Health | Medical marijuana: How much is enough? | Seattle Times Newspaper
A state Health Department proposal that medical-marijuana patients be allowed more than 2 pounds of pot every two months took law enforcement by surprise and prompted the governor to tell health officials to start over.
Faced with a legislative mandate to spell out what constitutes a “60-day supply” by July 1, the department in February briefed Gov. Christine Gregoire’s office on its recommendation: Patients or caregivers could possess up to 35 ounces of cultivated marijuana and be allowed a plant-growing area of 100 square feet.
In four hearings around the state last fall, hundreds of patients and medical-marijuana advocates lined up to speak. But conspicuously absent from most hearings were the voices of two important “stakeholders”: doctors and law-enforcement officials.
Officially, law-enforcement leaders say they just want a number — any number — for the amount of pot qualified users can possess. They say they’re not doctors and they wouldn’t presume to set an amount any more than they would tell a patient how much cholesterol medication to take.
But when pressed, they express discomfort with the amounts revealed to the governor in the briefing.
Cowlitz County Sheriff Bill Mahoney says the whole issue is now “very, very difficult for law enforcement to deal with” because nobody knows what constitutes a 60-day supply.
“From my standpoint as a sheriff, I just need the state to step up and define it. I don’t care what the number is.”
But, he adds: “Most of our cops, if they were forced to come up with a number, they’d say 3 ounces.”
How did the state Department of Health (DOH) calculate the amount? According to its briefing memo, obtained through a Public Disclosure Act request, the department began with the average dosages given to a handful of patients enrolled in a federal medical-marijuana program.
The federal program, called “Compassionate Investigational New Drug”program, supplies a limited number of patients with 300 to 450 “joints” per month, or about 9 ounces, according to department research. It doubled that amount, because some patients might eat the marijuana instead of smoking it.
The 35-ounce amount is more than permitted in some places that allow medical marijuana use, but less than others. For example, Oregon allows 24 ounces of usable marijuana and six mature plants, while limits in California counties and cities range from 8 ounces to 3 pounds in Humboldt, Santa Cruz and Trinity counties, the Health Department’s memo said.
Washington State’s 60-day supply law is in real need of definition. I know when I first moved to Oregon I thought that three ounces was a whole lot of cannabis. And for a recreational user or someone suffering only from occasional pain or nausea, it is a lot of cannabis.
But I know patients who cannot smoke or vaporize, they must eat their medicine. Patients who are suffering so severely that the same three ounces that might last you months may only last them a few days. And we can never forget that marijuana is a crop; you don’t always get a guaranteed good harvest. A large possession limit allows a patient to stockpile in case of a failed crop.
This strange legislative dance between patients who need to grow medicine and police who need to catch potheads is always going to create these ludicrous situations where medical decisions must be tempered by the whims of “stakeholders” in law enforcement. This is why cannabis needs to be legal for all adults, otherwise patients will always suffer from non-medical limits, mistaken raids, and black-market prices.
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.
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.
[The latest upgrade to WordPress 2.5.1 has wiped out my style sheets. So that’s why the Stash site looks funny today. I’m working hard on getting it fixed, please be patient.]
Inmate in ’severe pain’ without medical marijuana | KOMO-TV - Seattle, Washington | News
SNOHOMISH COUNTY, Wash. — A 35-year-old Shelton man is fighting for the right to use medical marijuana. The problem is that Alex Morris is in the Snohomish County Jail. The state’s Medical Marijuana Act does not cover inmates of jails or prisons. Alex is in jail for 30 days.
His wife says those 30 days will make him very, very sick.
“He’s in severe pain, unbearable excruciating pain because he’s not able to eat to keep things down,” said Kim Morris. “He’s lost ten pounds in the last eight days.”
Alex has Crohn’s disease and as a result suffers severe headaches. The law covers that and Alex has his doctor’s permission; he’s registered as a user of medical marijuana.
“It allows me to eat, to hold food down, to come out of my dark hole I’m in,” said Alex, speaking from jail.
“Alex has tried all the other medications for Crohn’s and, for him, they don’t work,” said Kim.
But jail officials say Washington law clearly states that permission to use medical marijuana does not include correctional facilities.
“At this point in time we do not allow people to have medical marijuana in the jail,” said Deanna Dawson, executive director for corrections in the Snohomish County Executive’s Office.
Dawson says it would take an act of the Legislature to approve use of a drug not available in the jail pharmacy, specifically marijuana. The present law does not actually authorize prescriptions; it authorizes medicinal use.
