Local News | Seattle police seize marijuana patient files | Seattle Times Newspaper
Seattle police seized files on nearly 600 medical marijuana patients when officers searched the headquarters of a patient support group, activists said Wednesday.

The search occurred Tuesday after a nearby police bicycle officer reported the smell of marijuana. Martin Martinez, who runs the Lifevine cooperative as well as Cascadia NORML, the local chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said no one was arrested but officers seized about 12 ounces of marijuana in addition to the patient files and a computer. There were no marijuana plants growing there, Martinez said.

The police “have a heck of a lot of patient records I don’t think they should have,” said Douglas Hiatt, a Seattle attorney who specializes in medical marijuana cases. “For one thing, those records are protected under federal privacy laws. If you’re a medical marijuana patient, you don’t want the police to know who you are or where you live, and this is why - because you don’t get treated very well.”

Hiatt and Martinez said that before the search they tried to convince the officers as well as a deputy King County prosecutor there were no violations of the medical marijuana law.

Under Washington’s medical marijuana law, doctors can authorize patients to have as much as a 60-day supply of marijuana to treat symptoms of AIDS, cancer and other debilitating or chronic conditions. The law doesn’t define what a 60-day supply is, but the state Health Department proposed this month that it be defined as 24 ounces of usable pot, along with six mature plants and 18 immature plants. Marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

According to Hiatt, the seized documents included patient authorizations, full medical histories, and the names of doctors who authorized the marijuana use.

Alison Chinn Holcomb, who follows marijuana issues for the Washington state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that the group was providing or growing marijuana, and no information that has been revealed thus far would seem to justify seizing the patient files.

“These are very sick people with very serious conditions, and we’re sure none of them want the nature of those conditions made available to the public or to anyone who doesn’t have a valid need for it,” she said.

I have to wonder why Seattle police are involved in a marijuana case when the city overwhelmingly passed I-75, the initiative that makes enforcement of marijuana laws the police’s lowest priority.  A cop on a bike smelled some marijuana?  Was all other crime at a stand-still at that moment?

This is another instance where law enforcement is intimidating lawful medical marijuana patients through the seizure of patient records.  We had a similar case in Oregon where the DEA subpoenaed patient records from an Oregon clinic.  That was thrown out by the presiding judge as an unreasonable seizure.

Why would they do this?  Simple - to get people afraid of putting their names “on a list”.  A 2006 Zogby poll asked people whether they would support “treating marijuana like alcohol by taxing and regulating it.”  55% of the people on the West Coast agreed with the “relax it and tax it” idea.  They know the tide is turning.  And as I go around gathering signatures for the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, the only negative response I get from supporters of the measure is, “I don’t want to put my name down on some list!”

Now that June has arrived it is time to start looking at the Summer Festival Schedule.  I’m going to open this up with a look at the summer festivals I’ll be attending in my neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest.  I’m going to depend on you marvelous Stashers to keep me informed on what’s happening in your area.  Just send me an email at stash@norml.org and I’ll be glad to promote your area’s summer festival.  The Northwest schedule is listed in the Full Story below:

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Medical Marijuana User Denied Organ Transplant
When Jonathan Simchen was diagnosed with kidney failure last summer, he did just what the doctor ordered: He applied for a kidney transplant and took his prescribed medicine — medical marijuana.

The marijuana was meant to control his nausea.

Simchen, a 33-year-old diabetic who lives near Seattle, soon found out there was a Catch-22 rolled up in his legalized joints. He was turned down by two organ transplant programs because he uses medical marijuana.

“[They] took me off the list because they’re afraid of me being a future drug user,” said Simchen, who admits that he has used cocaine. But that was in the past and he even quit using medical marijuana at the hospital’s request.

When Simchen went to the University of Washington Medical Center, he says he was also turned down.

“They made it clear that if you had medical marijuana, they wouldn’t treat me. I just lost hope and got totally frustrated.”

Alisha Mark, a spokeswoman for Virginia Mason, would not discuss details of Simchon’s case because of medical privacy regulations, but said that “any patient who smokes any product — tobacco, cloves, medical marijuana — would be precluded from receiving a transplant here.”

Other transplant doctors and bioethicists, including some in states where medical marijuana is against the law, were surprised to hear about the refusals.

Vivian Tellis, the director of the transplant program at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, says that he would never turn somebody down because of a history of marijuana use or abuse. Because medical marijuana is not allowed in New York, most of those cases involve recreational use.

“There is no known contraindication between marijuana and the drugs you have to take after transplant,” Tellis said.

Maxwell J. Mehlman, director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University, said, “They use a screening process to avoid people who might be failures and they look at several factors from drug use to having a support system.  It has actually been a source of bioethical controversy because it allows them to reject homeless people and people who live alone. In some cases, it’s a backdoor way of rationing based on social worth and lifestyles.”

Following up on the LA Times story I reported yesterday, now we have ABC News picking up on this medical travesty.  It is so much an ingrained antipathy in our culture against “hippies” or “stoners”.  I’ve got to believe that it is nothing but prejudice, pure and simple, because there is no legitimate medical or scientific reason these transplant rejections.

