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1. Two different medical marijuana ballot initiatives proposed for Ohio
2. Colorado man fired for medical marijuana awarded unemployment claim on a technicality on appeal
3. Berkeley Patients Group sues Northeast Patients Group in Maine
4. 70-year-old woman convicted of felony for medical marijuana grow, gets probation

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In court filings, Berkeley Patients Group alleges Augusta-based Northeast Patients Group failed to pay back more than $630,000 in loans used for salaries and start-up funds during the successful 2010 permitting process.

Northeast’s chief executive Becky DeKeuster is also named in the lawsuit, which was filed July 6 in Cumberland County Superior Court. DeKeuster, who severed ties with Berkeley in February, is accused of breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty and disclosing trade secrets to a competitor. She declined to be interviewed yesterday.

In court filings, Berkeley claims she quit immediately prior to signing a letter of intent with Mobley Pain Management and Wellness Center, which Berkeley considers a competitor.

Mobley Pain Management is led by a former NBA player Cuttino Mobley, who is also affiliated with Summit Compassion Center, a dispensary planned for Warwick, R.I. Mobley played college basketball at University of Rhode Island and also attended Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield.

Mobley’s group planned to loan Northeast $2 million to get its Maine dispensaries up and running. Terms outlined in the letter of intent show Mobley would provide that funding in several increments, to be paid back over seven years at 18 percent interest.

Six-hundred thousand dollars in loans.  One-hundred twenty-five-thousand dollar annual salary for DeKeuster.  Two million dollars in loans from a former NBA player.  Betrayals and lawsuits and breaches and lots of money for lawyers and investors and executives all about getting a natural herb to sick people to alleviate their suffering.

Does it seem to anyone else we’ve lost sight of the whole point of medical marijuana?

This Northeast Patients Group thinks with 250 patients it can make $1.7 million and in year two with 400 patients they’ll make $3.2 million.  Are we moving from dealers selling overpriced weed because of prohibition’s artificial inflation to companies selling overpriced weed because of government’s over-restrictive regulation?  NPG and the others who were approved to run dispensaries had to submit a $15,000 application fee.  If they were rejected, they forfeited $1,000 of that.

Maine still allows for home grow, at least.  That’s the only defense we have from being gouged by dealers, government, and corporations.  Meanwhile, I think the next few years will be interesting as the first few “green rush” millionaires who came up from the ranks of marijuana activism have to face the influx of new players, like Mobley, who don’t come from an activism background and see medical marijuana as just another field from which to sow more wealth.

State lawmakers have given their initial approval to LD 1296, An Act To Amend the Maine Medical Use of Marijuana Act To Protect Patient Privacy.

LD 1296 seeks to protect the privacy of qualified medical cannabis patients by eliminating the 2010 mandate that citizens must be registered with the state in order to receive legal protection under state law. The measure also seeks to expand the number of qualifying conditions eligible for medical marijuana, and increases the amount of cannabis that patients may legally possess under a doctor’s supervision. LD 1296 also limits the ability of law enforcement to seize cannabis from lawful patients, and mandates for the return of any seized property within seven days.

Full text of LD 1296 is available online here.

You can track the status of this measure here.

Republican Gov. Paul LePage is expected to sign the bill,according to news reports.

Once signed, Maine will be one of the only states that provides full legal protections to medical marijuana patients without requiring them to register with the state.

You can urge Gov. LePage to support this legislation here.

Read more:
Maine Lawmakers Approve Medical Marijuana Patient Privacy Act

At Least 1 – 1.5 Million Americans are Legal Medical Marijuana Patients

Market for these patients in sixteen states and D.C. estimated at between $2 – $6 billion annually

MAY 31, 2011 - We don’t know his or her name, but somewhere in one of sixteen states and the District of Columbia is America’s 1,000,000th legal medical marijuana patient. We estimate the United States reached the million-patients mark sometime between the beginning of the year to when Arizona began issuing patient registry identification cards online in April 2011.

16 states, the Capitol, and ONE MILLION legal marijuana users.

Between one to one-and-a-half million people are legally authorized by their state to use marijuana in the United States, according to data compiled by NORML from state medical marijuana registries and patient estimates.  Assuming usage of one-half to one gram of cannabis medicine per day per patient and an average retail price of $320 per ounce, these legal consumers represent a $2.3 to $6.2 billion dollar market annually.

Based on state medical marijuana laws, the amounts of cannabis these legal marijuana users are entitled to possess means there is between 566 – 803 thousand pounds of legal usable cannabis allowed under state law in America.  These patients are allowed to cultivate between 17 – 24 million legal cannabis plants.  There may possibly be more, as California and New Mexico “limits” may be exceeded with doctor’s permission and some California counties explicitly allow greater amounts, so there may be as much as 1 million pounds of state-legal cannabis allowed under state law in America.

