STATE NEEDS MEETING OF MINDS ON POT

There's no other way to describe it, Michigan is schizophrenic about
marijuana.

Voters clearly want marijuana available for medical use, but local
officials, politicians, law enforcement agencies and many in the
medical community appear to be uncomfortable with the new law.

And there's no shortage of reasons why, starting with loopholes in the
law that some critics say essentially legalize the drug.

For three years, officials and marijuana supporters have been debating
how to implement the law with marijuana dispensaries or clubs
sprouting in our communities while officials use moratoriums and
develop zoning ordinances to ban them. Many communities, including
Muskegon Township, are in court to stop dispensaries from operating.
And the state Supreme Court will hear two cases on the issue this fall.

Between 80,000 and 100,000 Michigan residents have registered as
medical marijuana users but many are afraid to be identified as such.
Additionally, those "caregivers" who grow marijuana under the law to
provide to others are in danger of arrest both from the state and the
federal governments.

So what's it going to be? Can Michigan residents use marijuana to
relieve nausea, increase appetite and deal with pain, or not?

All of this was brought to a head last week by an appeals court ruling
that banned medical marijuana sales at a facility in Mount Pleasant
and prompted the estimated 400 to 500 dispensaries in Michigan to shut
down or risk being treated like criminals. But I've been thinking
about this issue since a former high school classmate shared her story.

She has developed fibromyalgia, which is quite painful. She was
uncomfortable with the narcotic painkillers she had been prescribed
and was looking for alternatives. Although she had never used
marijuana in her life, she decided to give pot a try.

She dutifully collected her medical records and took them to a
"dispensary" in a seedy part of Lansing to start the process to be a
registered user. As she sat in the waiting room, she realized that no
one else seemed to have any medical records with them or appeared to
be sick. And they all seemed to be quite a bit younger than her,
college students she thought.

When it was her turn, the "doctor" took a cursory look at her records,
took her hundred bucks and she was good to go. She ended her story by
saying that after that experience she never used marijuana, it seemed
criminal, she said as she showed us her official looking registered
user's card.

I didn't tell her that a Michigan court had recently ruled that all
records of Michigan medical marijuana users had to be turned over to
the federal government, which does treat marijuana use as a crime.

I'm not ready to join fellow Chronicle columnist Steve Gunn in calling
for the legalization of marijuana for all uses. But his argument is
making more and more sense.

Are the long-term effects of marijuana any worse than those of beer,
wine and liquor, which are legal? If marijuana was legalized would
Michigan immediately turn into a state of potheads? What about all the
money spent on what appears to be a losing battle in the war on drugs?
In this economy there are many competing uses for such huge sums.

Gov. Rick Snyder wouldn't go there when the Chronicle Editorial Board
asked him about the issue, not even to talk about the potential
economic benefits of taxing marijuana sales. "It's my job to enforce
the laws of the state," he told us. "The voters clearly want medical
marijuana, but that's not my issue. That's not why I ran. I'm focused
on jobs and kids."

And that's where our focus should be. The distraction and expense of
the medical marijuana debate does nothing to create jobs nor does it
help patients who should be having a legitimate discussion under the
law with their doctors instead of being forced to skulk around like
criminals.