The federal government won the latest round in its attempt to shut down Harborside Health Center, an Oakland marijuana dispensary, when the Supreme Court this week barred the city of Oakland from aiding in the company’s defense.

But it’s a hollow, short-lived victory at best.

Since 2012, when then-U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag sued Harborside, then considered the world’s largest marijuana dispensary, the entire landscape around the marijuana industry has changed.

If prosecuting Harborside, or raiding and shuttering Oaksterdam University in 2014, was intended to intimidate other cannabis entrepreneurs, it hasn’t worked very well.

In fact, it could well be billed as the “Shot Ignored Around the World.”

In November 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado made recreational marijuana legal. In California and nine other states, supporters are working to get similar initiatives on the November ballot.

In an October Gallup Poll, 58 percent of Americans said they believe marijuana should be legal.

Finally, it’s widely recognized as one of the fastest-growing industries in a nation that desperately needs manufacturing and industrial growth.

When you add it all up, it’s difficult to near-impossible to establish a legitimate motivation for the government to continue its case against a single dispensary.

It’s easy to understand how Harborside, one of Oakland’s top taxpayers, and Oaksterdam, a cannabis training and education center, became targets. They were large, vocal institutions in a city whose politicians were reshaping national drug policy.

Haag has since left office, and her colleagues at the U.S. attorney’s office should let the case go as well because the legal issue has been eclipsed by changes in attitude, enforcement and policy. The office did not respond to a request for comment on the case.

At the same time the feds are trying to shut down Harborside, across town Blum Oakland, a dispensary in downtown Oakland, has merged with Terra Tech Corp., an Irvine cannabis-based agriculture company, making it the first publicly traded company to add marijuana dispensaries to its list of cannabis businesses.

Blum has 42,000 registered patients and serves about 1,000 clients a day, bringing in about $14 million a year, according to a Terra Tech news release.

It seems that everyone except the federal government is positioning themselves to take advantage of the obvious: the continued — and inevitable — move toward legalizing recreational marijuana use.

“It’s always been a third-rail issue for the feds,” said Marsha Cohen, a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. “If they’d been willing to make it a (legal) Schedule II drug, we’d have good research on its medical uses, proper dosages and a pharmaceutical definition.

“What we have instead is a Wild West situation with everyone trying to get into a business that’s not adequately regulated.”

The feds would better serve constituents by reclassifying the drug so it can be researched for legitimate medical use, along with adopting uniform regulations and prices to make it available for the average consumer.

The federal government’s approach to marijuana, treating it as a taboo narcotic in the same category as heroin, is a remnant from a bygone century. It needs to be cast off, forgotten and replaced with a modern-day approach to a widely used substance whose medical benefits deserve full scrutiny.

A majority of Americans seem to understand that by now.

Chip Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His columns run Tuesday and Friday. Email: chjohson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @chjohnson