I might be one of the handful of full time smokers that supported Obama’s dispensary raids.

No one seems to remember the time (in California especially) when dispensaries were literally popping up left and right. Many of them were illegitimate; they had no patient history and fudged the numbers on their taxes. These were for-profit dispensaries involved with shipping weed across state lines to the east coast. They gave true medical dispensaries a bad name.

From what I remember, the DEA basically served a 30-day notice to all the dispensaries telling them to get their papers together because they’d be taking a hard look at them — which caused all the illegitimate places to close shop and flee.

All the news headlines at the time just focused on the high number of dispensary closures... when taken out of context, yeah it sounds bad. Just need to remember that there were hundreds and hundreds of these places in the Sacramento area alone, with new ones popping up every two weeks, and there are still many active today that survived the DEA raids.

It really bothers me when I see this story touted as an anti-Obama yet pro-cannabis story. I think he did more for cannabis than most people realized. The dirty dispensaries needed to be cleaned out.