This informative article from CBS News about the government’s claim that there is no need for medical patients to access cannabis, when there is a ‘fake’ cannabis pill on the market, features remarks from NORML advisory board member, professor and author

Mitch Earleywine, and former deputy drug czar under Bush 1.0 Herb Kleber, which strongly underlines the differences between credible and not credible on the topic of cannabis.

Credible:

[One] problem with Marinol is that it’s orally administered,” Dr. Mitch Earleywine, an associate professor of Clinical Psychology at the State University of New York at Albany, said in an email. “Therefore, it takes longer to work than cannabis inhaled from a vaporizer. (Usually 90 minutes at best rather than 15 seconds – a meaningful amount of time to the nauseated.)”

“It’s harder to control dosage, too, so folks end up discombobulated or without symptom relief,” he added. “In addition, folks who are vomiting can’t hold down the pills.” Earleywine also said that a dose Marinol costs three to five times as much as a comparable dose of medical marijuana.

Not Credible:

“Are there actions in the whole plant that you don’t get from just the Marinol? I would be surprised if there wasn’t,” he continued. “The problem is that most of the data about the potential medical actions of the smoked form are anecdotal.”

Dr. Kleber, who said he has prescribed Marinol to a patient and found it to be effective, points to what he characterizes as a significant advantage of the pill over traditional marijuana: “People don’t abuse it.”

“Marijuana addiction is becoming common and as a result I’m seeing an increasing number of people who have trouble stopping marijuana,” he said. “Contrary to popular beliefs that there is no marijuana withdrawal, there is marijuana withdrawal. It’s very clear cut.”

Talk about anecdotal! Dr. Kleber would have readers believe, that cannabis today, as compared to the prior 2,000 years of documented cannabis use by humans is that “Marijuana addiction is becoming common”.

Really?

“I’m seeing an increasing number of people who have trouble stopping marijuana”

Of course you are Herb because as it has been well documented by NORML that the criminal justice system throughout most of the United States presents minor cannabis offenders with the Hobson’s Choice of either going to jail or to visit the offices of the ‘Dr. Klebers’ in America for ‘treatment’.

Dr. Kleber well knows this, so his statement is for me the working definition of disingenuous!

Lastly, there is nothing new about Marinol as it has been legal and available for medical patients since the mid 1980s. If the pill worked as Dr. Kleber claims, voters and legislators in the 13 states with medical cannabis laws would not have opted for a whole plant solution.

Marinol was supposed to be the government’s great ’silver bullet’ back in the mid 1980s to end the public debate about patients’ need for whole-smoked cannabis–an analog of one of the plant’s major ingredients isolated in pill form.

Want to know more about ‘pot’ pills vs. the real thing? Checkout NORML’s published paper ‘Marinol vs. Natural Cannabis‘.

Does the Pot Pill Work?
The Government Says a Pill Called Marinol Offers the Same Benefits as
Medical Marijuana. Is it True?

By Brian Montopoli
August 4, 2009

(CBS) “Medical marijuana,” the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says, “already exists.”

They don’t just mean in California. A pill known as Marinol has been legal and approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use with a prescription anywhere in America since 1985.

It’s active ingredient? Dronabinol, better known as THC, the primary psychoactive element of the cannabis plant.

“Marinol provides standardized THC concentrations, does not contain the other 400 uncharacterized substances found in smoked marijuana, such as carcinogens or fungal spores, and is not associated with the quick high of smoked marijuana,” said Neil Hirsch, a spokesman for Marinol manufacturer Solvay Pharmaceuticals.

But Marinol is not the same thing as traditional, smokable marijuana. It is a less complex substance lacking both some of the good components found in traditional marijuana (such as cannabidiol, which has been found to have anti-seizure effects) and the bad or not-yet-fully-understood components (among them potential carcinogens) that can also come with the drug.

Ken Trainer, a 60-year-old Massachusetts resident who has battled Multiple Sclerosis for 25 years, said he has long been smoking marijuana to deal with the regular tremors he gets in his arms and legs.

“If I smoke a joint, the tremors go away most times before the joint is gone,” he said. “It makes my life a little easier.” Marinol, by contrast, “didn’t really do much of anything for me,” he said.

