CANNAMED - COLORADO'S LARGEST MEDICAL POT EVALUATION COMPANY - FACES
SCRUTINY FOR SELLING PATIENT INFORMATION

CannaMed - Colorado's largest medical pot evaluation company - faces
scrutiny for selling patient information

Karen needed a medical marijuana card. She'd smoked enough pot in her
fifty years to know that it subdued her recurring headaches, her
nausea, the pain that lingered from the knee surgery she'd had a few
years earlier. With all the medical marijuana dispensaries
proliferating around Denver, it just made sense to get legal with her
medication. To obtain that card, though, she needed a doctor to
recommend her for medical marijuana - and since she couldn't afford
health insurance, she hadn't seen a regular physician in years. Where
to find a doctor? The answer was easy: CannaMed.

When CannaMed opened in Denver in early 2008, it was one of the
state's first operations devoted to helping people get medical
marijuana cards. Today it bills itself as Colorado's leading medical
marijuana evaluation company, with new locations in Boulder and
Colorado Springs and a catchy slogan: "Can't med without CannaMed."

One of the main reasons people choose to med with CannaMed is that it
can be very cheap. When Karen called, she learned that an evaluation
appointment cost $200 - but CannaMed also offered a $50 "financial
aid" option, which sounded ideal. So this past October, she went to
CannaMed's Denver office and sat down with James Boland, the doctor
working there that day. He asked Karen why she wanted medical
marijuana and inquired about her knee surgery, and didn't seem to mind
that she hadn't brought medical records. "It was like, down to
business, boom-boom-boom," she remembers. After meeting with her for
five minutes, Boland signed Karen's recommendation for medical
marijuana. But he didn't give her the paperwork she'd need if she was
going to apply for a medical marijuana card with the state.

Under the terms of the financial aid program, CannaMed would hold on
to Karen's paperwork until she'd been assigned a caregiver - the
person who, at least on paper, would be in charge of providing her
with medical marijuana. Then the company would give the paperwork to
the caregiver, who would help Karen fill out her application for the
state and pay her $90 registration fee. According to the agreement
CannaMed had Karen sign, she'd have to keep that caregiver for a year
and couldn't grow any of her own medicine during that time. If she
wanted out of the deal, she'd have to pay.

And until CannaMed paired her with a caregiver, Karen could shop at a
CannaMed-affiliated dispensary, conveniently located next door to each
CannaMed evaluation location.

Karen went home and waited for her caregiver notification. And waited.
After about a month, an envelope came from CannaMed containing her
medical paperwork. Since she'd been told her caregiver would deal with
her application to the state, she figured this envelope contained
copies. And then she got a call from a woman who said she was her
official caregiver. She told Karen that she worked at a Denver
dispensary separate from those associated with CannaMed, and that if
Karen stopped by, she'd sell her some medicine.

Karen never did. "I was feeling kind of strange about the whole deal,"
she says.

A few weeks later, Karen got around to looking at her paperwork - and
realized that CannaMed had sent her the originals. That meant no one
had sent her application to the state, much less paid her $90
registration fee. Since her application had to be received by the
state within sixty days of the doctor's signature, by this point her
evaluation was no longer valid.

When she signed the CannaMed agreement, Karen wasn't told how the
other half of the financial aid program works - how the company sells
its financial aid patients to dispensaries and marijuana grow
facilities so that these operations can show they're caring for enough
patients to account for the marijuana they have on hand. Such sponsors
pay up to $350 per patient, sometimes buying them from CannaMed in
packs of fifty. And that's just one of several questionable CannaMed
practices that former employees and patients described for Westword.

While CannaMed's owner insists that he's doing nothing wrong, his
company could be on a collision course with legislation now going
through the State Capitol.

CannaMed recently cut its prices to $150 for a regular visit and $29
for its financial aid option - but Karen hasn't been tempted to
return, or to try any of the other operations that now offer medical
marijuana evaluations. "I'm not going back," says Karen. "I feel like
I've been walked on and cheated. It's just not fair."

There's one thing that David Mazin, owner of CannaMed, wants people to
know more than anything else: He's not Russian mafia.

He's heard the rumors going around medical marijuana circles. "We are
not Russian mafia," he says, fuming in his office at CannaMed's Denver
location. "I've been fucking working thirty years of my life here. I
came here in 1980, and because I'm Russian, that means I'm mafia?"

Maybe the rumors are fueled by his lifestyle, the 54-year-old Mazin
suggests. The Mercedes-Benz S-class he drives, the one with tinted
windows. The suits and wide-brim hat he wears. The fact that he smokes
all the time. Or maybe it's because on the wall of his office, he's
mounted a very realistic-looking gun below a photo of Tony Montana
from Scarface.