MARIJUANA ACTIVIST SUES COLORADO IN FEDERAL COURT

Say this about marijuana activist and cannabis spiritualist Brandon
Baker: The guy is an optimistic fellow.

Last week, Baker - a medical-marijuana patient and the founder of a
cannabis church called Greenfaith Ministry - filed suit against the
state of Colorado, arguing that many of the state's medical-marijuana
laws are illegal. That isn't so surprising, given that other cannabis
advocates have done the same. What is surprising is the venue Baker
chose to file his complaint.

The lawsuit (PDF) is filed in federal court, an arena in which all
marijuana use and distribution is as legal as a monkey knife fight.

Baker is arguing that Colorado's laws regulating medical-marijuana
dispensaries - and allowing local governments to ban the businesses
altogether - are an unconstitutional violation of medical-marijuana
patients' life and liberty. Baker, who is representing himself in the
lawsuit, writes:

[A] denial of medical care is a deprivation of an interest in liberty
or life that implicates rights to due process under U.S. Const. (sic)
and Colorado Constitution. . [T]hese vested interests extend to the
care-givers who provide medical marijuana patients with medication
under the Colorado Constitution.

This actually isn't the first time someone has filed a
medical-marijuana-related complaint in Colorado federal court.

Earlier this year, a Missouri man sued (PDF) two would-be business
partners over money he claimed he was scammed out of in a deal to
start a dispensary. The man, Mikhail Mats, says he was defrauded out
of more than $140,000 by David and Jacob Mazin, two brothers who run
the CannaMed chain of medical-marijuana referral clinics.

That case was filed in federal court because of the different home
states for the plaintiff and the defendants, a common practice. But
how a federal judge would have handled the elephant in the case -
after all, the business involved was essentially a federally criminal
enterprise - is unknown. A few months after filing, Mats voluntarily
moved to dismiss the case, indicating a settlement was reached, before
anything substantive happened.

That's unlikely to happen with Baker's suit, which seeks to have many
of Colorado's recently enacted medical-marijuana laws thrown out. In
other words, this should get interesting.