Orange County Register

Is this someone who didn’t get the memo (although so far as I can tell there hasn’t been an actual memo yet), someone thumbing their nose at the new boss, or something else entirely?

A week after AG Eric Holder affirmed to reporters that the Obama administration’s policy is not to raid medical marijuana dispensaries and patients in states with medical marijuana laws, the DEA raided the Emmalyn’s California Cannabis Clinic in San Francisco yesterday. Of course Holder put conditions on his promise — we’ll go after those that look like a front for illicit sales — but his comments were verbal rather than written. Still, this looks like a complete contradiction of what Holder said was stated Obama administration policy.

This incident reinforces the importance of the judge in the Charles Lynch case – a dispensary operator convicted on federal drug charges but not sentenced yet — getting written advisories from the Justice Dept. itself. I don’t know if this was a rogue DEA operation, or if they really had some evidence that Emmalyn was breaking state law — it seems unlikely, it was duly licensed by the city of San Francisco. Whatever it was, it seems pretty important to me for the Justice Dept. to put the new policy in writing and get it out to the DEA offices around the country so they can quit wasting our money.

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