City Passes Ban With 9-1 Vote

CITY COUNCIL BANS STOREFRONT SALES OF MEDICAL MARIJUANA

The Billings City Council adopted an emergency ordinance Tuesday
night that bans the storefront sale of medical marijuana, effective
on Wednesday.

The council has been dealing with various aspects of the regulation
of medical marijuana for the past several years.

Ward 3 City Councilman Vince Ruegamer said he and his colleagues had
already listened to more than 40 hours of public testimony on the
contentious subject.

During a special session Tuesday night, the council heard another
hour of testimony from 28 people, many of them familiar faces making
familiar points.

When the testimony was over, council members briefly discussed the
issue before adopting the ban on a 9-1 vote, with only Rich McFadden
of Ward 3 voting no and Angela Cimmino of Ward 2 absent. Like all
emergency ordinances, this one needed eight votes to pass.

The council had postponed action on the emergency ordinance at two
meetings in June, agreeing to wait for a ruling from a Lewis and
Clark County judge who was hearing a lawsuit that challenged a
restrictive law passed by the 2011 Legislature. Judge James Reynolds
had promised to issue a ruling before last Friday, when the new state
law was to have taken effect.

He did so Thursday, tossing out major portions of Senate Bill 423,
including a provision that would have banned for-profit sales of
medical marijuana, and another that would have banned providers from
advertising their product.

Reynolds left intact a section of the law that authorized local
governments to enact their own prohibitions on storefront sales of
medical cannabis.

Rep. Ken Peterson, R-Billings, said City Council members had asked
Montana legislators to give them guidance, to pass legislation that
would rein in some of the abuses resulting from the citizen
initiative that legalized medical cannabis. He and Rep. James Knox,
R-Billings, who also testified, said the Legislature had done its part.

"Please, do your part," Knox said.

There was a brief outburst from supporters of medical marijuana when
Peterson, at the end of his testimony, said pickup loads of teenagers
were driving up to marijuana dispensaries and leaving with supplies
of legal weed. Several people openly scoffed at the comment, and one
man walked out, saying he couldn't take any more.

Mayor Tom Hanel warned people that no further outbursts would be
tolerated, and he later threatened to have one side of the council
chambers cleared out, prompting cannabis entrepreneur Mark Higgins to
leave his seat and sit down on the other side of the aisle.

Janna Johnson, who described herself as a lifetime diabetic who uses
marijuana to treat various side effects of her disease, asked council
members where she was supposed to buy her pot if the ban were approved.

"People just want me to find it at some dude's house now," she said.
"That's wrong."

Under questioning from Ruegamer, Johnson said she had been using
medical marijuana for 15 years. Ruegamer asked her where she bought
it before the citizen initiative passed in 2004.

"I had to procure it from places I didn't like," she said.

Supporters of the ban said said storefronts lent an air of legitimacy
to marijuana and signaled that city officials condoned use of the drug.

"It gives the wrong message altogether," said Steve Zabawa, a member
of Safe Communities, Safe Kids, which has urged repeal of the citizen
initiative.

Medical marijuana provider Kathy Adler, the owner of New Frontier
Patient Care on Grand Avenue, and others urged the City Council to
postpone a vote until Montanans had another chance to weigh in on the issue.

She talked about the effort to gather petition signatures to place a
referendum on the 2012 ballot to overturn SB423. If supporters get
enough signatures by Sept. 30 of this year, the law would be
suspended until the 2012 election.

Adler pleaded with the council to "wait until you know what the
community actually wants."

Councilman Denis Pitman, of Ward 2, reminded people that the ban
applies only to the city of Billings. Referring to the just-passed
Fourth of July holiday, he said storefront sales of medical
marijuana, like fireworks, would be legal outside the city.