LAWMAKERS GO AFTER POT 'TELE-CLINICS'

Montana's traveling cannabis caravans, responsible for signing up
thousands of people for medical marijuana cards in the last year, will
be a thing of the past if a group of lawmakers here gets its way.

A bipartisan panel spent most of Tuesday morning brainstorming changes
to Montana's existing medical marijuana laws, taking particular aim at
traveling clinics, which according to some, have exploited problems in
Montana's law and made medical marijuana much more common.

Among its ideas: physicians who recommend marijuana for their patients
must have an established practice in Montana, and they must have a
face-to-face evaluation of a patient before issuing the person a
medical marijuana recommendation.

"No more telemedicine, no more traveling," said Rep. Diane Sands,
D-Missoula, chairwoman of the committee.

They also recommended that doctors follow professional standards of
care when dealing with a potential medical marijuana patient and they
must look at a patient's medical records before making a
recommendation for medical marijuana.

The panel also recommended changing the kinds of health conditions
that would qualify someone for a medical marijuana card. Someone
seeking a card for the broad topic of "chronic pain" would have to
have two doctors' recommendations, including one by specialist,
according to the panel.

About 13,000 of the 17,000 Montanans who have medical marijuana cards
use the drug for "chronic pain," said Sen. Rick Laible, R-Darby, a
non-voting member of the committee.

The legislators also took up the cards themselves, saying people
should have to have the card on them and have some form of photo
identification when using medical marijuana.

The group, an offshoot of the Families, Children, Public Health and
Human Services interim committee, which has been studying the issue,
anticipates having the bill written by August. Its ideas are still a
long way from becoming law. First, any bill would have to be endorsed
by the whole committee and then presented to the entire Legislature
for its approval in January.

The panel's ideas will not be the only medical marijuana bills for
lawmakers to consider, Sands said. Lawmakers will likely have a range
of ideas, she said, from repealing Montana's medical marijuana law
entirely to legalizing marijuana for all purposes.

The committee is also considering banning the smoking of marijuana in
public.

It is scheduled to meet again next month, when the committee will take
up the growing and distribution of medical marijuana.

Sands and others on the panel said the traveling clinics are one of
the main drivers behind public animus toward medical marijuana.

But Jim Gingery, executive director of the Montana Medical Growers
Association, a trade group of medical marijuana growers, told
lawmakers that many doctors in Montana are forbidden from recommending
cannabis to their patients, even if they think it could help them.
Doctors who work for any government-supported hospital and doctors
affiliated with many of state's hospitals cannot prescribe cannabis
either because their hospital forbids it or because their hospital
could lose federal funding for promoting a substance that is
considered an illicit drug at the federal level.

"That's the whole thing with the traveling clinics," he said. "That's
where it got started."

Chris Arneson, public relations officer for Montana Caregivers
Network, the Missoula organization that has hosted most of Montana's
traveling clinics and teleconferences, said in an interview with Lee
Newspapers that the teleconferences are misunderstood. It's true that
the network does employ a physician who will meet with patients over a
digital video link, but all those patients must either fax or e-mail
their medical records to the doctor, Arneson said, and most of those
patients were referred to the network because their treating physician
is not in a position to prescribe medical marijuana.

Such teleconferencing is merely a convenience for people who cannot
drive to their Missoula offices.

"They're in too much pain," he said.