Dan May brought his anti-medical marijuana dog-and-pony show to City Council again Monday. I can only hope his underlings make more convincing cases when they're trying to put criminals behind bars.

May cherry-picked a few quotes, flashed a few inflammatory photos and rattled-off some misleading statistics, all taken out of context, in order to make the case that medical marijuana dispensaries and grow operations are illegal, despite Colorado voters having legalized medical marijuana ten years ago. May and a guest brought in from Denver painted these facilities as the perpetrators of a massive fraud, and as an imminent threat to public health and safety, though they offered nothing but anecdotes to support that.

Such a case would have been laughed out of criminal court. May was free to bend and twist the "facts" to suit his fancy, without a defense attorney there to correct the record or blow holes in his arguments. Only a jury of rutabagas would have been won over. That the DA thought this was good enough to woo City Council suggests a low opinion of our intelligence.

The Gazette reported that May told City Council to go slow on writing its ordinance -- but that's not really what he told us. He told us -- and I'm paraphrasing -- that doing anything to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries in the city would make us complicit in criminal activity, since they are, in May's opinion, illegal. I asked why, if they're illegal, we aren't raiding them and shutting them down? I never got a coherent explanation for this glaring inconsistency.

These allegedly-illegal facilities are operating in plain view across the city (and the state); they advertise their locations in the alternative weekly. It would seem like shooting fish in a barrel for the Police Department and Dan May to swoop-in and make the bust. Yet the DA and his mentor, John Suthers, won't do it -- which suggests to me that they know they're on thin ice in both the court of law and court of public opinion. Rather than put their legal theories to the test, by closing dispensaries, they are using their positions, and public resources, to wage a propaganda war against them, using scare tactics and distortions of fact. They want to re-fight a battle they lost ten years ago. But almost everyone else is moving on.

Many other cities in Colorado already are regulating these allegedly-illegal dispensaries. El Paso County has put temporary regulations in place, which tacitly acknowledge the right of dispensaries to exist. The legislature is considering bills that make provision for these allegedly-illegal dispensaries (although they may be called something else). Local governments are collecting taxes from these allegedly-illegal operations. All of Colorado seems willing to legitimize these activities, by regulating and taxing them, except for an isolated band of well-placed reactionaries, who are relying on the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to keep Colorado patients and care-givers living in a state of fear.

Dan May's dogs jumped through rings and his ponies danced in circles on their hind legs, but the audience wasn't dazzled; a majority on council seems determined to move forward on refinements to a draft ordinance, despite May's advice. Rather than doing nothing, or waiting for the state to solve our local problems for us -- and rather than going backward -- we're going to move ahead with a public process, using the draft ordinance as a template on which refinements can be written, with all opinions considered.

This council, like much of the rest of Colorado, seems to want to move forward and deal constructively with the new reality. Dan May will be relevant again when he catches up.