SENATE PANEL CONTINUES WORK ON MEDICAL CANNABIS

A Senate subcommittee continued its work Tuesday on a new bill seeking
to create a much tighter medical marijuana system in Montana, with the
goal of greatly restricting the number of people eligible for cards to
legally use it.

The three-member panel will meet again this morning with hopes of
completing work on the bill, which would be introduced later in the
day. The plan is for the Senate Judiciary Committee to schedule a
public hearing Friday morning on the new bill.

The bill would be debated on the Senate floor Saturday, Monday or
Tuesday at the latest.

"I anticipate under this new approach we're going to have a
significantly diminished number of cardholders," said the panel's
chairman, Sen. Jeff Essmann, R-Billings, said at the meeting. "I'm
anticipating less than 2,000."

As of February, 28,739 people were authorized to use medical marijuana
in Montana. The lion's share of them obtained cards citing various
kinds of severe and chronic pain categories.

The proposed bill, which would follow New Mexico's model, would make
it much harder for people claiming severe and chronic pain to obtain
cards.

A patient would be required to see his primary physician at least four
times over six months for the doctor to be allowed to recommend that
the person use medical marijuana.

The patient then would have to get a second physician with experience
in serious pain modulation to sign off on their primary physician's
recommendation.

Essmann said the new bill is intended to be adopted in conjunction
with another bill, House Bill 161, by Speaker Mike Milburn, R-Cascade,
that would repeal the current law. Voters approved an initiative in
2004 to legalize medical marijuana.

Although HB161 passed the House, the Senate Judiciary Committee
deadlocked over it last week. It remains in committee.

"I think they both need to pass to make this work," Essmann said after
the meeting.

The proposed bill also would forbid storefront businesses from selling
medical marijuana and would ban any advertising and promotion.

The bill would allow a licensed patient to grow a specified number of
marijuana plants and seedlings with the help of a volunteer assistant.

For those licensed patients who are in hospices, nursing homes or
rental property where they are forbidden from growing marijuana, they
could buy it from certain entities run by a five-member advisory
boards that would sell it to them. However, the sales would be on a
"reimbursed cost basis, not for a profit," a move intended to take
squeeze some of the money out of the current system.

Licensed couriers would have to deliver the medical pot to
patients.

Other members of the subcommittee are Sens. Cliff Larsen, D-Missoula,
and Chas Vincent, R-Libby.