By Steven T. Jones
The Examiner reports that Mayor Gavin Newsom is proposing a crackdown on the city’s medical marijuana clubs, including requiring them to keep detailed patient records that advocates say could easily be used by the federal government to prosecute people for smoking pot, which is legal under California law but not under federal law.
And once again, it appears that Newsom’s increasingly conservative approach to policing and regulation is being driven by his top crime adviser, law-and-order Republican Kevin Ryan, the former US attorney who was fired for incompetence by the Bush Administration despite his deep political loyalty to Bush and the GOP. Ryan, who led the federal government’s war on drugs against San Franciscans (including an overzealous prosecution of Ed Rosenthal), is quoted by the Examiner trying to justify going well beyond recent state guidelines.
Newsom’s office didn’t respond to our questions, but the latest proposal is directly at odds with the city’s innovative approach to regulating the clubs, which had among its central tenets protection of patient privacy and wariness of giving the federal government information that could be used to prosecute San Franciscans.