MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Seven in ten Americans agree, medical marijuana should be available in the U.S. Patients can already get it in 16 states and will soon be able to get a prescription for pot in D.C. too, but state law's allowing it run counter to federal law.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIAfter 15 years of tension between state and federal authorities, U.S. attorneys in California are cracking down on the marijuana industry. In a state where up to 500 metric tons of cannabis is consumed each year, the effort has wide-ranging implications. Whether shock waves will spread across the country or not, the action has lots of advocates up in arms.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIJoining us in studio to discuss this is Peter Reuter, director of the Center of Economics of Crime and Justice Policy at the University of Maryland. He is also the co-founder of Rand's Drug Policy Research Center and a senior economist with the organization. Peter Reuter, thank you for joining us.

MR. PETER REUTERThank you.

NNAMDIAlso in studio with us is Martin Austermuhle, associate editor with DCist.com Martin Austermuhle, good to see you again.

MR. MARTIN AUSTERMUHLEGood to see you, too, thanks for having me.

NNAMDIAnd joining us from studios in San Francisco, the studios of KQED is Michael Montgomery, a reporter and producer with the Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch Unit and a contributor to KQED public radio. Michael Montgomery, thank you for joining us.

MR. MICHAEL MONTGOMERYThanks for having me.

NNAMDIAnd the audience of course, if you'd like to join this conversation, the number is 800-433-8850. Do you think that medical marijuana should be legal? Why or why not? Let's start with a basic question, 800-433-8850. You can also send email to kojo@wamu.org. Michael Montgomery, medical marijuana has been legal in California for 15 years now. How easy or how tough is it to get?

MONTGOMERYIt's quite for easy for any adult to get. You can simply go to one of hundreds of doctors who provide recommendations and are more than willing to provide it to you. They generally are able to locate some kind of ailment that will qualify you to get marijuana, a medical marijuana recommendation and it costs you about $100 and in that sense I would argue that marijuana has become virtually legal in the sense of access for most adults in California.

NNAMDIMichael, you first and then Peter, in some ways California has become a case study in what not to do when it comes to medical marijuana policy. How far is the reality then from what backers of Prop 215, the ballot initiative that made it legal imagined?

MONTGOMERYWell, if you talk to people who actually wrote Prop 215, the impulse according to them was to help the seriously ill and dying get something to help relieve pain. Now, there was also though, a sort of parallel track of activists who saw 215 as the first step towards full legalization and so I think in California you've had these twin paths, a sort of a narrow use as a medicine for a very small number of patients and folks who really see this as a way to get marijuana to as many people as possible.

MONTGOMERYI think that the second group has really sort of won out in the sense that marijuana or medical marijuana has become a very large industry here in terms of businesses and advertisers and what have you and it's taken on the feel of a commercial industry and this is one reason the feds say they're pushing back on it. They say that Prop 215 did not envision such an industry and I think they're determined to chop it to size, if you will although whether they're successful is another question.

NNAMDIPeter Reuter, same question?

REUTERI think that basically describes it. This medical marijuana has always been advocated primarily by organizations interested in marijuana law reform generally and it's been seen as a device for getting a sort of tolerance of marijuana in society on a legal basis and that has become even clearer in the case of California. In fact, D.C. is impressive in the sense that it is really trying to take medical marijuana literally and figure out ways of responsively providing it for medical purposes only. That's true in a number of states. California is the most distinguished outlier. I think Colorado is probably towards that end as well.

NNAMDIWell, any state with legalized medical marijuana finds itself at odds with the federal law and there's often been tension between the two. How are U.S. attorneys in California trying to rein in the cannabis industry there? I'll start with Peter and then go to Michael.

REUTERIt's interesting, the U.S. attorneys at the beginning of the Obama administration, there was a famous memo, at least in our world a famous memo, from the deputy attorney general saying act responsibly and we're not going to do anything. The recent memo in effect is a statement you haven't been acting responsibly. It doesn't go at the fundamentals, it is concerned with the visibility, openness and commercial-ness of the existing operations and I think as a matter of public policy it's perfectly okay for them to be going after that aspect of it.

REUTERI don't think it changes anything very fundamentally, it probably will, you know, if they're successful it will look less conspicuous and it will be less commercial. I think that's an acceptable goal.

NNAMDIMichael, what tactics are U.S. attorneys in California using to rein in the cannabis industry there?

MONTGOMERYWell, obviously keeping in mind that, you know, there's been a battle over marijuana or cannabis here for decades particularly up here in northern California which grows, produces so much. What's new is it's not a completely new tactic, what is new in terms of how they're using it, is the U.S. attorneys are now targeting landowners, property owners people who lease or rent land to growers.

