Marijuana Dispensaries Don’t Seem Like Big Threat: WA Paper

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Photo: GrassCity.com

​“It’s time to de-stupidify medical marijuana,” begins a Friday editorial by Shawn Vestal in The Spokane Spokesman-Review, which then proceeds to do exactly that.

Vestal’s excellent editorial pointed out the considerable time, effort and money spent on bringing down a local medical marijuana dispensary in Washington state.
“If someone breaks into your garage, don’t hold your breath waiting for an officer,” the paper editorialized. “But if you’re growing medical marijuana in that garage, they’ll find a way to send a car.”
“Simple folk might do something simple, like legalize it,” the editorial said. “Medical or not: Who cares?”


Photo: Artist Trust
Shawn Vestal, The Spokesman-Review: “Simple folk might do something simple, like legalize it.”

​”Of course, if you come out and say this, you run two risks: the enthusiastic embrace of patchoulied Rastafarians and Phish fans, and asinine arguments from those who see pot as sinister and fail to recognize the difference between recreational and medical use of the drug,” Vestal wrote.
“The county prosecutor’s office says dispensaries are flatly prohibited, and the state agrees, saying the law limits providers to supplying one person, period,” the paper editorialized. “Advocates of medical marijuana argue that the law limiting providers to one patient ‘at any one time’ means simply: one at a time.”
“Both interpretations are inane,” Vestal wrote. “What we have is a law that allows people to have pot, but not to get it. Even growing your own — I’m no gardener, but wouldn’t you have to commit a crime to get the seeds?”
“I visited a Spokane dispensary this week — you can still smell it on me,” Vestal wrote. “Understandably, given that news media coverage helped prompt last year’s bust, no one there was interested in an interview.”
“But it didn’t seem like a big community threat to me,” he wrote. “Didn’t seem like Eliot Ness needed to come breaking down that door.”
“I know we’re not Seattle,” Vestal wrote. “But maybe we’ve got more important things to do, too.”
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