New crop

Thousands of medical-cannabis patients cheered the passage of Assembly Bill 2312, which would install statewide regulation of California’s estimated $1.3 billion medical-cannabis industry.

The bill passed out of the state Assembly on a 41-28 vote this past Thursday, May 31, just a day before the deadline for 2012 bills to clear their house of origin. A.B. 2312 heads to the Senate for debate this June and July.

Just after the bill passed, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 5 organizer and Oakland resident Matthew Witemyre called it, “a really, really good day for us.”

“When A.B. 2312 was introduced, it had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing,” he said.

Patients’ group Americans for Safe Access, as well as California NORML and UFCW Local 5 had helped organize a weekend-long “Unity Conference” in Sacramento for hundreds of activists from across the state. Then, on May 21, some 300 patients—many in wheelchairs or suffering from multiple sclerosis and other serious illnesses—personally lobbied their representatives.

About 80 percent of Californians support medical access to the drug, Witemyre said. It has become an issue in contested June 5 primaries across the state, not to mention the general election in November.

Sacramento County also seems poised to vote on regulating dispensaries.

This comes on the heels of last fall’s statewide crackdown, which slammed into Sacramento County the hardest. Not only did federal and local drug warriors exterminate the county’s thriving crop of dispensaries, the board of supervisors banned home growing and has begun harassing small gardeners. Those days look numbered, however.

A group of shuttered dispensary operators—including Kimberly Cargile’s Common Roots and David Spradlin’s Magnolia Wellness, as well as 240 volunteers led by campaign coordinator Mickey Martin of Martinez, Calif.—is hard at work to end the home-grow ban, as well as permitting, taxing and regulating about 20 dispensaries. The group is using a county initiative to install local law by popular vote, going over the heads of supervisors.

The group has met its funding goals of about $100,000, said Martin, and the Patient Access to Regulated Medical Cannabis Act of 2012 has gathered about 20,000 unvalidated signatures. It’ll need about 43,000 valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot. The Committee for Safe Patient Access to Regulated Cannabis intends to gather 60,000 signatures and file them mid-June, said Martin.

Once the signatures are verified, the measure should appear on the November ballot, setting up what will be a close contest, Martin said. Sacramento County voters are split evenly on the issue, he said, but a vote on it seems almost certain.

“We think June is going to be a big month, and we’re going to be able to pull it off without any problems,” Martin said.