“I don’t have a problem with people being in custody, the question is: is it cruel and unusual punishment to keep a person incarcerated and not provide them with the vital medications they require?” said Alex’s attorney James Kovac.
This is a story that has been told before, regrettably ending in the deaths of patients like Peter McWilliams. No operational state medical marijuana law allows the prescription for marijuana (cf. Arizona), because that runs afoul of the federal government’s regulations regarding drug scheduling and any doctor who prescribes marijuana will lose his license to prescribe any drug.
So states have set up recommendations for marijuana, and the Clinton administration tried to intimidate doctors to not even recommend marijuana, but the Supreme Court ruled that would violate doctors’ right to free speech.
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.
“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.
It’s Friday, May 2nd and it’s 4:20 somewhere in the world! I’m your host, “Radical” Russ Belville and this is your NORML Daily Audio Stash.
Tomorrow is the Global Marijuana March, taking place in over 200 cities worldwide. Check out GlobalMarijuanaMarch.org for more details on the march in your area. Take to the streets and demand respect. We are not criminals, we are cannabis consumers. We are no more criminals for smoking pot in private than citizens who take a drink in private. We can end adult marijuana prohibition, but the world needs to see us standing up for our rights! It starts with you – take the time to get involved.
Friday is Cannabis Community day on the Stash, and coming up after the news, we’re speaking with our regular guest Steve Bloom, the webmaster at CelebStoner.com. Steve’s got the details for New York City’s Marijuana March, along with a New York native’s look at how the Big Apple became the marijuana arrest capital of the world. We also break down the role of weed in the NFL draft and great box-office weekends for Harold & Kumar and CelebStoner Amy Poehler’s movie, Baby Mama.
Next, Cannabis Karri brings back Freedom People with a perfect song for a protest weekend, “New (R)evolution”. Let’s all start a new revolution and get hemp re-legalized in this country.
Then we wrap things up with Tim Smith, a criminal defense attorney in Cincinnati, Ohio. Tim’s here to tell us about the Marijuana March event this weekend in Cincy and the threats by law enforcement to shut them down by threatening the venue owner’s liquor license.
Finally, don’t forget that every Saturday we’re now posting the NORML Weekend Music Stash, where you can get all of the last ten songs from our daily musical breaks in one podcast, suitable for your weekend party pleasure. If you have a band that would like to be featured on our podcast, please send us an email at stash ‘at’ norml.org.
So sit back and relax with your favorite strain and enjoy your NORML Daily Audio Stash…
Finally today, a personal note. This year’s Global Marijuana March marks the third year of my involvement with NORML through my local chapter, Oregon NORML.
We want to invite everyone in the Portland / Vancouver area to enjoy the huge festivities we have planned. We have Pioneer Courthouse Square reserved in the heart of Downtown Portland for the entire day. Vendors and bands will begin at 10am.
Then we leave for the march at High Noon, led by Ma, our Cannabis Dragon – a forty-foot-long hemp-cloth dragon like you might see at a Chinese New Year, with a four-foot head made completely from cannabis stalks.
We return to the Square for more of the festival, with special guest speakers, including myself, educating the public about marijuana in-between band sets.
We’re kicking off our PR campaign for OCTA 2010, the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, an initiative for 2010 that will legalize, tax, and regulate the sales of cannabis in Oregon through state-run liquor stores.
The outdoor festival ends at 5pm, but then we’re off to the Mt. Tabor Legacy Theater at SE 39th & Hawthorne at 8pm to enjoy the Marijuana March After Party, a concert featuring The Martyrs and Marquee, with special guest Chief Greenbud and our headliners, Las Vegas hemp-hop superstars, Los Marijuanos.
Then the after after party is at my place, I suppose, since the DJ, his girlfriend, a visiting Sacramento NORML board member, and two vendors are crashing there for the weekend. Ah, you know what? I have the greatest job in the world.
The death of Timothy Garon, 56, at Bailey-Boushay House, an intensive care nursing center was confirmed to The Associated Press by his lawyer, Douglas Hiatt, and Alisha Mark, a spokeswoman for Virginia Mason Medical Center, which operates Bailey-Boushay.
Dr. Brad Roter, the physician who authorized Garon to smoke pot to alleviate for nausea and abdominal pain and to stimulate his appetite, said he did not know it would be such a hurdle if Garon were to need a transplant.
