The U.S. House of Representatives voted today 161-264 to defeat an amendment that would have prevented the U.S. Department of Justice and the DEA from spending tax payer money to raid and prosecute medical marijuana patients. News of the vote on this amendment to a DOJ appropriations bill was cut from my story After Raich published today by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.

My Bay Guardian editors are terrific and they have made it possible for me to cover the medical cannabis movement for the last five years. They did not cut this information out of the story because they wished to be unfair or censor me. This information was removed mostly due to space constraints and partly because the story focused on the ongoing prosecution of medical cannabis dispensaries. On the very day that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Gonzalez v. Raich that the federal government had the authority to prosecute cannabis patients and their growers under the Commerce Clause, the largest operator of medical cannabis dispensaries in California had its bank accounts frozen by the Los Angeles Police Department. Seven dispensaries run by Compassionate Caregivers Inc., which served 22,000 patients and caregivers, are now closed. Compassionate Caregivers was a big operation and it made some drug law reformers very nervous - especially right before the House vote. The medical cannabis patients group, Americans for Safe Access, declined to comment on the shut down.

The LAPD said their move to seize the assets was directly related to outcome of the Raich decision, despite the fact that it did not change California state law. I covered the Supreme Court ruling for the European wire service Agence France Presse and did a longer story for Alternet Supremes Uphold Status Quo that went out to weeklies around the country. Their rewrite of my opening paragraph was clumsy, but overall I liked their edit of the story. On the Alternet site, also check out former police chief Norm Stamper's terrific story War On Crime, Not On Drugs which posted today.