Yet after fifteen years, one million patients, and a million pounds of legal marijuana, few if any of the dire predictions by opponents of medical marijuana have come to fruition.  Medical marijuana states like Oregon are experiencing their lowest-ever rates of workplace fatalities, injuries, and accidents.  States like Colorado are experiencing their lowest rates in three decades of fatal crashes per million miles driven.  In medical marijuana states for which we have data (through Michigan in 2008), use by minor teenagers is down in all but Maine and down by at least 10% in states with the greatest proportion of their population using medical cannabis.

Fourteen of the seventeen medical marijuana jurisdictions have mandatory registries while two (California and Colorado) offer optional registries and one (Washington) has no registry system.  Estimating California’s patient numbers is hampered by its registry system being on a county-by-county basis.  California NORML’s Dale Gieringer estimates between 2% – 3% of the state’s population are holding medical marijuana recommendations – meaning possibly over one million medical marijuana patients in California alone.

California’s patient population can be estimated from data from other medical marijuana states where patients are required to register, shown in the table below. The top two of these are Colorado and Montana, which, like California, have a well developed network of cannabis clinics and dispensaries, and which report usage rates of 2.5% and 3.0%, respectively. Other states, where medical marijuana is less developed, report lower rates of 1% and less. However, California is likely to be on the high side because it has the oldest and most liberal law in the nation. Significantly, California is the only state that permits marijuana to be used for any condition for which it provides relief – in particular, psychiatric disorders, such as PTSD, bipolar disorder, ADD, anxiety and depression, which account for some 20%-25% of the total patient population. Adjusting for this, usage in California could be as much as 25% to 33% higher than in Colorado and Montana, which would put it well over 3% of the population (1,125,000).

A 2%+ patient population estimate is supported by data from the Oakland Patient ID Center, which has been issuing patient identification cards to its members since 1996. The OPIDC serves patients from all over the state, but especially the greater Oakland-East Bay area of Northern California, where its cards are honored by law enforcement. As of 2010, the OPIDC had issued ID’s to 19,805 members from five East Bay cities (Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Hayward and Richmond), amounting to 2.4% of the local population.Because the cards were issued over a period of 14 years, they include numerous patients who have lapsed, moved, or deceased. On the other hand, they do not include many other local patients who have current recommendations but never registered with the OPIDC.

We have made a similar estimate for Washington State’s patients, who are the only ones in the nation with no registry system in place (Gov. Gregoire recently signed a bill that initiates a voluntary registry).  With a law very similar to Oregon’s concerning qualifying conditions, applying Oregon’s 1.04% patient population figure gives us about 69,000 patients in Washington. However, Washington State’s larger urban centers (Seattle and Spokane), combined with a more liberal law than Oregon’s regarding who can sign recommendations (osteopaths, naturopaths, and nurse practitioners can recommend in Washington) and the lack of a state registry’s burden to patient compliance with the program suggests a higher estimate of 1.5% – 2% may be appropriate.  Numbers like Colorado’s 2.5% and Montana’s 3% are improbable as Washington lacks the greater patient access to dispensaries seen in those states.

Delaware, New Jersey, and D.C.’s programs are not operational yet, so they are not shown in our data table.  Most of the other state’s programs produce reports of patient registry numbers.  With Arizona signing up over 3,600 patients since mid-April, when it’s online-only registration went into effect, Arizona is on track to register over 30,000 patients this year.

Quick Facts about Medical Marijuana States:

• The 1.1 – 1.5 million estimated and registered medical marijuana patients in America are legally entitled to cultivate 17 – 24 million cannabis plants and possess 283 –  402 tons of harvested buds.
• The seventeen jurisdictions with medical marijuana encompass over 90 million Americans and 162 votes in the 2012 Electoral College.
• Patients make up over 3% of the population of Montana, almost 2.5% of Colorado, over 2% of California. and over 1% of Oregon, and Washington.
• After Michigan at 0.76% of population, every other medical marijuana state has less than 3 in 1,000 (0.3%) patients in its population.
• California, Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Oregon, and Montana comprise over 98% of the legal medical marijuana patients in America.
• More than 3 out of four (77% – 83%) of all medical marijuana patients live on the West Coast.
• Rhode Island and Vermont, two states where over 10% of the adult population uses marijuana monthly, have patient populations of 0.29% and 0.05%, respectively.
• Monthly teen use of marijuana is down in every medical marijuana state except Maine.
• Annual highway fatalities are down in every medical marijuana state except Rhode Island.
• Incidents of workplace injuries and illnesses are down in every medical marijuana state.

16 states, the Capitol, and 750,000 legal marijuana users.

We don’t know his or her name, but somewhere in one of sixteen states and the District of Columbia is America’s 750,000th legal medical marijuana patient.  The United States reached the three-quarter-million-patients mark as Arizona began issuing patient registry identification cards online in April 2011.