56-year-old Des Moines resident Jeff Elton, who was diagnosed with gastroparesis six years ago, had a similar experience when he was prescribed Marinol to deal with his chronic nausea and vomiting.

“I felt no relief, I didn’t feel ill, I felt nothing,” he said. “It might as well be M&M’s.”

Elton said he switched to marijuana, which he smokes through a vaporizer – a device that heats the active ingredients into a vapor instead of burning them. He said it allows him to keep down his food and regain some of the weight he lost while on Marinol.

Full Story

A medical billing company may be blowing smoke, but could reimbursing patients for medical marijuana lower drug costs for employers?
By Jeremy Smerd, Workforce Management Online, July 2009

In mid-June, Rhode Island became the third state to legalize the sale of marijuana for medical use, giving momentum to advocates who believe the legalization of the drug offers a dose of sanity for the nation’s costly health care system.

Now that more states are legalizing the sale of the marijuana used solely as a medicine, the next hurdle for reformers who say the drug is more cost-effective than pharmaceuticals is getting those who pay for health care—insurers and employers—to reimburse patients for its use.

“It’s going to take an employer that says, ‘We’re not interested in marijuana as a gateway drug or any of that reefer madness. We want to talk about dollars and cents,’ ” says Allen St. Pierre, executive director of NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws). “If the idea here is saving money, then there’s no question that medical marijuana should be part of the ambit of choices that doctors, patients and employers can have.”

The effort to legalize the sale of medical marijuana has focused mainly on whether the medical effectiveness of the drug justifies making it legal to obtain in plant form. The medical benefits have been most closely tied to treating weight loss, nausea, pain, inflammation, spasticity and other symptoms associated with cancer, AIDS, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy and arthritis.

Advocates for its legalization say its medical benefits should be made available to ease the suffering of patients. In a nod to the plant’s medicinal powers, pharmaceutical companies have produced synthetic forms of some of its active chemicals.

Less attention, though, has been focused on whether paying for patients’ medical marijuana is a cost-effective way to manage certain illnesses. Advocates argue that marijuana is an effective medicine that can also be a cost-effective alternative to pharmaceuticals.

Reimbursing patients who use it could push them away from otherwise costly drugs that some advocates say are not as effective. Employers, as payers of health care, should champion the legalization of medical marijuana as a potential cost-saving tool, advocates say.

Despite the recent legislative victories, however, even employers that want to reimburse patients who use medical marijuana cannot.

Stephen DeAngelo, chief executive of Harborside Health Center, a medical marijuana dispensary in Oakland, California, has tried to provide a medical marijuana benefit through the health plan he provides to his 67 full-time employees.

“Blue Cross Blue Shield will not reimburse for medical marijuana; we checked,” he says. “It’s illegal under federal law and they can’t do anything that will break federal law.” Instead, he provides his employees, all of whom are medical marijuana patients, with a free gram of marijuana for every shift they work, a policy he says has lowered his company’s health insurance costs. “Many of these patients had drug bills of several hundred dollars a week before they began using medical marijuana,” he says. “Now they are about $40 or $50 a week.”

Full Story

Here is an update from South Dakota where the judge who placed a one year gag order on South Dakota NORML’s Bob Newland not to publicly advocate for cannabis law reform whilst on probation for a minor cannabis offense has had to defend his sentencing and constitutionally-questionable limitations on Mr. Newland’s First Amendment rights to free speech; the right to peaceably assemble; petition the government for a redress of grievances.

To place this into sharper political context, in their first attempt two years ago, South Dakotan voters narrowly defeated a pro-medical cannabis initiative, 51%-49%.

Therefore, placing First Amendment restrictions on the state’s most vocal and notable cannabis law reform advocate for a minor cannabis offense sets a wretched legal precedent for personal freedom and political organizing in South Dakota.

To make matters worse, now an anti-drug state senator is gratuitously misleading the public by claiming that medical cannabis advocates in South Dakota are disingenuous:

“Judge Delaney was absolutely correct. To characterize Newland as an advocate for the legalization of marijuana for MEDICAL purposes is untrue. He is only interested in making marijuana available for his friends and others for recreational purposes, and perhaps financial gain.”

