THIS SHERIFF HEARS A DIFFERENT DRUMMER

One day more than a decade ago, shortly after he'd turned heads
throughout Maine's law enforcement community by publicly coming out in
favor of legalized medical marijuana, one of Cumberland County Sheriff
Mark Dion's senior officers knocked on his office door.

"Tell me you're not going to keep pursuing this," the officer said
pleadingly.

"It's where we've got to go," Dion replied with a smile.

He wasn't kidding.

Some might call him window dressing for Northeast Patients Group, the
nonprofit company that last week received four of six state permits to
open medical marijuana dispensaries throughout Maine.

But Dion, who will have a seat at the table when Northeast Patients
Group's board of directors holds its first meeting Friday, promises
that his influence over Maine's fledgling marijuana-distribution
system will extend far beyond the company's letterhead.

"I'm not planning on dropping in twice a year for lunch and asking,
'How are we doing?'" Dion said over a cup of coffee this week. "I want
to make sure that when this begins, we begin it right."

His new cannabis connection aside, these are interesting times for
Dion.

He'll step down as sheriff at the end of this year after three
consecutive four-year terms, ending a law enforcement career that he
began as a Portland police officer in 1977.

Armed with a 2005 law degree from the University of Maine School of
Law, he's setting up a legal practice on India Street in Portland with
law-school classmate and friend Jonathan Berry. (A running joke with
the much-younger Berry is that the practice will give Dion, 55,
"someplace to go when I'm 70.")

And now, as Portland and other communities scramble to make way for
the medical-marijuana dispensaries that voters approved last fall,
Dion has become the first law enforcement official in Maine -- if not
the nation -- to go into the pot-selling business.

"I don't know that I'd care to put myself in the same position," mused
Camden Police Chief Philip Roberts, president of the Maine Chiefs of
Police Association.

Roberts, who works 20 minutes up the road from a site in Thomaston
where Northeast Patients Group tentatively plans a dispensary, said
his organization opposed last fall's successful ballot question. Its
passage made Maine the third state, along with New Mexico and Rhode
Island, to implement a system of state-licensed medical-marijuana
dispensaries.

And while the chiefs accept the reality that 59 percent of Maine's
voters decided it was a good idea, Roberts said, Dion still stands
alone in his all-out embrace of the new law.

"It's the law, but that doesn't mean we like it," Roberts said. "I
don't know of any other police chiefs or sheriffs who support it."

Dion, long considered a far-lefty in a profession where political
views typically skew to the right, has no qualms about standing alone
in his belief that there's nothing wrong (and a lot right) with making
marijuana available to sick people who can legitimately benefit from
it.

Back in 1998, just one day after Dion declared his support for Maine's
first medical marijuana initiative, the state's 15 other county
sheriffs announced in no uncertain terms that Dion spoke for nobody
but himself. (The news story quite correctly labeled Dion a
"maverick.")

Sixty-one percent of Maine's voters agreed with Dion that year and
made medicinal pot legal. Problem was, there still was no way for
patients to get their hands on it legally.

Two years later, with the help of then-state Sen. Ann Rand,
D-Portland, there was Dion pushing for an outside-the-box solution to
the supply problem: Rather than just torch marijuana that police
confiscated, why not give it to sick people who could use it to allay
their nausea, regain their appetites and otherwise offset the symptoms
of various illnesses?

"That went nowhere," Dion recalled.

But that was then -- and this is now.

Dion's long-held position on medicinal marijuana -- that compassion
for those who need it trumps any concerns about how it meshes (or not)
with other state and federal drug laws -- has clearly gained traction
since he first went out on that thin limb 12 years ago.

Fourteen states now recognize pot as a legitimate and legal medicine.
What's more, the Obama administration (unlike its predecessor) has
called a de facto truce between the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration and states whose pro-medicinal-marijuana laws remain in
conflict with federal drug statutes.

Hence Dion has no qualms about jumping in once again -- this time with
both feet.

He thinks, as does Northeast Patients Group Executive Director Becky
DeKeuster, that it's important to have someone with a law enforcement
background on the company's board, to instill public confidence and
immediately open a line of communication with those still-skeptical
sheriffs and police chiefs.

"I hope to be that bridge person," Dion said.

He'll also play an obvious role in devising a security plan, not just
for protecting the product, but also for screening prospective
staffers. (The latter's importance was underscored by this headline
Tuesday from the Maine State Police: "Owner of Rockland Meth Clinic
Arrested" for alleged possession of cocaine.)

Finally, Dion hopes to dispel the lingering notion that smoking
medicinal marijuana is nothing more than a party in disguise.

He still remembers the terminally ill, retired fire chief in the
midcoast who told him during a past campaign, "Sheriff, I don't know
what it means, what's that word, to 'catch a buzz.' When I take
marijuana, I just feel normal again."

"The problem is, unlike other medicines that come into our lives
wearing lab coats and double-blind tests, marijuana comes to us
wearing blue jeans, T-shirts and rock concerts," Dion said. "There
needs to be more public education around all of this."

What Dion won't do, contrary to some of the whispering that greeted
his new gig, is get rich from this venture. While Northeast Patients
Group's bylaws allow for board members to be compensated, he said he
won't accept a nickel.

"In my mind, it's no different from if I was asked to be on the board
of directors for the YMCA," Dion said. "I don't want to create a
perception, real or otherwise, that my opinion, my guidance or my
statements about dispensary activity are somehow diminished by the
fact that I'm taking a check. That doesn't work for me."

Last week, as the news of his latest affiliation set the tongues to
wagging once again, someone slipped a note under Dion's office door.
He took it as a sign that the times, even within law enforcement, are
indeed changing.

"Good job," the note read. "Keep it up."

"I have no idea who wrote it," Dion said. "But it was nice to hear."