SWIFT ACTION SOUGHT ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

D.C. Council Chairman Ready to Begin Crafting Policy With Lifting of Ban

D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) said Monday that he wants
to move swiftly to establish regulations for distributing medical
marijuana now that Congress has voted to lift restrictions on city drug policy.

Gray said the council will use Initiative 59, which voters
overwhelmingly approved in 1998, to begin crafting a policy that
allows doctors to prescribe marijuana to patients with serious illnesses.

"We've waited 10 years. . . . I think the opportunity to send it is
now," Gray said. "There is no reason to sit on it."

But one day after Congress voted to lift the Barr amendment, there
was widespread confusion across city government about how the policy
might be implemented.

Attorney General Peter Nickles said Monday that he has instructed his
staff to review whether the council can use Initiative 59 to legalize
medical marijuana or whether it is too dated to withstand legal scrutiny.

Even if it is valid, Nickles said, under home rule the initiative
would still have to survive a 30-day congressional review period
because the original proposal was never sent to Capitol Hill.

But Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who played a key role in
having the amendment removed in the spending bill, said she doesn't
think the measure needs to go back before Congress.

In making its decision to remove the Barr amendment, Norton said
Congress was under the assumption that the city would use
administrative regulations to implement its medical-marijuana policy.

"Congress thought they were simply taking the ban off and the
District would simply proceed or not proceed," Norton said. "After
all we have gone through, I can tell you, the Congress is not anxious
to see this issue here again. It's taken me 10 years."

Norton said she cannot guarantee that Congress would not try to block
medical marijuana if the issue appeared before it without being
entangled in a massive government spending bill.

But Gray said he doubts the House and Senate would intervene if the
issue lands before them. He noted that Congress has passed only three
disapproval resolutions on council bills since home rule began in 1973.

During the congressional review period, Gray said that city health
and public safety officials would begin establishing regulations on
how the marijuana should be prescribed and distributed.

The biggest question facing city leaders is whether the city or
another organization should get into the business of growing and
distributing marijuana.

Thirteen states allow for medical marijuana. But Bruce Mirken, a
spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project, said many of those state
laws call for patients to grow their own marijuana, or to designate
someone to legally grow it for them, to avoid government involvement
in the cultivation of an illegal substance.

But Mirken noted that California, New Mexico and, beginning next
year, Rhode Island and Maine have embraced policies that allow for
the creation of government-sanctioned distribution centers.

Mirken says that strategy -- made easier by the Obama
administration's pledge not to use federal law to arrest medical
marijuana distributors -- makes more sense for the District.

"The grow-your-own provisions simply don't work for everybody,
particularly in urban areas," Mirken said. "We think a regulated
system of dispensaries is ideal, but there needs to be rules. It
shouldn't just be a free-for-all."

On Monday, the medical community was also scrambling to examine the
ramifications of legalizing medical marijuana in the District.

The Whitman-Walker Clinic, which specializes in treating and
preventing HIV/AIDS, was a key sponsor of putting Initiative 59 on the ballot.

But clinic spokesman Chip Lewis said Whitman-Walker would still have
to undertake an extensive study of medical marijuana before it could
recommend that any of its patients use the drug.

"Whitman-Walker believes people living with HIV/AIDS and other
chronic medical conditions should have access to any legal medication
under physician treatment," Lewis said. "But we would have to do some
careful planning and thought . . . around the issues of care before
we could implement anything."

Marijuana growers are also following events at city hall closely.

Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for
the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said he has received more than two
dozen e-mails or phone calls since late last week from marijuana
growers or distributors who want to do business in the nation's capital.

"There are probably at least 20 of these cannabis shop owners on the
West Coast that have a dead-eye target on the District," St. Pierre
said. "Over the weekend, we must have gotten 20 to 30 e-mails or
phone messages from people I would say are entrepreneurs."