperatives are likewise nonprofit
corporate entities “since they are not organized to make profit for themselves, as
such, or for their members, as such, but only for their members as producers.”
(Food & Agric. Code, § 54033.) Agricultural cooperatives share many
characteristics with consumer cooperatives. (See, e.g., id. at § 54002, et seq.)
Cooperatives should not purchase marijuana from, or sell to, non-members;
instead, they should only provide a means for facilitating or coordinating
transactions between members.
2. Collectives: California law does not define collectives, but the dictionary
defines them as “a business, farm, etc., jointly owned and operated by the members
of a group.” (Random House Unabridged Dictionary; Random House, Inc.
© 2006.) Applying this definition, a collective should be an organization that
merely facilitates the collaborative efforts of patient and caregiver members –
including the allocation of costs and revenues. As such, a collective is not a
statutory entity, but as a practical matter it might have to organize as some form of
business to carry out its activities. The collective should not purchase marijuana
from, or sell to, non-members; instead, it should only provide a means for
facilitating or coordinating transactions between members.
4. Collectives Should Acquire, Possess, and Distribute Only Lawfully
Cultivated Marijuana: Collectives and cooperatives should acquire marijuana
only from their constituent members, because only marijuana grown by a qualified
patient or his or her primary caregiver may lawfully be transported by, or
distributed to, other members of a collective or cooperative. (§§ 11362.765,
11362.775.) The collective or cooperative may then allocate it to other members of
the group. Nothing allows marijuana to be purchased from outside the collective or
cooperative for distribution to its members. Instead, the cycle should be a closedcircuit
of marijuana cultivation and consumption with no purchases or sales to or
from non-members. To help prevent diversion of medical marijuana to nonmedical
markets, collectives and cooperatives should document each member’s
contribution of labor, resources, or money to the enterprise. They also should track
and record the source of their marijuana.
5. Distribution and Sales to Non-Members are Prohibited: State law
allows primary caregivers to be reimbursed for certain services (including
marijuana cultivation), but nothing allows individuals or groups to sell or distribute
marijuana to non-members. Accordingly, a collective or cooperative may not
distribute medical marijuana to any person who is not a member in good standing
of the organization. A dispensing collective or cooperative may credit its members
for marijuana they provide to the collective, which it may then allocate to other
members. (§ 11362.765(c).) Members also may reimburse the collective or
cooperative for marijuana that has been allocated to them. Any monetary
reimbursement that members provide to the collective or cooperative should only
be an amount necessary to cover overhead costs and operating expenses.
6. Permissible Reimbursements and Allocations: Marijuana grown at a
collective or cooperative for medical purposes may be:
a) Provided free to qualified patients and primary caregivers who are
members of the collective or cooperative;
b) Provided in exchange for services rendered to the entity;
c) Allocated based on fees that are reasonably calculated to cover
overhead costs and operating expenses; or
d) Any combination of the above.
I have read nothing that gives the green light to the typical meaning of sales in the AG's guidelines. The ordinary meaning of a sale is a transaction for the purchase of a good with nothing else required. E.g: Buying lettuce at your local super market. You were not required to have some type of contribution in the production of that lettuce. Also, the market made a profit off of the sale.
The distinct differences in the AG's guidelines are that the example type of sale I gave above about purchasing lettuce at the market would not be allowed under the AG' guidelines. Sure, money can transact between hands, but under very defined guidelines. They are above for you to read. But, the ordinary meaning of a sale to the ordinary person does not fly. No where does the AG say carte blanche sales are legal. There are many strings attached to his meaning of "sales." If I am wrong, I stand to be corrected with citations to the AG guidelines.
A. Business Forms: Any group that is collectively or cooperatively cultivating and
distributing marijuana for medical purposes should be organized and operated in a manner
that ensures the security of the crop and safeguards against diversion for non-medical
purposes. The following are guidelines to help cooperatives and collectives operate within
the law, and to help law enforcement determine whether they are doing so.
1. Statutory Cooperatives: A cooperative must file articles of incorporation
with the state and conduct its business for the mutual benefit of its members.
(Corp. Code, § 12201, 12300.) No business may call itself a “cooperative” (or “coop”)
unless it is properly organized and registered as such a corporation under the
Corporations or Food and Agricultural Code. (Id. at § 12311(b).) Cooperative
corporations are “democratically controlled and are not organized to make a profit
for themselves, as such, or for their members, as such, but primarily for their
members as patrons.” (Id. at § 12201.) The earnings and savings of the business
must be used for the general welfare of its members or equitably distributed to
members in the form of cash, property, credits, or services. (Ibid.) Cooperatives
must follow strict rules on organization, articles, elections, and distribution of
earnings, and must report individual transactions from individual members each
year. (See id. at § 12200, et seq.) Agricultural cooperatives are likewise nonprofit
corporate entities “since they are not organized to make profit for themselves, as
such, or for their members, as such, but only for their members as producers.”
