Medical marijuana users are breathing a little more easily

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — After California legalized medical marijuana, Charles Lynch opened his cannabis dispensary nearly two years ago in Morro Bay, getting a license from the city and joining the Chamber of Commerce. Even the mayor showed up for the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

A year later, U.S. drug enforcement agents raided his business. Now Lynch is worried that he’ll get at least five years in prison when he’s sentenced Monday in federal court in Los Angeles on five counts of distributing marijuana.

Whatever happens, Lynch said, he’ll appeal. “I don’t feel like I deserve going through life as a convicted felon for doing things the state of California allowed me to do,” he said.

However, the nation’s medical marijuana users are breathing a little more easily these days, confident that such stories soon will be a thing of the past.

At news conferences last month and again last Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that there would be no more federal prosecutions of cases involving medical cannabis dispensaries. He said they would be left alone as long as they were complying with state laws.

Medical marijuana advocates predict that the issue soon will leave the public realm of politics and become a private issue between doctors and patients. They also said that President Barack Obama had kept a promise that he made on the campaign trail last year.

Holder said the new policy would be “to go after those who violate both federal and state law.”

“To the extent that people do that, and try and use medical marijuana laws for activity that is not designed to comport with what the intention was of a state law, those are the organizations or people who we’ll target,” Holder said Wednesday. “And that’s consistent with what the president said during the campaign.”

The decision affects California and 12 other states that have legalized marijuana for medical purposes: Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington state.

Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., who lobbied the new administration on the issue, called it “a welcomed shift” in federal policy, charging that the administration of George W. Bush “foolishly wasted precious federal resources” to prosecute law-abiding health-care providers.

“This new policy makes sense and is far more humane,” said Capps, the new vice chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health.

Holder said that his department had limited resources and that its focus would be on people and organizations that were growing or cultivating “substantial amounts of marijuana and doing so in a way that’s inconsistent with federal law and state law.”

Stephen Gutwillig, California’s state director of the Drug Policy Alliance, said that the new policy would protect millions of Americans who benefited from the medicinal properties of marijuana.

“Under the Obama administration, the federal government may finally be recovering from a long bout with ‘reefer madness,’” he said.