SPLIFFED

The Legislature's Medical-Marijuana Law Runs Afoul Of Reality

LEGISLATIVE HEARINGS are frequently drowsy affairs, and the afternoon
session of the Senate Committee on Health and Long-Term Care on
February 12 promised to be no livelier than most. But a citizen
activist changed all that in a hurry.

The hearing was to take public testimony on Senate Bill 5176: "an act
relating to rules to implement the medical marijuana law." Citizen
activist Joanna McKee of the medical marijuana supply cooperative
Green Cross unwittingly livened things up by showing the room the
enormous amount of pot the Legislature was preparing to allow an ill
individual to possess.

Until McKee's performance, the bill, introduced for the third
straight session by Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Welles of Seattle, was hardly
controversial. Its purpose was merely to allow the state Department
of Health to define how much marijuana a physician might legally
prescribe a patient to relieve pain, nausea, and anxiety due to a
diagnosed medical condition, to carry out the public will expressed
in Initiative 692 passed in November 1998. A substantial number of
members of the committee were known to sympathize with the bill;
after initial doubts, law enforcement agencies had begun to rally
round it; even the governor's highly conservative Council on
Substance Abuse had come around. Of the 18 people signed up to
testify that day, not one planned to oppose the bill.

The bill itself is an effort to win a numbers game: The authors of
Initiative 692 declined to specify what a "reasonable" amount of
therapeutic marijuana might mean, instead referring to allowing
patients to legally possess "a 60-day supply." That ambiguity has
created controversies between law enforcement agencies and medical
marijuana users. SB 5176 attempts to clarify the situation by
instructing the state Department of Health to take existing federal
guidelines into consideration in defining what constitutes a legal
supply. "All I was trying to do was show the committee what the Feds
are dispensing to patients in its program," says McKee. "My point
was, whatever we do in Washington, it shouldn't be less than what the
[federal] government is allowing people to have right now."

To allow the legislators to visualize her point, McKee held up a
canister sent to her by one of the eight patients still receiving
marijuana from the federal government's nearly phased-out medical
marijuana experiment. "What happens is, the marijuana is grown at a
federal site in Mississippi and shipped to the North Carolina
Research Triangle Institute, where they roll it into cigarettes and
pack it into these canisters and send it off to pharmacies to be
picked up by authorized patients," explains McKee. Each canister
constitutes a 30-day supply, so Washington patients, under the rule
proposed in SB 5176, would be able to possess double the amount in
the canister, or 1 pound, 11a ounces.

In terms of volume, the can McKee held up that day was pretty
impressive, too; so big that you'd have trouble packing a purported
60-day supply into a volume the size of a half-gallon milk carton.
Anybody, sick or not, who can go through that much ganja in 60 days
without lots of enthusiastic help is one serious viper indeed, mon.

And, in those "street prices" so beloved of cops and journalists,
that amount of Mary Jane would go, depending on grade and season, for
somewhere between $8,500 and $11,000.

SOMETHING CLEARLY is out of whack here, and it's not too hard to
figure out what. For the last 40 years, since marijuana became a
significant cash crop (the third biggest in America, it's estimated,
and easily the most profitable), private growers have been
hybridizing and cloning and genetically engineering their weed for
ever-greater punch and productivity. But the bureaucrats at the fed's
Lazy M Ranch in Mississippi haven't had the financial incentive to do
the same. Consequence: Street bud these days averages somewhere
between 10 and 20 times as potent as the dirt weed the feds dish out.

No politician so far has publicly admitted that therefore the whole
notion of basing "a 60-day supply" on what the feds pass out is
dangerously out-of-date. Instead the joint just keeps getting handed
along.

On March 9, the full Senate passed Kohl-Welles' bill and passed it to
the House, where it breezed through the Health Care Committee last
Tuesday and on to Rules. Its fate there is uncertain; it takes the OK
of both co-chairs of the committee to move the bill out for floor
debate, and Republican co-chair Clyde Ballard of East Wenatchee is
not widely known as a proponent of liberalizing drug laws, even in
compassionate cases.

Even if Ballard recognizes that his own law-and-order-oriented
constituency is beginning to lean toward strictly controlled
legalization of marijuana, it may not do the state's citizens much
good in the short run. Rather than confront the growing sentiment at
the state level for changes in marijuana law, the feds are trying to
reverse state laws that conflict with the federal definition of
marijuana as a Class I (no redeeming medical value) "controlled
substance." The same day SB 5176 moved onto the Rules Committee, the
Supreme Court heard U.S. v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers Co-op. Try to
visualize anything useful coming out of that quarter. Go on, try.