MONTGOMERYFor example, in the central valley, there's been an explosion of that. Or people who are leasing, you know, buildings to dispensaries and they are saying, you have, they're warning them that, you know, illegal activity is going on here and they're warning them that the property could be seized. And owners are paying attention to that and we're seeing a number of dispensaries even in San Francisco and some other areas, closing down because the owners don't want to have their land seized. So they're trying to get at the economics of it.

MONTGOMERYThere have been warnings or threats, for example, that they'll go after media organizations that carry advertisements for dispensaries. That's been another, you know, growth industry, if you will. So I think they're taking a slightly different tack, these might not even be criminal prosecutions, these could just be civil forfeitures which would require fewer resources from the feds.

MONTGOMERYNow, again, how far they can go with this and, you know, how far they're willing to target people who seem to be in compliance with state law remains unclear. But I do think that the feds have made it clear that they are not going to not target someone just because they might be in compliance with state law and that's I think perhaps something of a development.

NNAMDIBut it's been almost a month since this crackdown began. What has the reaction been from people who benefit from the medical marijuana industry?

MONTGOMERYWell, there's concern. I mean, it is multiple levels of the patients, people who use this as medicine, are worried that this will restrict their access. I don’t think that that's happening right now just because there are so many dispensaries or delivery services, people who supply medical marijuana without even a storefront.

MONTGOMERYSo there's worry there. I think the biggest worry right now perhaps is the economic side of things, people going out of business, growers going out of business. I think the worry right now is how this is going to impact the industry and there's no signs that at any large level patients are not able to get their -- what they consider their medicine.

NNAMDIAgain the number to call is 800-433-8850. We're talking about medical marijuana inviting your calls. Are you worried that the crackdown on medical marijuana in California will derail plans here in Washington, D.C.? 800-433-8850, you can also go to our website kojoshow.org and join the conversation there. Martin Austermuhle, D.C. is actually second in the nation close on California's heels to legalize medical marijuana. Fourteen years later the district is now on the eve of putting its program in place. Has there been any concern locally in light of what's going on in California?

AUSTERMUHLEThere has been, it's tough to measure exactly how concerned people are because a lot of people who are applying for medical marijuana licenses in the district are somewhat apprehensive to talk to the media, understandably so. But one way to look at it is that for cultivation centers which there are supposed to be ten and when the system is fully up and running, the district pre-approved about 60 applicants to actually submit full applications to get these licenses.

AUSTERMUHLEOnly 16 applicants actually ended up submitting licenses and they only ended up applying for 28 licenses all told. So it seems that there could be some concern just looking at how many applicants you had, how big the pool was and how, basically how many applications were finally turned in.

NNAMDIAnd it's my understanding that city officials have given word that the application deadline for the five dispensaries has been moved from October 31st to November 15th. Why is that?

AUSTERMUHLEWell, I mean, the application deadline for cultivation centers and dispensaries they were both pushed back two weeks and in essence the entire program's implementation day has been pushed back a couple of weeks. And I think it's because they're looking at California and trying to do everything that California did not do.

AUSTERMUHLEI mean, as much as the west coast can be looked at like the Wild West of medical marijuana, this is the, you know, buttoned-up kind of straight and narrow east coast approach and the district is really trying to be as restrictive and careful as possible, including giving extensions to applicants who are still trying to work their way through, what's it, 113 pages of regulations.

NNAMDIThat's how we roll, babe.

AUSTERMUHLEExactly, and you know, very -- there's no application form. It's not like they give you a 15-page application form for a license. You're basically reading 113 pages of regulations and making up the application as you go along.

NNAMDIYour turn Peter Reuter...

REUTERJust Congress sits on the Hill overlooking the district. It's very hard not to do this in a very cautious way.

NNAMDIIndeed. Martin, you say that one of the main things D.C. has going for it in keeping its medical marijuana program on track is that it's not California.

AUSTERMUHLEYeah, exactly. I mean, I think they recognize the limitations they have. Yes, Congress shut down this program once and shut it down for the better part of 12 years so what's to stop a Republican congressman from coming by and stopping it again or a Republican president. So I think they're approaching it a lot more carefully and deliberately than, I think, California did.

NNAMDIMichael, care to comment on the crackdown on growers in California?

MONTGOMERYWell, you know, it's a paradox here. What you've had, for example, in -- and I would agree that it's statewide, it's a free-for-all, I mean there are no clear cut statewide regulations that really, you know, that are tight say like you have in Colorado. What's interesting is this paradox. Let's take a city like Oakland, which really did try to get its act together at least with dispensaries. It only licenses four dispensaries.

MONTGOMERYHowever, that means because it's so easy to get a medical marijuana recommendation, it means that some of these dispensaries are huge, I mean $20 to $30 million a year in revenue. That attracts the feds. I mean, they can be perfectly compliant with state law, but when you get that big, the feds start looking at you.