(Food & Agric. Code, § 54033.) Agricultural cooperatives share many
characteristics with consumer cooperatives. (See, e.g., id. at § 54002, et seq.)
Cooperatives should not purchase marijuana from, or sell to, non-members;
instead, they should only provide a means for facilitating or coordinating
transactions between members.
2. Collectives: California law does not define collectives, but the dictionary
defines them as “a business, farm, etc., jointly owned and operated by the members
of a group.” (Random House Unabridged Dictionary; Random House, Inc.
© 2006.) Applying this definition, a collective should be an organization that
merely facilitates the collaborative efforts of patient and caregiver members –
including the allocation of costs and revenues. As such, a collective is not a
statutory entity, but as a practical matter it might have to organize as some form of
business to carry out its activities. The collective should not purchase marijuana
from, or sell to, non-members; instead, it should only provide a means for
facilitating or coordinating transactions between members.
4. Collectives Should Acquire, Possess, and Distribute Only Lawfully
Cultivated Marijuana: Collectives and cooperatives should acquire marijuana
only from their constituent members, because only marijuana grown by a qualified
patient or his or her primary caregiver may lawfully be transported by, or
distributed to, other members of a collective or cooperative. (§§ 11362.765,
11362.775.) The collective or cooperative may then allocate it to other members of
the group. Nothing allows marijuana to be purchased from outside the collective or
cooperative for distribution to its members. Instead, the cycle should be a closedcircuit
of marijuana cultivation and consumption with no purchases or sales to or
from non-members. To help prevent diversion of medical marijuana to nonmedical
markets, collectives and cooperatives should document each member’s
contribution of labor, resources, or money to the enterprise. They also should track
and record the source of their marijuana.
5. Distribution and Sales to Non-Members are Prohibited: State law
allows primary caregivers to be reimbursed for certain services (including
marijuana cultivation), but nothing allows individuals or groups to sell or distribute
marijuana to non-members. Accordingly, a collective or cooperative may not
distribute medical marijuana to any person who is not a member in good standing
of the organization. A dispensing collective or cooperative may credit its members
for marijuana they provide to the collective, which it may then allocate to other
members. (§ 11362.765(c).) Members also may reimburse the collective or
cooperative for marijuana that has been allocated to them. Any monetary
reimbursement that members provide to the collective or cooperative should only
be an amount necessary to cover overhead costs and operating expenses.
6. Permissible Reimbursements and Allocations: Marijuana grown at a
collective or cooperative for medical purposes may be:
a) Provided free to qualified patients and primary caregivers who are
members of the collective or cooperative;
b) Provided in exchange for services rendered to the entity;
c) Allocated based on fees that are reasonably calculated to cover
overhead costs and operating expenses; or
d) Any combination of the above.
I have read nothing that gives the green light to the typical meaning of sales in the AG's guidelines. The ordinary meaning of a sale is a transaction for the purchase of a good with nothing else required. E.g: Buying lettuce at your local super market. You were not required to have some type of contribution in the production of that lettuce. Also, the market made a profit off of the sale.
The distinct differences in the AG's guidelines are that the example type of sale I gave above about purchasing lettuce at the market would not be allowed under the AG' guidelines. Sure, money can transact between hands, but under very defined guidelines. They are above for you to read. But, the ordinary meaning of a sale to the ordinary person does not fly. No where does the AG say carte blanche sales are legal. There are many strings attached to his meaning of "sales." If I am wrong, I stand to be corrected with citations to the AG guidelines.
The very first rule of the Rochdale Principles for cooperatives says that:
REI sells (practically gives) patronage memberships to anyone who walks in off the street. Why couldn't a coop do the same for patients?
Extending this to cannabis cooperatives suggests to me that any legal patient with the means to participate, even if it's merely a monetary contribution, can be a patron of a properly organized coop. A coop could generally include a storefront (we could even call it a "dispensary") by definition. Patrons=patients, members= caregivers. Members own the coop and patrons benefit from the cooperative ownership.
REI sells (practically gives) patronage memberships to anyone who walks in off the street. Why couldn't a coop do the same for patients?
Does REI profit? Meaning do they have a net profit from revenue? I do not know. Please, show me the answer with concrete fact--no guess.
Nevermind
Member Refund 101
Members Share in the Profits
As a cooperative, REI is owned by its members. That's why sharing profits with our members is first priority at REI. If REI earns a profit during the year, the majority of that profit is returned annually to members in the form of a member refund on your dividend notice.