The voters of South Dakota need to run another pro-cannabis law reform initiative and pass it ASAP, making politicos like Adelstein and Judge Delaney eat crow—like hundreds of other politicos since the early 1990s who’ve opposed cannabis law reform, only to see voter-driven initiatives wash over them, and their opposition to these important–and popular–public law reforms.

——————————–

28 July 2009

Hello everyone,

I write today to tell a tale of an execrable and gratuitous lie told by SD State Senator Stanford Adelstein.

First, on Monday, July 27, the following story appeared in the Rapid City Journal

Judge defends marijuana sentence
Jack Delaney imposed a gag order on political activist Bob Newland

By Kevin Woster, Journal staff | Monday, July 27, 2009

The well-known public advocate for the legalization of marijuana for medical purposes had previously pleaded guilty to felony possession of the drug. And Delaney wanted to make the sentence sting without imposing an unduly harsh prison term on a 60-year-old man with a relatively clean criminal record.

So in essence, he told him to shut up for a year about one thing: medical marijuana, and an ongoing campaign to bring the issue to another public vote in 2010.

Delaney sentenced Newland to one year in Pennington County Jail but suspended all but 45 days under a set of stipulations that included weekly drug tests, random searches and a one-year ban on public advocacy for medical marijuana.

Delaney rejects assertions by some that he was imposing his personal beliefs on medical marijuana through the sentence.

“I have no concern whatsoever about whether medical marijuana is legalized,” Delaney said during an interview with the Journal in his office. “The important thing was to have a sentence crafted to impose a penalty on Mr. Newland that was significant to him.”

The advocacy ban was an infringement on Newland’s First Amendment rights. Delaney doesn’t deny that. But neither does he consider it more onerous or any less appropriate than many other infringements imposed as part of felony sentences.

The random searches Newland faces in the next year would be violations of his constitutional rights, but for the felony plea. Felons can face otherwise unconstitutional firearms restrictions and the right to associate with certain people or go to certain establishments, Delaney said.

“We restrict speech as well in a lot of protection orders, or in divorces, where in some cases the parties’ freedom to speak to one another may be limited,” he said.

And given the fact that the maximum penalty for Class 6 felony marijuana possession was two years in prison and a $4,000 fine, Newland’s sentence could be considered light by others who face similar charges, Delaney said. He was particularly concerned about younger minority defendants who might get a longer jail term for the same crime.

“I’m sitting there faced with a gentleman who is older, well known, who is thought by many to be considerably more well off than he is, and he is seeking a sentence that is going to be considerably more lenient that what they (minority defendants) might receive,” Delaney said. “So my thought was that I have to take something from him that is as valuable or maybe even more valuable than his freedom.”

Delaney settled on what he calls the “partial infringement of speech,” as well as limits on his freedom of association in support of medical marijuana. Newland may still meet in private with medical marijuana advocates to plan the medical-marijuana campaign. But he cannot appear publicly in or speak on or for the campaign.

“I’m taking away a legal right of the person to associate,” Delaney said. “I’m taking away his liberties. But not nearly as much as if he were in jail.”

Typical sentences for the same felony possession charge range from 45 days to 120 days in jail, Delaney said. But many of those who receive such sentences have more criminal marks on their record, he said.

Delaney has received about 40 e-mails commenting on the verdict, with many critical of the ban on speech and public involvement in the medical marijuana campaign. Many of the e-mails came from people active in the medical marijuana movement, he said, and some engaged in “name calling.”

Others, however, were more understanding when Delaney explained his rationale.

“All felonies are serious crimes, and they have a wide range of impacts on anybody who’s a felon,” he said. “This is unusual. And if it hadn’t been Bob Newland, it wouldn’t have had the same impact.”

Contact Kevin Woster at 394-8413 or kevin.woster@rapidcityjournal.com
*************

In the online “Comments” on this story, Sen. Adelstein said this (reprinted as written, bad grammar and spelling intact):

Judge Delaney was absolutely correct. To characterize Newland as an advocate for the legalization of marijuana for MEDICAL purposes is untrue. He is only interested in making marijuana available for his friends and others for recreational purposes, and perhaps financial gain.

