This report tracks the number of medical cannabis related law enforcement encounters reported to our office each month.  It serves to identify trends in and hot spots for law enforcement activity.  Having this information is important because it can help us to better protect ourselves as medical cannabis patients.  Check back each month for the latest State of the State blog posting!

The first chart shows the total amount of law enforcement encounters, in January, that patients reported to our office.  The types of law enforcement encounters are broken down into two categories:  those where the patient possessed an amount of medicine exceeding the guidelines and those where the patient was within the guidelines.

From this chart we can tell that there are clearly still some local law enforcement agents that seem to be ignoring California’s medical cannabis laws.  Because of this, we as patients need to be sure we know our rights ahead of time so we can help to protect ourselves in the event of a law enforcement encounter.

While most of these encounters are scattered throughout the state of California, there are several areas, or “hot spots,” where multiple incidents occurred and/or the severity of the encounter was considerable.  For the month of January, we have identified Mono, Monterey, Riverside and Sonoma counties as hot spots for law enforcement activity.

In order to provide you with the most accurate information possible, I encourage all of you to contact our office if you are ever involved in a medical cannabis related law enforcement encounter and to encourage other patients to do so as well.  And, most importantly, always remember the magic words:  “I choose to remain silent and I want to see my lawyer.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Americans for Safe Access (ASA), California, Law Enforcement, Legal, Medical Cannabis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.