Irvine-based Weedmaps – the very popular website that guides cannabis fans to stores – recently announced it would stop listing illegal retailers later this year. The decision is a rare dose of good news for the legal marijuana industry in California.

The Weedmaps site features information on the products offered by hundreds of sellers in the Golden State, details on the special sales they are offering, information on different products and consumer reviews of dispensaries and their inventories. It is considered such a key part of the marijuana scene in California that one legal seller told the Los Angeles Times that its decision to not list illegal stores would wipe out 80 percent of them.

The Newsom administration has been pressuring Weedmaps for months to stop listing illegal stores, which far outnumber legal stores in the Golden State. Because they don’t pay taxes – and don’t cover expensive safety packaging and product testing – illegal shops can have a price advantage of 40 percent or more on legal dispensaries.

Legal shops decried unfair competition

After Proposition 64 passed in 2016 – legalizing the sale of recreational marijuana in California as of Jan. 1, 2018 – the legal cannabis industry’s initial complaints were about the slowness of the state in providing permits to pot shops and about the refusal of three-quarters of cities and counties to authorize such shops.

But as 2018 unfolded, the focus of complaints shifted to what legal stores saw as deeply unfair competition from illegal stores. As CalWatchdog reported, state officials announced in February that only $345.2 million was generated in revenue from sales, excise and cultivation taxes in 2018 – about a third of what was expected. This led the state’s Cannabis Advisory Committee to blast the “fragmented and uncoordinated” law enforcement response to illegal cannabis sales.

This and other complaints led Gov. Gavin Newsom to seek and receive an increase of at least 74 percent in enforcement funding in the 2019-20 state budget, which will allow the state to add more than 200 new enforcement and compliance positions by July 2020.

The legal industry in recent months has been heartened by efforts in Los Angeles to target illegal dispensaries by turning off their utilities and citing not just shop owners and employees but landlords. There have also been raids in Mendocino, Sonoma, Siskiyou, Trinity and Riverside counties that seized nearly 300,000 marijuana plants being grown without a license. Authorities also seized 20 tons of cannabis in June in Santa Barbara County, which has unexpectedly emerged as a major growing area since Proposition 64’s passage.

Analyst: Illegal shops’ market share growing

But the good news was followed by a report this month from BDS Analytics, which tracks cannabis sales data, that illegal stores appeared to be increasing their market share in California. As of June, state residents were buying three times more marijuana from illegal stores than legal ones.

Industry experts say illegal shops don’t just have a pricing advantage. Since many emerged after California voters approved the sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes in 1996, they had a 20-year head start on legal sellers in establishing relationships with growers and building customer bases.

But Newsom, for one, never expected a smooth start to the legal California cannabis industry. In 2016, while campaigning for Proposition 64, he said he believed it would take the industry “five to seven years” to hit its stride after legal sales began.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said, “If you don’t want us prosecuting [marijuana users] in your state, then get your regulatory act together.”

Here’s the problem. In 1996, Californians passed Proposition 215, which legalized medical marijuana. My late colleague Alan Bock’s editorials in the Orange County Register helped pass it. And he wrote a book on medical marijuana, “Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana.”

Prop. 215’s language stipulated:

“(C) To encourage the federal and state governments to implement a plan to provide for the safe and affordable distribution of marijuana to all patients in medical need of marijuana.”

But the Legislature has done next to nothing to implement that language, leaving cities to enact a patch-quilt of contradictory laws. For example, Anaheim has shut down its dispensaries — in violation of Prop. 215.

By contrast, in San Francisco, medical pot is welcome. But the city just said “no to a medical marijuana green-light district.”

That’s 18 years of neglect by the Legislature over an important issue. Maybe they’re out back toking.

By John Seiler

Some good news: Nullification is spreading. AP reports:

“JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Imagine the scenario: A federal agent attempts to arrest someone for illegally selling a machine gun. Instead, the federal agent is arrested – charged in a state court with the crime of enforcing federal gun laws.

“Farfetched? Not as much as you might think.

“The scenario would become conceivable if legislation passed by Missouri’s Republican-led Legislature is signed into law by Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon.

“The Missouri legislation is perhaps the most extreme example of a states’ rights movement that has been spreading across the nation. States are increasingly adopting laws that purport to nullify federal laws – setting up intentional legal conflicts, directing local police not to enforce federal laws and, in rare cases, even threatening criminal charges for federal agents who dare to do their jobs.

“An Associated Press analysis found that about four-fifths of the states now have enacted local laws that directly reject or ignore federal laws on marijuana use, gun control, health insurance requirements and identification standards for driver’s licenses. The recent trend began in Democratic leaning California with a 1996 medical marijuana law and has proliferated lately in Republican strongholds like Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback this spring became the first to sign a measure threatening felony charges against federal agents who enforce certain firearms laws in his state.”