Ms. Mark, I concede that smoking “any product — tobacco, cloves, medical marijuana” isn’t healthy and could be a reason to deny a transplant.  (I am curious, though, how many clove smokers you’ve rejected.)  But you must know that eating cannabis, vaporizing cannabis, tinctures of cannabis, and synthetic THC pills avoid all of the harms of smoking, right?

Institutionalized medicine is bigoted against medical marijuana.  You can grow it yourself; no need for a pharmacist.  You can harvest it yourself; no need for a drug company.  You can use it with no fear of toxicity; no need for more costly medical bills.  You can control your own treatment; no need for time-wasting expensive doctor’s visits.  You can take it or leave it; no need for spendy rehab centers.  If it were protected from job discrimination like a medicine, no need for so much drug testing.

Medical marijuana is not harmful to these transplant patients.  It is harmful to the institutionalized Western disease-care system of medicine, though.

Medical marijuana and organ transplants don’t mix - Los Angeles Times

SEATTLE — This month, Timothy Garon, 56, a Seattle musician, died after being turned down for a liver transplant. He was rejected partly because he had used medical marijuana.

Now, a second critically ill patient in Washington state says he has been denied a spot in two organ transplant programs because he uses doctor-prescribed marijuana.

Jonathon Simchen, 33, of Fife, a town south of Seattle, is a diabetic whose kidneys and pancreas have failed.

He said he was removed from the transplant program at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle because he admitted using medical marijuana. Later, he said, University of Washington Medical Center transplant officials refused to accept him because of the medical marijuana issue.

The lawyer who represented Garon has taken on Simchen’s case.

Douglas Hiatt argues that his clients are the victims of a loosely defined transplant policy, one not based on science.

University of Washington officials, citing privacy laws, declined to discuss specifics of individual cases, but issued a statement acknowledging that they took marijuana use into consideration.

“Although medical marijuana may be an issue in rare cases, it is never the sole determinant in arriving at medical decisions about candidates for organ transplants,” the statement said.

A spokeswoman for Virginia Mason Hospital said smoking of any kind could “lead to patient-safety and transplant-effectiveness issues” and was precluded. She said the hospital’s transplant committee would also weigh a patient’s use of medical marijuana in pill form.

At the University of Washington, the transplant committee said it reviewed “behavioral concerns such as a history of substance abuse or dependency. If such a history exists, then the committee looks at the period of abstinence the candidate has demonstrated to date,” as well as the patient’s efforts to maintain abstinence and potential to abuse again.

Asked why the committee considered marijuana use under a doctor’s supervision “a history of substance abuse,” a hospital spokesman cited the federal law categorizing marijuana as an illegal drug.

Peggy Stewart, a clinical social worker with the liver transplant program at UCLA Medical Center, said bias existed in the medical community against marijuana because of the federal law.

Some transplant committee members see it as an illegal substance and as grounds for automatic rejection.

She said many other addictive prescriptions, particularly pain medications, did not automatically disqualify patients from transplant lists because they were not illegal substances under federal law.

It’s bad because it’s illegal because it’s bad because it’s illegal because it’s bad because it’s illegal…

It is simply beyond my ability to process the outrage of this ignorant cowardice!  Medical professionals will knowingly divert the frailest patients from the safe non-toxic herb and onto the dangerous addictive pharmaceuticals, and then hide behind the government’s skirts?  Ooh, it’s against federal law?  Your state doesn’t think so, members of your profession are recommending it, and your oath is to first do no harm!

Furthermore, that one official says they’d even “weigh” use of medical marijuana in pill form.  That’s called Marinol, and it isn’t against federal law.

As for the “patient safety and transplant-effectiveness” issues, you don’t have any evidence to back that up.  Vaporization or edibles eliminate the problems with smoking.  Post transplant there is no “addictiveness” in the serious physical sense of the word to jeopardize transplant-effectiveness.

This is nothing more than institutionalized discrimination against a disliked minority, only this isn’t about the color of their skin but rather the color of their medicine.

Just catching up on some of the reports from the March this weekend:

Close to 500 protesters took to the streets [of Calgary, Alberta, Canada] Saturday in favour of marijuana’s medicinal use and making it more accessible to those suffering debilitating pain.

Amid the incense aromas and reggae beats, several hundred Austinites rallied at the Capitol on Saturday for the legalization of marijuana for personal and medical use.

Rolling out at high noon May 3, the Ninth Annual Million Marijuana March smoked through downtown Portland as part of Oregon NORML’s protest of pot prohibition and to support the use of medicinal marijuana through Oregon’s sometimes controversial Medical Marijuana Act.

“These guys are easy compared to the anarchists,” said Sgt. Voepel of the Portland Police Department, “they’re on time, and they’re orderly.”

According to the Sarge, the only rabble rousers during the march were two drunkards who were pestering people but were unconnected to the peaceful pro-pot gatherers. No pot smokers were spotted.

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