I met with him at the Capitol in Room 411, (or maybe 412) during the session to offer, to assist for MRDICAL purposes in a Bill, as Chair of Health and Human Services. I said that I would only do so if there were 3 (three) simple changes in the legislation he was proposing.

1. There would be a required prescription from and MD legally authorized to issue drug prescription

2.The prescription could only be given if either there was no FDA drug that would accomplish the same as the marijuana or that drug cost three more times the cost of the pot.

3. The marijuana could only come from one or two sites approved and inspected by the SD Dept of Health

He and his friends in the room flatly rejected all three saying that anyone could grow the stuff for anyone else at any time that it was needed

I walked out of the room, knowing that they had no true interest in the help for people with pain and/or suffering. I of course opposed their bill vigorously and it did not even get to the House floor.

Newland is and should be treated as a common felon. The Judge was correct from stopping his phone posturing, I only wish that it was for more than a single year.

Stan Adelstein, State Senator District 32

The details of the meeting as described by Adelstein are a lie. You can read the true story at the decorum Forum Blog, and you can comment there or at the Journal “Comments” site above.

Best regards,

Bob Newland
24594 Chokecherry Ridge Rd
Hermosa SD 57744
605-255-4032
newland@rapidcity.com

Kerlikowske Finds Ideology

7/24/09, 12:34 am EST
This is a major disappointment:

Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske hit the road this week to rail against the perils of pot:

“Marijuana is dangerous and has no medicinal benefit,” he said at an appearance in Fresno, California.

This is a striking departure from what Kerlikowske told me in an interview in May.

Because of the restrictive terms the Vice President’s office imposed on our interview, I’m not at liberty to quote the drug czar directly.

But when I asked Kerlikowske for an example of how he hoped to bring sound science back to Office of National Drug Control Policy, he told me that science would answer whether smoked marijuana has any medical benefit.

That’s a question that science answers, he told me, not ideology.

From this week’s comments, it appears it took just two more months on the job for Kerlikowske’s openness to scientific uncertainty to snap shut in a fit of ideological conviction.

Tim Dickinson

[Editor's Note: Do an online search on 'marijuana' and 'legalization'. One word: momentum. Further evidence is found today with the front page story about medical cannabis and the 'NORMLization' of cannabis in general in America's business newspaper of record. The article partly profiles NORML board member Dale Gieringer and former NORML director Richard Cowan.

BTW, check out the online photos and videos in the original article.]

With ‘Med Pot’ Raids Halted, Selling Grass Grows Greener
By JUSTIN SCHECK and STU WOO

JULY 23, 2009

—————
LAKE FOREST, Calif. — Sellers of marijuana as a medicine here don’t fret about raids any more. They’ve stopped stressing over where to hide their stash or how to move it unseen.

Now their concerns involve the state Board of Equalization, which collects sales tax and requires a retailer ID number. Or city planning offices, which insist that staircases comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Then there is marketing strategy, which can mean paying to be a “featured dispensary” on a Web site for pot smokers.

After years in the shadows, medical marijuana in California is aspiring to crack the commercial mainstream.

“I want to do everything I can to run this as a legitimate business,” says Jan Werner, 55 years old, who invested in a pot store in a shopping mall after 36 years as a car salesman.

State voters decreed back in 1996 that Californians had a right to use marijuana for any illness — from cancer to anorexia to any other condition it might help. But supplying “med pot” remained risky. The ballot measure didn’t specify who could sell it or how. The state provided few guidelines, leaving local governments to impose a patchwork of restrictions. Above all, because pot possession remained illegal under U.S. law, sellers had to worry about federal raids.

But in February, the Justice Department said it would adhere to President Barack Obama’s campaign statement that federal agents no longer would target med-pot dealers who comply with state law. Since then, vendors who had kept a low profile have begun to expand, and entrepreneurs who had avoided cannabis have begun to invest.

