photo from cannabisculture.com

The day before, DEA raids also swept through Montana, forcing at least one business, Montana Cannabis, to close its doors. One marijuana advocate called the action a “blatant, obvious, calculated, bullying interference by the federal government.”
But wait. Didn’t the Obama administration say it wouldn’t pursue cases against marijuana dispensaries that are legal under state law (16 states have legalized the drug – California and Montana being two of them)?
The answer is more nuanced and complex than most marijuana advocates would like to admit. In 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder did issue a memo that outlined guidelines on federal action, telling authorities not to arrest or prosecute users of suppliers who are not breaking any local laws.
But the Holder memo does not have the force of law behind it, and district attorneys general throughout the country can ultimately decide how they will treat the federally-regulated Schedule 1 drug. Details of the recent California and Montana raids are still largely unknown, as the DEA has yet to comment on why they took place or what was seized.
According to William Kroger, an L.A.-based attorney representing the two West Hollywood dispensaries, the dispensaries both complied with Holder’s guidelines better than most other dispensaries, yet they still got raided.

“My sense is that on one hand, there is this message coming from the Obama administration on medical marijuana saying ‘don’t push this too far,’” Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, told The Daily Caller. “But when it gets carried out by federal law enforcement, any nuance in that message gets lost, and people in federal law enforcement try to push it back even further than the Holder memo would suggest.”
“Why does it have to be armed agents? Why the need for a show of force like this?” Nadelmann added, before calling the recent raids “very heavy-handed response by the Justice Department that appears inconsistent with the Holder memo and the general message of the Obama administration.”
Chris Goldstein, founder of Freedom Is Green, and a leader in reforming state laws on the East Coast for medical marijuana, called the DEA raids, “state-sanctioned robbery.”
“The important thing here is they never arrest anybody,” Goldstein told TheDC. “They go in, take the money and the marijuana, and that’s it. It’s essentially a robbery…but where does the money go?” He went on to say that during raids, the DEA isn’t doing any real enforcement, just “stealing product and cash.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/03/22/marijuana-advocates-upset-with-obama-administration-policy
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