SALEM, Ore. (AP) — The right of Oregonians to use marijuana for medical reasons and also to obtain concealed handgun permits is being challenged by local sheriffs who say federal law prevents those people from packing heat.

Advocates for the state’s medical marijuana law countered Wednesday in the Oregon Court of Appeals that the sheriffs simply don’t like the program and are looking for ways to undermine it.

Both sides now are looking to the courts to say definitively whether there’s anything to prevent Oregon from issuing the concealed handgun permits to users of medicinal pot.

Sheriffs from Washington and Jackson counties say, though, that they want clarification from the court on whether federal gun laws prohibiting illegal drug users from possessing handguns applies to people who have permits to use marijuana for medical reasons. Marijuana is still classified as a controlled substance under federal law, they said.

Lower courts had twice ordered the two sheriffs to give weapons permits to people who had lost them because they are medical marijuana users, and both appealed those rulings.

I hope the Oregon court takes some guidance from the California Supreme Court and US Supreme Court rulings on San Bernardino and San Diego counties’ suit over registry ID cards.  The California counties, headed up by law enforcement ideologues that hate their state’s medical marijuana law, thought they didn’t have to enforce the state law that required counties to make ID cards because the federal law says all pot is illegal.  Both the state and federal supreme courts deferred to earlier appellate judgments that state and local cops are charged with enforcing state and local law, not federal law.

By that reasoning, I’d assume county sheriffs in Oregon are bound to enforce state law, and since Oregon’s medical marijuana law says it is to be treated “like other medicines”, unless the sheriffs are pulling concealed handgun permits from Vicodin and Oxycontin users, they shouldn’t be pulling them from medical marijuana users.

Furthermore, since this state has no dispensary system, patients are forced to grow their own or store large quantities of medicine, making them prime targets for robbers and home invasions – disabled people with lots of weed in their homes are the very people the 2nd Amendment was enacted to protect!

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Russ Belville interviewed by Portland NBC affiliate (KGW)

Happy 4/20 to activists everywhere!  I spent the morning Salem at the Oregon State Capitol with activists from Oregon NORML and other groups in protest of Senate Bill 388.  These are changes in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act being sought by law enforcement in association with one medical marijuana patients organization.  Every other organization representing patients in Oregon stand united in opposition to these changes.

Most troublesome are measures designed to curb the number of patients a medical grower can provide for.   We have many patients in hospice who are served by these large cooperative grows, and SB388 would make them almost impossible.  A compassionate grower I know asked, “which one of my 26 cancer, MS, and AIDS patients do I tell I can’t help anymore?”

(Sorry to say my day is completely booked with 4/20 festivities… so no Stash for today.  The complete 4/20 round-up will be online tomorrow.  Have a great day, I know I am. — “R”R)

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Download the NORML Daily Audio Stash for 2008-06-26

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I’m doing a bit of remote podcasting from here on the Central Oregon coast.  Hope you enjoy today’s show.  I’ve got an interview with Portland attorney and NORML Legal Committee member Leland Berger.  With the Supreme Court deciding today there is an individual right to keep and bear arms, it’s fitting that we talk about how a couple of sheriffs in Oregon tried to take away that right from some law-abiding medical marijuana patients.

As you can read below, we had a winner in our Pass the Stash contest.  Thanks for all the entries, and next time I won’t make the questions so tricky (worldwide box office? possession only? tricky, dude…)

Also enjoy another tune from the incredible Carolyn Wonderland.  It’s her ballad of a young woman serving time for dealing pot called “Annie’s Scarlet Letter.”

Gotta go – the ocean beckons…

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This report just in from NORML Legal Committee member Lee Berger, a criminal defense attorney here in Oregon:

Washington County (Hillsboro; just west of Portland) Oregon Judge Steven L. Price ordered Sheriff Rob Gordon to return to three Oregon Medical Marijuana patients their concealed handgun licenses. Sheriff Gordon had denied one patient’s application, one patient’s renewal, and had revoked one patient’s license based on the argument that federal law prohibiting the possession of a firearm by a controlled substances user preempted state law.  Judge Price ruled it did not, as did Washington County Judge Marco Hernandez before him.

I argued the same issue (with basically the same letter from the sheriff and the same argument from county counsel) before Jackson County (Medford, Southern Oregon) Presiding Judge Shively on Friday morning and am hopeful for a similar result.

I’ve long argued about the effect the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Parmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs has on our Constitutional rights, and the 2nd Amendment is no less a victim than the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 14th, and 15th.

My contention is that since most mandatory minimum sentences double when there are firearms present, even if the firearms are legally possessed, doesn’t this in essence serve to deprive cannabis consumers of our 2nd Amendment rights?  People think of guns and drugs and automatically assume the person must be some cold-blooded drug dealer when many are just cannabis gardeners who can’t call the cops when scary kids with weapons break in to steal very profitable crops.

But these cases take the cake.  I’ve talked with Lee about these cases, where sheriffs in Oregon’s more conservative counties will disarm medical marijuana patients who are following state laws with respect to marijuana and the handgun.  The idea that the patients are really just dope dealers is a prejudice found often in law enforcement, which is the craziest idea when those patients have filled out a form with the state and registered their address for growing into an electronic database that is instantly accessible by law enforcement to verify legality.  That’s far more registration than most law-abiding gun owners are subject to.

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