The City Council is behaving with extreme disregard for sick and suffering patients in Mountain View and the surrounding cities for whom cannabis is the safest and most effective medicine available. Mayor Bryant, a cancer survivor herself, was prescribed Marinol (synthetic THC) for her condition and has said publicly that she would probably use cannabis if she got cancer again and found that it helped. Nevertheless, she is pointedly standing in the way of providing access to others. Rather than shying away from "being the center for dispensaries in our area," Mountain View should welcome the chance to shame the surrounding cities and help our own constituents and theirs. That's what LEADERSHIP is all about.

Many of the restrictions being proposed unfairly single out dispensary operators and make it difficult or impossible to operate in the city. The police chiefs of both Los Angeles and San Francisco have both stated flatly that the existence of cannabis dispensaries is NOT correlated with any increase in crime. So why are so many on the City Council letting their fear and ignorance trample the civil rights of their constituents?

It didn't take 14 years after Emancipation for City Councils to decide how best to draft regulations to free slaves. It didn't take 14 years after women got the vote for City Councils to try to figure out how to make that happen. The people of California voted 14 years ago -- 14 years! -- to allow patients to use cannabis. Support nationally for medical cannabis is over 70%; in Mountain View, it is almost certainly in the 80-90%+ range. The City Council needs to take a courageous stand and fight for the rights of patients to safe access to their medicine.

Jonathan Steigman
Mountain View

This whole medical pot issue is a ploy for recreational users to break the law. In LA over 100 dispensaries have been closed for various violations including the providing of "prescriptions" onsite by "doctors" who don't examine the patient but collect $500 for the document.

If pot is a valid drug why isn't it provided in a standard dose and strength? Why is it sold in a dispensary rather than a drugstore? We have an entire infrastructure in place called pharmacists that are trained and certified about how to dispense medicine. Why do we need another amateur-hour setup with untrained individuals?

I vote for no pot clubs in Mountain View and I applaud Palo Alto and Los Altos for banning them.

"cannabis is the safest and most effective medicine available"??

PeaceLove, where did you get your medical degree? Or law degree? Or history degree for that matter.

For God's Sake stop smoking that stuff. You are losing your mind!

Ron: Cannabis is a plant. It no more belongs in a pharmacy than eucalyptus or ginseng. Nevertheless, the reason it is not widely available as medicine is that the federal government has for decades deliberately and consistently put up roadblocks to medical researchers who want to study its efficacy in formal trials. The government controls the only legal source of medical cannabis and they make it difficult, if not impossible to get it for research.

The government still supplies a small number of medical cannabis patients with 300 cannabis cigarettes every 25 days, over 6 pounds per year. However they have refused to extend the program out to any new patients.

le dude: Insults aren't arguments.

Years of blatantly dishonest propaganda from our government has convinced many people that cannabis is some sort of highly dangerous substance, like alcohol or tobacco. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Humans have natural cannabinoids in their bodies, and the use of cannabis in medicine is a hot topic of research among many medical professionals.

Judge Francis Young of the DEA ruled in 1988 that cannabis is "one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man" and that it is "safer than many foods we commonly consume." He further went on to say that denying that some physicians consider cannabis medically efficacious would be "unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious" and that science and evidence dictated that it should be moved off its Schedule 1 status immediately. Our government ignored the ruling of its own DEA.

"Estimates suggest that from twenty million to fifty million Americans routinely, albeit illegally, smoke marijuana without the benefit of direct medical supervision. Yet, despite this long history of use and the extraordinarily high numbers of social smokers, there are simply no credible medical reports to suggest that consuming marijuana has caused a
single death."

Full text of the DEA ruling here: Web Link

The relative safety of cannabis has been noted more recently by the World Health Organization and the Institute of Medicine.

Thank you judge for closing buddies down. They are not our buddies and most move on.