75A - PH - MEDICAL MARIJUANA - PROHIBIT

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The state Department of Health Services would develop regulations that define how much pot dispensaries can grow and store, bypassing the many nebulous questions surrounding how pot clubs currently get their wh.o esale product. Although the bill's primary intent is to protect patients facing reactionary and unjust arrests, the bill could have the secondary effect of regulating cultivators. This may explain why Californians for Compassionate Use, tike organization that thought up Proposition 21 S, has joined the Committee on Moral Concerns in opposing the bill. But get this: the registry system is sirictly voluntary. Vasconcellos' bill is mare focused cn reining in the police, and so ~t barely dwells on reining in medical-pot cultivators. The new cards offer absolute protection. from scary Modoc County sheriffs, but in return both patients anal. caregivers must operate responsibly. For operators in progressive cities such as Berkeley and Oakland, who already can move in the light of day, there's no incentive to sigm onto the deal. And so, through a strange accident of history, marijuana seems likely to remain the least-regulated ingestible substance ul California. Of course, good old-fashioned drug laws may solve the Ken Estes problem for us. Assistant district attorney Phyllis Franks of Contra Costa County is preparing to try Estes on four felonies stemming from the Concord. raids, and if convicted, he'll be out of business. This brings up the final legal question unresolved by Proposition 215: how do prosecutors determine whether someone is a legally sanctioned caregiver, or a drug dealer? The answer is there is no answer. District attorneys around. the state have relied on counting pot plants; if you've got too many, you must be a dealer. How many plants is too many? No one knows. While a handful of cities such as Berkeley have capped the amount of pot cannabis clubs can have on hand, prosecutors more typically eyeball the plants and make a simple judgment call. That's what they've done with Estes, but the system is hardly precise. If Estes is convicted, he will pay a terrible price for this lack of precision; the charges carry a possible prison sentence of three years and. eight months. But his complex reputation also could be laundered overnight. When Estes turned himself in, forty demonstrators accompanied him to the station, and his image -- the martyr of medical marijuana, persecuted by vindictive prosecutors -- was flashed across the nightly news throughout the Bay Area.. Stacey Trainor's allegations aside, Ken Estes seems a kind, generous man, ready to take you into his company at a moment's notice. But nothing out there can protect us from his tendency to trust the wrong people, of whom there are still plenty in the shadowy, twilight world of marijuana. Estes admits he's made some mistakes, and vows to improve his operation. "We began. something here, and we didn't know where it would go," he says. "I've made mistakes in retrospect, but we tried to work it out. Stacey and all that stuff was a big problem -- I had no problems before that. I believe I know who's behind this, the robberies. All this stuff that's gone on has happened since Stacey went to the police, and the police behoved her, They told me that many times women turn on their drug-dealing boyfriends, and this seems like a case of that, I wish I could have hired better people, but I can't say that I would have done anything different. I really didn't foresee the criminal element making its presence like it did. But I can only do so much." And should Estes revert to his old, seat-of his-pants ways, we may have no choice but to put up with. him. www comnassionatecoalition orb/comment/reply/3789 51 75A-60