The case has highlighted a new ethical consideration for those allocating organs for transplant, especially in the dozen states that have medical marijuana laws: When dying patients need a transplant, should it be held against them if they’ve used pot with a doctor’s blessing?
Garon died a week after his doctor told him a University of Washington Medical Center committee had again denied him a spot on the liver transplant list because of his use of marijuana, although it was authorized under Washington state law.
“He said I’m going to die with such conviction,” Garon told an AP reporter at the time. “I’m not angry, I’m not mad, I’m just confused.”
Garon believes he contracted hepatitis C by sharing needles with “speed freaks” as a teenager. In recent years, he said, pot has been the only drug he’s used. In December, he was arrested for growing marijuana.
He had been in the hospice for two months and previously was rejected for a transplant at Swedish Medical Center for the same reason he later got from the university hospital.
Swedish said he would be considered if he avoided pot for six months and the university hospital offered to reconsider if he enrolled in a 60-day drug treatment program, but doctors said his liver disease was too advanced for him to last that long. The university hospital committee agreed to reconsider anyway, then denied him again.
The idea of keeping drug addicts off of transplant lists is not necessarily a bad idea. There are precious few organs to go around, and one should not be given to a person who is just likely to destroy the new organ because of their addictions. But this is clearly not the case with medical marijuana patients.
The grim irony here is that Garon could have used other drugs to treat his hepatitis symptoms, but those pharmaceuticals are toxic to the very liver he needed to be transplanted. He used medical marijuana because of its lack of liver toxicity. Perhaps it is what kept him alive as long as he was; perhaps the other drugs would have killed him more quickly.
Doctors in charge of the transplant division at UWMC were unsure that after the transplant, Garon wouldn’t resume using medical marijuana. Most of their quotes revealed an astonishing lack of understanding about cannabis, with worries about Garon being unable to control a so-called addiction to cannabis, that, had he continued smoking cannabis, his immune system, suppressed for the transplant, would be unable to fight off any infections or molds he might pick up from smoking.
A man is dead today because of ignorance about medical marijuana, stereotypes against responsible cannabis users, and the cruel federal prohibition of the most helpful plant known to mankind.
‘Operation Green Reaper’ brings pot arrests
Federal agents and prosecutors are sending a message to commercial marijuana growers moving from British Columbia to Western Washington: Stay out.
The message came in the form of a task force of federal, state and local cops that swooped down at 6 a.m. Wednesday to conduct searches at about 14 locations and 10 vehicles in the Seattle area.
Their targets were two garden-supply companies and a mortgage broker that authorities say provide the horticultural supplies, financing and other support that make the indoor pot operations possible.
The marijuana grows — run primarily by motorcycle gangs or Vietnamese immigrant-organized crime groups — have “become a plague” in British Columbia, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Bartlett said.
With border security tightened after 9/11, some growers believed they could avoid having to run the gantlet at the U.S.-Canadian border by starting grow operations in Washington.
If found guilty of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana, they face a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years to life in prison and a $4 million fine.
Federal agents were poised to arrest several people named in the indictments, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Vogel, the prosecutor in charge of the 15-month-long investigation dubbed “Operation Green Reaper.”
Bartlett portrayed marijuana grow operations as violent and the houses they occupy as miniature toxic waste dumps, filled with pesticides, fertilizers, mold and debris. He said five people have been killed in Tacoma, Everett and Covington in connection with grow houses.
Arnold Moorin, Drug Enforcement Administration special agent in charge, said about 450 grow houses have been raided in Washington in the past couple of years, and many of them had been booby-trapped.
First off, you have to love the militaristic names they come up with. “Operation Green Reaper”? What, was “Operation Gardening Apocalypse” taken?
In this story we’re seeing more of that talking point that I warned you about earlier: the indoor marijuana grow as a “toxic waste dump”. Meth lab, grow op, what’s the difference - that’s the message they’re pushing here.
Look, just re-legalize it and everyone can grow their own, indoors or outdoors, and large commercial operations won’t have to be hermetically-sealed mold-factories in suburban neighborhoods. What terrible thing will happen if marijuana is legal? People might smoke it?
Guess what, we are smoking it already. All you’re accomplishing with the “Green Reaper” operations is jacking up the price of marijuana, which makes it more lucrative for the motorcycle and Vietnamese gangs you’re fighting against. (Of course, that’s the point of the Drug War: the more money you throw at it the worse the problem becomes which then requires that you throw more money at it. Cops win, prisons win, politicians win, and drug dealers win.)
