My friend Ann Harrison is covering the ongoing skirmishes in the drug war in California. The state of California has legalized growing and distributing pot to people who have medical marijuana prescriptions, but the DEA has begun to arrest these people on federal charges (despite the fact that federal laws only have jurisdiction over interstate matters, so pot grown and distributed in California is outside the DEA’s jurisdiction).
The DEA is conducting this war like a guerrilla attack on the people of California. Private citizens who record their busts from public sidewalks are assaulted by DEA agents who try to erase their camera-memory. The press-conferences are closed to the public. The dispensary raids concentrate on computer records of patients and growers, and many of those arrested face ten-year minimum sentences.
Ann is bent on blowing the lid off of this. While the stories she files with newspapers get trimmed to “news haiku,” on her blog she’s publishing transcripts of the secret press-conferences, information on the use of local law to do the Feds’ bidding, and the myriad ways that the DEA is cooking the process to wage its war on Americans.
Q: Does the California law that permits patients to use medical cannabis have any bearing at all on protecting the medical cannabis dispensaries?
Pena: Before I answer that question, one thing, and I think it is really important that I forgot to mention and I think it’s a public concern. On these three grow locations that we visited, they all had illegal wires tapping into PG&E the outlets all over the houses, very unsafe. I’m sure that you have heard of the situations were houses have been burning down, this causes a great deal of concern for us.
Like I said once you see that CD which we are handing out you will see the wiring system which is what causes the fires that were all contained in the three different areas that we went to. So this is how some of our houses are getting burned down.
What is your question again?