Fourteen of the seventeen medical marijuana jurisdictions have mandatory registries while two (California and Colorado) offer optional registries and one (Washington) has no registry system.  Delaware, New Jersey, and D.C.’s programs are not operational yet.  Most of the other state’s programs produce reports of patient registry numbers.  With Arizona signing up over 3,600 patients since mid-April, when it’s online-only registration went into effect, the fourteen operational programs have served well over 750,000 legal medical marijuana patients.

Quick Facts about Medical Marijuana States:

The 754,799 estimated and registered medical marijuana patients in America are legally entitled to cultivate 11,200,739 cannabis plants and possess 197.78 tons of harvested buds.

The seventeen jurisdictions with medical marijuana encompass over 90 million Americans and 162 votes in the 2012 Electoral College.

Patients make up over 3% of the population of Montana, almost 2.5% of Colorado, and over 1% of California, Oregon, and Washington.  After Michigan at 0.76% of population, every other medical marijuana state has less than 0.3% patients in its population.

Rhode Island and Vermont, two states where over 10% of the adult population uses marijuana monthly, have patient populations of 0.29% and 0.05%, respectively.

Most importantly, in all of these states, trains still run on time, fewer teenagers are using marijuana, economies still produce goods and services, traffic safety has increased, and hoardes of pot zombies aren’t roaming the streets in search of sttrraaiinns!

On Tuesday, May 10, members of the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee voted 8 to 3 against the passage of LD 1453, which sought to regulate the commercial production and distribution of marijuana for adults over 21 years of age.

NORML would like to thank those of you who took the time to contact your state elected officials in support of LD 1453, and we fully expect to see a similar version of this legislation reintroduced next year. NORML would also like to thank the primary sponsor of LD 1453, Rep. Diane Russell (D-Portland). You may also contact Rep. Russell and thank her for political leadership on the marijuana law reform issue.

Thank you for your support of sensible marijuana law reform in Maine.

Here is the original post:
Maine Lawmakers Reject Bill to Tax and Regulate Marijuana

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine’s highest court says a couple can sue a hospital that disclosed confidential health care information to police, leading to drug charges against them.

The Maine Supreme Judicial Court on Tuesday reinstated a lawsuit brought by Dwayne and Debbie Bonney against Stephens Memorial Hospital in Norway.

The Bonneys went to the hospital in 2007 after being assaulted at their South Paris home. A security guard overheard them telling nurses what happened and called police over the Bonneys’ objections. Police went to their home and found evidence of marijuana cultivation.

The Bonneys claimed the guard violated their rights under federal and state laws.

The supreme court ruled state law does not shield health care providers from liability for disclosing confidential information unless it involves an examination to obtain evidence for prosecutors.

Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Maine-court-says-hospital-not-shielded-1333735.php#ixzz1JL8kLpB9

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1. Nevada introduces bill to create medical marijuana dispensaries
2. Maine introduces marijuana legalization bill
3. Indiana discovers over 200 mistakes in drug testing cases from 2007-2009
4. Maryland set to pass bill for true affirmative defense for medical marijuana

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Lawmakers have introduced legislation that seeks to legalize and regulate the “production, distribution, and sale” of marijuana to adults. As introduced, Legislative Document 1453 seeks to regulate the commercial production and distribution of marijuana for adults over 21 years of age. This measure would impose licensing requirements and excise taxes on the commercial, for-profit retail sale of cannabis.

Adults who possess or grow marijuana for personal use, or who share cannabis with other adults, would not be subject to taxation under the law.

LD 1453 proposes to make Maine the first state in the nation to enact a rational public policy for the control and regulation of marijuana. Please show your support for this measure by contacting your state elected officials and urging them to support these common sense proposals. For your convenience, a pre-written letter will be e-mailed to your state representative when you enter your contact information below.

Read more here:

Bill to Tax and Regulate Marijuana Introduced in Maine Legislature

Members of the Maine Joint Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety will not consider legislation this year that sought to expand the state’s existing marijuana decriminalization law.

Under present law, the adult possession of up to 2.5 ounces of marijuana is a non-criminal offense punishable by a fine only.

LD 754 sought to amend existing law so that the adult possession of over 2.5 ounces but less than 5 ounces is classified as a civil violation.

LD 750 sought to amend existing law so that the cultivation of up to six marijuana plants by an adult is also classified as a civil violation.

In 2009, Maine lawmakers increased the amount of marijuana that may be classified as a civil offense from 1.25 ounces to 2.5 ounces.

A co-sponsor of both LD 754 and LD 750, Rep. Diane Russell, has announced her intention to introduce legislation to legalize and regulate the adult use and distribution of cannabis later this year.

NORML would like to thank those of you who took the time to contact your lawmakers in support of LD 754 and LD 750. NORML continues to work with sympathetic lawmakers in Maine and will keep you abreast of forthcoming statewide reform efforts as they become finalized.
Read more:
Maine Lawmakers Reject Bills To Expand Marijuana Decriminalization