Some now are using traditional business practices like political lobbying and supply-chain consolidation. Others are seeking capital or offering investment banking for pot purveyors. In Oakland, a school offers courses such as “Cannabusiness 102″ and calls itself Oaksterdam University, after the pot-friendly Dutch city. As shops proliferate, there are even signs the nascent industry could be heading for another familiar business phenomenon: the bubble.

Medical use of pot now is legal in 13 states. It is also facing some resistance. New Hampshire’s Democratic governor, John Lynch, vetoed a med-pot bill this month, citing inadequate safeguards. Los Angeles, which passed a moratorium on new dispensaries in 2007, is trying to close a loophole that has led to an explosion of new ones.

John Lovell, a lobbyist for the California Peace Officers’ Association, objects to “the notion that marijuana is safe and can be used for any and all purposes to heal any and all ailments,” adding: “There are 34 different elements in marijuana smoke that are shared with tobacco.” He and others also complain about the ease with which patients can get pot recommendations from certain doctors.

Still, at a time of deep recession, the med-pot business is attracting career switchers. Mr. Werner was the sales manager of a Chrysler dealership, and dismayed with the collapse of car sales. He had a doctor’s recommendation to smoke pot, for pain from a spinal condition. One day a car-dealer friend, Bill Shofner, who also had a pot recommendation (for migraines), suggested: Why not become pot vendors?

Each invested $40,000. Following state guidelines, they set up as a nonprofit, called Lake Forest Community Collective, from which they would draw salaries.

It is on the second floor of a strip mall in the Los Angeles suburb of Lake Forest that also houses Mexican restaurants and a Peet’s Coffee shop. A customer first encounters a brightly lit front room with a security window and an Obama poster, then is buzzed into a vestibule with an ATM. Beyond that is a spotless room with glass cases displaying pot in pill bottles.

Scribbled on a board are prices, from $10 to $25 a gram, for different strains: Sour Diesel, Purple Urkel, Bubba Hash. Sour Diesel is popular, says a volunteer, and “really potent.”

This still is a far cry from, say, Amsterdam, where pot remains illegal but authorities are so tolerant that pot is available in coffeehouses.

In California, pot sales, legal and illegal, are estimated to total $14 billion a year. Medical marijuana makes up maybe an eighth of that, says Dale Gieringer, director of the state’s chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He estimates the state has three million pot smokers, including 350,000 with doctors’ recommendations.

Full Story

Photo Caption: Hundreds attend the Colorado Board of Health hearing today on rules and regulations pertaining to the medical use of marijuana. The hearing had to be moved from the offices of the Department of Health to the Tivoli Student Union on the Auraria campus because of increased public interest. (THE DENVER POST | Kathryn Scott Osler)

Update: The Colorado Board of Health voted not to place patient limits on cannabis buyers clubs to five patients, and other proposed limitations. Congratulations to the 500 or more concerned citizens in Colorado who came from all parts of state for a historically high turnout for a state board meeting.

Auraria crowd stands up for access to medical marijuana

By Claire Trageser
The Denver Post
Posted: 07/20/2009
———-

About 350 people signed up to testify at the Colorado Board of Health’s meeting today about proposed changes to the state’s medical-marijuana laws.

The most controversial of those planned changes would effectively shut down medical-marijuana dispensaries and could potentially cut off access to the drug for some of the 7,630 Coloradans registered as patients who can legally use marijuana.

Public testimony started around 2 p.m. at the Tivoli Student Union on the Auraria campus, which was standing room only as more than 500
spectators filled all of the seats in a large auditorium and balcony.

Despite slips of paper distributed by Sensible Colorado, “a pro-marijuana, nonprofit advocacy group” reminding those in attendance to “be respectful and professional” and not to “speak out of turn or taunt speakers,” the audience often broke out in cheers, hisses, or boos.

The board is contemplating a number of changes to Colorado’s Amendment 20, passed by voters in 2000. The amendment allows those with debilitating medical conditions to either grow their own marijuana or appoint a “caregiver” to do the growing for them. The proposed changes to that amendment would limit caregivers, which sometimes take the form of dispensaries serving hundreds of patients, to supplying five patients at a time.