MONTGOMERYSo here's the question for D.C. It's true. I think small is beautiful. You stay small and -- you know, and the feds quite likely won't pay you much attention. However, if you're small you're not going to be able to supply that much medical marijuana to patients so in a potentially, and I don't know the numbers exactly for D.C., it could keep, you know, the pool of patients, if you will, in the thousands. And that may be fine for D.C., but it will limit the size of the program. And in California, there have been lawsuits over that issue of restricting access to something that's entitled to folks under state law. So there's tension there, but the key is, I think, staying very small. I mean, very small.

AUSTERMUHLEAnd the district, just to chime in real quick, the district has actually kept it extremely small and one of the initial documents that the chief financial officer put out, laying out the financials of the cities program. He assumed then the first year or so, there'd be about 300 qualifying patients. A lot of advocates say that's underestimating it by a long shot. But that's what the city is going on so they're assuming it's going to be small.

NNAMDIHere is Chris is Bethesda, Md. Chris, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

CHRISDude, I use marijuana medically now and the -- my little (unintelligible) yeah. Anyway...

NNAMDIWell, I think we're going to have to take a short break and see if Nick can -- if Chris can get his point that he'd like to make together. You, too, can call us 800-433-8850. Especially, if you're sober. Are you worried that the crackdown on medical marijuana will derail plans here in Washington, D.C.? 800-433-8850, I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back to our conversation on medical marijuana. We're talking with Martin Austermuhle, associate editor of DCist. Peter Reuter is director of the Center of Economics of Crime and Justice Policy at the University of Maryland and co-founder of RAND's Drug Policy Research Center and a senior economist with that organization.

NNAMDIJoining us from the studios of KQED in San Francisco is Michael Montgomery, he's a reporter and producer with the Center for Investigative Reporting California Watch Unit and a contributor to KQED public radio. We're inviting your calls at 800-433-8850. Martin Austermuhle, since the crackdown started has D.C. Mayor, Vincent Gray, or U.S. Attorney Ron Machen's office commented on the potential local implications of it?

AUSTERMUHLENot really, they haven't said a word. I mean, especially not U.S. Attorney Machen. And I think that exemplifies that even though some people say that the department of justice, someone backtracked on their stance on medical marijuana, they're still giving a lot of flexibility to individual U.S. Attorney's and that means that if the U.S. Attorney for the district doesn't want to go after medical marijuana dispensaries and cultivation centers, he doesn't have to.

AUSTERMUHLEThat being said, the U.S. Attorney for the district is appointed by the President. If the President should be, let's say, a republican sometime in the future, they could very well appoint someone who doesn't like medical marijuana and they could start pursuing medical marijuana cultivators and dispensers here in the city.

NNAMDILike to read a web comment that we got from Vishnu. "This federal crackdown has a flawed logic to it. People will continue to use marijuana, but they will obtain it illegally, probably from a dealer associated with a gang rather than obtaining it from a dispensary. Shutting down dispensaries benefits the Mexican drug cartels, they'll step in to fill the new gap in the market. President Obama is simultaneously taking away jobs from some Californians and giving the Mexican cartels money to fund other illegal activities such as human trafficking."

NNAMDI"This was not a smart move on the part of the justice department." I'll start with you, Peter Reuter. A lot of legalization advocates are crying foul about this. Saying the enforcement effort in California is a complete reversal of the Obama administrations previous stance on the issue of medical marijuana. Is it?

REUTERI think in this case the justice department, well, the U.S. Attorneys are not being unreasonable. I think that, as Mark said, U.S. Attorneys are very independent actors. And it's even unusual to have the U.S. Attorneys in California get together as a group and make the statement. But it's not a statement from the Attorney General to the justice department, to my knowledge, has been entirely silent on this. So this is what the U.S. Attorneys are doing.

REUTERAnd as I say, you know, without going into all the details my sense is that they're being fairly clear about what it is they object to and they're not going after medical marijuana per say. They're going after, you know, what not -- correctly characterizes as the wild west out there and the high commercialization. I mean, I might disagree that that, you know, they should go after that, but it's not an unreasonable and it is quite a specific target. So I mean, all the arguments of legalization still stand, but I don’t think this is any particular attack on...

NNAMDIMichael Montgomery, some advocates have said that the Deputy Attorney General David Ogden wrote a memo in 2009, which, well, was an agreement with what's going on in California. Care to respond to that or talk about it?

MONTGOMERYI think -- yeah. I mean, I think that the Ogden memo and I was just rereading it this morning, I think it's been misread. I think people read more into it than is in there. Now, I would agree that the tone is slightly different then the newer memo that came out last summer, the Cole memo. But it is -- it has never been the position of the Obama administration that as long as you're in compliance with the state law, the feds won't go after you. They've never said that in those terms.

NNAMDIWhat does the Ogden memo actually say?

MONTGOMERYWell, I don't want to read you the whole thing. I don't have it in front me.

NNAMDIOh, no, please not the whole thing. Just a...

