Altered State - California's slow journey to marijuana regulation

Daylight blinds you as you emerge from the BART station underground onto the sidewalk. Your eyes adjust and the first thing you see is President Barack Obama smiling, so lifelike you could almost reach out and shake his hand. Except he’s just a two-dimensional cardboard cutout in a window display below a sign reading “Oaksterdam University.”

Inside this hall of knowledge, the aroma is unmistakable: marijuana.

Richard Lee, founder and president of Oaksterdam University, is at the far end of the room. It’s been a busy August for the marijuana maverick: He launched an initiative that will give Californians the chance to vote for the legalization of marijuana as soon as next year, if it qualifies for the ballot, which shouldn’t be too hard. Recent polls show that nearly 60 percent of voters might approve such a proposition.

In short, 2009 has been a sea-change year for marijuana. Thanks to Obama, the recession and the explosion of cannabis clubs across the state, legislators are now more willing than ever to go where no politician has gone before. San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman Tom Ammiano has even introduced a bill to legalize pot for adults over 18.

It hasn’t been easy keeping up with the times, and here in Sacramento, officials are years behind when it comes to following the state’s existing medical-marijuana laws. All that may become moot if marijuana is fully legalized. Lee’s confident it will come to pass.

“It’s not a total lock, but it’s doable,” he says.

Lee’s downtown neighborhood, “Oaksterdam”—a portmanteau of Oakland and the Netherlands’ capital—is an example of what regulated, taxed and controlled cannabis can look like. Medical-marijuana collectives, pot-friendly coffeehouses, a weed university complete with a student center and store—Lee’s helped transform Oakland’s blighted, crime-riddled downtown into a unique hub that feeds the city treasury’s coffers to the tune of almost $1 million a year.

This July, Oakland became the first city in America to place a special tax on cannabis sales, which could rake in another $1 million annually. And that’s just the beginning. Number crunchers predict that legalizing marijuana could bring in $2 billion annually statewide. At least. That figure caught the attention of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who stated in May that it’s “time for a debate” on the subject.

Here in Sacramento, the number and unprecedented popularity of dispensaries recently caught City Hall with its pants down, forcing officials to scramble to control a multimillion-dollar industry that exploded under its nose—an industry they still deem “illegal.”

But Californians have made up their minds. They love their pot, and legalization almost seems inevitable.

A little background: In 1996, some 5,382,915 voters took a first step and decided to legalize medical marijuana. The Compassionate Use Act, or Proposition 215, a controversial ballot measure that allowed patients with a doctor’s recommendation to possess and cultivate medical marijuana for personal use, passed with more than 55 percent of the vote.

But the law had loose ends: Could patients form co-ops, or collectives, where cultivated marijuana could be sold? How much marijuana is enough for one person? Who determines said amount: the state, the county, the city, doctors or patients?

It took California eight years to come up with answers to those questions, but finally, in 2004, the Legislature passed the Medical Marijuana Program Act, or Senate Bill 420. Among its many provisions, the law provided counties guidelines for how much cannabis a patient could grow or possess, and also required counties to implement a voluntary identification-card program to protect both patients and caregivers from arrest.

The law also gave patients and caregivers the right to lawfully form collectives, or cannabis dispensaries, which the state requires cities to regulate. Today, there are more than 40 such medical collectives> Con't on LK