Carmen Trutanich

“LA City Attorney Revives Cynical Bush Tactic of Threatening Medical Marijuana Dispensary Landlords

Finally, nearly two weeks after Los Angeles City Attorney Carmen Trutanich issued a press release announcing nuisance abatement actions against local dispensaries, Americans for Safe Access has unearthed one of at least 18 letters sent to medical marijuana providers and their landlords threatening imminent eviction.

Under the Bush Administration, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) used the similar tactic of sending letters to more than 300 dispensary landlords in California, threatening criminal prosecution and seizure of their property if they did not evict their tenants. Although this cynical tactic resulted in the closure of dozens of dispensaries across the state, the federal government’s effort to undermine the implementation of California’s medical marijuana law has thankfully failed.”

Read the rest of this entry with links on the ASA Blog.

The Los Angeles City Attorney’s office misrepresented the position of California Attorney General Jerry Brown today, implying that the state’s top law enforcement official said that all sales of cannabis are illegal. That never happened. On Saturday, KFI Radio in Los Angeles broadcast a previously recorded statement by the Attorney General Brown in which he says, “Unfortunately, in some communities, Los Angeles in particular, there’s a lot of exploitation and just getting into the drug business, the dope business.”

Pundits at the notoriously conservative radio station (home to Rush Limbaugh and anti-gay crusader “Dr. Laura” Schlesinger) then added their own spin to the Attorney General’s comments. The reporters opined “California’s Attorney General says he supports efforts by LA prosecutors to go after marijuana dispensaries selling pot to patients. Jerry Brown says marijuana’s illegal to sell, no matter what, but he says the state’s medical marijuana laws are very confusing about who is allowed to provide the drug to patients.”

Really? No recorded evidence supports that expansive interpretation of the Attorney General’s comments. In fact, a spokesman told Americans for Safe Access today that the report was inaccurate and Brown has not changed his position. That didn’t stop the Jane Usher from the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office from picking up where the ideologues at KFI left off, and taking it even further. She read the commentator’s expansive interpretation and the Attorney Generals comments back-to-back, never indicating to Councilmembers that she was mixing the two and muddying the waters.

This is just the latest dirty pool from entrenched staff at the City Attorney’s office, who seem bent on steering the Los Angeles City Council down their own narrow ideological path. They have consistently confused Primary Caregivers with patients’ collectives and ignored important case law like People v Urziceanu. The City Attorney’s staff has been wrong about regulations, wrong about case law, wrong about the infamous hardship provision, and wrong about extending the moratorium. It is not surprising they are wrong about Jerry Brown, too.

Perhaps City Councilmembers would do well to look to what the Attorney General said in his guidelines for medical cannabis published last year. Attorney General Brown wrote that “a properly organized and operated collective of cooperative that dispenses medical marijuana through a storefront may be lawful under California law,” provided the facility substantially complies with the guidelines.

Harsh criticism today by Councilmembers Reyes and Koretz indicate that the City Council is growing weary of bad legal advice. After lengthy debate, Councilmembers rejected the City Attorney’s ban on sales of cannabis for a second time – opting instead for alternative language proposed by Council President Garcetti.

You can read more about today’s City Council meeting in the LA Times.

“The process that started with a motion by Los Angeles City Councilmember Dennis Zine in 2005 may reach a milestone on Tuesday, when the City Council is scheduled to vote on a draft ordinance regulating hundreds of medical cannabis collectives in the city. That vote will do little to quell controversy in the city. Advocates and neighborhood groups are both unsatisfied with the proposal. The advocate community is buzzing about lawsuits, voter initiatives, and recall campaigns. The media wants to know whom to blame, and everyone is pointing fingers.

In this milieu, Councilmembers have a lot to do if they plan to adopt the ordinance before the Thanksgiving break. At joint committee and City Council meetings last week, the Councilmembers proposed more than forty sometimes contradictory amendments to the ordinance; and in a rebuke to City Attorney Carmen Trutanich, sent instructions to staff to research other regulatory models and alternative legal interpretations. (You can download the various amendments from the Council File Management System by searching for documents related to Council File. No. 08-0923.)…”

Read the entire post with links on the ASA Blog.

Questions:

Should California state and local officials be concerned about pesticide contamination on medical cannabis?
How does the risk of contaminated cannabis (an unregulated agricultural product) compare with risk associated with regulated agricultural products?

Answers:

California has the strictest pesticide regulations in the nation and these regulations are supervised by the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (CDPR).  CDPR makes purchases of produce from California supermarkets and tests this produce for pesticide residues.

Over 30% of California produce purchased from supermarkets has been shown by CDPR testing to possess legal levels of pesticide residues.

1% of all CDPR tested produce, purchased in supermarkets, is found to contain illegal levels of pesticide residues.

The Los Angeles City Attorney’s office found 5.25% of the cannabis samples tested from purchases made at Los Angeles dispensaries (3 out of 52 samples) to contain pesticide residues.  Legal thresholds of pesticide residue on cannabis have not yet been established by the EPA or CDPR.  By comparison, when the CDPR tests fresh ginger root purchased from California supermarkets, it has found that 5% of samples contain illegally high levels of pesticide residues.

The important consideration is that we are comparing the contamination rates of an unregulated agricultural product (cannabis) with a regulated agricultural product (ginger root).

94.75% of medical cannabis sampled from Los Angeles dispensaries was found to be clean and within California standards for any agricultural product, without any regulation whatsoever. That is remarkable, because it means that nearly all California cannabis producers are currently producing pure cannabis. With sensible and simple regulation, we should easily bring this purity level to 100%.

While politicians should be concerned about the potential for contamination on cannabis, the only solution to prevent this contamination is regulation of how medical cannabis is dispensed.  One of the biggest advantages of regulating non-profit dispensaries comes from the oversight provided by intelligent regulation.

Our Los Angeles City Attorney, Carmen Trutanich, has made quite a fuss over pesticide contaminated cannabis. Mr. Trutanich, an avid cigar smoker, might wish to be more concerned about the thirteen different pesticides that tobacco companies regularly use on the crop that comprises his stogie. According to the federal General Accounting Office, twenty-five million pounds of pesticide are used on tobacco crops in the US each year. Tobacco pesticides include some of the most dangerous pesticides used in the United States, according the GAO. These tobacco pesticides can cause acute poisoning, cancer, nervous system damage and birth defects. Mr. Trutanich doesn’t have to spray his cigar with his trusty can of Raid, the prop he used on Fox News to warn of contaminated cannabis, since his cigar already contains plenty of pesticides…

Sources:
California Department of Pesticide Regulation website
Associated Press: “Federal oversight on tobacco pesticides inadequate, report says.” 25 April 2003 – Siobhan McDonough, Associated Press

“City Attorney, Carmen Trutanich has been deceitful about medical cannabis. He has been lying about the law, court precedence, the State Attorney General’s Medical Cannabis Guidelines and about pesticides. His dishonesty hurts more than just medical cannabis patients, it hurts the city and beyond…”

Read the entire post on CityWathcLA