MONTGOMERYBut essentially it's saying there's -- here's the key language. The key language says that as a general matter, you know, federal resources in your states will not target individuals whose actions are unclear and unambiguous compliance with the existing state law. And then it goes on to say, for example, prosecution of individuals with cancer or other serious illnesses who use marijuana as part of a recommended treatment or their care providers -- and that was reiterated in the Cole memo.

MONTGOMERYAnd I think the Cole -- the more recent memo put more emphasis on that point that there -- you know, this sort of informal exemption, if you will, only applies to the seriously ill and their care providers. It doesn't apply to dispensaries, it doesn't apply to growers. I just want to make one other point out here, what the feds response to the question about the drug gangs. I mean, I do think that this pushback will push some of the trade back underground.

MONTGOMERYWhat the feds response to that is that drug gangs have already moved into the trade here and there is certainly some evidence to support that, that because of California's failure to get a handle on things and because of its commercialization, drug gangs and Mexican gangs, not just Mexicans, are moving in. And there's a lot of evidence of that. There's a question about links to the cartels. So here's an interesting question -- so what's interesting is that those places say Mendocino County, up North from where I am.

MONTGOMERYThey've responded by saying, okay, we're going to regulate growing. We're going to keep it small scale and we're going to try to bring growers out of the shadows into some kind of regulatory system. Aren't we better off as a society if this trade is regulated? And what we're now seeing is the federal pushback is now hitting that program. So the argument goes both ways, but I think it's a very interesting question of, you know, who's better off if the trade is regulated or not?

NNAMDIMartin Austermuhle, do you think this is a reversal of a position of the Obama administration?

AUSTERMUHLENo, I don't think it's a full reversal. I think that the more recent memo, in at least the people I've spoken to here, would freak them out on -- at least on this side of the country, was that the more recent memo specifically didn't only call out cultivators and dispensers, but it also said something about city officials, essentially government officials that enable them or allow them to do what they do.

AUSTERMUHLESo if I'm a government worker and it's my job to hand out a license to someone that's eventually going to grow marijuana or give it out to someone, I'm going to be nervous because that's essentially legal language saying that I'm just as responsible as the person growing it or giving it out.

AUSTERMUHLEAnd so the district came up with this additional legal waiver which basically -- it forces anybody who's applying for a license to waive all their legal rights to basically say the district, even though the district is giving me a license, they're not formally authorizing me to grow marijuana. Which is a strange, you know, it's legal acrobatics but it's what the city felt they had to do.

NNAMDIMichael, you were going to say.

MONTGOMERYIf I can add. Yeah, no, I mean, so, yeah, exactly. To amplify my point. So what we're seeing is because of -- in the -- the language in that memo in U.S. Attorney's letters that have come out over the last year, if you're a city official involved in some kind of a licensing or permitting program, you yourself could be vulnerable for prosecution under the -- for violating the controlled substances act. So what, from a local perspective, that's enraged some officials because they're saying, well, wait a minute, you know, we're trying to get a handle on this.

MONTGOMERYSay, you know, pot growers in Oakland, you know, who grow all over the place, the city wants to centralize that production. The feds are saying, if you do that in any kind of commercial scale, you could be vulnerable for prosecution so advocates see that as perpetuating the drug war. The feds see it as enforcing federal law.

NNAMDIGot to go to the telephones where quite a few callers await us on this issue. We'll start with Nick in Beltsville, Md. Nick, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

NICKYeah, my comment was from a little while -- what was being discussed earlier. I did want to mention one thing that the -- one of your panelists was saying something about legal acrobatics. It sounds vaguely familiar to what they're doing for pot growers in stamps being issued. And I think it was the early 1900s. But what I wanted to say was, is that, to my understanding, the counter culture -- and I want to highlight that phrase of marijuana use has been demonized throughout the course since its been -- become an issue.

NICKAnd so now with it being, you know, kind of molded into well, medical use, for those that can qualify under that, it seems like the district is more or less trying to, you know, weed out those that use it, regardless of whether they really medically need it or not. Because, like, what your other -- one of your other panelists was saying before...

NNAMDIWhen you say the district, do you mean the District of Columbia or the District in California?

NICKOh, D.C.

NNAMDID.C., okay.

NICKThe Washington D.C.

NNAMDIMark Austermuhle, what do you say to that?

AUSTERMUHLENo. I mean, I agree. I think that the district and just to compare to California here, to get a recommendation because you can't legally get a prescription but you can get a recommendation from a doctor. You have to prove that you have a, what they call, a bona fide relationship with a doctor. So you can't just walk into a doctor's office for the first time, say I've got a headache and he's going to write you a recommendation for medical marijuana. You have to have gone to him for x amount of time and he has to -- he or she have to -- they have to know you.

AUSTERMUHLEAnd they can only prescribe it or recommend it, sorry, for four qualifying conditions. And those are very limited. It's glaucoma, it's cancer, it's HIV/AIDS, it's multiple sclerosis. So it's, you know, it's not California in that sense.

