Medical Marijuana

FOX WANTS ACTION ON DISPENSARIES

House Speaker Says He'll Petition Federal Government to See What
State Needs to Do

PROVIDENCE ---- House Speaker Gordon D. Fox says he'll personally
petition the U.S. Department of Justice to seek a way for Rhode
Island to open the medical marijuana dispensaries that advocates have
long sought.

"I plan on going to the federal government to ask them: what do you
need it to look like?" the Providence Democrat said Tuesday. "Because
I think it's been too long and there have been too many people
waiting. ... I hear so many stories of people waiting for relief and
they are not being addressed. They deserve better than that."

Earlier this year, Governor Chafee halted the process of issuing the
state's first dispensary operating licenses, following a warning from
the Justice Department that the facilities might violate federal law.

Later Chafee said he would petition, along with Washing-ton Gov.
Christine Gregoire, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration to
reclassify marijuana so it can be sold as a physician-prescribed
drug. He also said he would work with the legislature to scale back
the size of the proposed dispensaries.

Fox says the governor's office has not yet presented Assembly leaders
with such a plan.

He believes that the administration can potentially address the
federal government's concerns through the rulemaking process, which
falls under the auspices of executive branch agencies rather than the
state legislature.

"If it is about volume of business, or whatever, I think you can come
up with some rules, and you don't have to come to the legislature
saying, 'This is what you have to do'," Fox said.

Like advocates, he believes that large-scale, state-regulated
facilities where marijuana is grown and sold are preferable to the
current system, which allows medical marijuana patients to either
grow their own marijuana or purchase the drug from "caregivers"
licensed to sell and grow limited quantities of it.

Fox argues that the federal government has lately been sending "mixed
signals" about its stance on the medical marijuana dispensaries,
which are also referred to as "compassion centers."

Under federal law, marijuana is a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance, or
drug, with no medicinal value. Anyone operating a dispensary,
therefore, could be charged with running large-scale drug operations.

But Fox says that while individual U.S. Attorneys have issued
warnings to state officials, their boss, U.S. Attorney General Eric
H. Holder Jr., has told Congress that his department would not
crackdown on government-approved dispensaries if they met certain
legal requirements.

And Fox says that in California, a recent federal deadline to shut
down dispensaries has come and gone. "It is like, what's really going on here?"