Local News | “Informal conversation” on medical marijuana | Seattle Times Newspaper
State health officials met with representatives of law enforcement and medicine Monday, another step in their legislatively mandated mission to define the “60-day supply” of marijuana granted in state law to patients with serious health conditions.Although the health department sought public comment in an unusual set of workshops around the state before drafting a rule — which will start the clock on a set of formal hearings — Gov. Christine Gregoire directed it to seek more comment from law enforcement and the medical community, which were barely represented among the hundreds who spoke at the workshops.
For an hour and a half, the participants wrestled with the task.
“This is a medical decision. It should be determined by physicians,” said Don Pierce, executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. But the number shouldn’t be so big that “anybody involved in cultivation and sale could hide behind it.”
Earlier this year, health officials told the governor they planned a limit of 35 ounces and a 100-square-foot growing area.
Dr. Bob Wood, director of the HIV/AIDS Program for Public Health — Seattle & King County, said a pack-a-day smoker would use about 4.4 pounds of tobacco in two months. And two months’ worth of the HIV/AIDS pills he takes weigh 2.2 pounds.
Setting a medical-marijuana limit is difficult, Wood said, because the health department is seeking a “one size fits all” number, something unusual in medicine.
Health officials said they expect to produce a draft by July 1.
Prohibition really warps this conversation. The abuse of prescription drugs is skyrocketing, yet nobody proposes we have police making recommendations to doctors about how many pharmaceuticals they can prescribe.
When police hear “35 ounces”, the gears start turning and they start adding up numbers. Three hundred an ounce, 35 ounces, why that’s over ten grand worth of weed! It sets off their Spidey sense and all they can think of is criminals. They imagine patients only really need a couple of ounces and they’ll be selling the rest and the market will explode! Nobody could really need a kilogram of weed, they figure.
If they gave it some thought, they’d realize that higher limits would lead to less profit for drug dealers.
Right now there are medical marijuana patients who get their medicine from the black market because their caregivers aren’t legally allowed to grow very much medicine. Remember, it’s a crop, and bad things can happen to crops – mites, molds, fungi, or just poor gardening. It’s easy to run out when you have, say, a three ounce limit and you’re a patient who must eat a half-ounce of cannabis a week to function.
If you allow them to grow more, these patients are less likely to visit a dealer. You’re taking the best return customers away from the dealers! You’re hurting the dealer’s bottom line.
Also, as patients are able to maintain larger amounts, it floods the intra-patient market. Patients tend to share with patients, or at the very most, expect modest reimbursement for indoor gardening expenses. My experience in Oregon, where we have a statewide 24 ounce limit, has been one where I know hundreds of patients who haven’t visited the weed dealer in years and pay in expenses the equivalent of $50 per ounce for some of the finest organic cannabis on the planet.
Now, will there be black marketeers hiding behind the medical marijuana card? Of course; don’t be naive. But how are they using it?
Nobody involved in large scale drug dealing – the kind police always say they really mean to target – is stopping at a 10′x10′ grow area and a kilogram of pot. The true dealers have far more than that. They’d use the card to avoid being busted for the minor traffic infraction where they might have a baggie and a pipe on them, or at most, to transport a few plants and some pot from one location to another. But no card is going to help them save their massive suburban house grow-op if police manage to get a valid search warrant.
A real high-level criminal dealer isn’t going to get a medical marijuana card, because he doesn’t want to have anything to do with being tracked in some law enforcement or government database. What you’ll be left with is the names and addresses of the few desperate idiots trying to make a buck scamming this system as low-level pot dealers, the kind of people who would be scamming any other system to make an easy living.
Even so, why is the low risk of fraud a consideration in determining the medical needs of a patient? People defraud Medicare, but we still give Medicare patients quality treatment. Is Washington State really willing to look a cancer patient in the eye and say, “Sorry, you can’t have enough medicine because some guy might sell dimebags in the park.”
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