How is the Member Refund Calculated?
As a member, you'll get back a percentage of the money you spend at REI-every year! REI's goal is to return an annual refund of up to 10% to our members. In 2008, REI returned 10% of the dollar amount of members' eligible* purchases. For example, a member who purchased $500 in eligible merchandise in 2008 received a refund of $50 (10% of $500**). Since 1938, REI has never failed to return a dividend to its members.
*Purchases not eligible: sale/clearance items (prices ending in $._9 or $._3), gift cards, certificates, services, fees, travel and REI Outdoor School classes and outings.
The only difference I find with a cooperative like REI and trying to compare it, is the very distinct difference that a MMJ cooperative has to abide by the statutes of Prop 215 and SB 420. REI does not. A MMJ cooperative is restrained by laws that REI is not. That is what I find most people ignoring when trying to make similar comparisons.
You can't drive trucks through loopholes that folks keep on trying to bring up. Maybe a bike, lol, but not no truck.
Member Refund 101
Members Share in the Profits
As a cooperative, REI is owned by its members. That's why sharing profits with our members is first priority at REI. If REI earns a profit during the year, the majority of that profit is returned annually to members in the form of a member refund on your dividend notice.
How is the Member Refund Calculated?
As a member, you'll get back a percentage of the money you spend at REI-every year! REI's goal is to return an annual refund of up to 10% to our members. In 2008, REI returned 10% of the dollar amount of members' eligible* purchases. For example, a member who purchased $500 in eligible merchandise in 2008 received a refund of $50 (10% of $500**). Since 1938, REI has never failed to return a dividend to its members.
*Purchases not eligible: sale/clearance items (prices ending in $._9 or $._3), gift cards, certificates, services, fees, travel and REI Outdoor School classes and outings.
The only difference I find with a cooperative like REI and trying to compare it, is the very distinct difference that a MMJ cooperative has to abide by the statutes of Prop 215 and SB 420. REI does not. A MMJ cooperative is restrained by laws that REI is not. That is what I find most people ignoring when trying to make similar comparisons.
You can't drive trucks through loopholes that folks keep on trying to bring up. Maybe a bike, lol, but not no truck.
Aren't we basically in agreement that the co-op can only serve patron/patients who've designated a member of the co-op their caregiver? Is anything I said pushing the boundaries of SB420 or p215? Where is the proscription on keeping the medicine in a central location where it's accessible to the patients for whatever forms of recompense are agreed on? Sure the cities can zone them away or ban then entirely but I guess it's up to the courts to further clarify things...
J
JackTheGrower
Thanks you guys for more insight.
You are pretty on key. I will speak of a collective as an example. A collective could have it's garden at a different location than where the medicine would be divided amongst the collective members. And, you are right about a storefront location for dividing the meds. And technically, the place where the meds are being divided are beings dispensed--dispensary.
They key is following the statutes and the guidelines. The way Ds are currently doing this don't pass the muster. They are driving trucks through loopholes.
Patients are not collectively growing, meds are being purchased from outside a closed circuit and that is they way Ds work right now. I was doing the same thing in 2005 with my D. Case law was not clear at all back then.
Example: Could we call Marlboro a collective? A select few growers grow the tobacco and then it is sold for a profit. Are the purchasers collective members making a cash contribution? Or, are they just customers buying cigarettes straight up retail sale? Kind of a stretch analogy, but you should get my drift.
It's hard to believe that anyone takes Scott Imler's bullcrap seriously.
J
JackTheGrower
The Rift with LA pointed out that not all sales are illegal. So the AG is the top cop and he said not all sails are illegal. Pun intended.. Just have to be in the right kind of boat..
Seriously..
So yes some members may choose to contribute cash in the form of membership and others may find value in manning the counter or doing customer relations of some form..
The net result is the shared responsibility to keep the doors open.
Pythagllio is more accurate than Wikipedia!
From your linked article.
The Hijacking of Prop 215.
By January, 1996, it was clear that Dennis Peron and his friends and allies were not going to come up with the signatures needed to get the medical marijuana initiative on the ballot. New York-based Ethan Nadelmann agreed to fund a professional signature drive in exchange for which he would run the campaign (via Zimmerman). Zimmerman then submitted ballot arguments emphasizing Prop 215 as an affirmative defense for those arrested (i.e., business as usual for law enforcement). Dennis and his lieutenant John Entwistle submitted alternative arguments emphasizing that the measure would be a bar to arrest and prosecution. Zimmerman's weaker version was approved and his status as campaign manager confirmed by Secretary of State Bill Jones, a Republican.