NNAMDIWell, Peter Reuter, even as dispensaries and grow sites are being targeted, you say it's very likely that there will be at least one ballot initiative legalizing marijuana across the board in California next year.

REUTERYeah. I mean, in last November, Prop 19 lost 53 to 47. And what's interesting in the exit polls is that over five percent of those who voted against Prop 19, said they would have -- that they were in favor of legal marijuana but that Prop 19 was a very badly written initiative which indeed it was. I mean, the great argument for legalizing marijuana in California, the sort of thing that's made it urgent at this time, is the notion that would provide state revenues.

REUTERBut Prop 19 explicitly took the state out of the revenue collection business. So it was in lots of ways a terrible initiative. You know, there is already a ballot initiative, I think, that has enough signatures to get on the 2012 referendum and there may be a second one which would be fairly -- which would be very confusing.

NNAMDIIf you have considered getting involved in the medical marijuana business here in Washington, D.C., we'd like to hear from you 800-433-8850. Or have you or a loved one smoked marijuana for its medicinal benefits? 800-433-8850 or you can go to our website kojoshow.org, join the conversation there, send us a tweet @kojoshow or email to kojo@wamu.org. On to Jason in Tacoma, Md. Nick, thank you for your call. Jason, you are on the air. Go ahead, please.

JASONHi, I actually recently moved back from Los Angeles to the area.

NNAMDIYes.

JASONAnd it was striking how the culture was so much different where it was not necessarily passe, but, you know, people respected it as alcohol and it was something that people would enjoy responsibly and it wasn't something that was so misunderstood, as it seems to be here. I wonder if that's not the bigger challenge in getting the laws passed that would -- I mean, we've been talking about so...

NNAMDIHere's first, Peter Reuter, stay on the line, Jason.

REUTERI've been doing some talking to people in the Netherlands where it is essentially legal to -- it's essentially legal to use. And my question has been, do parents teach their children how to use cannabis responsibly? And I've collected some stories which are exactly showing that, you know, one fellow who's a ministry of justice official, which made it particularly interesting, who had been really angry that he'd had a kid stay -- an American kid staying with him who just took pot to be stoned.

REUTERWhereas he brought up his kid to take it after dinner along with bran -- cognac as sort of part of a socialized (unintelligible) . On the other hand, my best informant on this says he thinks that's pretty rare, that in fact, it's still used in a fairly sort of -- mostly for getting stoned, even in the Netherlands.

NNAMDIFor a recreational purposes. Jason, you should know we got a comment from Jacob who, on our website, who said he also recently moved to D.C. from downtown Los Angeles. And, Michael, I'd like to hear your response to what Jacob had to say. He says "While I lived in L.A., the number of drug dealers on corners decreased as did parallel crimes associated with illegal drug sales." Does the empirical data back that up?

MONTGOMERYWell, Peter's the man with the empirical data, but I think that based on my conversations with law enforcement in the Bay area, I think it's probably true that the emergence of dispensaries or rather the easy availability of marijuana under the medical marijuana laws has seen a drop in sort of street drugs sales of marijuana. I -- at least certainly San Francisco and Oakland police will tell you that they feel there's been less of that kind of crime then in the past.

MONTGOMERYYou know, for other cities, I don't know. I mean, Los Angeles, for a period, had a lot of dispensaries. And some of those dispensaries were later, you know, busted as criminal enterprises. But certainly, I can say in the Bay area, the emergence of dispensaries has seen a drop in the street trade in marijuana.

NNAMDIOkay. Jason, thank you very much for your call. Here now is Haley in Washington, D.C. Haley, your turn.

KALEYHi, actually it's Kaley (sp?) and I'm with...

NNAMDIHi Kaley.

KALEY...Safe Access D.C. And we advocate for the rights of medical marijuana patients and we're a chapter for Americans for Safe Access which was -- has a very strong presence in California right now that is fighting against this crackdown. And I just wanted to bring up how often people talk about how D.C. won't have a large patient population considering that it's only four medical conditions.

KALEYBut being that one of those medical conditions is HIV and we have somewhere between 15,000 to 20,000 HIV positive individuals in the District, that automatically qualifies thousands of people to have access. And why isn't the D.C. government moving forward with helping these patients? And that's a lot of what my organization has been asking rather than talking about, you know, recreational users. There are actually a lot of people who could use -- HIV patients could use it for appetite loss.

KALEYWith AIDS for helping with keeping down the anti-retro viral medications. And me personally, I use medical marijuana for dyskinesia of the esophagus. And I have a long standing history with my doctor who has provided me with a recommendation and I'm waiting for the D.C. government...

NNAMDIKaley, share your...

KALEY... (unintelligible) forward.

NNAMDI...share your own educated speculation about why you think the D.C. government is, in your view, taking so long?

