Scott Imler was greatly disappointed in the way 215 turned out. If he had known, he most likely wouldn't have done it at all.
http://reflectionsonplayboy.com/2007...marijuana.html
“It’s just ridiculous the amount of money that’s going through these cannabis clubs. It’s absolutely ridiculous,” says Scott Imler, a minister in the United Methodist Church who has long been active in promoting medical marijuana.
Eleven years ago, he was working to pass proposition 215, the [statewide] ballot measure that legalized it. Today, Imler has second thoughts.
“The purpose of proposition 215 was not to create a new industry. It was to protect legitimate patients from criminal prosecution,” Imler says.
The aim back then, reflected in television spots, was for a highly regulated system in which licensed pharmacies would dispense medical marijuana to the seriously ill. Proposition 215’s backers had people with AIDS, cancer, and glaucoma in mind.
“What happened when we were writing it was, as you can imagine, every patient group in the state and they all have their lobbies. You know, the kidney patients and the heart patient. Every patient group wanted to be included in the list,” Imler recalls. “And so we didn’t wanna get in the position of deciding what it could be used for and what it couldn’t be used for. We weren’t doctors. We weren’t scientists. We weren’t researchers. We were just patients with a problem.”
Imler says they were forced to make the proposition vague.
So the law voters passed mentioned not only cancer and AIDS but “...any other illness for which marijuana provides relief.” A decade later, if you’ve got a note from a doctor, you can buy medical pot for just about any imaginable condition.
“Let me just ask you plain and simple. Is there this proliferation because people are simply using, quote, unquote, medical marijuana, to get high?” Safer asks.
“I think there’s a lot of that. And I think you know, a lot of what we have now is basically pot dealers in storefronts,” Imler says.
Many businesses calling themselves dispensaries or cannabis clubs advertise in alternative papers, as do doctors around the state who will give you a quick once-over and, for a price, a permit to buy.