VETO SB423, TAKE CONTROL OF MARIJUANA ISSUE

When Montanans legalized medical marijuana in 2004, they did so by a
larger majority than Californians had a few years earlier. More
Montanans wanted to protect patients who receive medical benefits from
marijuana than voted for President George W. Bush or any other
statewide candidate that year.

Today, along with broad agreement that there have been problems and
that the law's loopholes and gray areas require fixing and regulation,
polls consistently show that Montana voters still strongly support the
principle of medical marijuana rights. One, by Public Policy Polling
several months ago, found only 20 percent of voters want to repeal the
law, and 76 percent support either new regulation or no changes at
all.

A Mason-Dixon poll conducted more recently obtained similar results,
showing that a whopping 87 percent supports either new regulation or
no change in the current law.

Yet Republican leaders of the Montana Legislature, who have the votes
to pass nearly anything, have insisted only on trying to repeal the
law rather than fix it. For months, they ignored bipartisan regulatory
proposals strongly supported by law enforcement, local governments and
patients, and instead passed only a repeal bill.

Now that the Gov. Brian Schweitzer vetoed that, the sole remaining
option was passage of SB423, which proponents openly admit has been
designed to "get as close to repeal as possible."

Republicans don't want to fix the program so that it actually works
for both patients and law enforcement; they don't want to strictly
regulate and, thus, save some of the many new jobs that have been
created to produce an array of superior cannabis-based products for
patients. It seems they'd rather keep marijuana illegitimate, shameful
and subject to unsavory black market pressures.

The governor did suggest a cadre of amendments to the bill under his
power to amend through veto. His amendments fell on largely deaf ears,
and the bill was returned to him with little change.

So, instead of fixing our law's problems, SB423 will make the
voter-adopted policy even more broken and dysfunctional, and
legitimate patients all over the state will suffer if it becomes law.
Its proponents make no secret of their goal to arbitrarily shrink the
number of legal patients to fewer than 2,000 -- rather than simply
tighten the law to ensure that all patients are medically justified
and supervised.

In its current form, SB423 will leave Montana with only the pretense
of allowing medical marijuana under the draconian terms of the
nation's very worst medical law. The bill defies federal rules on
health care privacy by requiring patient status to be divulged to
local law enforcement without guarantees of confidentiality.

It intrudes in unprecedented ways on physician standards of practice
and free speech by requiring any doctor who makes more than 15
marijuana recommendations to pay the cost of an automatic
investigation. It virtually guarantees that if any patients could
obtain medical recommendations, very few would actually have
consistent, dependable access to medicinal quality cannabis because it
would require that cannabis be grown -- magically "for free" -- either
by a sick patient or by a close friend or relative who can't grow for
anyone else.

The bill maximizes the difficulty and cost of producing cannabis, yet
bans any payment for it. It's replete with provisions like these,
intended solely to obstruct compassionate voter intent rather than
allow its fulfillment in controlled and socially acceptable ways.

We don't treat people this way who use narcotics to deal with their
chronic pain, cancer, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis and other severe
and usually permanent medical conditions. Yet narcotics -- even when
used as directed -- kill hundreds of people every year, while marijuana
itself has never killed anyone.

A study of Montana's marijuana patients conducted by a pain
specialist, and published last September in Practical Pain Management,
documented that these patients sharply reduce their dependence on
narcotics and function more productively as a result.

Hundreds of sincere and suffering Montana patients have traveled great
distances in lousy weather over the past few months to testify that
medical marijuana offers them a better option, in many cases the only
one that actually works.

How can we tell a woman who no longer endures a dozen seizures every
day that she has to go back to using the narcotics that didn't control
her epilepsy but whose side effects did cause her to gain hundreds of
extra pounds? How do we tell an MS patient that he has to return to
using the drugs that made it impossible for him to talk coherently
with his children?

We have to do better. The governor should reject SB423 outright and
take on the job of using administrative powers under our current law
to create regulation that will control rather than obstruct the will
of the state's voters.