Kharla Vezzetti

Jun 6, 2002 – California saw spirited rallies against the DEA in a nationwide day of protest organized by Americans for Safe Access.

Santa Rosa, where the DEA recently raided the Aiko patients’ co-operative, was the scene of the nation’s largest protest. Some 300 demonstrators turned out, closing the federal building to the public. KSRO talk show host Pat Thurston joined five or six others to block the doorway in civil disobedience. Police were highly cooperative, and no one was arrested.…

OAKLAND, Jan 14 2002. BART announced that it has scrapped plants to deploy drug-sniffing dogs on its trains following a flood of protests from angry patrons and NORML supporters.

BART had deployed canine units on loan from US Customs to sniff out passengers for two nights in December. They succeeded in nabbing 12 passengers for misdemeanor marijuana possession and a 13th for petty pot dealing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. No hard drugs were found in the searches.

In a letter to the BART Board, California NORML coordinator Dale Gieringer denounced the searches as an “obnoxious invasion of personal privacy that will do nothing to enhance public safety.”…

1999 – Marijuana activists are pushing the city of Berkeley to stop police from arresting minor pot offenders in violation of the city’s 20-year-old Marijuana Ordinance, which declares that marijuana should be lowest enforcement priority.

Police statistics show a dramatic doubling in the number of marijuana arrests last year following a crackdown aimed at clearing street people off Telegraph Ave. The increase was driven by a near tripling in the number of felony pot arrests, mainly for petty sales or intent to sell..…

SAN FRANCISCO, May 3, 2002 – US Judge Charles Breyer has issued a summary judgement for the government in its case against the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Club plus two other Bay Area cannabis clubs.

In his decision, Breyer rejected the clubs’ interstate commerce clause challenge, noting that marijuana distribution is economic activity and is accordingly considered interstate commerce under previous Ninth Circuit precedent. He dismissed the notion that clubs could invoke substantive due process rights, indicating that these could at most apply to individual patients, not distributors.…

An electoral showdown is looming in California this November over Proposition 36, which would end prison sentences for non-violent drug users (www.drugreform.org).

Modeled on Arizona’s successful Proposition 200, Prop. 36 would allow most offenders charged with simple possession of drugs to opt for a diversion program instead of imprisonment. Criminal charges would be dismissed upon successful completion of the program.

Prop. 36 is tightly written to exclude dangerous and violent criminals. It applies only to first and second time drug possession offenders who are not charged with other crimes simultaneously and have not had a serious or violent “strike” in the past five years.…

August 18 – In its long-awaited ruling in Qualified Patients Association vs. the City of Anaheim, the California Court of Appeals ruled that Anaheim could not use federal pre-emption as a grounds to ban medical marijuana dispensaries. The court struck down a lower court decision that had sustained a demurrer to QPA’s suit against Anaheim on the grounds that dispensaries were illegal under federal law.

On a second issue, the court found with the city of Anaheim as to whether the QPA could sue on the grounds that the city’s ordinance violated the state Unruh Act by discriminating against them on the basis of a disability or medical condition.…

The Control and Tax Cannabis initiative to legalize marijuana for adult use in California will appear on the November 2nd ballot as Proposition 19.

Coincidentally, this was the number of the original California Marijuana Initiative of 1972, the first-ever marijuana decriminalization initiative. The CMI fell short with 33% of the vote but set the stage for California’s landmark decriminalization law, the Moscone Act, in 1975. (A vintage poster for the 1972 initiative is shown at left.)

This year’s Prop 19 has picked up key endorsements from labor and civil rights advocates.…

COVELO, Cal, Jul 7th 2010: The DEA flouted Mendocino County’s newly enacted medical marijuana cultivation ordinance by raiding the first collective that had applied to the sheriff’s cultivation permit program.

A multi-agency federal task force descended on the property of Joy Greenfield, 68, the first Mendo patient to pay the $1050 application fee under the ordinance, which allows collectives to grow up to 99 plants provided they comply with certain regulations. Ms Greenfield had applied in the name of her collective, “Light the Way,” which opened in San Diego earlier this year.…

SACRAMENTO, Jun 22 – The California Assembly Public Safety Committee approved Sen. Mark Leno’s bill SB 1449 to downgrade petty marijuana possession from a misdemeanor to an infraction. The bill passed with no discussion by a vote of 4-1, with Ammiano (D-SF), Beall (D-SJ), Hill (D-SanMateo) and Yamada (D-Davis) voting aye, and Portantino (D-Pasadena) nay. The two Republicans, Hagman and Gilmore, abstained.

SB 1449 now moves on to the Assembly floor for a final vote. Similar decriminalization bills have passed the Senate three times in past years, only to be defeated in the Assembly.…

California NORML Press Release
CONTACTS: Dale Gieringer (415) 563-5858; Edie Lerman (707) 937-1711

RED BLUFF, Jun 4th. In a lawsuit supported by California NORML, Tehama County patients filed suit today against a county ordinance that limits their right to grow marijuana at home.

The lawsuit, by the law firm of Edie Lerman and J David Nick of Ukiah, asks for a writ of mandate to strike down the Tehama ordinance.

The plaintiffs claim that the ordinance makes it impossible for them to legally exercise their Proposition 215 right to cultivate medical marijuana for themselves.…

June 4 – The California Assembly has passed a bill, AB 2650, that bans dispensaries within 600 feet of schools. Thanks to lobbying by MMJ advocates, the bill was greatly watered down from an earlier version which would have banned them within 1,000 feet of schools, parks, libraries, religious institutions, child care or youth centers, or other dispensaries.

Advocates also won a grandfather exemption for cities that already have conflicting ordinances. The original bill, which would have drastically restricted dispensaries statewide, was first drafted by AG candidate Alberto Torrico and introduced by Joan Buchanan at the behest of the the Peace Officers’ Research Association of Cal (PORAC).…

May 28th, 2010 – In a lawsuit sponsored by California NORML, Tehama County patients are challenging a local ordinance that would drastically limit their right to grow medical marijuana.

Tehama’s is the most restrictive of a rapidly growing number of anti-cultivation measures that have recently been proposed by local officials hostile to medical marijuana. The Tehama ordinance declares it a public nuisance to grow marijuana anywhere within 1,000 feet of a school, school bus stop, church, park, or youth-oriented facility; restricts gardens to no more than 12 mature or 24 total plants on parcels of 20 acres or less; requires outdoor gardens to be surrounded by an opaque fence at least six feet high and located 100 feet or more from the property boundaries; and requires every patient garden to be registered with the county health services agency for a fee to be determined.…

Cal NORML Release – May 5, 2010

The California Board of Equalization reports that the state is collecting $50 – $100 million
in sales taxes from medical marijuana, confirming the estimate previously published in an economic analysis by California NORML (also independently affirmed by Americans for Safe Access).

California NORML currently estimates the state’s retail market for medical marijuana at
over $1 billion per year in a total adult use market of $6 billion. An initiative to legalize
and tax marijuana for adult use will be on this November’s ballot (see http://www.taxcannabis2010.org).…