Global Ganja Report

California Attorney General Kamala Harris urged state lawmakers in a Dec. 21 letter to clarify the Golden State's 1996 medical marijuana law, saying numerous holes in the statute have left law enforcement and legitimate patients in a state of uncertainty. In the letter to state legislature leaders, Harris said lawmakers need to make clear if the hundreds of storefront dispensaries and delivery services that sell cannabis—ostensibly for medical use—are legal, or if the only legal means of procuring the herb are patient collectives in which all members jointly grow their own supply.

"Without a substantive change to existing law, these irreconcilable interpretations of the law, and the resulting uncertainty for law enforcement and seriously ill patients, will persist," she wrote in the open letter addressed to Senate President Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John Perez.

Harris also sent a separate letter to California's US attorneys advising them of her request to the Legislature and asking them to focus on human trafficking and international mafias operating in the state instead of cannabis dispensaries. "The federal government is ill-equipped to be the sole arbiter of whether an individual or group is acting within the bounds of California's medical marijuana laws when cultivating marijuana for medical purposes," Harris wrote (AP, Dec. 21)

Graphic by Herbal Remedies 

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