Prop 215 was ahead in the polls by a 60-40 margin when Zimmerman took over the campaign. Prospective voters said they'd made up their minds based on their own or a family member's experience and/or media coverage of Dennis's San Francisco Buyer's Club. The No-on-215 campaign was led by an overconfident Attorney General Lungren and other politicians and law enforcement officials who assumed the populace would buy their war-on-drugs propaganda forever.
Zimmerman ordered Peron not to talk to reporters and set about projecting a more respectable image -his own. "Every time I debate [Orange County Sheriff] Brad Gates," Zimmerman complained to an interviewer, "he always begins by saying, 'This bill was written by a dope dealer from San Francisco,' and emphasizes the looseness with which the Cannabis Buyers Club was run." Zimmerman said he would counter, "If Prop 215 were law, we wouldn't need such clubs."
Zimmerman produced three TV ads that ran in Southern California depicting doctors and pharmacists in conventional settings, but his modest campaign was overwhelmed by news stories focused on Peron after an Aug. 4 raid by 100 black-clad state Bureau of Narcotics agents closed the SFCBC. When Dennis challenged the legality of the closure order, Zimmerman convinced the northern California ACLU chapter not to file an amicus brief on his behalf.
The raid on Dennis's club came to the attention of Garry Trudeau (thanks to John Entwistle) and soon there appeared a Doonesbury strip in which Zonker's friend Cornell says, "I can't get hold of any pot for our AIDS patients. Our regular sources have been spooked ever since the Cannabis Buyers' Club in San Francisco got raided ... " Lungren urged California publishers to spike Doonesbury and held a press conference to reveal the evidence his investigators had assembled against Peron and the SFCBC. He lost his cool during the question-and-answer session. "Skin flushed and voice raised, Attorney General Dan Lungren went head-to-head with a comic strip Tuesday ... " is how Robert Salladay began his Oakland Tribune story.
A gradual, month-long decline in support for Prop 215 ended Oct. 1, the day of Lungren's press conference. The AG had Peron arrested Oct. 5 on criminal charges that included conspiracy to distribute marijuana -one more effort to make the vote a referendum on him and his club. Strong opposition was voiced in the closing weeks by Drug Czar McCaffrey, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Gray Davis, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, C. Everett Koop, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush, and 57 of Calfornia's 58 district attorneys, but Prop 215 passed by a 56-44% margin, with more than 5 million people voting yes. The wall of Prohibition was cracking.
Zimmerman's version of the campaign was relayed thus by Hannah Rosin of the New Republic in February '97: "The passage of Proposition 215 surprised even its most zealous supporters. In the months before the November election, they fought what they thought was an uphill battle against an enemy that tried to portray them as a front for the seedy drug dealers on Market Street... The pro-215 advocates stuck to their line: the referendum was simply about limited, medical use of the drug, and then only in extreme cases... The pro-215 activists tailored their image midstream; they hired a pinstriped professional, Bill Zimmerman, to run the campaign, and to run it at a conspicuous distance from people like Dennis Peron. 'He was pictured on election night smoking a joint and saying, "Let's all get stoned and watch election night returns," Zimmerman recalls. 'That kind of behavior supports the opponents' view that we are a stalking horse for legalization... He could ruin it for the truly sick.' Zimmerman's images stuck."
[Then why Peron, also? ^^^]
As soon as Prop 215 passed, Zimmerman was hired by Nadelmann to arrange (progressively weaker) medical-marijuana ballot initiatives in other states. After voters in Oregon and Washington approved theirs in 1998, Rolling Stone published a piece on medical marijuana by William Greider that dubbed Zimmermanm, who happened to be his primary source, "the national head of the movement." Greider proclaimed, "If this year's outcome turns out to be an important turning point, one explanation may be that the 1998 referendum propositions were different [than Prop 215]. They were designed to be law-enforcement friendly, and they included new regulatory rules that avoid much of the legal ambiguity and conflict that followed California's decriminalization vote in 1996." But the '98 election did not turn out to be a turning point. It may have been hard to see, because a super-nova keeps expanding after it explodes, but the movement led by Dennis Peron had begun to cool and lose political momentum from the time he was pushed aside in April 1996.
60 Minutes Rewrites History
The first segment on 60 Minutes Sept. 23 was just plain embarrassing -reporter Scott Pelley asking the President of Iran questions on the level of "When did you stop beating your wife?" Pelley asked, "What do you admire about President Bush?," which drew a look of bemused consternation."What trait ... " Pelley added helpfully. Ahmadinejad tossed it back: "As an American, tell me what trait do you admire?" There was a flicker of fear in the CBS man's eyes but he came up with, "Well Mr. Bush is without question a very religious man." Ahmadinejad still looked bemused as he replied, politely, "What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion to occupy another country and kill its people, please tell me, does Christianity tell its followers to do that?"
