"Dispensaries" and "Medicine" for "Patients"

Supervisor Mirkarimi deserves credit for carrying the recent ordinance to regulate the city's 34 marijuana clubs for the first time, even though Proposition 215, the medical marijuana measure, passed in California way back in 1996. The December issue of the Haight Ashbury Beat has a front-page story ("All Haight Cannabis Dispensaries Expected to Stay Open Under New Rules," Alex Dixon) using the current jargon that progressives favor when discussing the issue: The pot clubs are "cannabis dispensaries," pot is "medicine," and club members/card holders are "patients." 

You don't have to accept Arthur Evans's terminology---that the clubs are "drug dealers"---to find the euphemistic terminology a little tiresome. Even more tiresome is the pretense that allowing the clubs' customers/"patients" to buy an ounce a day is somehow a reasonable compromise from the half-pound an earlier draft of the ordinance allowed. No matter how sick you are or what the nature of your ailment is, no one really needs an ounce of marijuana a day---or even a week. The heaviest pot smoker I know smokes about an ounce a month, a staggering amount, considering the potency of contemporary marijuana. This stuff is a far cry from the Mexican weed we smoked in the Sixties, most of which was seeds and stems anyhow. Anyone who is coming in every day to buy an ounce is probably re-selling it. Hence, Arthur Evans is right---or at least half-right---when he calls the pot clubs "drug dealers," since they are evidently enabling a lot of small-time drug dealing.