DON'T HOLD YOUR BREATH FOR A MEDICAL MARIJUANA LAW THAT MAKES SENSE

Michigan's medical marijuana users are in a pickle.

A 2-year-old state law gives them immunity from prosecution for "the
acquisition, possession, cultivation, manufacture, use, internal
possession, delivery, transfer or transportation of marijuana," so
long as they've been authorized to do so for the relief of a
legitimate malady or symptom.

But Michigan continues to make it a crime for almost anyone --
including other licensed medical marijuana users -- to provide the pot
that card-carrying patients are entitled to acquire, possess,
cultivate, etc.

The paradox was outlined in sharp relief earlier this year when a
frustrated Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Joel Hoekstra asked an
assistant attorney general appearing before him how prosecutors were
supposed to enforce such an illogical muddle.

"So you can have a (marijuana) transaction," Hoeskstra began
incredulously, "where one half of it's legal, and the other half is
illegal?"

"That's how the Medical Marijuana Act is designed at this point,"
answered the assistant attorney general, Heather Meingast.

"And the attorney general believes that's a workable definition of how
this should happen?" Hoekstra pressed.

"It's not a question of whether it's workable or not," Meingast
retorted. "Is there a better way? Clearly."

Death to dispensaries

The Michigan Marijuana Act of 2008 -- adopted by a majority of
Michigan voters even more substantial than the one that delivered the
state's electoral votes to Barack Obama -- is fraught with hazard for
innocents who imagine that just because it is legal for some people to
buy marijuana, it must be legal for somebody else to sell it.

In the case referenced above, Isabella County Prosecutor Larry Burdick
sought the Court of Appeals' sanction for his efforts to close a local
marijuana dispensary where licensed medical marijuana patients and
their caregivers stored and exchanged harvests from the 12 pot plants
each patient is authorized to cultivate.

A county trial judge had rebuffed Burdick's crackdown, reasoning that
while the Medical Marijuana Act failed to authorize such dispensaries
explicitly, it appeared to protect licensed medical marijuana patients
or caregivers -- such as the founders of the Isabella County
dispensary -- from prosecution or police harassment for transferring
small amounts of medical marijuana among one another.

But Hoekstra and two other appellate court judges -- Engler appointee
Christopher Murray and Granholm appointee Cynthia Stephens -- agreed
with Prosecutor Burdick and Assistant AG Meingast that the law
protects only patients and caregivers who receive marijuana, not those
who provide it.

Under the law, as Meingast explained to the court, "The patient walks
away, the dealer is subject to prosecution" -- even if the dealer in
question is a patient providing surplus marijuana to another patient.

It might not make a lot of sense, she conceded, but fashioning a more
workable law was up to the state Legislature or "the democratic process."

They'll fix it, all right

It is the democratic process, of course, that got us into this mess in
the first place.

In 2010, the same Michigan electorate that had voted to legalize
medical marijuana two years earlier elected Republican legislative
majorities, a Republican attorney general and a few dozen county
prosecutors convinced that the Medical Marijuana Act was a terrible
idea from the get-go -- and determined to use the law enforcement
resources at their disposal to limit the scope of the act or
emasculate it altogether.

And these are the very same public officials that legitimate medical
marijuana users are depending on to make the new law more "workable?"

You can inhale, ladies and gentlemen (providing you have the requisite
state issued license, of course), but I wouldn't hold your breath.