KALEYWell, I mean, the D.C. governments been dragging its feet. It doesn't want to be caught in a legal battle and we've already seen, you know, funding for syringe exchange programs be challenged, we've seen the rights for abortion for low income women be taken away by Congress. So there's a lot of fear that Congress is going to take away this program. And we kind of are being overly cautious in putting it into place.

KALEYAnd we're being so cautious that we're squeezing out any chance for there to be grass roots presence of individuals here in D.C. who will fight for their rights. No one here in D.C. is going to stand up and fight for medical marijuana if the D.C. government's going to squeeze patients so tight and make them sign away all their rights. And also I want to bring up (unintelligible) ...

NNAMDIWell, you underscore the point that Martin Austermuhle made earlier and that is that the D.C. government is keenly aware and sensitive to the fact that it sits right here where the Congress and the federal government are headquartered.

AUSTERMUHLEAnd I just wanted to echo what was just being said that is well, specifically, yes. I think the district government has underestimated the pool potential qualified patients. I mean, I think -- I was saying just before the show that just the number of people in the city that have HIV/AIDS, and it's an extremely high rate, makes a lot more people qualified than the district government was able to fess up to.

AUSTERMUHLENow, I don't know if they underestimated because they just were pulling a number out of thin air, or because they wanted to make it look like the program was just going to be so tiny that it would foolish for any Congressman from just about anywhere to step in and stop it.

NNAMDIThank you very much for your call, Hailey. We've got to take a short break. When we come back we'll continue this conversation on medical marijuana, coming soon to a dispensary in the District of Columbia near you, although we don't quite know how soon that is. However, we are happy to take your calls at 800-433-8850. Are you an advocate for legalization across the board? Why or why not. 800-433-8850 or go to our website, kojoshow.org, offer your opinion there. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWe're talking medical marijuana with Martin Austermuhle, associate editor with DCist; Peter Reuter, director of the Center of Economics of Crime and Justice Policy at the University of Maryland, and co-founder of RAND Drug Policy Research Center, he's a senior economist with that organization; and Michael Montgomery who joins us from studios in San Francisco. He's a reporter and producer with the Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch Unit. He's also a contributor to KQED public radio. Allow me to go directly to the telephones to Regina in Rockville, Md. Regina, you are on the air. Go ahead, please.

REGINAGood afternoon. First of all I want -- I chuckled when the woman brought up the statistics about the number of HIV/AIDS cases in Washington D.C., and the need for a medical marijuana to be available to those people. You know, D.C. government has to start diagnosing and treating those people first. Then maybe they will know that they will get the drugs that they need along with miracle marijuana -- medical marijuana if it's warranted. I am certainly an advocate for medical marijuana. I think it has great uses.

REGINAI am not an advocate for wide spread legalization of marijuana. I'm concerned about the other social and health effects that widespread use will have and whether or not the government here or anywhere will be ready to take care of the accidents and the different things that may occur that accompany the use of (unintelligible) substance.

NNAMDIWell, Regina, let's look at the California experience for a second. Michael Montgomery, we got a question from Kathleen, which says, "The panel has all agreed that California is the wild west of medical marijuana. Just curious, has there been any spike in crime in California related to the increased illicit consumption of marijuana? Even if they are not sick, why should we care unless it creates a public harm?" Any indications of what the public harm has been in California?

MONTGOMERYI think that's difficult to measure, and I think it depends on which sectors of the marijuana industry you look at. Certainly on the side of production, there has been a huge, huge upsurge in growing and cultivating of marijuana in California. Advocates would argue that much of that is illegal, but certainly the numbers are pretty clear that since Proposition 215 was passed in 1996, production numbers have gone up 10 or 15-fold.

MONTGOMERYWe've seen environmental destruction with these growers, both indoor and outdoor. As I said before we've seen drug gangs moving in, and we've seen a very interesting phenomena in the Central Valley, that's you know, these large farms where we've had marijuana growers moving in there growing under the cover of state law, and then exporting to places illegally like D.C. and Boston and New York. So there's been that.

MONTGOMERYNow you could argue that if it were better regulated, that kind of practice would go away. On the usage, we've definitely seen marijuana use go up. Its impact on society and crime in that area is difficult to assess. Peter might have more thoughts on that. But I think it's a tough one to measure.

NNAMDIAnd Regina, thank you very much for your call.

REGINAI'm not speaking of the criminal aspect. I'm speaking of things like car accidents, and -- car accidents and even the effects of smoked marijuana on lungs and increase in lung cancer and all of those sorts of different things. I'd hate to Lindsey Lohan given free drink and smoke alcohol (sic) , there's no telling how many people she could kill.

NNAMDII suspect she already had free reign, but here is Peter Reuter. She's certainly taking license. Peter Reuter, any indication of any of the social consequences if you will?