The second segment -"Pot Shops," produced by David Browning, narrated by Morley Safer, and featuring Scott Imler as a Methodist minister- was an outrageous revision of history. Did CBS lay off all its fact-checkers in an economy move? Roll the tape:
Morley Safer: ... Even one of the key proponents of medical marijuana says things have gotten out of hand.
Imler (a 50-something man in a white collar with a prissy voice and a mincing manner): It's just ridiculous the amount of money that's going through these cannabis clubs. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Morley: Scott Imler, a minister in the United Methodist Church (shot of Imler in a white robe preaching to bored people in pews) who has long been active in promoting medical marijuana. Eleven years ago, he was working to pass Proposition 215, the ballot measure that legalized it. Today, Imler has second thoughts.
Imler (smiling, to Morley): The purpose of proposition 215 was not to create a new industry. It was to protect legitimate patients from criminal prosecution.
Morley (over clips of Zimmerman's Prop 215 ads): The aim back then, reflected in television spots, was for a highly regulated system in which licensed pharmacies would dispense medical marijuana to the seriously ill. Proposition 215's backers had people with AIDS, cancer, and glaucoma in mind.
Imler (sounding beleagured as he recalls being under enormous pressure from imaginary lobbyists): What happened when we were writing it was, as you can imagine, every patient group in the state and they all have their lobbies -you know, the kidney patients and the heart patients. Every patient group wanted to be included in the list. And so we didn't want to get in the position of deciding what it could be used for and what it couldn't be used for. We weren't doctors. We weren't scientists. We weren't researchers. We were just patients with a problem."
The drafting of Prop 215 was a collective process. The primary authors were Dennis Peron and John Entwistle; Dale Gieringer of California NORML; attorney Bill Panzer; Valerie Corral, a medical user, caregiver and gardener who insisted that cultivation be protected; and the late Tod Mikuriya, MD, who contributed the all-important opening line allowing doctors to approve use in treating "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief." When Imler says, "We weren't doctors," he simultaneously claims authorship credit for himself and denies it to Mikuriya, who interviewed some 200 patients at the SFCBC in the early '90s and documented their ailments.
Gieringer says that Imler attended planning sessions regularly and that his past experience working on an initiative opposing nuclear power proved useful; but Gieringer can't recall anything specific that Imler contributed to the final version of 215, and acknowledges that the image of patients' groups clamoring to be protected is absurd on its face. "He was confabulating," says Gieringer about Imler's claim on 60 Minutes.
In an email to your correspondent dated 22 Aug 2005 Imler made no mention of any pressure from patients' groups seeking protection under Prop 215. He wrote, "Enjoyed your recent article about marijuana's continually emerging efficacy for the wide variety of ailments commonly treated with far more dangerous and expensive pharmaceuticals. You are certainly correct that the 'movement leaders' were aware of this reality in '95 & '96 during the preparation and campaigning for Proposition 215, which is why the 'any other condition' language was included" How and why did Imler came up with his 60 Minutes confabulation? It turned out to be the lynchpin for the whole segment, prefigured by Morley asking in his introduction, "How is the California state law working? The answer involves another statute: the law of unintended consequences." Click that play button again:
Morley: What you're saying is you were forced to make the proposition vague.
Imler: We were, yeah.
Morley (over a long shot of the ballot measure's text): So the law voters passed mentioned not only cancer and AIDS but (suddenly, we see a blow-up of the following words, as if they had been buried in fine print) "...any other illness for which marijuana provides relief." A decade later, if you've got a note from a doctor, you can buy medical pot for just about any imaginable condition. (Cut to a young black woman at a dispensary.)
Producer David Browning did not zoom in for a close shot of the words " any other illness for which marijuana provides relief" because if he had, the viewer would have realized it's not fine print, it's the first sentence of the initiative. This was a very subtle, very duplicitous maneuver. (You're doing a heckuva job, Browning.) The fact that Prop 215 covers people who use marijuana to treat a wide range of conditions is not an unintended consequence of vagueness forced on the authors by patients' groups. It reflects the understanding that Dennis Peron, Tod Mikuriya and the other authors had developed over years of listening to thousands of medical users.
And it reflects the way the components of marijuana actually work, modulating the rate at which neurotransmitters are released in various systems of the body -cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, excretory, immune, nervous, musculo-skeletal, and reproductive.
