MEDICAL POT LAW NOT CUT AND DRY

LIVINGSTON -- Downtown Livingston has gone to pot.

In the open garage doorway of a small white warehouse, six blocks
from the Park County Sheriff's Office and minutes from the nouveau
eateries and art galleries where tourists stroll, Homer Terry churns
ice into a 5-gallon bucket of marijuana.

It's a hot Friday afternoon. The whir of Terry's power drill and stir
paddle mixes with the shovel chucks of a nearby railroad crew
spreading gravel. He gives the customary Montana greeting of a slight
head nod and an easy smile to passers-by, but otherwise he keeps
working, blending bits of marijuana into a potent, smokable paste.

Some would say Terry is making hashish, but the man with drill in
hand churning a slurpee of cannabis prefers to say he's harvesting
"tri-chromes," that is, the secretions of resins rich in THC forming
on the exterior of discarded marijuana plant matter. Others would say
Terry and the other half-dozen volunteers toiling on the northern
edge of a busy thoroughfare in this sleepy railroad town are growing dope.

Terry, a volunteer at the medical marijuana growing coop, would say
he's making medicine. And the state of Montana agrees.

Voters Said Yes

It's been four years since Montana voters cast a near supermajority
endorsement to legalize medical marijuana. The ballot initiative,
allowing patients with a doctor's referrals to grow as many as six
marijuana plants for medicinal purposes, garnered more voter support
that November than Gov. Brian Schweitzer or U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg.

In practice, however the law is receiving mixed reviews. Patient
groups and legally sanctioned growers say they now navigate a vague
legal path with enough unexpected curves to send some,
unintentionally, into violation of drug laws.

Likewise, law enforcement officials say they are seeing the emergence
of a marijuana culture they didn't expect, with a few large, indoor
marijuana farms and a shield of confidentiality preventing detectives
from determining whether business is being done according to law.

In practice, medical marijuana didn't' take root right away in
Montana. Even after the law passed with 63 percent approval Nov. 2,
2004, newspaper accounts of the vote suggested that "Montanans
suffering from certain medical conditions may be able to legally
smoke marijuana," emphasis on the word "may" not "can." Prior to the
vote, Montanans were warned by U.S. Deputy Drug Czar Scott Burns that
federal law trumps state law and that Montana wouldn't be a safe
harbor for legal cannabis.

Except for a few incidents, however, medical marijuana in Montana
hasn't resulted in many arrests by federal or state officials. State
registration of patients approved to use medical marijuana has more
than tripled in the last year, said Roy Kemp who issues medical
marijuana licenses for the state Department of Public Health and
Human Services.

"We had 1,280 registered patients this July," said Kemp, who receives
40 to 50 applications a week. "We had 358 last July."

State health officials run a registry of patients, Kemp said. It
tracks the number of participating doctors, currently 162, as well as
the number of appointed caregivers, 386. The state never discloses
the names of the people involved to anyone, including police.

What Kemp will disclose are the categories of qualifying conditions
into which registrants fall. Patients suffering from severe and
chronic pain with nausea or muscle spasms represent 70 percent of
those registered for a medical marijuana license good for one year.
Patients suffering from severe seizures coupled with severe nausea
and muscle spasms are the second largest group, at 11 percent.

One Patient's Experience

Included in the remaining 8 percent of registered patients is Donna
Woodworth, who has struggled with diminishing weight since being
treated for colon cancer 25 years ago. Appetite loss due to medical
treatment or chronic condition is one of about a dozen conditions
covered by the state medical marijuana law.

"Suddenly, I can eat what I call my old lady diet," said Woodworth,
"yogurt and mashed potatoes and some bread. Basically that's what I eat."

Since being approved for medical marijuana, Woodworth said her body
weight has increased from 80 pounds to 112. Using cannabis is not an
easy subject to talk about, said Woodworth, who lives in Livingston
and receives her marijuana from Montana Caregivers, a registered
corporation that grows marijuana for some 50 medical marijuana patients.

Marijuana use bares a stigma with or without the state card, said
Woodworth, who nervously spoke of her experience while standing in
Montana Caregiver's Park Avenue office. People who casually know she
uses cannabis assume she's doing something wrong.

At the mention of implied wrongdoing, grower Renita Minnick begins to
laugh. She, her husband, David, and another grower formed a sort of
co-op and started growing medical marijuana a year ago. Friends then
were warning that they were all going to jail. They've been waiting
for the bad news ever since.

