Homicides Rattle Managers and Clients of Nonprofit Collectives
The first page of the LATExtra section of this morning’s Los Angeles Times reported the killings of two workers at medical marijuana dispensaries five miles apart on the same afternoon. [“2 pot shop killings probed” by Joel Rubin and Paloma Esquivel, June 26, 2010] The Higher Path Holistic Care Collective (see photo) is on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park; Hollywood Holistic 2 is below Hollywood Boulevard, just west of Gower.
“The killings rattled medical marijuana collective operators and patient advocates,” according to the story, which highlights the breadth of the nonprofit community in Los Angeles: California law permits nonprofit collectives to raise and distribute medical marijuana. (Among the more than 400 illegally operating marijuana dispensaries in the City of Los Angeles, many are not nonprofit operations, while few are collectives that distribute marijuana to members who have grown it. They are retail outlets in a marketplace that, until recently, has been saturated – much to the displeasure of many neighborhoods.)
The story illustrates, as well, special challenges faced by organizations within this nonprofit niche. ‘Pot shops,’ as the Times’ article puts it, operate with large amounts of cash – making them an attractive target for robbery. But Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca suggested an even scarier possibility. Noting that armed robbery differs from “assassinating the person you’re robbing,” he said that the vicious nature of killings suggested that drug cartels could be involved in the violence.
Note: both these homicides occurred in the City of Los Angeles, which is outside the Sheriff’s jurisdiction.
(Photo of Higher Path Holistic Care Collective on Saturday morning.)
