With a myriad of major announcements surrounding San Bernardino’s budget crisis, could well-regulated and controlled medical marijuana dispensaries be the solution?
By Sam Sabzehzar | April 8, 2013
SoCal residents like Anna Boyce, RN (ret.) have been educating the community about the benefits of medical cannabis, yet dispensary bans sends her to the street market for her medicine.The City of San Bernardino is going through a crisis few cities in the U.S. have ever seen.
Scandal after scandal among the elite circles of San Bernardino, those elected to power have squandered their positions as well as their city’s funds.
One way out that is sure to help every member of society is through the establishment of well-written medical marijuana regulations that allow landlords to rent to collectives a location to dispense their medicine.
This will not only ensure safe access to medical cannabis for those who seek it, but it allows a city full of potential to begin realizing it.
Medical cannabis dispensary regulations would allow the city’s law enforcement to focus their limited resources on violent crimes and protecting their community rather than playing pawn in a drug war that only alienates those tasked with protecting their community from the very people their share it with.
Not only has the drug war been a complete failure, it’s consequences reach far beyond the range of the collateral damage most wars of aggression experience.
With over 25% of the world’s prison population residing in a country that has a for-profit prison industry, perhaps it is time to stop allowing not-for profit pot providers a place in their for-profit prison systems.
This will not only save a family from being ripped apart, an adult from being denied gainful employment, but will help restore justice in a judicial system that has helped send more people of color into our prisons than their were black people living under slavery or at the height of apartheid in South Africa.
By keeping people out of prison and by not tagging non-violent drug offenders as criminals we can keep dispensaries open and safe, our communities safe, and our unemployment numbers as low as the unrented building space.
One great example at the global level is Portugal, which has seen drastic improvements in their society once their reformed their drug laws. If the United States isn’t quite ready to follow as a nation, perhaps a city like San Bernardino, California can be a trial run and really show just how much a society can improve when it stops seeking to destroy it’s own.
We don’t need to wait until the War on Drugs stops being waged to assess the body count and see the drug war was lost and there are no winners. Even those profiting off this failed public policy will one day come to realize, if they haven’t already, that their contributions to the war on drugs help shape part of the mistrust in our system, for our system and by our system, and no amount of money made or legally stolen can buy the solutions because money can’t heal the system.
