SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE KEEPS WORKING ON MARIJUANA BILL

HELENA -- 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 Wednesday morning with hopes
of completing 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 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. "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.

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 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 prohibit 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 to grow marijuana, they
could buy it from certain entities run by a five-member advisory
board 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
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.