It often happens that an ardent disciple will wind up viewing the leader as a betrayer. The leader develops, changes his/her line, responds to changing conditions, etc., and wants the flexibility to do so at all times. The disciple has embraced the leader's program and/or philosophy at a fixed point in time, and remains committed to his/her understanding of the program while the leader advances. In the early '90s Dennis's constituents were mainly AIDS patients. He had lost his lover and all his best friends to the epidemic, and when he talked about "the sick and dying" he wasn't doing so for effect. By '96 he had 9,000 club members, many of whom were seemingly able-bodied young men, and he was saying "if they can prescribe Prozac to shy teenagers, all marijuana use is medical." Imler deplored this line. If he had been truly respectful, had related to Dennis as a leader whose vision was keener than his own, he would not have reacted with such fierce outrage.
"He's just jealous of me," says Dennis, sadly. "So, so jealous."
Sounds like a pissing match for credit between the two. So, what does that have to do with what really went down back then?
The Hijacking of Prop 215.
By January, 1996, it was clear that Dennis Peron and his friends and allies were not going to come up with the signatures needed to get the medical marijuana initiative on the ballot. New York-based Ethan Nadelmann agreed to fund a professional signature drive in exchange for which he would run the campaign (via Zimmerman). Zimmerman then submitted ballot arguments emphasizing Prop 215 as an affirmative defense for those arrested (i.e., business as usual for law enforcement). Dennis and his lieutenant John Entwistle submitted alternative arguments emphasizing that the measure would be a bar to arrest and prosecution. Zimmerman's weaker version was approved and his status as campaign manager confirmed by Secretary of State Bill Jones, a Republican.
Prop 215 was ahead in the polls by a 60-40 margin when Zimmerman took over the campaign. Prospective voters said they'd made up their minds based on their own or a family member's experience and/or media coverage of Dennis's San Francisco Buyer's Club. The No-on-215 campaign was led by an overconfident Attorney General Lungren and other politicians and law enforcement officials who assumed the populace would buy their war-on-drugs propaganda forever.
Zimmerman ordered Peron not to talk to reporters and set about projecting a more respectable image -his own. "Every time I debate [Orange County Sheriff] Brad Gates," Zimmerman complained to an interviewer, "he always begins by saying, 'This bill was written by a dope dealer from San Francisco,' and emphasizes the looseness with which the Cannabis Buyers Club was run." Zimmerman said he would counter, "If Prop 215 were law, we wouldn't need such clubs."
Zimmerman produced three TV ads that ran in Southern California depicting doctors and pharmacists in conventional settings, but his modest campaign was overwhelmed by news stories focused on Peron after an Aug. 4 raid by 100 black-clad state Bureau of Narcotics agents closed the SFCBC. When Dennis challenged the legality of the closure order, Zimmerman convinced the northern California ACLU chapter not to file an amicus brief on his behalf.
The raid on Dennis's club came to the attention of Garry Trudeau (thanks to John Entwistle) and soon there appeared a Doonesbury strip in which Zonker's friend Cornell says, "I can't get hold of any pot for our AIDS patients. Our regular sources have been spooked ever since the Cannabis Buyers' Club in San Francisco got raided ... " Lungren urged California publishers to spike Doonesbury and held a press conference to reveal the evidence his investigators had assembled against Peron and the SFCBC. He lost his cool during the question-and-answer session. "Skin flushed and voice raised, Attorney General Dan Lungren went head-to-head with a comic strip Tuesday ... " is how Robert Salladay began his Oakland Tribune story.
A gradual, month-long decline in support for Prop 215 ended Oct. 1, the day of Lungren's press conference. The AG had Peron arrested Oct. 5 on criminal charges that included conspiracy to distribute marijuana -one more effort to make the vote a referendum on him and his club. Strong opposition was voiced in the closing weeks by Drug Czar McCaffrey, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Gray Davis, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, C. Everett Koop, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, George HW Bush, and 57 of Calfornia's 58 district attorneys, but Prop 215 passed by a 56-44% margin, with more than 5 million people voting yes. The wall of Prohibition was cracking.
Zimmerman's version of the campaign was relayed thus by Hannah Rosin of the New Republic in February '97: "The passage of Proposition 215 surprised even its most zealous supporters. In the months before the November election, they fought what they thought was an uphill battle against an enemy that tried to portray them as a front for the seedy drug dealers on Market Street... The pro-215 advocates stuck to their line: the referendum was simply about limited, medical use of the drug, and then only in extreme cases... The pro-215 activists tailored their image midstream; they hired a pinstriped professional, Bill Zimmerman, to run the campaign, and to run it at a conspicuous distance from people like Dennis Peron. 'He was pictured on election night smoking a joint and saying, "Let's all get stoned and watch election night returns," Zimmerman recalls. 'That kind of behavior supports the opponents' view that we are a stalking horse for legalization... He could ruin it for the truly sick.' Zimmerman's images stuck."