"There were a lot of people saying, 'You're not in jail yet?' " said
Minnick. "And some are still saying 'You're not in jail?' "

'Caregivers' With Green Thumbs

The Minnicks are registered patients. Renita has a degenerative
diabetic eye disease. Dave's spine was injured in an auto accident
that causes him chronic pain. But they're also caregivers, the term
used by the state to identify people chosen by patients to grow
medical marijuana.

Caregivers have to be selected by a patient. No selection, no
authorization to grow marijuana legally. Each patient is allowed to
have up to six marijuana plants. A caregiver with several patients
can have a pretty big crop. The growers in Minnick's co-op are
raising about 300 medical marijuana plants in multiple stages under
grow lights inside a secured building.

The operation is legitimate under state medical marijuana standards,
but the setting mirrors a noncertified operation. There are smoking
pipes and rolling papers in the break room, along with smoke-free
marijuana vaporizers for patients concerned about carcinogens.

The varieties of marijuana grown sport names like AK-47, White Widow
and Kush. Different varieties produce different highs.

"It's a large grow operation," said Tim Barnes, a detective with the
Missouri River Drug Task Force. "Minnick was in the newspapers, so
we've always known what was going on. Dave's pretty much been forthcoming."

Lingering Legal Questions

Dave Minnick not only invited the detectives to check out his crop,
he said he approached the Park County attorney before he got going so
law enforcement wouldn't be alarmed. They were still alarmed, Minnick
said. The county prosecutor first told Minnick to leave, then called
in a deputy and asked the caregiver to stay once he realized Minnick
wasn't joking.

Barnes isn't sure large grow operations were expected when the
medical marijuana initiative passed. It's one of many issues he
thinks the law overlooked or ignored. Growers aren't required to
keep records and because state records are tightly guarded, it's
difficult to determine if the marijuana is being grown for registered
patients and if the amount of marijuana grown exceeds the limit of
six plants per patient.

Barnes also has concerns about caregivers growing a small number of
plants in homes were children are present. And he's not entirely
convinced everyone registered for medical marijuana needs it. There
is no age limit for legally using medical marijuana.

"One of the things that concerns me is that more people are moving
here because they can have access to medical marijuana," Barnes said.
"It's all over the state, not just here."

Patients and caregivers have concerns, too, said Tom Daubert, with
Patients and Families United, an advocacy group for medical marijuana users.

Working with law enforcement, Daubert and others are trying to work
some of the kinks out of the state law. Patients and Families United
would like to see some allowances for transportation by nonpatients.
Patients too ill to travel now must rely on caregiver home delivery
or courier, which poses problems because only patients and caregivers
can possess the drug. Barnes and other detectives want more
accountability written into the law.

One Missoula patient committed suicide last year after drug
enforcement agents seized her marijuana because it was sent through
United Parcel Service.

The group would also like to increase the amount of marijuana a
patient is allowed to have on hand from an ounce, roughly a lunch bag
full, to a larger amount. The group lobbied the 2007 Legislature to
make the changes to no avail.

Federal officials would like to put the kibosh on medical marijuana,
in part because they believe it undermines drug prevention programs
such as the elementary school program Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE.

"I don't have a lot of huge worries about it because I trust
Americans to fix what they break, but I'm worried about the message
we're sending to our kids. That's a tragedy," said Jeffrey Sweetin,
special agent in charge of the Rocky Mountain Division of the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Agency. "The kids that flunked DARE are now telling
your kids, my kids, that this is medicine."

Marijuana is classified as a Schedule I narcotic, meaning the federal
government believes it has no useful purpose. Doctors can't prescribe
the drug without breaking the law, they can only recommend it.
Government agencies like the National Institutes of Health have
argued for years that marijuana is damaging, Sweetin said. That
argument was not heard in states where marijuana advocates have
persuaded voters to allow medical marijuana.

"Please understand, we don't ignore marijuana grow operations,"
Sweetin said. "I assure you, there are thresholds at every U.S.
attorney's office."

Not all doctors agree that marijuana is harmful. Ed Stickney, a
retired physician in Billings, has written referrals for several
patients. He said that particularly in pain cases, marijuana poses
less of an addiction threat than powerful painkillers like OxyContin.

"I contend that if it were discovered today, marijuana would be
considered a miracle drug," Stickney said.