PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The Senate committee on Health & Human Services unanimously approved Wednesday afternoon a bill to allow licensed dispensaries or “compassion centers” to grow and sell marijuana to the 600 patients who currently have the state’s blessings to use the drug for medicinal purposes.
The bill now heads to the full Senate.
A hearing earlier this year hammered home the inherent conflict in the two-year-old state law that allows the sick to smoke marijuana to ease their pain, but provides them no legal way to obtain it.
A Warwick HIV patient told the lawmakers how he would make his way, frail and in pain, from his suburban apartment to the streets of Providence in search of a drug dealer, and how, the first time he went, he was robbed.
A similar bill was approved by the Rhode Island Senate last year, only to die in a House committee. The governor later vetoed a compromise plan to study the concept. The study commission was to “evaluate patients’ access to medical marijuana, the efficacy of compassion centers … the definition of qualifying medical conditions,” among other issues.
As Governor Carcieri saw it, the commission had been created to “move Rhode Island further down the path of weakening the laws governing — and public perception of — illicit drugs,” and “create a roadmap for making the state a party to the manufacture, processing and distribution of a controlled substance.”
In his veto message, he also cited a U.S. Supreme Court decision that held “that it is Congress’ Constitutional responsibility to regulate the interstate drug market, whether legal or not. This ruling puts the individual grower and any future ‘compassion center,’ regardless of licensing status with the state, at risk for prosecution by the federal government,” and “I will not stand idly by as the state flagrantly violates federal law for the promotion of an illegal controlled substance.”
Governor Carcieri, if the Congress has the authority to regulate the interstate illegal marijuana market, and your state now recognizes 600 patients’ right to use cannabis as medicine, isn’t the state already “flagrantly violat[ing] federal law for the promotion of an illegal controlled substance”? Aren’t you protecting 600 customers of Rhode Island’s illegal marijuana dealers? To legalize medical marijuana without a means to acquire it is to subsidize illegal marijuana sales at the state level. You’re actually promoting illegal marijuana more by not having dispensaries!
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Let me start off by simply stating,”Governor Carcieri is a waste of flesh”! He cares about no one but himself and his fellow droogs in this state, like most politicians. He’s also quite notorious for using “the laws governing” and twisting them into to any shape of pretzel he chooses, i.e.: Narragansett Indian smoke shop raid.
Don’t be surprised if the first few dispensaries opened get raided immediately- illegally. Maybe he just wants a bigger cut for all this like his little kiddie operated sweat shop he has piece of down in S.A.!
Keeping my fingers crossed for Rhode Island…