San Diego Union-Tribune EDITORIAL (July 16, 2006) - 'Free doobie Monday"? Frequent buyer discounts? Reese's Peanut Butter and Pot Cups? Friends waiting outside a medical marijuana dispensary for a patient to buy and split the pot? A Web site ad offering "doctor's recommendations" to patients for "$50 off/Just bring your prior doctor's cannabis letter/'215' card to your initial visit"? Is such clear commercialization of the Compassionate Use Act really what Californians intended when they passed it 10 years ago?

In much of this marketing, in storefronts and on the Web, lies potential criminalization - and not just by the thieves who steal dope from dispensaries. That's why San Diego District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis' office and U.S. Attorney Carol Lam's office raided dispensaries in San Diego and filed charges against individuals associated with them. It's the prosecutors' job to bust businesses that stretch far beyond the law. And it's now the courts' job to decide if the charges will stick.

Their task would be much easier if the Legislature would clarify the law, which doesn't mention medical pot dispensaries - preferably by prohibiting them. It should not take a doctorate in jurisprudence to foresee how readily and lucratively opportunists exploit the current law.

This latest investigation turned up repeat recommendations by a handful of physicians who defeat even the lax guidelines of the Medical Board of California. It also found storefronts that supply patients who were mostly between ages 17 and 40; primary caregivers who were mostly between 18 and 30; and diagnoses that by a wide, wide margin were far less serious than AIDS or cancer and readily treatable by legal medications.

Where voters saw compassion, scammers saw dollar signs. The initiative's sponsors saw pot's incipient legalization. The Legislature ducks. But the predictably abysmal failure to distinguish between claimed medicinal and abjectly recreational pot isn't the only development.

San Diego County has long refused to establish a regime to identify lawful medicinal marijuana users, a task that the Legislature mandated - and that has stumped even San Francisco. County officials now seek the court's declaration that U.S. law and an international treaty outlawing marijuana's medicinal use trump the state's permitting of it.

While the Legislature quails even at clarifying medicinal marijuana, the judiciary wisely may step in to abolish it.

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