Right on! And I’m proud that left-wing California took the lead in nullification with Proposition 215, way back 17 years ago.

Now, there’s more our state could do. Here are the very first words of the California Constitution:

“ARTICLE 1 DECLARATION OF RIGHTS

“SECTION 1. All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”

Note the last word: “privacy.”

As everyone has been learning from the recent scandals, the U.S. government has been spying on all of us continually, in complete violation of the Bill of Rights. What the California Legislature should do is pass a law implementing the “inalienable right” to “privacy” in our state by banning our high tech companies — Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — from cooperating with the U.S. government unless the Fourth Amendment is strictly followed. That amendment mandates:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

And the state law should specify that the last words, “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized,” ban the NSA, FBI and other Stasi Super Snooper State agencies from grabbing any Big Data, such as all phone and other records from Verizon, Google, etc.

And the law should specify that, if the NSA, FBI, etc. do not comply, then the California Highway Patrol and the California National Guard will arrest the police-state Stasi offenders and prosecute them under our state laws.

I voted against Proposition 215, the so-called Compassionate Use Act, which legalized marijuana use here in the nation’s largest pot-growing state for — wink, wink, nod, nod — “medicinal purposes.”

That’s why it is rather ironic that I find myself compelled to come to the defense of the 1996 law, which the California Supreme Court’s seven justices this week unanimously agreed to review.

It’s not that I have changed my mind about Prop. 215 over the past 16 years.

I still believe it was a Trojan Horse sponsored by all-too-clever interests whose ultimate aim is to decriminalize use of not only cannabis, but also cocaine, heroin, crystal meth and every other currently illegal drug. I also remain troubled that the Compassionate Use Act brazenly contravenes longstanding federal drug law.

So why am I defending Prop. 215? Because it was approved by 56 percent of California voters. Because I think it a mockery of the democratic process when judges overturn the results of a public plebiscite.

The temptation for the 44 percent of us who voted against Prop. 215 is to applaud the state’s highest court for addressing itself to the continuing controversy the law precipitated.

To urge the justices to allow local governments throughout the state to ban marijuana dispensaries if they see fit. To strike down the Compassionate Use Act altogether on grounds that it violates federal law.

But the time for the courts to strike down Prop. 215 was back in 1996, before the measure actually made the state ballot. Not after the measure was approved by the voters. Not 16 years after the fact.

If the forthcoming court review of Prop. 215 was an aberration, perhaps it would not so offend my democratic (small d) sensibilities. But California judges and courts have been notorious over the years in nullifying the expressed will of the state’s electorate.

Other Initiatives

In 1994, Proposition 187 was approved by 59 percent of California voters. The Save our State initiative would have prohibited illegal aliens from receiving public education, health care and other taxpayer-funded entitlements.

However, it was declared unconstitutional by federal judge Mariana Pfaelzer, a liberal judicial activist appointed by President Jimmy Carter. When Gray Davis became governor, he decided not to appeal, effectively killing the law.

Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, was approved by 54 percent of voters in 1996, the same year Prop. 215 won passage. It prohibited the state from considering race, sex or ethnicity in public employment, public contracting and public education.

It was initially stuck down as unconstitutional by federal judge Thelton Henderson, yet another liberal judicial activist appointed by Carter. However, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently upheld the law.

Props. 22 and 8

In 2000, Proposition 22 was approved by an overwhelming 61 percent of California voters. The Knight Initiative, as it was known, specified that only marriages between a man and woman would be lawfully recognized in the Golden State. Eight years later, the California Supreme Court struck down Prop. 22 as unconstitutional.

The court’s action led, in turn, to Proposition 8, the California Marriage Protection Act. That 2008 constitutional amendment, which prohibited same-sex marriages, was approved by 52 percent of the electorate.

Prop. 8 was overturned in 2010 by federal judge Vaughn Walker, who retired not long after his ruling and announced that he was in a long term same-sex relationship. His ruling was stayed and the fate of the voter-approved law may ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

California’s initiative system, which worked just fine for much of the past 101 years, has in recent decades become a democratic bait-and-switch. The people of the state are supposed to have the power to enact law at the ballot box, but the reality is that judges and courts — all too often politically motivated — decide what voter-approved propositions may and may not become state law.

That’s why initiative system needs a fix. The suggestion here is a judicial tribunal that previews proposed propositions before they reach the ballot. Before millions of dollars are spent for and against the measure. And before — rather than after — the measure is approved by the state electorate.

Such judicial preview will not all together prevent the courthouse assault on direct democracy we’ve witnessed over the past couple decades. But it will raise the bar considerably for judges and courts that presume to thwart the will of the electorate.

— Joseph Perkins