NEW JERSEY'S MEDICAL MARIJUANA LAW LOSES PLANNED GROWER AND DISPENSERS

Five months before its new medical marijuana law is set to take
effect, New Jersey this week moved further away from having answers
to basic questions about how the law will work - specifically, who
will grow the marijuana and who will dispense it.

Gov. Chris Christie's administration had been pursuing a plan to make
Rutgers University the only approved cultivator of cannabis, and to
make teaching hospitals the only places where patients could get it.

But on Thursday, Rutgers announced that it would not participate for
fear of losing grants from the federal government. State officials
said the hospitals had the same concern.

State laws legalizing medical marijuana are at odds with federal law.
The Obama administration has stopped the practice of raiding
marijuana dispensaries in those states, but the Drug Enforcement
Administration remains reluctant to grant permission to grow the
plants, even for medical research.

"This is genuinely something we were interested in doing," said
Robert M. Goodman, the executive dean of agriculture and natural
resources at Rutgers. "We have agricultural stations; we have
programs in medicinally reactive plants, in chemical biology, in
pharmacy. It's a potential new crop for the state, and we're
interested in promoting the state's economy."

But, he added, "it just puts too much at risk," jeopardizing research
grants, contracts, student aid or other funds from Washington.

Fourteen states have passed laws allowing medical use of marijuana,
but New Jersey's, signed in January, is in some ways the strictest.
The law was written to prevent the proliferation of growers and
dispensaries seen in states like California and Colorado, at first
limiting the state to six dispensaries run by nonprofits, and it
prohibits patients from growing the plants themselves.

New Jersey allows doctors to prescribe marijuana only for patients
with terminal illness or a fairly limited set of specific, chronic
conditions, and limits each person to two ounces per month, compared
with as much as 24 ounces in other states.

Governor Christie, a Republican who took office days after the law
was enacted, has sought to make it still more restrictive in the way
it is carried out. The administration is supposed to put regulations
in place for carrying out the law by Oct. 1, and the law is scheduled
to go into effect on Jan. 1.

Michael Drewniak, the governor's chief spokesman, said Friday that
the administration still expected to have dispensaries ready to open in 2011.

"As we've said all along, we've been considering other options beyond
the Rutgers plan," Mr. Drewniak said, "and we will continue working
diligently to implement a high-quality and secure program." He
declined to elaborate.

The governor is angry about the university's decision, according to
officials who were granted anonymity to comment on private
discussions, and so are some legislators. Assemblyman Reed Gusciora,
a Democrat from Mercer County who was one of the primary sponsors of
the legalization bill, said "the university is chickening out" by not
testing federal authorities' willingness to grant a waiver.

State Senator Nicholas P. Scutari, a Democrat from Linden who was the
other main sponsor, said that Mr. Christie wanted too much control
over the program and that the state would have no choice but to
approve private growers.

"We've known this was going to be a concern for Rutgers from the
get-go, but the administration indicated no, it's not going to be a
problem," Mr. Scutari said. And the hospitals, he said, "have got the
same exact issue."

The New Jersey Council of Teaching Hospitals declined to comment, but
several people briefed on the discussions said the hospitals wanted
some kind of guarantee that they would not be jeopardizing federal money.

Mr. Christie has said he had concerns about how to carry out the law
with enough security. At his request, the Legislature delayed putting
the law into effect for 90 days.

The plan to use Rutgers and teaching hospitals would have given the
state far more direct control over the program than the Legislature
intended, but for the most part, lawmakers said they were amenable to
the idea if it would work.