Marijuana Policy Project

Venice Beach is the renowned playground of the wacky and offbeat and one of Los Angeles’s top tourist draws in the summer. Now, in addition to the outlets offering pizza by the slice, tattoos and ribald T-shirts, visitors encounter at least five operating medical marijuana dispensaries along the boardwalk.

Venice has always been known as a place for people who embrace an alternative lifestyle and an easy place to get weed. But pot isn’t just sold furtively in alleys now. It’s promoted by people such as a young, bikini top-clad woman I saw last week, wearing a mini-skirt reading “get high tonight” emblazoned on the backside and other boardwalk hawkers declaring “The doctor is in” to passersby.

It’s not just Venice Beach. These dispensaries are all over Los Angeles. There were only a handful in 2006 but now there are, by various counts, between 400 and upwards of 600 cooperatives in the city. That’s primarily the result of a hardship exemption included in a 2007 moratorium by the City Council that unintentionally led to the explosive growth of new dispensaries.

It’s easy to become skeptical about the cooperatives when you consider the ease with which some of them dispense marijuana. Evaluations can often be done on a walk in-basis or over the phone. Some places advertise that you will not have to pay if you do not qualify for a doctor’s recommendation.

Los Angeles City Councilman Greig Smith, a critic of the clubs and a reserve officer with the city’s police department, believes that “many of these facilities are just fronts for recreational use.”

Smith says that detectives tell him that 90 percent to 95 percent of the visitors to the marijuana dispensaries do not have legitimate medical needs.

Of course, an accurate sidewalk diagnosis can’t be done as easily for a glaucoma patient vs. someone with a more obvious condition such as cancer or AIDS. But even some supporters of medical marijuana worry that the hardship loophole in Los Angeles has given medical marijuana a bad name.

“It’s a legitimate worry and I think, to be blunt, you have to say that Los Angeles has proven a textbook example of how not to regulate medical marijuana,” says Bruce Mirken, director of communications at the Marijuana Policy Project.

In addition to advocating for medical marijuana, MPP supports legalization and treating it like alcohol. But Mirken says legalizing marijuana for recreational use is a separate conversation than making it available to the ill. “It’s entirely possible to do one without the other and we’ve never thought it was productive to treat one as a back door way to the other,” he says.

California led the way by becoming the first state in 1996 to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes when voters passed Proposition 215 by 56 percent. Twelve states have followed since, including ones that aren’t exactly liberal bastions — like Montana and Colorado. That hasn’t affected federal law, which considers marijuana illegal for any purpose, though in practice the Drug Enforcement Administration, since President Obama took office, has mostly refrained from raiding the cannabis dispensaries.

Many politicians have been slow to support medical marijuana for fear of appearing soft on drugs. But the public is not nearly so hesitant.

A 2004 poll commissioned by the American Association of Retired Persons found that 72 percent of those polled — all 45 years old and older — agree that “adults should be allowed to legally use marijuana for medical purposes if a physician recommends it.” In a February 2009 Zogby poll sponsored by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws 72 percent favored ending federal raids on medical marijuana providers.

Even Congress shows signs of relenting. The House recently passed the fiscal 2010 appropriations bill that covers funding for Washington, D.C., without the “Barr Amendment” that had prevented the District from implementing a medical marijuana initiative approved by voters in 1998. The most noteworthy supporter of the exclusion: the man who the amendment was named for, former GOP Georgia Rep. Bob Barr (1995-2003). Since he left Congress, Barr’s become a libertarian and critic of the drug war.

It may be that the future of medical marijuana distribution lies in states like New Mexicoand Rhode Island, which allow state licensed dispensaries and will probably be a stricter filter than some of the California dispensaries when it comes to weeding out would-be recreational users.

Or maybe cash-strapped cities will take a page from Oakland, Calif., whose residents recently voted to raise funds by imposing an additional tax on the city’s four medical marijuana dispensaries.

The dispute in California over medical marijuana is not so much whether to allow it but how to implement the law, as evidenced by Los Angeles’s proliferation of pot dispensaries.

Meanwhile, the debate over recreational use continues without any clear consensus though a possible shift is visible in momentum toward the pro-legalization forces. An April Field Poll found that 56 percent of California’s registered voters support legalizing and taxing marijuana. State legislator Tom Ammiano has introduced a bill to do just that that. Even Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said it is time to open that debate.

With millions or even billions of potential revenue, perhaps California will once again be a trendsetter.