This is getting interesting, so, since I'm anti-dispensary but pro-club, I'll throw my two cents into the mix.
Let's face it, the dispensaries ARE the root of the problem, the anti's see them and they are incited into action. Why? Try to see it from their (albeit misinformed) perspective: Marijuana isn't even street legal and now there's a pot bar down on the corner!
The dispensary, in the eyes of our anti, has gone from a legitimate establishment for medical purposes to a pub where weed is sold instead of the myriad forms of alcohol. Why has this happened? Because a dispensary is a FOR PROFIT establishment from the beginning, with some of the locations housing more pot than even the generous laws of SOME other countries would be willing to allow under non-medical circumstances. Basically, in the eyes of an indoctrinated anti-cannabis person, a dispensary owner is just a glorified drug lord.
If you try to understand the mentality of the person holding these beliefs, it's quite often easy to predict their behavior. Most anti's have the mentality of an old man in his 90's when it comes to their personal beliefs... they're just plain stubborn. You can't shove something like a dispensary in the face of someone like that, it just causes an explosion. Small steps are required, beliefs like that have to be gently overcome, not bulldozed.
Then there's the fact that dispensaries are just not necessary. The current system of 5 patients per caregiver more than compensates for the current establishment.
If we took our efforts in making dispensaries officially legal, and put them into organizing a real cooperative of MMMJ growers, we would see a system where a central hub could serve as a host to localized clubs and networks. Under that framework, you'd have a network that could provide caregivers with a place to legitimately acquire medicine if a patient needed something that you could not provide at the present time. Tweak the law a tiny bit and you can make exchanges between caregivers completely legal, and the whole system becomes an almost perfect vehicle for medical cannabis production and distribution, all without legalizing dispensaries.
An obvious way in which dispensaries flout the law is by circumventing the caregiver. A patient is allowed ONE.... ONE caregiver in Michigan. This poses a serious problem to a caregiver whose patient strolls down to the dispensary and fills out the paperwork. If that stuff gets sent in, he's just lost a patient and may never know it, all while possibly holding what has now become illegal bud and growing 12 illegal plants on the patient's behalf. Then there's the patient side of the equation... After he's gone to the dispensary and they've taken the paperwork and sent it into the state, the next time he goes to his original caregiver, the patient and the caregiver are now in violation of the law because they've just participated in the illegal sale of a controlled substance.
In closing, despensaries are just redundant. Clubs are what we truly need, clubs that do not sell medicine and confuse a very precise system, but clubs that merely unite the community in a place where the spirit of the system we've been given can be honored.
