Medical Marijuana: We Have to Wonder Why Nine Years Elapsed Between Voter Approval and the Decision to Protect the Consumer and the Public From Graft and the Lugubrious Practices of More Than 180 Dispensaries in Denver.

There will be a public hearing on Article XI. Medical Marijuana Dispensaries, January 11 before City Council at 5:30 p.m. at the City and County Building.

Did the City Council feel that this was an innocent franchise business connected to hospitals and clinics? Did they pretend to ignore the outcome thinking that no one would take these enterprises seriously? Did we believe that the medical doctors would all have the highest scruples and protect the patients from abusing the service? Did law enforcement think that because they are already overburdened that the incidental indiscretions of medical marijuana dispensaries would in some way be an unnecessary waste of their precious energy? Whatever the case may be the public is actually to blame for this mess because enough of us voted for this enterprise for it to take root.

If you read one of the local weekly papers from pages 78 through 88 there are countless come on ads in many styles and many that are thinly reaching out to the clients on the proceeding pages for other adult services. The placement of this cavalcade of ads is planned to create the mystique that there is something sensual and available to all who pay the price of admission.

The real purpose of medical marijuana dispensaries is to treat people who are in the throes of dying and need relief. Most of those who voted for amendment 20 in 2000 expected that this would be an enterprise that was highly regulated by the medical providers and care givers from places such as hospices. For a person experiencing acute, chronic pain there is ample reason to provide any means of sedation and marijuana has long been sought as a means of relaxing, as some people drink alcohol, or smoke a cigarette. In Amsterdam, where the limits of behavior is tolerated, the existence of all of these practices finds a natural place in their well formed and established tolerance of diversity.

In our small city landscape many of the beneficiaries of the businesses are the mafia and not the patient, as the ballot amendment was intended. It is sad that this is true for our lustful society but it is not without precedent. Insurance providers and the medical practice continually over charges and do not care for the patient ahead of profit. The medical marijuana dispensaries simply fit into the landscape of medical care in this market driven economy.

Personally, the matter of regulating dispensaries is a moot point. We would be much better served believing in what we have and our relationship to one another with peace and justice for all. If a person genuinely needs this medicine then it should be freely available as the plants were growing all over the sides of the highways in the 1930’s. Anyone can grow the crop with little effort since it is a weed that is highly adaptable. If everyone who wished to consume marijuana simply had their own plants that would be the end of this salacious feeding frenzy and the clinics would dry up and disappear.