Eleven people were scheduled to testify in support of the proposal, but two were not present when their names were called, and one, the owner of Cannabis Therapeutics in Colorado Springs, seemed to have accidentally signed up on the wrong side.

“This must be a mistake,” said Glenn Schlabs, the president of the board of health.

Holly Dodge, the deputy district attorney for El Paso County, spoke in support of the proposal on behalf of 20 other DAs on the Colorado
District Attorneys’ Council. She said the proposed changes would clarify, not change, the intention of the original amendment.

“There is no way of appropriately protecting a patient when they have a caregiver with 300 other patients,” she said. “That’s not caregiving, that’s marijuana growing.”

Her comments were met with boos from the crowd.

Other supporters who spoke, including police officers and spokespeople for anti-drug advocacy groups, emphasized the proposal’s ability to help
law-enforcement officers control marijuana growing operations. Because there is no limit on a caregiver’s size, several speakers said police
officers have had difficulty determining whether a growing operation is legal.

“While Amendment 20 is clear in its intent, its definition is vague enough that district attorneys cannot meaningfully advise people on the
street who are enforcing marijuana laws,” said Helen Morgan, Denver’s chief deputy district attorney.

In addition, the board heard testimony from Ned Calonge, chief medical officer of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment; Ron Hyman, registrar of vital statistics at the state health department; and representatives from Sensible Colorado and the Colorado branch of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

In his presentation to the board, Hyman said the state’s marijuana registry does not have enough resources to manage what he called the
“explosive growth” of registered marijuana patients.

The registry has grown by about 1,000 patients a month this year, including 2,000 new patients in June, Hyman said. He predicted that the
state would have 15,000 registered patients by the end of the year.

“We’re doing the same amount of work in a day that we used to do in over a month,” he said.

Calonge then explained why the proposal sets the patient cap for caregivers at five.

“We define a primary caregiver as significantly participating in a patient’s everyday care,” he said. “If those caregivers are making home
visits to each patient, considering travel time, they could visit five patients a day.”

Calonge cited numerous examples where a caregiver is defined as seeing five patients a day, including Rhode Island’s medical-marijuana law and
the number of patients nurses from a home-health care company sees.

“We believe we have ample precedent and supportive evidence for this number,” he said.

The board then heard testimony from those opposed to the proposal, including a doctor, a police officer, a caregiver and a medical-marijuana patient.

“More regulation drives people to the black market, and that means patient care suffers,” said Dr. Paul Bregman.

“If this law passes, patients will lose their access to safe medicine and some will die,” said the owner of a Colorado dispensary. “Please be compassionate.”

The dispensary owner said that although his dispensary serves more than five patients, he believes he provides significant care to each one.
When asked by the board where he would set his own patient limit, he said that even 5,000 patients would not be too many.

“I’d like to be under the same standards as Walgreens or a Wal-Mart pharmacy,” he said.

Lauren Davis, a former senior district attorney in Denver said the proposal would not address the concerns raised by the other law-enforcement officials who had testified.

“Limiting caregivers will increase the number of small-grower operations,” she said.

Although the public-comment period of the meeting was set to begin at 12:50 p.m., by noon, the meeting was already an hour behind schedule.
After public comments, the board will deliberate and then vote on whether to approve the proposal.

Claire Trageser: ctrageser@denverpost.com or 303-954-1638

—————

Patients say pot restrictions will force them to buy from black market

The Associated Press
Posted: 07/20/2009

DENVER Colorado’s chief medical officer, police officers and prosecutors are urging health officials to limit the state’s medical marijuana providers to five patients each. They say the current system ‘which has no limits’ is causing confusion over who can legally grow marijuana and is susceptible to fraud.

But medical marijuana users and their supporters said the rule change, one of five being considered, would make it harder for people who need
the drug to get it legally.

The state health board is holding an all-day hearing on the changes on the Auraria Campus. Opponents far outnumber supporters with 350 people signing up to speak against the changes.

Voters allowed the use of medical marijuana in Colorado by passing Amendment 20 in 2000. The board is considering rules changing how the
program is run. Opponents say the five person limit is a significant change and that the board doesn’t have the authority to do that.