[Then why Peron, also? ^^^]
As soon as Prop 215 passed, Zimmerman was hired by Nadelmann to arrange (progressively weaker) medical-marijuana ballot initiatives in other states. After voters in Oregon and Washington approved theirs in 1998, Rolling Stone published a piece on medical marijuana by William Greider that dubbed Zimmermanm, who happened to be his primary source, "the national head of the movement." Greider proclaimed, "If this year's outcome turns out to be an important turning point, one explanation may be that the 1998 referendum propositions were different [than Prop 215]. They were designed to be law-enforcement friendly, and they included new regulatory rules that avoid much of the legal ambiguity and conflict that followed California's decriminalization vote in 1996." But the '98 election did not turn out to be a turning point. It may have been hard to see, because a super-nova keeps expanding after it explodes, but the movement led by Dennis Peron had begun to cool and lose political momentum from the time he was pushed aside in April 1996.
60 Minutes Rewrites History
The first segment on 60 Minutes Sept. 23 was just plain embarrassing -reporter Scott Pelley asking the President of Iran questions on the level of "When did you stop beating your wife?" Pelley asked, "What do you admire about President Bush?," which drew a look of bemused consternation."What trait ... " Pelley added helpfully. Ahmadinejad tossed it back: "As an American, tell me what trait do you admire?" There was a flicker of fear in the CBS man's eyes but he came up with, "Well Mr. Bush is without question a very religious man." Ahmadinejad still looked bemused as he replied, politely, "What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion to occupy another country and kill its people, please tell me, does Christianity tell its followers to do that?"
The second segment -"Pot Shops," produced by David Browning, narrated by Morley Safer, and featuring Scott Imler as a Methodist minister- was an outrageous revision of history. Did CBS lay off all its fact-checkers in an economy move? Roll the tape:
Morley Safer: ... Even one of the key proponents of medical marijuana says things have gotten out of hand.
Imler (a 50-something man in a white collar with a prissy voice and a mincing manner): It's just ridiculous the amount of money that's going through these cannabis clubs. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Morley: Scott Imler, a minister in the United Methodist Church (shot of Imler in a white robe preaching to bored people in pews) who has long been active in promoting medical marijuana. Eleven years ago, he was working to pass Proposition 215, the ballot measure that legalized it. Today, Imler has second thoughts.
Imler (smiling, to Morley): The purpose of proposition 215 was not to create a new industry. It was to protect legitimate patients from criminal prosecution.
Morley (over clips of Zimmerman's Prop 215 ads): The aim back then, reflected in television spots, was for a highly regulated system in which licensed pharmacies would dispense medical marijuana to the seriously ill. Proposition 215's backers had people with AIDS, cancer, and glaucoma in mind.
Imler (sounding beleagured as he recalls being under enormous pressure from imaginary lobbyists): What happened when we were writing it was, as you can imagine, every patient group in the state and they all have their lobbies -you know, the kidney patients and the heart patients. Every patient group wanted to be included in the list. And so we didn't want to get in the position of deciding what it could be used for and what it couldn't be used for. We weren't doctors. We weren't scientists. We weren't researchers. We were just patients with a problem."
The drafting of Prop 215 was a collective process. The primary authors were Dennis Peron and John Entwistle; Dale Gieringer of California NORML; attorney Bill Panzer; Valerie Corral, a medical user, caregiver and gardener who insisted that cultivation be protected; and the late Tod Mikuriya, MD, who contributed the all-important opening line allowing doctors to approve use in treating "any other illness for which marijuana provides relief." When Imler says, "We weren't doctors," he simultaneously claims authorship credit for himself and denies it to Mikuriya, who interviewed some 200 patients at the SFCBC in the early '90s and documented their ailments.
Gieringer says that Imler attended planning sessions regularly and that his past experience working on an initiative opposing nuclear power proved useful; but Gieringer can't recall anything specific that Imler contributed to the final version of 215, and acknowledges that the image of patients' groups clamoring to be protected is absurd on its face. "He was confabulating," says Gieringer about Imler's claim on 60 Minutes.
In an email to your correspondent dated 22 Aug 2005 Imler made no mention of any pressure from patients' groups seeking protection under Prop 215. He wrote, "Enjoyed your recent article about marijuana's continually emerging efficacy for the wide variety of ailments commonly treated with far more dangerous and expensive pharmaceuticals. You are certainly correct that the 'movement leaders' were aware of this reality in '95 & '96 during the preparation and campaigning for Proposition 215, which is why the 'any other condition' language was included" How and why did Imler came up with his 60 Minutes confabulation? It turned out to be the lynchpin for the whole segment, prefigured by Morley asking in his introduction, "How is the California state law working? The answer involves another statute: the law of unintended consequences." Click that play button again:
Morley: What you're saying is you were forced to make the proposition vague.