REUTERThe social consequences of marijuana, whether legal or illegal, are fairly modest. I mean, it is not good for you. it is associated with higher accident rates, et cetera, but a lot of the numbers turn out to be quite small in terms of how much it increases.

NNAMDIWell, you know, every pot smoker listening now is saying, are you going to compare this to alcohol or not? At what point are you going to compare to the social effects of alcohol.

REUTERCan I give you 30 seconds on that?

NNAMDIYes, please

REUTEROkay. Well, if we were starting society over again, and we had to choose one of these, and the decision was based not on how much people enjoyed it, but how much harm they would cause, we would as a society choose marijuana.

NNAMDIWell...

REUTERThat's not the choice we have now. The question is, if you add marijuana to the mix, Does that sort of make things worse, and the answer is well, you'll get more accidents, you get more physical problems, et cetera. On the other hand, you don't get a few billion dollars in criminal revenues, you don't get a lot of corruption in Mexico, a whole lot of other things, and you just have to make a choice about how you compare those things.

NNAMDIAnd Martin Austermuhle, we got a Facebook comment from Kevin who says, "Why are we wasting taxpayer money to stop something enforcement agencies have not been successful stopping? The war on marijuana is a losing battle. Accept it, regulate it, tax it, and it will be a win-win situation." But Martin, you say it's not likely that anyone is going to get rich off of medical marijuana in Washington D.C. Why not?

AUSTERMUHLEOh, certainly not in the District, because the way they set up the system, just how much it costs to submit an application, which is $5,000, and just by comparison, $5,000 application fee, with that alone, I could get a yearlong license to run a nightclub in the District and serve alcohol, so just to give you a little sense. And that's not even what it's gonna cost a year to run the dispensaries or cultivation centers. That's just to apply to get a license. But beyond that, they've limited the amount of plants that people can grow. They've limited the amount of marijuana that patients can get.

AUSTERMUHLEI mean, they're assuming the patient pool is gonna be relatively small. The system is gonna be very, very tightly restricted and small is I think the idea, so there's not gonna be these multimillionaires, you know, making bank off of medical marijuana in the District. The concern is will anybody be able to make enough money to even break -- to even, you know, just make -- not even make a profit, but break even to survive.

NNAMDIAnd Michael, we got this question from Tatiana, which, based on the California experience you might be able to answer. "Why do we need dispensaries to sell medical marijuana? Why can't it be sold in pharmacies like other drugs? Wouldn't this solve the problem?"

MONTGOMERYWell, it might, but you would have to have federal regulations. I mean, the reason, you know, the whole system of prescription drugs is based on federal regulations. The whole system of prescriptions is based on that. Because marijuana is still classified as a Schedule 1 narcotic, doctors can't issue prescriptions for it, thus you can't set up a regulatory framework, thus it can't be sold in pharmacies. It's a sort of catch-22, and, you know, I would argue that, you know, perhaps there will be a -- for people who support legalization, perhaps it'll go federally with each, you know, different state taking that step.

MONTGOMERYBut I think what is more likely is we're gonna be in the situation we're in now, were some states it's legal, some states it's not, and federal law will continue to enforce the controlled substances act against marijuana.

NNAMDIPeter Reuter?

REUTERI mean, one of the issues that underlies all this is in fact marijuana truly the best medicine available for particular conditions, and the federal government has been unenthusiastic about funding research to examine that. It's not actually just the federal government. I once talked to a scientist involved in this kind of work, and he said, why would I spend my time doing research around the use of a natural weed, which can't be titrated accurately anyway, it's much better to sort of come up with a synthetic where we could control the titration et cetera.

REUTERSo there really is a catch-22 here. There's no research done really about marijuana as medicine, something not supported by the federal government, and that increases the folk belief that this must be medicine, and the government is just hiding that fact, and I don't see a way out of that, but it's sort of one of the weaknesses in the medical marijuana movement.

AUSTERMUHLEAnd what I'm specifically curious about is obviously the District has gone the way it's gone and there's 16 other states that have legalized it, but I'm curious to see the way Maryland goes, and Maryland has been, you know, they had a debate last year about medicinal marijuana. It was voted against, but there's -- I think they've appointed a commission to study it. They've also allowed an affirmative defense, so if you get stopped with a certain amount of marijuana, you can actually claim that you're using it for medicinal reasons.

AUSTERMUHLEAnd just recently, a couple weeks ago, there was a news story that the state's health commissioner was looking to work with universities to actually study the medicinal use of marijuana, which I think would be -- that's necessary I think at this point, and it would definitely add a lot of fuel to the argument of the people who want this.

NNAMDIHere's Jay in Maryland. Jay, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JAYYeah, hi Kojo and guests. Thanks for taking my call. I'm responding to a recent previous call indicating a lot of fear about accidents and the health effects of smoking marijuana, and one your guests responded, you know, there's actually very little data on this, however, there are a couple of small studies that indicate preliminarily that smoking marijuana is actually protective in the lung for cancer of patients that smoke tobacco.