California’s citizens and legislators may be at the vanguard of America’s progressive cannabis policy-making, but, unfortunately, many in the law enforcement community in the Golden State are still uncomfortable with–and resistive of–the will of the voters (their employers) when it comes to physician-sanctioned, patient access to medicinal cannabis.

A ‘white paper’ released to California law enforcement (including prosecutors) in late April by the California Police Chiefs Association is just now being seen by the general public and the cannabis law reform community, and the paper once again reinforces the clear intent of the law enforcement community to continue leading the charge in maintaining the status quo of cannabis prohibition.

By any fair measurement, law enforcement is unrivaled in serving as one of the five pillars of cannabis prohibition.

Read the CPCA report here.

In response, later this summer, the NORML Foundation will publish a definitive legal guide to medical cannabis for practicing lawyers and medical cannabis dispensaries. Additionally, NORML seeks to provide complimentary copies of the guide to all of the public defenders’ offices in California.

By Dale Gieringer, Director, CA NORML

Like many medical marijuana users, Kristin Redeen needed additional prescription medications for her severe chronic pain. For seven years she had been treated at a private pain clinic in the Central Valley, where a doctor maintained her on Percocet, a semi-synthetic opioid. One day Kristin was unexpectedly asked to submit a urine sample.  

“They already knew about my medical marijuana use,” says Kristin, who contacted California NORML. “I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.”

When the test  came back, Kristin was informed that the clinic would no longer renew her prescription because she had tested positive for an illegal controlled substance. Her doctor at the clinic cited legal concerns, claiming –falsely– that DEA regulations forbid giving prescription narcotics to users of marijuana or other illegal drugs.

Kristin was cut off from her Percocet and began suffering seizures. She finally found a physician who was willing to prescribe her another opioid, Vicodin, but only at low doses insufficient to relieve her constant pain.

Kristin is one of a growing number of medical marijuana patients discriminated against by pain clinics. “I must have heard of 25 cases this year,” says Doug Hiatt, an attorney in Washington state. “It’s Jim Crow medicine.”

NORML has received a surge of complaints within the last six months.  Many medical marijuana users report that they can’t find a clinic willing to take them on.  Others, like Kristin, have been abandoned by clinics that suddenly adopted aggressive drug-screening policies.

Clinics say they are legally compelled to drug-test chronic pain patients so as to avoid liability for overdoses and diversion of prescription drugs, particularly opioids such as oxycontin –which have nothing to do with cannabis.

Chronic pain patients have good reason to object to being denied medical access to cannabis. Chronic pain is the leading indication for medical cannabis use, accounting for 90% of the patients in Oregon’s medical marijuana program.   More than 60 studies have shown cannabinoids to be effective in pain relief, according to a compilation by the International Association of Cannabis Medicine which includes four controlled studies of smoked marijuana by California’s Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research.

Full Story

Originally published, July 1, 2009, by University of Pittsburgh Law School publication, The Jurist.

Despite the glamorization on the hit Showtime series ‘Weeds’, flashy documentaries on CNBC delving into the business side of California’s multi-billion dollar annual cannabis industry derived from Californian’s unprecedented 13-year old legal access to medical cannabis products—qualifying patients in the state (and there are hundreds of thousands of them currently) can access high-quality medical cannabis via 24/7 vending machines in cities like Los Angeles—is Rhode Island the little state that is saying ‘yes we cannabis’ the loudest via their legislature?

‘Californication’ Of Cannabis
While California is clearly at the vanguard of implementing major legal and policy changes in seeming conflict with the federal government’s 72-year old cannabis prohibition laws, in fact little ol’ Rhode Island is on the precipice of effectively breaking the federal government’s ban on the cultivation and sale of cannabis by joining New Mexico as the only states favoring medical cannabis laws to have state-sanctioned medical cannabis cultivators and retail outlets for qualifying medical patients.

While there are an estimated 1,800-2,000 medical cannabis dispensaries (or in the new post Mentch parlance, cannabis wellness centers) in California alone, few of them are genuinely, legally sanctioned under state laws to sell cannabis in a retail environment. However, this blooming of cannabis wellness centers in California has happened under the full view of law enforcement, state policy makers and the public health community. Californians have ‘Main Street’ access to cannabis in many parts of the Golden State, which has evolved entirely organically—in other words, the mores and values of most Californians largely accept cannabis use, whether for recreational or medicinal purposes.

