Medical Marijuana: Entrapment and Worse

Radley Balko reports:

Last Friday, the DEA raided a medical marijuana producer in Colorado. The story needs some fleshing out, but at the moment it appears that Chris Bartkowicz wasn't violating any state law. Medical marijuana is legal in Colorado. His offense appears to have been boasting about how much money he makes growing the drug for patients...The DEA is not only unapologetic, they appear to be blatantly ignoring last year's directive from the Obama Justice Department instructing U.S. attorneys to allow medical marijuana growers and distributors to operate so long as they're complying with state law.

From the Balko link:

Along with the raid, Jeffrey Sweetin, the Drug Enforcement Administration's special agent in charge of the Denver office, sent a message to anyone involved in Colorado's increasingly profitable medical-marijuana industry. (p)"It's still a violation of federal law," Sweetin said. "It's not medicine. We're still going to continue to investigate and arrest people."
...
A memo in October from Deputy U.S. Attorney General David Ogden said federal agents should not target people in "clear and unambiguous compliance with existing state laws providing for the medical use of marijuana." The memo led many in Colorado's medical-marijuana community to believe that federal agents would no longer raid medical-marijuana dispensaries or growers.

Guidelines included in the memo to distinguish between lawful medical-marijuana operations and unlawful ones include whether the operations produce more plants or generate more money than state laws intend. Sweetin said those guidelines put much of Colorado's medical-marijuana industry in the crosshairs and that he has been gathering information on dispensary owners and their operations for months.

"Technically, every dispensary in the state is in blatant violation of federal law," he said. "The time is coming when we go into a dispensary, we find out what their profit is, we seize the building and we arrest everybody. They're violating federal law; they're at risk of arrest and imprisonment."

Reason notes:

The really galling aspect of this case is that Jeffrey Sweetin, who runs the DEA's Denver office, does not even pretend to be interpreting state law, as the Justice Department memo ostensibly requires.

Wrt another raid, I commented:

The government has engaged in entrapment.

"We're going to be restrained, sensible and decent about medical marijuana," sez the Prez.

So the providers come into the open, and...wham!

A jury might accept an entrapment defense--I would--, so I look for non-drug offenses to be included in the indictments.
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Note to Obama: you can confiscate a lot of money by pulling the same trick with delinquent taxes.

Another note to Obama: when federal police ignore the President's policy directives and pursue their own agenda, they have begun acting like a Praetorian Guard.
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Doubtless many growers of medical marijuana do not have compassionate motives, but that's not the point.