COPS USED FAKE PATIENT IDs TO BUY MEDICAL POT; WAS IT ENTRAPMENT?

Oakland County Sheriff's deputies used phony Michigan
medical-marijuana cards -- created on a county computer -- to trick
state-approved medical marijuana providers into selling the drug to
the cops, according to documents obtained by the Free Press from
defense attorneys.

Days after the drug buys, county narcotics agents raided two
medical-marijuana dispensaries Aug. 25 in Ferndale and Waterford.

"These officers were denied entrance on several occasions because of
improper paperwork, but when they appeared with these cards, I had no
way to check," said Brian Vaughan, a doorman at the now closed
Everybody's Cafe dispensary in Waterford, who is charged with
multiple drug violations.

"You've got law enforcement spending time and money to entrap users
of medical marijuana," Southfield attorney Michael Komorn said Tuesday.

But law-enforcement officials said Tuesday the phony patient ID cards
were a legitimate way to get evidence.

"Regardless of whether the cards were real or not, the pure and
simple fact is, dispensaries are not legal in Michigan," Oakland
County Undersheriff Mike McCabe said.

Whether the fake cards constitute entrapment and whether dispensaries
are legal will be decided by judges in cases expected to land in
state appeals courts, as both sides predict that the raids could lead
to landmark decisions that interpret the murky Michigan Medical Marijuana Act.

Raids Could Settle State Pot Law

Oakland County authorities said that when their undercover officers
used forged medical-marijuana identification cards -- near duplicates
of those issued to more than 41,000 Michiganders -- it was a
perfectly legitimate way to bust those selling medical marijuana who
abused the Michigan Medical Marijuana Act.

But defense attorneys for more than two dozen medical-marijuana
patients arrested in the Aug. 25 raids of medical-marijuana
establishments in Ferndale and Waterford are crying foul, saying
their clients were trapped into lawbreaking while trying to stay
within the state law.

Both sides say the cases -- stemming from raids of Everybody's Cafe,
a social club for patients in Waterford, and of the Clinical Relief
storefront dispensary in Ferndale -- are sure to land in state
appeals courts and likely to decide whether dispensaries, commercial
outlets for selling the drug to patients, are legal in Michigan.

Oakland County Prosecutor Jessica Cooper said Tuesday that using the
fake ID cards "wasn't entrapment (because) entrapment is a legal
defense that applies only in cases where someone is lured into
committing an illegal act.

"They weren't lured, but instead were "so far outside the act (it's)
absurd," Cooper said.

She cited evidence of "hand-to-hand buys of copious amounts of drugs."

And a state-approved caregiver, which many of the establishments'
employees claim to be, can provide medical marijuana only to his or
her five registered patients, "regardless of whether the cards were
real or not," Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe said.

"Obviously, none of these officers (with the Oakland County Narcotics
Enforcement Team) were their patients," McCabe said Wednesday.

But officials with the Michigan Department of Community Health, the
agency charged by the state Legislature with implementing the state
law allowing medical marijuana, said many parts of the law are
unclear to their department's attorneys.

"There's nothing in the act that addresses the change process if a
patient wants to add a caregiver or remove a caregiver," and whether
dispensaries are illegal "is nothing that we have any opinion on,"
Celeste Clarkson, manager of the Michigan Medical Marijuana Registry
Program, said Tuesday.

Prosecutor Cooper and McCabe's boss, Oakland County Sheriff Michael
Bouchard, have said they're on a crusade -- supported by County
Executive L. Brooks Patterson -- to show that medical marijuana
dispensaries and related establishments are illegal in Michigan.

"They're using people like us as victims in this and they're
destroying our businesses and our lives," William Teichman, 50, of
Waterford said.

Teichman, a Chrysler engineer; his wife, Candi Teichman, and more
than two dozen other Oakland County residents have been charged with
multiple counts of illegal drug delivery, based on the alleged sales
of medical marijuana to undercover officers at establishments
including the Teichmans' former restaurant, Everybody's Cafe. The
restaurant, now shuttered, used to close each day at 4 p.m. and
operate as a compassion club for medical marijuana users, their
attorney Jeffrey Perlman of Southfield said.

"Bill and Candi were giving people a place to use their medical
marijuana, mostly by eating it, not smoking it, so they wouldn't have
to do it at home in front of children or out on the streets," Perlman said.

"Nobody was allowed in without a document from the state showing they
were a certified patient. And so, everyone in the cafe was legal
except these officers" who used phony state ID cards, Perlman said Tuesday.

The case constitutes entrapment because "the people in the cafe who
were caregivers would never have sold to someone who was illegal,"
Perlman said.

The cases could take years to be settled by the state's highest
courts, or be resolved far more quickly by a Republican landslide in
November if Lansing lawmakers subsequently repealed the Michigan
Medical Marijuana Act, which was passed in 2008.