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PotShot

New medical marijuana law doesn't say where patients will get pot
M.L. JOHNSON | kgw.com | 01/15/2006

When Debra Nievera went before lawmakers to ask them to legalize medical marijuana, she envisioned a program that would let her safely acquire the drug to alleviate the painful symptoms of the intestinal disorder Crohn's disease and other ailments.

She will probably be disappointed.

Rhode Island this month became the 11th state to allow sick people to use marijuana as medicine. The list also includes Washington, Oregon and Alaska. But federal law still bans the drug, and none of the states where medical use is allowed have found a way for patients to legally, conveniently and safely acquire the drug.

In some states, passage of a medical marijuana law has had little effect because there is no system set up to get pot to sick people. In others, dozens of people have been arrested for providing medicinal marijuana.

People in those states warn the road ahead in Rhode Island will likely not be as smooth as patients like Nievera hoped.

The federal government classifies marijuana as a controlled substance with no medical value. Doctors cannot legally prescribe it, and pharmacies cannot stock it.

Most states have tried to strike a middle ground, registering patients with diseases such as cancer and AIDS and letting them or people designated as their caregivers grow small amounts of marijuana for the patients' use.

Max Schlueter, who oversees the state office in Vermont where patients who want to use marijuana must register, said it's not that simple — many patients there have been left wondering where they're going to get the drug.

"They're just not going to try to score some dope on the street," Schlueter said.

Just 23 people have applied to the state's medical marijuana program since it was set up two years ago, and he said he believes that's partly because of the supply issue.

California took a different approach when it passed the first medical marijuana law in 1996. Patients there don't have to register with the state and can pay caregivers to grow pot for them. Cities such as Oakland and Santa Cruz have designated official growers.

The result is a boom in marijuana clubs that grow hundreds of plants for thousands of patients. A few years ago, the state had 30 dispensaries, said Hilary McQuie, spokeswoman for Americans for Safe Access, a medical marijuana advocacy group. Today, there are 175.

McQuie estimated that 120,000 Californians use medical marijuana because it is relatively easy to get. Oregon, the state with the most patients registered, has about 12,000 in its program.

Rhode Island is unlikely to develop a California-like system. Its law limits caregivers to growing pot for five people.

In all states, those who grow medicinal marijuana risk getting arrested by federal authorities. The most famous supplier arrested may be Ed Rosenthal, an author of several books on how to grow marijuana. He served one day in prison in 2003 for growing pot for patients in Oakland, Calif.

Rosenthal, who had more than 100 plants when he was arrested and is appealing his conviction, said it's not realistic for states to expect patients — many of whom are disabled or weakened by illness — to grow their own pot.

"If we talked about any other medicine, people would get outraged," Rosenthal said. "What if you said to a diabetic, 'Well, you have to register with the state, you can only have so much at one time, you have to buy it on the black market.'"

In Colorado, there have been about a dozen high-profile medical marijuana arrests a year by state and federal authorities since the state legalized medical marijuana in 2000, said Sean McAllister, founder of Sensible Colorado, which advocates for changes in state drug policy.

Diane Brackett, spokeswoman for the Drug Enforcement Agency's field office in New England, said the agency does not target medical marijuana patients but focuses on large-scale growers and dealers. So, while growers like Rosenthal attract the DEA's attention, medical marijuana advocates point out that plenty of people buy pot every day without being arrested.

"I could pick up a phone and get some if I needed some," said Rhonda O'Donnell, 43, of Warwick, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and pushed to have medical marijuana legalized in Rhode Island. "I already know people, and I think most people do."

While some medical groups, including the Rhode Island Medical Society, support medical marijuana laws, other advocates and physicians say they are concerned about the quality of medicinal marijuana when it's bought on the street. Also, unlike prescription drugs, which are tightly regulated, dosage is hard to control when the patient is smoking a plant.

"If you're not growing it yourself, you don't know what you are getting," said Schlueter, who runs Vermont's registry. "And I'm not talking about marijuana that's been adulterated with rat poison, but just has it been stored properly? Is it dusty? Is it moldy? These people have compromised immune systems."

That's one thing that worries Nievera, 52, of Coventry, who said she is unwilling to buy pot on the street.

"You don't know what the quality is, if you are wasting your money," she said.

Tom Riley, a spokesman for the federal Office of National Drug Control Policy, which lobbied Rhode Island's legislators to vote against medical marijuana, said the lack of regulation is one of his agency's main objections.

"That's not how we do medicine in this country," he said. "What you really have created here is one track for all other medicines, and another for marijuana."

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killer12382

Thats the MAIN problem behind medpot laws....no access to medpot for patients that don't have green thumbs.
The states pass these feel good laws but don't think down the road as how they are supposed to realistically supply medpot to patients.

dedbr

but nobody want's to listen to me.

Some idea's are ahead of their time methink's...

Deddy

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MrIMStoned

This is what happened in Canada for that summer where marijuana was legal because the government didn't change the laws to allow sick patients to access medical marijuana.

So all you need is to take the government to court for not giving access to med pot then have the court decide that the laws must be changed in a year and hope no one gets around to changing the law. Then laws become non existent because they failed to change them and the government quickly acts to make pot illegal again with harsher laws and inact a system that has many complicacies, and is nearly impossible to get through, to access med pot. Which will be of low quality **** grown in a mine and you'll just end up getting it on the street anyways.

It's these sort of things that make Canada is so progressive.

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"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"

killer12382

It's different in Canada though as they have a Federal medpot law. If the states started growing medpot the DEA would come down on them like a ton of bricks. NO SIR...they would not tolerate that at all.

 

TheNewGuy

State medpot laws are more to make a point than they are to actually allow people to use marijuana for medical reasons. Its just a way of "voting" for a federal medpot law. If a few more states can do it, the supreme court may change its decision.

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PotShot

Cannabis obviously has medical value, so it certainly should not be a schedule 1 substance. What needs to happen is the rescheduling of cannabis to 3, or at least 2 to begin with. The powers that be drag feet on this, because it will blow the top off the whole prohibition thing.

dedbr

Is that just herb or what?

Deddy

killer12382

Thats not how the US Supreme Court works. They've looked at the issue already and have, for the most part, said that medpot is an issue controlled by the feds. It's not a popularity contest at the supreme court. All 50 states could have a medpot law and they would still rule the same way. Even more so as it is becoming more and more conservative.

urania3

SCOTUS decided in Gonzales v. Raich that the CSA is a constitutional use of the commerce clause.

While it is true that as a general rule the court adheres to the doctrine of stare decisis, the Court has looked to the following general considerations in overruling precedent:

"[We] may ask whether the rule has proven to be intolerable simply in defying
practical workability, Swift & Co. v. Wickham, 382 U.S. 111, 116 (1965); whether the rule is subject to the kind of reliance that would lend a special hardship to the consequences of overruling and add inequity to the cost of repudiation, e.g., United States v. Title Ins. & Trust Co., 265 U.S. 472, 486 (1924); whether related principles of law have so far developed as to have left the old rule no more than a remnant of abandoned doctrine, see Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S. 164, 173-174 (1989); or whether facts have so changed, or come to be seen so differently, as to have robbed the old rule of significant application or justification, e.g., Burnet, supra, at 412 (Brandeis, J. dissenting)." (Casey, 505 U.S. at 854-55.)

I think it could be successfully argued if all 50 states have mmj laws, it robs the old rule of significant application or justification.

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