LEGISLATIVE PANEL GETS TO WORK ON POT LAW FIX

A panel of lawmakers is starting to "get into the weeds," as one
state senator put it, and are hoping to write first-drafts of
possible new laws by the end of the summer to address Montana's
wide-open medical-marijuana scene.

"We have to have a firm dividing line between what's legal and what's
illegal," Powell County Attorney Lewis Smith told the interim
Children, Families, Health and Human Services Committee at a meeting
Monday.

The bipartisan group has been studying the state's medical-marijuana
regulatory scheme. Rep. Diane Sands, D-Missoula, the chairwoman of
the committee, said she expected the group to have bills for
discussion by its next meeting, which will be in August.

Sands appointed a smaller subcommittee of the group to start working
on the language of the bills, which will be recommended to the 2011
Legislature in January. Their first meeting is scheduled for Tuesday
morning.

Many of the potential solutions deal with licensing medical-marijuana
caregivers and stepping up regulation in the industry, which was
created after 62 percent of Montanans voted in 2004 to legalize
marijuana for medical uses.

Smith wasn't alone in his call for stiffer regulations. A long line
of people addressed the committee Monday, most of them involved in
the medical-marijuana community and most of them urging the members
for laws that would professionalize the industry. Still, many also
called upon lawmakers not to forget the sick and suffering who say
medical marijuana helps them.

"I have patients who I don't know how I am going to get out of the
city limits," said Pam Birchard, a Great Falls medical-marijuana
caregiver with a small practice. Great Falls has a local ban on
medical-marijuana caregivers. Birchard said after the meeting that
she has been transporting her patients out of the city limits to give
them their marijuana. Two of her patients are very ill and housebound.

"She is at home to die," Birchard said of one patient in an interview
with Lee Newspapers. The patient experiences pain relief with medical
marijuana, and Birchard said she worried how the woman would handle
what might be her final days.

Others, like R.A. Rosio, president of Montana Pain Management in
Missoula, another medical-marijuana clinic, encouraged lawmakers to
"please take the time to understand who it is you're
regulating."

Rosio told lawmakers that some medical-marijuana growers and
caregivers are moving ahead with their own internal certification
standards.

"Eventually, this will be very, very tightly regulated and we welcome
it," he said.

Also on display at the meeting was a kind of cultural divide within
the medical-marijuana community, specifically between two of its most
prominent members: Tom Daubert, of Helena, the man behind the 2004
citizen's initiative that legalized medical marijuana; and Jason
Christ, the founder of Montana Caregivers Network, which runs
traveling medical-marijuana clinics where hundreds of people can get
medical-marijuana cards in a single day, often with little time with
a doctor.

Daubert told lawmakers that Christ, who was standing right next to
him, was "exploiting (the law's) problems and loopholes, registering
thousands in one day."

Daubert has long supported tighter regulations of the industry to
eliminate those kinds of clinics and return it to what he said was
the original intent of the law.

Christ, who is also a medical-marijuana patient, encouraged lawmakers
to tread lightly into stiffer regulations, even as he said more
government involvement is needed in the industry.

"It's going to take an army of people to regulate this," he
said.

Christ, who said he has two intestinal disorders that make sitting
down uncomfortable, particularly praised Montana's law that allows
medical-marijuana users to smoke in public.

"After this speech, I am going to go outside and smoke a bowl," he
told the panel.

Shortly after, he produced a large, glass pipe and left to do just
that.