Most of Seattle's medical-marijuana dispensaries closed down after yesterday's federal raids on 14 locations.

But not Fweedom in Ballard or the Northwest Patient Resource Center on Alki.

"Why would we close down?" said Tyler Godfrey of Fweedom. "We don't have anything to hide, we aren't doing anything wrong," he said. ""Just because the DEA's in town doesn't mean we're closing down." Godfrey says not all cannabis dispensaries are created equal—some stress transparency with city and state governments, above-board business practices, and careful quality control. Others, he said, do not.

Godfrey noted that Seattle Cannabis Co-op, just a few blocks from Fweedom, was raided. "How come we didn't get raided?" he asked. "Maybe," he said, the raided dispensaries "didn't have as much of a medical mindset." Maybe, he said, the raids were "going after places that aren't so good for the community—maybe ones that are dealing with an out-of-state pipeline, maybe selling to people who aren't patients."

That matched statements made by the DEA and the Department of Justice yesterday, which indicated that the raids weren't about cannabis-as-medicine per se—rather, in the words of U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan, that "state laws of compassion were never intended to protect brash criminal conduct that masquerades as medical treatment."

Godfrey agreed: "People who give medical-marijuana patients a bad name should be filtered out."

One distributor, who acts as a liaison between growers and dispensaries (let's call him D) echoed Godfrey and Durkin. In the current moment of chaotic deregulation, he said, "we have storefronts and vendors but no taxes or quality control." Some vendors treat cannabis as medicine, he said, and some treat it as recreational.

"Quality control is very important to me," D said, showing me how carefully he vacuum-seals and how extensively he labels his products. He also takes care to work with conscientious growers who change their clothes coming in and out of the grow areas, make sure to drain their plants of nutrients before harvesting, and take other precautions to make sure their cannabis is not only consistent, but clean.

"I'm sure there are some quality-of-life users out there," he said, "but my product could also end up in the hands of someone with an autoimmune disease. The dispensaries will do whatever they want, but I don't want that to be my beard hair in there."

Godfrey of Fweedom says his dispensary—and the better dispensaries in the city—maintain serious quality control standards, "complete transparency," and try to reflect the city's "community values" with food drives and other charity programs.

"We're supposed to be nonprofits," he said. "But some of us aren't acting like nonprofits."