A recent Field poll of California voters affirms this with 56% support for outright legalization.

In Rhode Island, there is no highly refined ‘cannabis culture’, or longstanding public cannabis law reform efforts to speak of—unlike Californians that have publicly debated ‘legalizing’ cannabis on numerous statewide ballot initiatives and legislative proposals going back to the early 1970s—yet, Rhode Island’s legislators, from both parties and chambers, in opposition to the Governor and numerous federal government’s anti-drug bureaucracies (i.e., DEA, ONDCP, NIDA, DOJ, FBI, etc…) first passed a ‘self-preservation’ medical cannabis law two years ago [a ‘self-preservation’ medical cannabis model is defined as a qualified patient, for which a severely limited number of medical ailments qualify for cannabis use (i.e., Cancer, AIDS, Glaucoma, Epilepsy and MS), can legally possess or grow a small amount of cannabis; there is no legal retail access to cannabis, seeds or plant cuttings (clones)].

The Little State That Says To Washington: ‘Yes We Cannabis!’
However, Rhode Island legislators, only two years after passage of the original medical cannabis laws, recognized that a self-preservation model is inadequate to serve the needs of sick, dying or sense-threatened patients who need whole-smoked cannabis and edibles. Again, in full opposition to the Governor and federal agencies, overrode their second veto to establish Rhode Island as the first bona fide state to legally sanction and license third parties to cultivate and sell cannabis (in the case of Rhode Island, the recent medical cannabis legislation has provided initial approval to three medical cannabis wellness centers for the entire state).

Full Story

(LA Times) The owner of a Morro Bay pot dispensary who emerged as a key figure in the national debate over medical marijuana was sentenced to one year and one day in prison today by a federal judge in Los Angeles.

Charles Lynch, 47, dressed in a dark suit, sat with his hands clasped and stared straight ahead as the sentence was imposed by U.S. District Court Judge George H. Wu. Lynch declined the opportunity to address the court moments earlier. His mother, seated in the courtroom gallery nearby, fought back tears as Wu said he saw no way around imposing a sentence of at least one year.

Lynch’s case made headlines nationwide and came to symbolize the tension between conflicting state and federal marijuana laws. Cultivating, using and selling doctor-recommended marijuana is allowed under some circumstances in California and about a dozen other states, but such activities are banned entirely under federal law.

Lynch was prosecuted for illegally distributing marijuana from his Central Coast Compassionate Caregivers facility, despite having the blessing of Morro Bay’s mayor, city attorney and other civic leaders.

The Obama Administration had signaled that it will not seek prosecutions and raids against medical marijuana dispensary owners who are acting in accordance with state laws.  Charles Lynch couldn’t have followed state laws more scrupulously, but that is a moot point in the federal courthouse, where defendants cannot even mention the medical nature of their legal state-approved business.

This case highlights the need to pass Rep. Barney Franks’ Medical Marijuana Protection Act of 2009, to be introduced later today.  The bill would protect providers and patients in the thirteen medical marijuana states from harassment and prosecution by federal authorities (more on that bill later today).

In the meantime, we can appeal to the man who can bring us some Change We Can Believe In, President Obama, who in the stroke of a pen can commute Charles Lynch’s sentence just as easily as former President Bush commuted former VP Chief of Staff Scooter Libby’s sentence in the CIA agent-outing Valerie Plame case.  Mr. Lynch would remain convicted and retain a criminal record, but he would be spared of any prison time.  Or President Obama could do the truly honorable thing and pardon Mr. Lynch just as easily as former President Ford pardoned former President Nixon, absolving him of any conviction or prison time.

The Change we’d like to see is our Federal Government respecting the will of the people in thirteen states regarding medical use of marijuana and our President living up to his campaign promises to focus his Justice Department resources on more urgent matters.

Call President Obama at 202-456-1111.
Tell him to commute the sentence of
Charles Lynch or pardon him outright!