Opinion | Let’s talk about marijuana | Seattle Times Newspaper
As a nation, we spend at least $7.5 billion annually enforcing our marijuana laws. In 2006, the latest year for which we have numbers, a record 830,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana — 89 percent of them simply for possessing it.
Our criminal-justice system wastes time and resources with these low-level marijuana-possession cases while half our violent crimes go unsolved. And those facing the judge are disproportionately African American and Latino.
Indeed, the consequences of an arrest for even a small amount of marijuana can haunt someone for the rest of his or her life. We have met and heard from people who lost or were denied jobs, had their homes raided and their property seized, lost child-visitation rights, and had their medical marijuana confiscated.
We realized Prohibition was creating a lot of new problems and solving few, if any, of the old ones. States now control alcohol sales and consumption. And our tax dollars are more effectively directed at regulation, public education and treatment for those whose use becomes problematic.
WA high court says random school drug testing unconstitutional
OLYMPIA, Wash. — The state Supreme Court ruled Thursday that random drug testing of student athletes is unconstitutional, finding that each has “a genuine and fundamental privacy interest in controlling his or her own bodily functions.”
The court ruled unanimously in favor of some parents and students in the lower Columbia River town of Cathlamet who were fighting the tiny Wahkiakum School District’s policy of random urine tests of middle school and high school student athletes.
The high court wrote, “we can conceive of no way to draw a principled line permitting drug testing only student athletes.”
“If we were to allow random drug testing here, what prevents school districts from either later drug testing students participating in any extracurricular activities, as federal courts now allow, or testing the entire student population?” Justice Richard Sanders wrote for the court’s plurality. Joining him were Chief Justice Gerry Alexander and Justices Susan Owens and Tom Chambers.
“In particular, the school district has failed to show that a suspicion-based regime of drug testing is inadequate to achieve its legitimate objectives,” [Justice Barbara] Madsen wrote.
Madsen wrote that if there is not an observable drug problem in the school, “the school’s interest in detecting drug use does not justify nonconsensual drug testing.”
She wrote that if drug use is a problem, then schools have the individualized suspicion necessary to require a drug test.
“Thus, it is difficult to see how a suspicionless drug testing program is necessary,” she wrote.
Hooray for the Pacific Northwest (yeah, I’m biased)! It’s nice when your state constitution provides you more privacy protections than the United States Constitution… just ask the people of Alaska, where personal possession of <1oz. of cannabis at home and growing <25 plants is protected as a privacy right.
I particularly like Justice Madsen’s commonsense opinion: If you can’t see a drug problem, there’s no need to test randomly, and if you can see the drug problem, then you’ll know who to test!
Dr. Earleywine on cannabis and impotence, student drug testing; Paul Armentano on Sen. Kennedy's cancer and cannabis; WA debates medmj limits; music by The Hot Rocks.
Tonya Davis on Ohio medmj bill; Prof. Geraint Osborne on "typical" Canadian cannabis consumers; ABC News picks up transplant story; music by Machine Love.
Chris Fowlie from New Zealand NORML on "J-Day"; Paul Armentano returns with Israeli research on cannabis vs. alcohol and driving; music by Julian Fauth.
Pot’s Effects On Driving Performance Contrast Alcohol’s, Study Says; Survey: One In Seven Public School Districts Drug Test Students; Hawaii: Legislature Approves Medical Marijuana Task Force Measure; Dale Geiringer on CA bills; Jesse Stout on RI bill.
UK Parliament to vote on stiffer pot penalties; Inhaled cannabis reduces neuropathic pain; Keith Stroup goes to trial Monday, will argue constitutionality of Mass. pot laws; interview with Douglas Hiatt, attorney for Tim Garon.
Hepatitis C Patient Denied Transplant Based on State and Doctor Approved Medi-Pot Use; New Study Indicates Cannabis-Associated Psychosis Risk Is Minimal; More Than 230 Cities, 35 Countries To Hold Marijuana Rallies This Weekend
Part 1 of Marijuana Law Reform 2007: State Legislative Reforms and Future Efforts panel at the NORML 2007 Conference. Panelists: Mikki Norris, Joshua Schimburg, Alison Holcomb, Esq., Keith Stroup, Esq., Jesse Stout, Ray Warren, Ethan Nadelmann, Ph.D. Panel chair: Paul Armentano
