Two weeks ago, Dr. Stephen Hosea held an informal symposium for his colleagues at Cottage Hospital — where he’s director of internal medicine — on “Why Marijuana Should Be Legalized for the Sake of Our Children.” Given Hosea’s impressive stature within the medical community — and the intense political heat generated by anything involving marijuana these days — one might have expected a talk so explosively titled to have triggered a bigger splash. Hosea himself was struck by the limited interest his hour-long presentation received.
In a weird way, however, Hosea’s experience parallels the conspicuous silence that’s engulfed the campaigns both for and against Measure T, which if passed, will ban all medical marijuana dispensaries within the City of Santa Barbara. There have been no forums, no debates, and only a smattering of yard signs. To the extent money talks, Measure T partisans are barely whispering. Supporters have raised a paltry $6,500 and opponents twice that. Even when combined, these sums constitute a meager drop in the bucket compared to most city races.
Making this silence starker still was the loud, lengthy, and often rancorous legislative process — including 22 well-attended public hearings — in which Santa Barbara’s City Council sought to balance fiercely competing community interests surrounding the proliferation of retail pot shops. Without storefront dispensaries, the pro-pot crowd predicted, cancer patients would be forced to seek medical solace elsewhere, buying their marijuana on the black market. Dispensary critics countered that pot shop owners politically exploited the sick to make big bucks selling to recreational abusers — often the conspicuously young and able-bodied — who got their medical “recommendations” from unscrupulous pot docs.