Imler: We were, yeah.
Morley (over a long shot of the ballot measure's text): So the law voters passed mentioned not only cancer and AIDS but (suddenly, we see a blow-up of the following words, as if they had been buried in fine print) "...any other illness for which marijuana provides relief." A decade later, if you've got a note from a doctor, you can buy medical pot for just about any imaginable condition. (Cut to a young black woman at a dispensary.)
Producer David Browning did not zoom in for a close shot of the words " any other illness for which marijuana provides relief" because if he had, the viewer would have realized it's not fine print, it's the first sentence of the initiative. This was a very subtle, very duplicitous maneuver. (You're doing a heckuva job, Browning.) The fact that Prop 215 covers people who use marijuana to treat a wide range of conditions is not an unintended consequence of vagueness forced on the authors by patients' groups. It reflects the understanding that Dennis Peron, Tod Mikuriya and the other authors had developed over years of listening to thousands of medical users.
And it reflects the way the components of marijuana actually work, modulating the rate at which neurotransmitters are released in various systems of the body -cardiovascular, digestive, endocrine, excretory, immune, nervous, musculo-skeletal, and reproductive.
It often happens that an ardent disciple will wind up viewing the leader as a betrayer. The leader develops, changes his/her line, responds to changing conditions, etc., and wants the flexibility to do so at all times. The disciple has embraced the leader's program and/or philosophy at a fixed point in time, and remains committed to his/her understanding of the program while the leader advances. In the early '90s Dennis's constituents were mainly AIDS patients. He had lost his lover and all his best friends to the epidemic, and when he talked about "the sick and dying" he wasn't doing so for effect. By '96 he had 9,000 club members, many of whom were seemingly able-bodied young men, and he was saying "if they can prescribe Prozac to shy teenagers, all marijuana use is medical." Imler deplored this line. If he had been truly respectful, had related to Dennis as a leader whose vision was keener than his own, he would not have reacted with such fierce outrage.
"He's just jealous of me," says Dennis, sadly. "So, so jealous."
Sounds like a pissing match for credit between the two. So, what does that have to do with what really went down back then?
I guess to me it's DGs opinion that matters.
But whatever, if you think it helps the movement to denigrate people that have move it along and defended it, while others stand around complaining about what people do, by all means, continue. However, Imler's position is just an act of idiocy IMO, and all I see is someone else driving a wedge between us. But then potheads do love to squabble amongst themselves, no fucking doubt.
We will never truly know. It is one mans word against the other. All I know is that DG (NORML) is all about legalization. No doubt in my mind that there is a bias there and personal agenda. I am all for legalization, but this is MMJ related, so DG has a conflict of interest position. With the things Imler has said that I have quoted, it's reasonable to believe they would piss on each other.
[EDIT] Bruce Margolin, the lawyer and director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), which seeks to legalize pot, held a “letter-writing” party at his West Hollywood office to put pressure on the Los Angeles City Council, demanding that it allow over-the-counter sales.
[EDIT] Bruce Margolin, the lawyer and director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), which seeks to legalize pot, held a “letter-writing” party at his West Hollywood office to put pressure on the Los Angeles City Council, demanding that it allow over-the-counter sales.
Oh well, I can't really take you seriously if you have that opinion of DG.
Denigrate all you like. It just makes you an asshole. Believe Scott Imler's bullshit all you like, that makes you an idiot.
Denigrate all you like. It just makes you an asshole. Believe Scott Imler's bullshit all you like, that makes you an idiot.
I believe it sounds like a quibble for credit. My views match Imler's current views on MMJ. If he flip flopped or whatever, I don't care. Some people realize they are wrong and change their view and ways. I don't know if I am completely right! But, I am entitled to my personal opinion on an issue like this.
On a serious note, why do you always feel the need to call names, now I'm an "idiot?" Does it really bother you that much when someone does not agree with your points and opinions? I could care less what I'm called from behind a computer screen. I find it rather laughable. I assume it gives you some instant emotional pleasure for a quick moment, so continue if you'd like.
On a serious note, why do you always feel the need to call names, now I'm an "idiot?" Does it really bother you that much when someone does not agree with your points and opinions? I could care less what I'm called from behind a computer screen. I find it rather laughable. I assume it gives you some instant emotional pleasure for a quick moment, so continue if you'd like.
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