Carroll: The pot dispensary wars - The Denver Post
Carroll: The pot dispensary wars - The Denver Post Medical marijuana backers just won't take yes for an answer. The Denver City Council this week took the extraordinary step of passing regulations that will allow 200 to 300 marijuana dispensaries in a town where none existed just months ago. Not a single council member voted no. So were dispensary backers grateful? Not on your life. The hearing was rife with complaints that the restrictions trampled on patient and caregiver rights. A lawsuit was threatened. From the alarmed reaction, you'd have thought the council had been supplanted by a cabal of pot prohibitionists from the attorney general's office. The irony is that the dispensaries — in Denver and elsewhere — face a genuine threat: The legislature is considering shutting them down by limiting each "caregiver" to five patients, making such disputes as occurred in Denver irrelevant. "If you believe in the dispensary model — and I believe in the dispensary model — you better start working now to save it," Councilman Charlie Brown advised the critics, after counseling flexibility on their part. Brown is right. The self-righteous carping only confirms the worst suspicions of dispensary opponents: that the medical marijuana lobby is actually interested mainly in the backdoor legalization of cannabis itself — a status that Colorado voters rejected in 2006, six years after they legalized medical marijuana with Amendment 20.
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