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1. I-502 makes the Washington ballot, would legalize marijuana
2. Mexican drought affecting marijuana crops
3. Hawaiian legislature may take chronic pain out of medical marijuana
4. New Hampshire legalization bill
5. Vermont may limit patients to 1,000 total

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• Glen Schwarz from Arkansas NORML

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When you hear us and other outlets refer to “sixteen medical marijuana states and DC,” you should be careful to remember that really means there’s pseudo-legalized California, five semi-functional medical marijuana states (Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Montana*, and Michigan), four quasi-functional medical marijuana states (Hawaii, Rhode Island, New Mexico, Arizona), four dysfunctional medical marijuana states (Alaska, Maine, Nevada, and Vermont), and three medical marijuana states in name only (New Jersey, Delaware, and DC) that haven’t actually protected any users.

What I mean by that: In California, anyone who wants to use marijuana for a medical purpose can do so.  In the “semi-functional” states, most of the serious medical users can qualify and have some level of access to medicine.  In the “quasi-functional” states, fewer people are able to qualify and access.  In the “dysfunctional” states, less than 1,000 users qualify.

Now in Vermont, the proponents of a dispensary system there want to ensure that Vermont remains “dysfunctional” by capping the total number of qualifying patients – by law – to only 1,000.

Vermont has about 450 medical marijuana patients. They currently grow their own marijuana or have a designated caregiver do it for them. However, that will change soon.

As many as four distribution centers state-wide could be operational by the end of the year. Legislation prohibits more and limits the number of patients in the state to 1,000.

According to the Vermont Department of Public Health, “about one out of three American women and one out of two American men now living will eventually have cancer” and according to the Centers for Disease Control, there will be 919 men diagnosed this year with prostate cancer alone in Vermont, another 481 will get lung cancer.  So, just for one condition and only two incidences of that condition, there are a potential 1,400 qualifying medical marijuana patients.

So, technically, this law could create a situation where a state bureaucrat has to tell someone with cancer, “Sorry, you’re #1,001. You’ll just have to wait til one of the thousand patients dies for a spot to open up.”

Patients and advocates say strict regulations in Vermont – along with the patient limit – should limit fears of raids. Vermont cities and towns can ban or zone dispensaries as they see fit.

“I think that hopefully for the federal government when they look at Vermont they look at Vermont as being a model,” said Virginia Renfrew, a spokeswoman for the Vermont People with AIDS Coalition.

That’s where medical marijuana is heading and where some of the people who support medical marijuana want to take it.  Vermont doesn’t even recognize glaucoma as a qualifying condition and protects only 0.07% of its population under its medical marijuana law.  Who knew there were Box Canyons in Vermont?

Only one person will be allowed in a dispensary at a time under the rules and customers will be seen by appointment only. No customer will be allowed in the building without their state-issued medical marijuana card

“They did a real good job.  They went from the position of ‘What’s best for the patients’ first,” said [state-registered medical marijuana patient Mark] Tucci. He says the second priority was preventing diversion to non-patients.

Tucci says he would advise most of his fellow patients to use a dispensary but he won’t be walking though that door soon. That’s because the law prevents those who buy medicine at dispensaries from growing their own.

So if you want to shop at one of the four state dispensaries, you get to go in, one at a time, to a building 1,000′ from schools or daycares, if your local community allows it at all, so it will be zoned into someplace far from where you are.  You’ll be video recorded at all times and police can come into the dispensary at any time with no warning for a “compliance check”.  Your dispensary can start with 12 mature plants until it signs up patients, then limited to just 28 mature plants for up to 14 patients.  It’s going to cost $2,500 (non-refundable) to apply to be a dispensary, $20,000 first year and $30,000 each year after to maintain the license, and start-up costs for all the massive security and tracking run about $150,000.  And according to a recent poll, 90% of Vermont’s patients favor this.

The time for legalization is now.

* One could argue Montana has slipped into the “quasi-functional” category after “repeal lite”.  It’s a vague categorization based on total patients served and ease of access.  My breaking point between “semi-” and “quasi-” is 10,000 patients and “quasi-” to “dys-” is 1,000 patients.

DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart - the last remaining member of the Bush Administration working for the Obama Administration.

In a move preceded by its Governor Chris Gregoire and other governors like Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chafee and Vermont’s Peter Shumlin, 42 Washington State Legislators today petitioned the DEA’s Administrator Michele Leonhart to reschedule marijuana at the federal level to recognize medical use.

We write in support of the petition that Governor Chafee and Governor Gregoire recently submitted to initiate rulemaking proceedings for the reclassification of medical cannabis (also known as marijuana) from Schedule I to Schedule II of the CSA.

We are also concerned that qualifying patients with serious medical conditions who could benefit from medical use of cannabis do not have a safe and consistent source of their medicine that has been recommended by a licensed health care professional in our state. The divergence in state and federal law creates a situation Where there is no regulated and safe system to supply legitimate patients who may need medical cannabis. More to the point, it is clear that the long-standing classification of medical use of cannabis in the United States as an illegal Schedule I substance is fundamentally flawed and should be changed. The federal government could quickly solve the issue if it were to reclassify cannabis for medical use from a Schedule I drug to a Schedule II drug so that it can be prescribed, which we believe the petition provides substantiated peer-reviewed scientific evidence to support.

The solution lies ultimately with the federal government. We urge the DEA to initiate rulemaking proceedings to reclassify medical cannabis as a Schedule II drug so qualifying patients who follow state law may obtain the medication they need through the traditional and safe method of physician prescribing and pharmacy dispensing.

Reacting to the news, NORML’s Allen St. Pierre replied to an activist who’d asked if this was the first time a state legislature has initiated such a rescheduling petition.  ”While 36 states from 1980-1994 passed numerous toothless medical cannabis reforms (most of these bills took the form of the legislature and governor ’memorializing’ Congress and the Executive Branch to change cannabis’ scheduling to II or below),” St. Pierre noted, “I think you maybe right that a state legislature itself to date has not formally petitioned the feds for down scheduling.”

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1. Attorney General Holder says federal government will work with governors in medical marijuana states to clarify dispensary operations
2. Gov. Shumlin signs dispensary legislation in Vermont, home grow still allowed
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• Rockin’ Friday: The Clintons – “Free Ride in a Cop Car”

CelebStoner.com Entertainment Report with Steve Bloom, co-author of Reefer Movie Madness: The Ultimate Stoner Film Guide

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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!

Vermont is now one step closer to allowing state-licensed dispensaries to distribute marijuana to qualified patients.

On Thursday, May 5, House lawmakers voted 99-44 in favor of Senate Bill 17, which allows for the state-sanctioned sale of marijuana to qualified patients. Under the bill, four dispensaries may be established to serve up to 1,000 patients.

House lawmakers overwhelmingly decided to pass the measure despite warnings from the US Department of Justice claiming that the operation of such facilities could place citizens and state officials in conflict with federal law.

However, in response to the DOJ’s actions, lawmakers added a provision to the law giving the governor power to “suspend the implementation” of marijuana dispensaries “if the governor determines that it is in the interest of justice and public safety.”

The Senate approved the House’s changes to SB 17 and the measure now goes to Governor Schumlin’s desk for his signature. The Governor had previously gone on record insupport of the bill.

NORML will continue to inform you of the status of SB 17 as it develops.

Read the rest here:
House Clears Way For Passage of Medical Marijuana Distribution Bill

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Legislation to reduce adult marijuana possession penalties has been reintroduced in Vermont.

House Bill 427 amends state law so that the adult possession of up to one ounce of marijuana is reduced from a criminal misdemeanor (punishable by six months in jail and a $500 maximum fine) to a civil offense, punishable by a $150 fine, no jail time, and no criminal record. Passage of the measure, which has been endorsed by Governor Peter Shumlin, will allow state law enforcement to reallocate an estimated $700,000 annually in criminal justice resources. According to a 2009 Mason/Dixon survey, 63 percent of Vermont’s voters favor decriminalization.

Please contact your state House member to support this legislation by entering your zip code below.

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Legislation to Reduce Marijuana Possession Penalties Introduced in Vermont