Feds Claim they're Thinking About the Kids in Seattle. But Not so Fast, Says TheFix.com

TheFix.com takes a closer look at the DEA and U.S. Attorney's crackdown on 23 dispensaries in the Seattle area.

Though medical marijuana's been legal in Washington state since December 1998, the recent crackdown by the feds were done under the auspices of that oh-so-common excuse, "Won't someone think of the children?"

The motivation for moving to close the dispensaries, as announced in a joint DEA/U.S. Attorney press release, was because they were open within 1,000 yards of high school.

In a self-congratulatory statement, U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan said, "We all work hard to create a safe zone for kids in school. We need to enforce one message for our students: Drugs have no place in or near our schools."

To be fair, this is true. Medical marijuana has nothing to do about high schoolers getting high and like alcohol and cigarettes, some kind of minimum age threshold has to be agreed upon. Teenagers under the age of 18 would not meet anyone's definition of "old enough."

However, a whopping 91 percent of high school students claim they can find and buy marijuana in their own school. It raises the question of why any high school student would hike more than a mile for some pot, when they can probably score during study hall. Also consider that medical marijuana has even more hoops and regulations for patients to jump through for a prescription than just buying beer or a pack of Camels with a fake ID.

Though anti-pot crusaders claim that legalization of pot leads to more supply for high schoolers, studies have shown that the amount available for purchase to high schoolers is no more than what's available to those in areas where there are no laws that allow cannabis use, recreational or medicinal.

The site predicts that things will get even uglier for Washington in the fall, when legalization efforts ramp up for the election.