JAYSo patients who were smoking tobacco concurrent with smoking marijuana, seemed to have a lower rate of carcinogenesis and mutagenesis in the alveoli in the lung, and also the accident rate, which one of your guests spoke to, that there's a slight increase, but failed to also indicate that there's small increases that that consumption with the consumption of alcohol or other drugs that we know are absolutely responsible for the loss of motor function and that type of skill, mother skill that's involved in operating machinery, that hasn't been studied and there is no evidence to conclude that. And also, another point...

NNAMDIWell, we do have to move on, Jay, because we're running out of time. Michael Montgomery, we talked about how nobody's likely to get rich in Washington D.C. off of this, but California has had some pretty epic budget woes in the last few years, and medical marijuana is big business there. How much money does the industry contribute to state coffers each year?

MONTGOMERYI think the estimate is 60 to a hundred million dollars in sales tax revenue, and that's, you know, for a state as big as California, it's not a huge amount. I think that some of the advocates argue that if we had full legalization here, those numbers could go up to a billion. Where you do see -- where those numbers do matter is in cities like Oakland which is, you know, where one single dispensary has paid a million dollars in taxes. You know, that money means a lot. It's cops on the streets, etc.

MONTGOMERYSo the pushback on the industry will be felt at the local level in terms of local government. I'm not sure the state is gonna really feel the difference if tax revenues drop.

NNAMDIMartin Austermuhle, in addition to the costs and potential risks associated with investing in medical marijuana, there's apparently another new deterrent from entrepreneurs. What has the IRS recently decided?

AUSTERMUHLEWell, this, again, applies more to California because it has an existing system, and I think one -- I think it was actually a dispensary in or around San Francisco that has been battling with the IRS over whether they can actually deduct business expenses, you know, from their taxes, and the IRS's response was ultimately, well, no, because what you're doing is illegal according to the federal government, so why are we gonna let you deduct anything? And that's obviously a concern for anybody who's an entrepreneur and wants to go into the business here that if they're gonna be buying stuff to grow marijuana, and it's not cheap, you know, they'd like to deduct that. They'd like that to be a business expense, but that doesn't seem like it will be an option.

NNAMDIPeter, researchers at Columbia University found that marijuana use is almost twice as high in states where medical marijuana is legal, and other research shows that treatment for marijuana abuse and dependency has gone up. Does research like that spell trouble for advocates going back to our earlier caller, Regina's, question?

REUTERWell, it's easily misinterpreted and the question is the causal direction. Is it that in states where marijuana is widely used, they are more likely to pass a medical marijuana statute, and, you know, that seems at least as plausible as the alternative. In most states, medical marijuana is provided on a very restricted basis, and it's very unlikely to have much effect on the extent of use. So I think that evidence is completely ambiguous.

NNAMDIIt doesn't get a lot of publicity, Martin Austermuhle, but it's my understanding that the federal government actually supplies a very small number of patients with medical marijuana, and the very first person to benefit from that program was a Washington D.C. resident.

AUSTERMUHLEHe was. His name was Robert Randall. He died a decade ago, but he -- I think it was in the mid-'70s or something, he was living in an apartment on Capitol Hill. The police just coincidentally raided an apartment next to his, looked over and saw on his outdoor porch that he was growing his own marijuana that he was then using for glaucoma. They arrest him, they charge him, and he decided to basically wage war against the federal government over whether marijuana, you know, could be used to cure his glaucoma, and he did a battery of tests.

AUSTERMUHLEHe went to Johns Hopkins. He was out in California, and basically, all the doctors he spoke to said, yeah, at the end of the day, this is the best that you could do for your glaucoma, and eventually the federal government fessed up and said fine, we're gonna provide you on a very limited basis, he had a doctor at Howard that was giving him medical marijuana for a couple years.

NNAMDII'm afraid that's all the time we have. Martin Austermuhle is an associate editor with DCist. Good to see you again, Martin.

AUSTERMUHLEGood to see you, thanks.

NNAMDIPeter Reuter is director of the Center of Economics of Crime and Justice Policy at the University of Maryland. He's also the co-founder of RAND Drug Policy Research Center, and a senior economist with the organization. Peter, thank you for joining us.

REUTERThank you.

NNAMDIMichael Montgomery is a reporter and producer with the Center for Investigative Reporting's California Watch Unit, and a contributor to KQED public radio. Michael, thank you for joining us.

MONTGOMERYThanks for having me on.

NNAMDI"The Kojo Nnamdi Show" is produced by Brendan Sweeney, Michael Martinez, Ingalisa Schrobsdorff and Tayla Burnie with assistance from Kathy Goldgeier and Elizabeth Weinstein. The managing producer is Diane Vogel. Our engineer today, Kellan Quigley. A.C. Valdez is on the phones. Thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.